“Snapshot of a Hall of Famer: Jerry Rice simply outworked others - San Jose Mercury News” plus 3 more |
- Snapshot of a Hall of Famer: Jerry Rice simply outworked others - San Jose Mercury News
- Jerry Rice expected to get Hall call today - Contra Costa Times
- Slacker Radio Comes to Palm's webOS - Brighthand
- More Details on Upcoming Road Warriors Book - 411mania.com
| Snapshot of a Hall of Famer: Jerry Rice simply outworked others - San Jose Mercury News Posted: 06 Feb 2010 04:50 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Two snapshots, one at hello and one at goodbye, demonstrate why Jerry Rice will be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame today in one of the least surprising announcements in sports history. Click! There's Rice as a 49ers rookie in 1985, and he's dropping footballs as if they're greased bowling balls. Rice flubs so many in one early-season game that Ronnie Lott silently vows to watch how the kid handles himself in the locker room. Lott finds Rice sitting alone, crying. "When I saw that, I knew we had something special," said Lott, a Hall of Fame defensive back for the 49ers. "It's the guys who don't care that you worry about." Click! There's Rice on the verge of retirement at age 42, having turned the NFL record book into a chapter of his personal biography. He's racked up more yardage than a frequent flier and caught more touchdown passes than Hall of Famers Lynn Swann, Raymond Berry and Charlie Joiner combined. Lott bumps into Rice and commends his friend for an amazing career. "Still not perfect," Rice tells him. "I still haven't played that perfect game." Two snapshots, one portrait. "I'll never forget those two meetings," Lott says now. "That humility, that drive, that determination — those things say more about Jerry Rice than any catch he ever made." Rice will get his turn at the podium today in South Florida, shortly after a 44-person selection committee makes the easy call to include him in the Hall of Fame class of 2010.The decision-making process will be brief, perhaps as short as when longtime football writer Ira Miller stood before the assembled group, cleared his throat and made the case for 49ers quarterback Joe Montana. "It's Joe Montana," Miller said. Then he sat back down. Rice also needs no elaboration. The committee could pick a number, any number. His 22,895 receiving yards put him 4.4 miles (7,687 yards) ahead of the next guy on the list, Isaac Bruce. Rice also has 208 touchdowns. The only player within 50 of that total is former Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith (175), who also is a lock for a Hall of Fame spot today. With Rice, statistics tell only half the story. And the other half is way more fun. Rice's life story reads like a collection of fables. He was born in dinky Starkville, Miss., before moving to even dinkier Crawford (pop. 445). He ran four miles down a dirt road each day to get to B.L. Moor School. There were only 20 kids in his sophomore class, so one day when Rice decided to skip out and loiter in the corridor. It didn't take long for the principal to crack the case. As the story goes, the principal tried to confront Rice, but the kid fled the scene like a startled hummingbird. It's the first documented case of Rice being as fast as the situation required. The next day, when the vice principal caught up to him, he whipped Rice six times and ordered him to report "... to the football coach. Rice fit in quickly, thanks to his principal-eluding speed, his sturdy body and strong hands, the result of his summer job working for his father, Joe. Rice's dad was a no-nonsense bricklayer who demanded that all six of his sons serve an apprenticeship. (Rice was the youngest boy; he had two younger sisters). During shifts that could last from 5 a.m. to sundown in the sizzling Southern heat, Rice would stand on the scaffold or the second story of an apartment building while dad tossed bricks from below. If Rice dropped one, the cost of the brick was deducted from his paycheck. "Some like to say that's where my great catching hands for football came from — I'm not so sure," Rice wrote in his autobiography. "Brick-catching requires hard hands and an aggressive approach; catching a football requires soft hands to cradle. Regardless, the hand-eye coordination had to help me down the road." Rice played well at Moor High School, but the venue was hardly a showcase for his talents. The stadium, such as it was, seated about 100 people and had light poles on just one side of the field. The only college to recruit him was Mississippi Valley State, a Division I-AA school in Itta Bena with an enrollment at the time of 2,500. Rice thrived there, too, catching 112 passes for 1,845 yards and 28 touchdowns as a senior. His coach, Archie "Gunslinger" Cooley, was fond of saying that Rice "can catch a BB on a dead run at night." Mississippi Valley State was too small to generate much national attention. Still, it proved big enough. John McVay, now 79, was there at the precise moment that Rice came onto the 49ers' radar screen — technically a television set in a Houston hotel room. The 49ers were in town for an Oct. 21, 1984, game against the Oilers. But the night before, head coach Bill Walsh was flipping channels when he happened across the action at Mississippi Valley State. Walsh watched for a while, mesmerized by a wiry receiver named Rice. He promptly summoned McVay and public relations Director Jerry Walker into his room. "Bill had such an unbelievable eye for talent — it's actually spooky," recalled McVay, a longtime 49ers executive. "He kept saying over and over again that Jerry looked super. "Bill would say, 'Look at the way he moves. Look at his concentration. Look at the way he uses his hands.' I saw it, too, but only because I was sitting at the hands of the master." The biggest knock against Rice as an NFL prospect was his lack of foot speed. He was timed at 4.6 seconds in the 40-yard dash, which made him a tortoise in a field of 4.4-second hares. But Walsh and McVay noticed something else about Rice's alleged lack of speed: Nobody ever caught him. Rice was always one step ahead, regardless of the distance or how many defensive backs were in pursuit. "To get an accurate 40 time on Jerry," McVay says now, "you'd have to have somebody chasing him." The 49ers owned the last pick of the first round in 1985, but they bundled their three top choices and traded them to the New England Patriots for No. 16 and used that spot to grab Rice. Arguably the greatest coup on draft day history hardly looked that way at the start. The bricklayer's son from the dirt roads of Mississippi had a hard time adjusting to San Francisco. Rice has said that when he stepped off the plane, he wanted to get right back on and fly home. He'd dazzle on the 49ers practice field but falter under the glare of NFL game days. Rice would muff a pass. Montana would glare. Fans would boo. A Mercury News headline would blare: "Snap, Crackle, Drop." "What do I remember about young Jerry Rice?" longtime offensive lineman Guy McIntyre said. "I remember that he dropped a lot of passes." Things got so bad that Walsh summoned McVay again. This time, Walsh had him call Rice's old Mississippi Valley State coach for ideas on how to get Rice to snap out of his funk. "Just keep throwing the ball to him," Cooley told McVay. "He'll work his way out of it." Rice remained after practices for extra sessions with veteran receiver Freddie Solomon. Other veteran teammates such as Lott, McIntyre, Dwight Clark and Mike Wilson helped him calm down. In the 14th game of Rice's rookie season, with the "Monday Night Football" spotlight, Rice broke loose for 10 catches and 241 yards. Just as Cooley had predicted, Rice worked his way out of it. Rice worked his way out of everything. For more than a decade, he helped set the tone for excellence at 49ers practices by treating mundane afternoons as if they were the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. If he caught a 15-yard route, Rice would run it the length of the field just to rehearse another touchdown. That was the goal of every pass, right? Rice and running back Roger Craig waged sweaty battles each day to prove who could work the hardest. "Not only was he head and shoulders above everybody else, but he was also the hardest worker on the field," Lott recalled. "What that established for everyone — Joe, myself, Steve Young, everybody — is the idea that you couldn't relax. You couldn't rest. You practiced for the purpose of being the best. "Jerry played just as hard on Wednesday that he did on Saturday. That, to me, is the essence of Jerry Rice." For more on the 49ers, see Daniel Brown's Hot Read blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/49ers. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Jerry Rice expected to get Hall call today - Contra Costa Times Posted: 06 Feb 2010 05:26 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Two snapshots, one at hello and one at goodbye, demonstrate why Jerry Rice will be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame today in one of the least surprising announcements in sports history. Click! There's Rice as a 49ers rookie in 1985 and he's dropping footballs like they're greased bowling balls. Rice flubs so many in one early season game that Ronnie Lott silently vows to watch how the kid handles himself in the locker room. Lott finds Rice sitting alone, crying. "When I saw that, I knew we had something special," Lott said. "It's the guys who don't care that you worry about." Click! There's Rice on the verge of retirement at age 42, having turned the NFL record book into a chapter of his personal biography. He's racked up more yardage than a frequent flier and caught more touchdown passes than Lynn Swann, Raymond Berry and Charlie Joiner combined. Lott bumps into Rice and commends his friend for an amazing career. "Still not perfect," Rice tells him. "I still haven't played that perfect game." Two snapshots, one portrait. "I'll never forget those two meetings," Lott says now. "That humility, that drive, that determination — those things say more about Jerry Rice than any catch he ever made." Rice will get his turn at the podium today in South Florida, shortly after a 44-person selection committee makes the easy call to include him in the Hall of Fame class of 2010. The decision-making process will be brief, perhaps as short as when longtime football writer Ira Miller stood before the assembled group, cleared his throat and made the case for Joe Montana."It's Joe Montana," Miller said. Then he sat back down. Rice also needs no elaboration. The committee could pick a number, any number. His 22,895 receiving yards put him 4.4 miles, or 7,687 yards, ahead of the next guy on the list, Isaac Bruce. Rice also has 208 touchdowns. The only player within 50 of that total is former Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith (175), who is also a lock for a Hall of Fame spot today. With Rice, statistics tell only half the story. And the other half is way more fun. Rice's life story reads like a collection of fables. He was born in dinky Starkville, Miss., before moving to even dinkier Crawford (pop. 445). He ran four miles down a dirt road each day to get to B.L. Moor School. There were only 20 kids in his sophomore class, so one day when Rice decided to skip out and loiter in the corridor, it didn't take long for the principal to crack the case. As the story goes, he tried to confront Rice but the kid fled the scene like a startled hummingbird. It's the first documented case of Rice being as fast as the situation required. The next day, when the vice principal caught up to him, he whipped Rice six times and ordered him to report "... to the football coach. Rice fit in quickly, thanks to his principal-eluding speed, his sturdy body and strong hands, the result of his summer job working for his father, Joe. Rice's dad was a no-nonsense bricklayer who demanded that all six of his sons serve an apprenticeship. (Rice was the youngest boy; he had two young sisters). During shifts that could last from 5 a.m. to sundown in the sizzling Southern heat, Rice would stand on the scaffold or the second story of an apartment building while dad tossed bricks from below. If Rice dropped one, the cost of the brick was deducted from his paycheck. "Some like to say that's where my great catching hands for football came from — I'm not so sure," Rice wrote in his autobiography. "Brick-catching requires hard hands and an aggressive approach; catching a football requires soft hands to cradle. Regardless, the hand-eye coordination had to help me down the road." No showcase Rice played well at Moor High School, but the venue was hardly a showcase for his talents. The football field, such as it was, seated about 100 people and had light poles on just one side. The only college to recruit him was Mississippi Valley State, a Division I-AA school in Itta Bena with an enrollment at the time of 2,500. Rice thrived there, too, catching 112 passes for 1,845 and 28 touchdowns as a senior. His coach, Archie "Gunslinger" Cooley, was fond of saying that Rice "can catch a BB on a dead run at night." Mississippi Valley State was too small to generate much national attention. Still, it proved big enough. John McVay, now 79, was there at the precise moment that Rice came onto the 49ers' radar screen — technically a television set in a Houston hotel room. The 49ers were in town for an Oct. 21, 1984, game against the Oilers. But the night before, coach Bill Walsh was flipping channels when he happened across the action at Mississippi Valley State. Walsh watched for a while, mesmerized by a wiry receiver named Rice. He promptly summoned McVay and public relations director Jerry Walker into his room. "Bill had such an unbelievable eye for talent — it's actually spooky," recalled McVay, a longtime 49ers executive. "He kept saying over and over again that Jerry looked super. "Bill would say, 'Look at the way he moves. Look at his concentration. Look at the way he uses his hands.' I saw it, too, but only because I was sitting at the hands of the master." Tortoise vs. hares The biggest knock against Rice as an NFL prospect was his lack of foot speed. He was timed at 4.6 seconds in the 40-yard dash, which made him a tortoise in a field of 4.4-second hares. But Walsh and McVay noticed something else about Rice's alleged lack of speed: Nobody ever caught him. Rice was always one step ahead, regardless of the distance or how many defensive backs were in pursuit. "To get an accurate 40 time on Jerry," McVay says now, "you'd have to have somebody chasing him." The 49ers owned the last pick of the first round in 1985, but they bundled their three top choices and traded them to the New England Patriots for No. 16 and used that spot to grab Rice. Arguably the greatest coup on draft day history hardly looked that way at the start. The bricklayer's son from the dirt roads of Mississippi had a hard time adjusting to San Francisco. Rice has said that when he stepped off the plane, he wanted to get right back on and fly home. He'd dazzle on the 49ers practice field but falter under the glare of NFL game days. Rice would muff a pass. Montana would glare. Fans would boo. "What do I remember about young Jerry Rice?" longtime offensive lineman Guy McIntyre said. "I remember that he dropped a lot of passes." Things got so bad that Walsh summoned McVay again. This time, Walsh had him call Rice's old Mississippi Valley State coach for ideas on how to get Rice to snap out of his funk. "Just keep throwing the ball to him," Cooley told McVay. "He'll work his way out of it." Breaking loose Rice remained after practices for extra sessions with veteran receiver Freddie Solomon. Other veterans such as Lott, McIntyre, Dwight Clark and Mike Wilson helped him calm down. In the 14th game of Rice's rookie season, with the "Monday Night Football" spotlight, Rice broke loose for 10 catches and 241 yards. Just as Cooley had predicted, Rice worked his way out of it. Rice worked his way out of everything. For more than a decade, he helped set the tone for excellence at 49ers practices by treating mundane afternoons as if they were the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. If he caught a 15-yard route, Rice would run it the length of the field just to rehearse another touchdown. That was the goal of every pass, right? Rice and running back Roger Craig waged sweaty battles each day to prove who could work the hardest. "Not only was he head and shoulders above everybody else, but he was also the hardest worker on the field," Lott recalled. "What that established for everyone — Joe, myself, Steve Young, everybody — is the idea that you couldn't relax. You couldn't rest. You practiced for the purpose of being the best. "Jerry played just as hard on Wednesday that he did on Sunday. That, to me, is the essence of Jerry Rice." Read Daniel Brown's Hot Read blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/49ers. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Slacker Radio Comes to Palm's webOS - Brighthand Posted: 06 Feb 2010 06:30 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Slacker, Inc. has introduced a version of the Slacker Radio Mobile app for Palm's latest devices. This allows users to listen to a wide variety of streaming music on their smartphone, for free. This software has music catalog that includes millions of songs -- nearly four times the leading competitor -- and offers high-quality stereo playback from any available wireless connection Slacker Radio Mobile gives users custom music stations based on their favorite artist or mix of artists, over 120 expert-programmed Slacker genre, seasonal and spotlight stations, and over 10,000 artist stations. It also provides artist biographies, album reviews, and "peek ahead" artist and album previews. In addition to marking songs as favorites, listeners can also ban songs and artists. Pricing and Availability It runs on the Palm Pre, Palm Pre Plus, Palm Pixi, and Palm Pixi Plus, but is available only in the United States and Canada. There are also versions of Slacker Radio for the Android OS, BlackBerry OS, and iPhone and iPod touch. Source: Slacker Related Articles:Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| More Details on Upcoming Road Warriors Book - 411mania.com Posted: 06 Feb 2010 05:26 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. "PRECIOUS" PAUL ELLERING TO WRITE FOREWORD FOR THE ROAD WARRIORS: DANGER, DEATH, AND THE RUSH OF WRESTLING! Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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