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S'Warnerful

Sporting News, The, Feb 7, 2000 by Dave Kindred

Two minutes, five seconds. Enough time to write another sentence in the story of Kurt Warner's life. Not that we needed even one more word, after all we'd read. Still, with two minutes and five seconds to play, with his team losing its way, he came to the Rams' huddle knowing the game was there to be won or lost. "Hey," he said there, "we've been moving the ball all day long." They needed to move it one more time.

Upstairs, the coach calling plays wanted to take a shot downfield. One shot and then run it twice. Move slowly if that's the only movement possible. Move it to where the kicker can win it. But take the one shot.

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Have the quarterback put air under it. That, Kurt Warner can do. He comes to his craft with an action smooth and quick through the throwing am If you attached a light to his hand and put him in the dark, you'd see an artist's circle inscribed in the air.

Two minutes, five seconds, 16-all. Kurt Warner's long and lovely journey through Iowa across the Atlantic and back to the banks of the Mississippi brought him to the huddle with the ball at his 27.

This time a year ago, we had no idea. Maybe only he had an idea, he and his wife, Brenda. They'd made the trip together, believing. They believed in Des Moines, they believed in Amsterdam. Now they believed in Atlanta, in a Super Bowl.

So he put air under the thing. He did it with a defender's body rising to fall on his.

Try that sometime. Try throwing a football 50 yards when a brute would bury you first.

It's not a thing many coaches upstairs would have asked a quarterback to do. With two minutes, five seconds to play, some quarterbacks are not the quarterbacks they've been all day. To throw an interception here would be to throw away a season's work.

Going down under the defender's rush, Warner didn't see the ball in flight. He knew only he had sent it in Isaac Bruce's direction, down the right sideline, down there somewhere. Maybe Bruce would catch it, maybe not. In a season full of improbabilities, anything could happen.

"What's great about America," the Rams' coach, Dick Vermeil, would say later, "is what you can do if you work hard with passion and with compassion."

Who's to argue? The Rams go from 4-12 to 13-3 with Vermeil, the league's second-oldest coach, a man who'd been out of the business for 14 years and was hired only after four other coaches couldn't be hired. They do it after a $16 million quarterback is hurt before he earns a penny of the money and must be replaced by a heavy-legged, minimum-wage novice who had played only part of one NFL game, throwing 11 passes, completing four.

Now that novice had a ball in the air with a chance to do again what he'd done all season, which was take another step toward immortality. A $5.50-an-hour stocker at a Cedar Falls Hy-Vee grocery five years ago, Warner began the 21st century as the NFL's Most Valuable Player. However many touchdown passes Warner threw this season, all you need to know is that only Dan Marino ever threw more.

He had the ball in the air, out of his sight, the ball in Brenda's eyes, her hands balled into little fists, and only those good folks who love the Titans could have wished for that ball to fall anywhere but into Bruce's hands. It had been 16-0 once; that was the score when Titans safety Blaine Bishop went down after a tackle, horribly down, silently down, unmoving, as if paralyzed. And on the Rams' sideline, the building silent, Kurt Warner dropped to a knee and prayed: "I asked the Lord to watch over him."

But the Titans had come back, moved by word that Bishop's injury was not as severe as feared. And now, at 16-all, with Warner's deep ball floating because its angle of delivery had been so steep, here came Isaac Bruce back a step.

Warner saw that. He saw Bruce 50 yards away. He was on the tuff, on his back, raising his head to look downfield, and he saw Bruce come back for the ball. And then he heard the sweetest sound of his career.

"I heard everybody screaming," Warner said.

Touchdown. Seventy-three yards, 1:54 to play.

Warner wouldn't touch the ball again as the Titans made this as memorable a Super Bowl as any. They put the lie to the notion that the game itself is the least of the Super Bowl week's attractions. They did a hero's thing and moved to within an arm's length of a touchdown to tie.

"Kurt Warner is Kurt Warner," Vermeil said. "It's not a fairy tale, it's real life. He is an example of what we all like to be on and off the field. He is a great example of persistence and believing in himself and a deep faith. ... What else can you write? He is a book He is a movie, this guy."

At game's end, Kurt Warner did what he has done after every victory in the Rams' improbable run to a world championship. He circled behind the Rams' bench and clamored on any foothold he could find to reach his wife in the stadium's first row. There he kissed her and told her, "I love you," and on this loveliest of lovely nights on a journey they'll never forget, he said, "We did it."

S'Warnerful

Sporting News, The, Feb 7, 2000 by Dave Kindred

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