2006 KANSAS CITY CHIEFS SEASONAL HIGHLIGHT...

2006 KANSAS CITY CHIEFS SEASONAL HIGHLIGHT CLIPS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

For Hunts, A Bond Forged On The Field – Bill King 2-6 When The Little Guys Hit It Big – Randy Covitz 7-8 An Army of One – Joe Posnanski 9-12 Pardon Chiefs Coach If He Doesn’t Panic Over QB’s Injury – Clark Judge 13-14 HANGING With Herm – Liz Merrill 15-16 Focus On – The Offense – Bob Gretz 17-18 Johnson Is So Old School, He’s New School – Dennis Dillon 19-22 Larry Johnson #1 – Running To 2,000 Yards – Bob Gretz 23-24 Larry Johnson #2 – History Of 2,000 Yards – Bob Gretz 25-28 Larry Johnson #3 – Is 2,000 Possible? – Bob Gretz 29-31 Johnson Readies To Go The Distance in 2006 – Jim Corbett 32-35 Where’s The Chief? C’mon, You Still Can’t Miss Gonzalez – Rick Dean 36-37 Shields Remains On Guard For KC – Liz Merrill 38-40 Natural Born Protector Now Defending Trent Green’s Backside – B.McCollough 41-45 Focus On – The Defense – Bob Gretz 46-47 Defense Remains In The Right Hands – Jonathan Rand 48-49 He’s D-Lighted – Liz Merrill 50-51 The Great Escape – CNNSI.com 52-53 ‘By The Grace Of God, I am Alive’ – Paul Attner 54-58 Sudden Impact – Adam Teicher 59-60 * Updated September 16, 2006

Families in Sports: Fathers and Sons

For Hunts, a bond forged on the field By BILL KING Senior writer Published June 12, 2006 : Page 01

Norma Hunt’s eyes still glisten with the preface to tears when she tells the story of Mother’s Day, 1972, when her 7-year-old son went tumbling from a stone urn while playing on the back porch of their Dallas home.

Clark Hunt landed hard and the urn fell on top of him, pinning his right foot. When she reached him, he was mangled and bleeding. It took 75 stitches to close the wounds and further surgery to repair the damage, and even then the orthopedists and vascular surgeons who worked on him weren’t sure that they’d fixed it.

The small boy with the father who paid large men to run fast went home in a wheelchair.

Six months later, he was back on his feet, but not fully healed. And yet his father, Lamar, the son of an oil baron and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, had an idea to press the bounds of his boy’s rehab.

He wanted Clark to run with him in a Thanksgiving Day road race called the Turkey Trot.

An eight-mile run.

“His mother sort of came unglued, and of course the doctors told her we shouldn’t do it,” Lamar Hunt says today, sharing a favorite story. “Clark had an oozing wound. And I’d never run eight miles in my life.”

Still, Hunt and son entered. They followed a plan meant to give Clark the best chance of finishing, alternating between running and walking at two minute intervals. Norma Hunt parked the car near the start/finish line and met them along the course with cups of water.

The design called for them to cover two miles out along the lake, then double back to their starting point. Then, they would head two miles out in the opposite direction and come two miles back to the finish.

Clark Hunt made the first two miles without pain, but began to struggle on the way back. As they passed the five mile marker, the boy’s pain persisted. They were headed outbound along the lake, away from his mother and the car. Lamar Hunt remembers that it was cold and windy. He kept encouraging his son, but the boy began to cry.

“We can do it, Clark,” Lamar said time and again. “We can do it.”

As they made the final turn the boy looked up, sobbing, but still trudging forward.

“We’ve got to do it, Dad,” Clark Hunt said, “because up there is where the car is parked.”

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Lamar Hunt smiles as he leans forward in an armchair at his son’s Dallas home, where they have rendezvoused before heading off to watch the Major League Soccer team that the family owns, FC Dallas. His eyes fire as he tells the story of the Turkey Trot all these years later.

Hunt is quick to point out that he is proud of all four of his children, but it is Clark who has taken the path most similar to his, first as an athlete at SMU, then as an executive in the soccer league they helped launch and, most recently, as chairman of the board with the Chiefs.

“There’s a great determination that Clark showed on that run that he has exhibited again and again since then,” Lamar Hunt said. “I believe it sets him apart. He has always had great determination from an athletic and academic standpoint, and now he has it in business.”

Both of his parents trace it back to the foot injury, and an eight-mile trek that could have harmed a fragile body, but instead ignited a young spirit.

“I think it showed Clark that you can overcome tremendous obstacles,” said Norma Hunt, who is a fixture alongside her husband and son in the family’s box at FC Dallas games, just as she has been for decades at Chiefs games. “Despite all that he went through, he was able to be successful on the athletic field. Like his father, he’s been successful in so many ways. He believes that whatever is put in front of him, he can truly overcome it.

“Sometimes, very good things come out of bad things.”

Playing catch on the field It is worth noting that, for all the gilded memories that are unique to Clark Hunt, all the sideline passes and big-game perks that were part of his childhood, the cherished moment that comes to his mind first is set in an empty NFL stadium.

That’s where he played catch with his dad.

Typically, the family would fly to Kansas City from Dallas on a Saturday and head directly to Arrowhead Stadium, where Lamar and Norma Hunt turned the owner’s suite into an elaborate, two-story apartment, replete with choir stalls from Spain, a fireplace from France and sports-themed artwork collected on trips around the world.

After settling in, Lamar Hunt would take his son down to the field, where they’d break out a bag of footballs, often alone.

“As a kid, to have the chance to be up there when there wasn’t a game going on — wow,” Clark Hunt said. “On those Saturdays, I could get down on the field and throw the ball with my father. He was great about that.”

Lamar Hunt crafted a game in which he and his son would trade punts, each of them trying to kick a perfect spiral that would nose over and then land, accurately, in the other’s hands. When Clark became a quarterback in high school, Lamar worked with him on passing.

“It’s an extremely special memory,” Clark Hunt said. “It’s something I’ll associate forever with my father.”

When Clark Hunt was considering colleges, his father joined him at each of the seven schools he visited. He chose SMU, but says Lamar Hunt never pushed him in that direction. Clark went with the intention of playing football, but wound up on the soccer team, which he eventually captained.

Lamar Hunt has missed only 19 games in 46 seasons as owner of the Chiefs and their predecessors, the Dallas Texans. He’d missed only three regular-season games when Clark started college: one for a funeral, one for a wedding and one for the birth of his first son, Lamar Jr.

Hunt missed three games in four years to watch Clark play soccer at SMU.

“He picked my games over Chiefs games, which meant a lot to me,” Clark Hunt said. “And it means even

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more to me now.”

For all his success, Lamar Hunt paints his time at SMU as a one of vast fun, but little achievement. “I was such a mediocre student, it’s embarrassing,” Lamar Hunt said. He spent four years on the football team, but never lettered.

Clark Hunt graduated atop his class at SMU in 1987, an achievement that he attributes more to work and desire than to innate intellect, although he clearly has the latter.

“I figured out how to be a good student because I was motivated to win,” Clark Hunt said. “Same thing with soccer. I was a mediocre soccer player who worked hard enough to become a starter on a nationally ranked team. It was not a talent that I was born with. And it’s not something your family can give you.”

That’s a distinction Clark Hunt points out at several stops on this guided tour of his life, and that Lamar echoes in a separate conversation. Clark Hunt’s first job after school was a plum one at Goldman Sachs in New York, an investment banking firm where his father says he had no connections. He spent two years there before returning to a slot in the Hunt family’s conglomerate.

He had little to do with the sports teams, focusing instead on investment strategies. While working with the family holdings, he started his own financial services business, which he says has been a success.

The 1994 World Cup, held in the U.S., changed his course. The event was a rousing hit. An idea for a major U.S. pro league percolated. Lamar Hunt, a longtime soccer proponent who owned the Dallas franchise in the NASL, but was admittedly gun-shy about doing it again, found himself sucked in by the momentum.

He invited — or, in Clark Hunt’s words “dragged in” — his son to join him in the endeavor, assigning him to assess a unique approach to ownership that the league was floating: a single-entity structure that would allow investors to share all the franchises, rather than parceling them out.

“We needed the expertise that he had, not because he played soccer, but because he knew how to analyze a business,” Lamar Hunt said. “The whole single-entity approach was new. Somebody had to really analyze it to determine whether it could work.”

Clark Hunt was intrigued, but he wasn’t sure his father should open his heart and wallet to another go-round with so fickle a temptress. Lamar Hunt also was making noise about spending millions to build soccer-specific stadiums, and his son clearly thought that was too risky a venture.

Still, Lamar Hunt had a track record. There had been failures. The NASL collapsed under the weight of its stars’ salaries. World Team Tennis, another Hunt signature, has survived for 30 years in varied states of health, but never captured a large national audience. But his idea for the AFL was akin to Columbus choosing to sail west, and after that, don’t you have to follow the man anywhere?

The Hunts went to work, side by side, to build the MLS.

“Lamar is the father of new sports leagues in this country,” Clark Hunt said. “There is nobody like him in that regard. And I had a chance to be there with him on the ground floor with one of them.”

That was neither his expectation, nor his plan. Clark Hunt says that, like his father, who has carried the nickname “Games” since childhood, he always has loved sports. But there are many tentacles to the Hunt’s family business, and Clark Hunt says he never thought sports would be the one to grab him.

MLS changed that. Involved since its inception, he feels connected to it, much as his father does to the NFL. Five years ago, Clark Hunt started upping his engagement with management of the Chiefs, prompted by Jack Steadman, then-chairman of the team’s board of directors, and confidant to Lamar Hunt since before he founded the franchise.

“None of us are getting any younger,” Steadman reminded Lamar Hunt.

Clark Hunt already was attending league meetings and Chiefs upper management sessions, but he was

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there without portfolio. Steadman suggested he take more responsibility. They named Clark Hunt vice chairman.

His progression came as the Chiefs were in the midst of negotiations for a stadium renovation. The first vote for public funding failed. It came to the ballot again in April, this time split into two measures: one that would renovate the stadiums for the Chiefs and Royals and another that would incorporate a “rolling roof” that would allow Kansas City to host a Super Bowl.

The voters delivered a split decision that had to be considered a victory, but was bittersweet for the Hunts. The renovation was approved, but the voters refused the roof, which had been a dream of the Chiefs’ patriarch, going back to the original plans for the sports complex that opened in 1972.

“For my father, whose legacy — he is so closely intertwined with the Super Bowl,” Clark Hunt said. “To not be able to bring his baby home for him was a disappointment. But he took it like a gentleman, like he always does. He was a very celebratory part of the party.”

Complementary interests Neither flies to the spotlight, but Lamar Hunt is even more understated, publicly, than is his son. He eschews titles, insisting that he be referred to as founder, rather than owner. For most of his life, he insisted on flying commercial, in coach, agreeing to book in first class only when traveling with wife Norma, a grudging concession that she refers to as a “gift.” Recently, Clark Hunt convinced his father to use the family’s private jet in deference to failing health.

“Lamar is as humble and unassuming as they come,” Clark Hunt said. “He has given me plenty of room to be my own person and shape my own way. As I look 30 or 40 years down the road from now, thinking about my own son, I wonder if it would work the same way, and I have a hard time seeing it.

“If my son came in and shared his thoughts sometimes like I do with Lamar, I’d think: ‘What in the world is he doing as part of this business?’”

If Lamar Hunt has thought that, he’s never said it. He gushes about the acumen that Clark Hunt has brought to the enterprise, which he describes as different from his own.

“The entertainment piece of the business is really what I was infected with: the marketing and ticket sales,” said Lamar Hunt, who spent much of that Saturday afternoon before the FC Dallas game jotting down ideas to better promote the team. “That’s not as much Clark’s bent.”

Lamar Hunt’s interests are most evident in the content of 50- and 60-item memos that he will craft after a game, based on observations that he accumulates through the day, which invariably begins for him with a walk-through of the stadium. He never takes notes, yet he opines in detail, with accuracy.

Clark Hunt says he focuses more on finance, asset values, organizational structure and making key hires. The sports franchises capture more of his attention than they used to, but he remains engaged in the family’s other businesses in ways his father rarely did.

Lately, Clark Hunt has begun to think of the sports properties as intertwined in something that his father steadfastly refuses to acknowledge: the Lamar Hunt legacy.

“A huge responsibility that I think about all the time is that he has a legacy in sports that no one else in this country has, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that that’s maintained for many, many years to come,” Clark Hunt said. “In the context of the decisions we make, I have to consider how it will affect his legacy. He won’t think about it that way. He’s not interested in creating a legacy. So those of us around him need to think about it and take it seriously.”

A mother's last word It is story time in the owner’s box at the FC Dallas game, and, prompted by a few questions, Norma Hunt has shifted into a gear reserved for carnival barkers and mothers of sons.

There is more to the story of the rehabilitation from Clark’s foot injury — a supremely painful ordeal which, by the way, Clark Hunt never mentioned during a three-hour conversation that made multiple swings through his childhood.

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“Of course they told you about the geese,” Norma Hunt says matter-of-factly, stopping the conversation dead.

The geese? Her son rolls his eyes.

It seems that soon after Clark Hunt returned from the hospital, while he was still confined to a wheelchair, his father came home one afternoon with a dozen baby geese, and a plan to keep his son occupied through the blazing Dallas summer.

Clark would help raise the hatchlings, and when they were ready to live on their own, the family would hold a ceremony. Then, they would march the baby geese through the yard, into a pond, and on to self-sufficiency.

“Clark was still in the wheelchair when we had the parade,” Norma Hunt said.

But not for long after it.

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Posted on Sun, Aug. 27, 2006

When the little guys hit it big

Helping to bring AFL and NFL together turned into a covert operation for Chiefs owner.

By RANDY COVITZ The Kansas City Star

The clandestine meeting occurred in front of the Texas Ranger statue in the lobby of Love Field in Dallas.

In a scene out of a spy novel, Lamar Hunt, the maverick founder of the upstart American Football League and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, was changing planes, and he signaled to Tex Schramm, general manager of the Dallas Cowboys of the established National Football league. They adjourned to Schramm’s car and secretly began discussing a merger of the two leagues in April 1966.

The rebel AFL, which began play in 1960, had caused a bidding war for players that neither side could withstand, so unbeknownst to the public, Hunt and Schramm exchanged proposals.

The result was a merger announced on June 8, 1966, uniting two sides in what would become the most successful sports league in the world.

“The greatest thing of all was nobody knew about it except for Lamar, Tex and (commissioner) Pete Rozelle,” recalled Gil Brandt, then the Cowboys’ personnel director. “It was a very, very, well-kept secret. It was fortunate that there were two guys who really had the best interest of the entire league in their minds, and that’s why it was done. Lamar is very league-conscious and always has been, and Tex was league-conscious.

“Because there were two people with a broad understanding without their own agenda, that’s why the whole thing came about.”

As the NFL celebrates the 40th anniversary of the merger, Hunt is still amazed they were able to pull it off.

“There was common sense that said that something needed to be done,” Hunt said. “That was the spirit in which Tex Schramm came to me. He and Pete Rozelle felt there were economic hardships on teams in the NFL as well as the AFL.

“Tex laid out the parameters that he thought would work. I thought they were reasonable. I took them to our nine-

1966 PHOTO

Cowboys president Tex Schramm (from left), NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt ended up on the same team after the AFL and NFL agreed to merge in 1966.

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© 2006 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.kansascity.com

person ownership, and seven of the nine felt it was the right thing to do. The two not in strong favor were the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. They felt the NFL was asking for too much.”

The merger called for the nine AFL clubs to pay a total of $18 million over a 20-year-period to join the NFL. A common draft would be instituted in 1967. Rozelle would serve as the commissioner. Two new franchises, Cincinnati as the AFL’s 10th franchise and New Orleans as the NFL’s 16th franchise, would be added by 1968. Interleague preseason games would be played in 1967, and a common schedule would begin in 1970.

Best of all, all existing franchises would remain intact.

“It was the right thing to do,” Hunt said. “It consolidated the sport. It assured the continuity of every team in both leagues. There have been mergers in sports before, like between the NFL and the All-America Football Conference (in 1950), where only three teams out of that league came in and four others went out of business. What’s happened has gone beyond anyone’s expectations. This gave the public the Super Bowl.”

When Hunt and the seven other original owners of the AFL — better known as “The Foolish Club” — plunked down $25,000 apiece plus a performance bond of $100,000 for their franchises in the fall of 1959 and formed their league, he didn’t envision an eventual merger with the NFL.

“The new league was to create a structure similar to baseball, where there was an American and a National League,” Hunt said, “and I was vaguely aware the American League in baseball was a rebel league. It started in 1901 and fought with the National League … and then they agreed to have a World Series.

“In a naïve sense, I was looking at the structure that a second league could survive and go from there.”

Once the merger talks began, Hunt wanted to keep the leagues separate, have a common draft, and meet in a championship game.

“The first thought was to have the champions of the two leagues play each other,” Hunt said. “The fans wanted it, the media wanted it. … My personal druthers were to keep the AFL teams pure as a separate league. There were strong feelings on both sides.

“When Paul Brown came into the AFL after the merger, he felt strongly he was an NFL-oriented person, and he felt he paid for an NFL franchise and wanted equality.”

Hunt still closely monitors the interconference games between the AFC and NFC and takes great pride in the AFC’s overall lead of 952-866.

The Chiefs won the AFL championship in 1966 and went on to play in the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, losing35-10 to Green Bay. By the next year, the title game was called the Super Bowl, a nickname coined by Hunt’s children, based on a toy known as a “super ball.”

Kansas City also won the last AFL championship in 1969, leading up to beating Minnesota 23-7 in Super Bowl IV.

“That was a wonderful culmination of the 10-year history of the American Football League,” Hunt said.

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Posted on Sun, Jul. 09, 2006

An army of one

Whether it’s the Chiefs or kids at his hometown football camp, Herm Edwards’ passion for building winners

runs deep.

JOE POSNANSKI The Kansas City Star

MONTEREY, Calif. | Herman Edwards points to the street where he had shined the boots of soldiers on their way to Vietnam. He was 13 then, and he would shout out: “Shoe shine 35 cents! Spit shine for 50!” He is 52 now. Edwards still shouts out.

“If you want to wear a do-rag on your head, you can go play in the parking lot!” Edwards yells at the 800 or so kids who sit and kneel in the grass. “Understand? Because I don’t care! This is a free camp! Free! And you are going to play by my rules!”

Herm Edwards does not scrimp on exclamation points.

The kids listen because Edwards is an NFL coach, and he is speaking truth. This is a free camp. It may be true that in 11 years of running the Herm Edwards Football Camp in his old hometown he does not remember ever throwing anybody out. He looks ready to do it, though.

“If you fight, you’re gone!” Edwards yells. “If you use bad language, you’re gone! It’s very simple to me! You do right, or you’re gone! I don’t care!”

Only the last exclamation points to a lie.

•••

The white house on Highland Street in the town of Seaside has a shiny red Kansas City Chiefs sticker on the mailbox. The green New York Jets sticker has almost been scraped away. Martha has worked hard scraping. Stickers can be stubborn.

“Mom won’t live anywhere else,” Herman Edwards says.

The story of Herman Edwards, the Kansas City Chiefs coach, begins here, on this small street in this small house in this small town that borders Monterey. Herm Edwards would pedal his Schwinn Sting-Ray to the end of Highland, turn west and gaze down the hill — it looked as if he could coast all the way into Monterey Bay. The view sold Herm’s father, Herman Edwards Sr., and he bought this house in 1961 with money he had saved over 20 years in the U.S. Army.

The couple next door quickly started a neighborhood petition to keep the family out.

“It wasn’t the ghetto here or anything like that,” Herm says. Now, he’s driving his Range Rover on Highland. “But it got rough. I’ll put it this way. I always knew where I lived. I always knew I was in Seaside. That wasn’t plush. I wasn’t in Monterey. I wasn’t in Carmel. I was in Seaside. I knew what that meant. I still know.”

The car glides past Martin Luther King Junior High, which was called something else before the assassination — Edwards can’t remember what. In those days, he wore an afro so big he had trouble pulling a football helmet over it. Anyway, basketball was his sport. “I used to tell people I was 6-foot-4,” Edwards says. “And with that afro, I was.”

Turn back to Highland. Martha’s home. She’s 81, but nobody ever believes it, least of all Martha. She shows off her prize collection of Herman Edwards posters, paintings, pictures, magazine covers and bobblehead dolls. “I’m so glad he’s back in Kansas City,” she says.

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“Mom,” Herm begins.

“Well, I am,” she continues. “New York was no good at the end.”

Herm grimaces. Martha’s right. The last season in New York was rough — even now it’s not exactly clear what went down.

In four seasons, Edwards had coached more playoff games than any other Jets coach. But in 2005, quarterbacks went down faster than Gatorade, and the team lost seven straight, finished 4-12. When the season ended, rumors flapped — Herm wanted out or the Jets wanted him out or both or neither. For a couple of wild weeks, unnamed sources dueled in the papers, talk-radio lines lit red, disloyalty accusations charged the air. Herm Edwards’ house on Long Island was surrounded by reporters and television trucks. He says his wife, Lia, cried. The standoff ended with the Jets getting a fourth-round pick. The Chiefs got Herm Edwards to be head coach.

“If the Jets had said they wanted me as their head coach, I would still be their head coach,” is what Herm Edwards wantsto say about that.

“I’m just so glad you are in Kansas City,” Martha says. “New York got so rough.”

“It wasn’t that rough,” Herm says, and his face hardens.

•••

As the Range Rover breezes through the turns of the old neighborhood, spectacular views — moving postcards — flash through the window. Green mountains. Blue bay. Green mountain again. Edwards says he never noticed his hometown’s beauty. “When you grow up around it, you don’t think about it,” he says. “I come back now and think, ‘How could I not notice this?’ ”

He had other things on his mind. Young Herm told everybody he would become famous. He would be on television. Most kids think like that, maybe. Edwards kept saying it even after he got into high school, long after other kids, for one reason or another, dropped pipe dreams. Herm Edwards was going places.

“I was getting out of here, Coach, I knew that,” he says. When Edwards gets to know people a little, he calls them “Coach.”

“You look around here now, and you think, ‘Wow, it’s beautiful.’ But it was jail to me then, Coach. I wasn’t going to live in this town all my life and talk about how I played football in high school. No way, Coach. No way.”

He was in the first class of Seaside kids to be bused to Monterey High School. After football practice, the bus wouldn’t get him home until 7 p.m. But he was on the best football team around. Herm intercepted 48 passes in three years — almost two per game. It’s a record they still talk about. Edwards had wanted to be a wide receiver, but Monterey did not throw the ball. Herm figured intercepting passes was about the only way he could get his hands on the ball.

“It was the craziest thing you ever saw, Coach,” Herm says. “I could see everything so clearly, it was like I was the one running the pass patterns. I just knew where the ball was going. I wasn’t guessing. I knew. Craziest thing you ever saw.”

Actually, the craziest thing he ever did happened at Monterey Peninsula Junior College. The other team set up for the game-winning field goal. Edwards, without telling anyone, drifted back toward the goalpost so that if the kick came up short, he could return it. The kick was not short. It was true. So Herman Edwards did what came to mind. He stood in front of the goalpost, jumped up and blocked the ball just before it cleared the upright. They still talk about that.

“It was all instinct,” Herm says. “I wasn’t trying to do that. It just worked out, Coach. Everything worked like magic. I lived on instinct then. I still do now.”

•••

The old barracks on Fort Ord are deserted; the wood has warped. This is now the campus of Cal State-Monterey Bay, where the sports teams are called Otters and the basketball arena is “The Kelp Bed.” With so many skeletons of Army buildings standing, though, it still looks like a military base. This was where Sgt. Herman Edwards Sr. finished his Army days after serving in two wars.



Herman Sr. met Martha on The Coleman Kaserne, a military facility in Germany. This was just after World War II ended. Martha was German, and she worked as a telephone operator because her English was quite good. Like in the movies, she fell for the stranger across a crowded room. He fell for her, too. They petitioned the U.S. government for the right to marry. They were granted that right but were warned the wedding would not be legal in most states in the American South. He was black. She was white.

“My father gave me discipline,” Herm Jr. says. “But my mother, Coach, my mother gave me passion!”

He says “passion” with the exclamation point, the word coming out like a shouted whisper. And he switches topics. He points to the field where young soldiers used to drill and where now those 800-or-so children play football.

“I want you to notice something,” he says. “When you look at the field, what do you see?” There is a lot to see. Three dozen volunteer coaches in red scream (none have whistles — at this camp, only Herm gets a whistle). A small child shot-puts a football high in the air, and six or seven players stand together and wait for it to fall, like seagulls on the beach begging for food. An older player tucks a football under his arm, and he fakes right, left, right, left again, and someone behind him yells, “I already tagged you.” A large young man with the body of a lineman but the heart of a quarterback throws a spiral. Later, when Herm Edwards asks for quarterbacks, he will stand up. “You’re a quarterback?” Herm will ask with a grin. “You Daunte Culpepper?”

There are girls and boys here, tall and short, slim and chubby, white and black and all shades in between. This is the freefootball camp Herm Edwards envisioned when he said to his friends in Monterey: “I don’t want to raise more money. I want to touch the kids personally.” Herm hopes to bring a camp like this to Kansas City next year.

“What do you see?” he asks.

See? Happy kids playing football? “No!” he says. “You see a clean field! See that now? There’s no garbage on this field anywhere! No pieces of paper! No cups! No garbage anywhere!”

He smiles. Herman Edwards Sr. always told his son: There is nothing more important than taking pride in what you do.

•••

People at the Monterey Boys and Girls Club love to talk about how small the place used to be. Opinions vary. Most say it was roughly the size of an old trailer. Ron Johnson, a former NFL wide receiver who runs the club, says it was smaller than that.

“That man won’t tell you this,” Johnson says, as he points at his lifelong friend and former NFL teammate Herm Edwards.“But he built this place.”

Herm does not have to say anything because his name is on the wall, right above the cafeteria where 600 meals are dished out to kids every day. Across a 5,000-square-foot play area, there’s the computer center, and research center, two basketball courts and also the science center, where there’s a tarantula that scares Edwards.

“He looked at the old Boys and Girls Club and said, ‘Oh man, we’ve got to do better than this,’ ” Johnson says. “And he started a capital campaign. And the money was raised. That’s just how Herm is. That’s how he has been for as long as I’ve known him.”

Herm shrugs. “When I first thought we needed a new Boys and Girls Club, nobody saw it,” he says. “It’s like they couldn’t picture it. It was too big, maybe. I don’t know. I always had this in mind. I could always see it.”

He switches topics again, and like one song blending into another, he talks about the Chiefs. “The thing about the Chiefs is everybody needs to understand the job. The job of the offense is not to score points. The job of the defense is not to stop the other team from scoring points. You understand, Coach? That’s what people think it’s about. That’s the way this team was playing. But that’s not what the job is.” Behind him, there are the cracks and laughter of kids playing pool.

“The job,” he says, “is to win. That’s all. Everybody’s heard me say that. You play to win the game (it is even the name of his book), but nobody knows what I mean by that. What I mean is, sometimes scoring 30 points is worse than scoring 20 points because you score too quickly, and your defense is on the field all day and can’t stop anybody in the fourth quarter. You understand me, Coach?

“I mean sometimes our defense has to stop the other team deep in their territory so Dante Hall will be in position to get a punt return. I mean sometimes our offense needs to hold the ball for 6 minutes to give our defense a break. I mean it




all has to work together. Everybody has to work to win. That’s the whole thing.”

The kids then run at Herm in a swarm, and he signs his name on the backs of their T-shirts.

“We have a chance to win, Coach,” Herm says. “I can see it.”

•••

The small white house on Highland was Herman Edwards Sr.’s pride, the only house he ever bought. He died in 1978, after Herm Jr.’s first season in the NFL. Edwards Sr. had been in a car crash, and Herm rushed to the hospital. He promised to take care of his mother and sister. He watched his father die. Herman Sr. was 60.

“They said ‘natural causes,’ ” Herm says. “What are those?”

He often tells stories about his father, both to the kids at the camp and to his players in the NFL. He has told the story about his father making him “sweep the corners” in the backyard so many times that many of his friends and former players can recount it word for word. He also tells of times the bugle would blow on Fort Ord. His father would stop the car, get out and salute the flag. He would make young Herm salute the flag, too.

“But nobody’s around, Dad,” young Herm would say.

“That’s when it’s most important,” Edwards Sr. replied.

“His father instilled incredible loyalty in Herm,” says Lamonte Winston, the Chiefs’ longtime director of player development. Winston says Edwards got him into the NFL more than 15 years ago. They had met at an NFL tryout camp — Winston was coaching then. The two connected. Winston was hired by the Chiefs the next year based mostly on Edwards’ recommendation. It never takes Edwards long to evaluate someone.

“He’s told me so many stories about his father,” Winston says. “I think he’s been trying to live up and be the kind of manhis father wanted him to be. I don’t think that’s ever very far from his mind.”

Yes, when Herman Edwards Sr. bought the small white house on Highland, the neighbors did start a petition. The petition was sent to the real estate agent, but Herman and Martha got the message. We don’t want you. They bought the house anyway. Martha still lives there 45 years later. She will not move. Everyone else who lived on the street is long gone.

There’s another part of that story. A few years after the petition failed, those neighbors came over to see Martha Edwards. They apologized. They said: “We were scared. But now we see what kind of people you are.” And they pointed at Herm Jr. and his sister and they said, “We are so proud of the way you raised your children.”

“Coach, people can change,” Herm Edwards says. “That’s what I live for. That’s why I come back home every year. You can help people change, Coach. You can make a difference in their lives. Football. Life. You can help people!”

And with that last exclamation point, he blows his whistle and runs back on the field, which is not far from where he usedto shine shoes and salute the flag and dream of being a star. He tells a young man to pick up a crumpled cup that the wind had blown out of the garbage can.

To reach Joe Posnanski, call (816) 234-4361 or send e-mail to [email protected].



Pardon Chiefs coach if he doesn't panic over QB's injury

Sep. 12, 2006

By Clark Judge CBS SportsLine.com Senior Writer Tell Clark your opinion!

So Kansas City quarterback Trent Green is sidelined with a concussion, and nobody's certain when he'll return. You think that's going to rattle new coach Herman Edwards?

Please.

Edwards has been down this road too many times. In fact, in six years as a head coach he has become an expert on playing without his starting quarterback. He did it last year. And the year before that. And the year before that.

"You know what's ironic?" he asked Tuesday. "The first year I was with the Jets (2001) was the only year I had one quarterback play all 16 games."

You can look it up. In 2001 he went to the playoffs with Vinny Testaverde as his starter. The following year, New York returned to postseason play with Chad Pennington, who supplanted Vinny after four games. In 2003, Pennington was hurt in the third preseason game and missed seven starts. The following year he missed three, but the Jets made it the playoffs anyway. Then, last year Pennington and what seemed like half the Jets roster bowed out with injuries.

"I got it all," said Edwards.

That's not necessarily bad. In fact, it can be constructive considering what Edwards is up against now. And, let's face it, it's not good. It never is when you lose your opening game and starting quarterback at the same time.

But I remember Edwards backed into a corner in 2003 when he lost Pennington with a broken left wrist suffered in a meaningless preseason game with the Giants. The coach was supposed to panic. He did not, and the Jets finished 6-10 -- losing

six games where the margin in each was no more than seven points.

OK, so they didn't make the playoffs, but that experience benefited Edwards when he lost Pennington again in 2004 and won two of three games with Quincy Carter. And the experience should benefit him now.

"It gives me an advantage because I've been there," said Edwards. "What a lot of people don't realize is that when we first made the switch to Chad (in 2002) we weren't the same offense early as we were the last seven games. We let him grow into it and gave him the ability to throw more as the season went along. Then, at the end, we were really rolling."

There are a couple of differences between what Edwards is going through now and what he went through then: First, the switch to Pennington in 2002 was voluntary; it was not necessitated by a debilitating injury to his starting quarterback. Second, once Pennington joined the huddle that season he never left, playing the last 14 games -- including two playoff starts.

Trent Green shouldn't be gone that long. Edwards, who spoke with Green by telephone, said the quarterback would be discharged from the hospital Tuesday and will recuperate at home. He also said he has no intention of signing a veteran quarterback to replace him.

Herman Edwards will speak from experience when he tells his team, 'We have to play a little bit different, and we'll be OK.' (Getty Images)

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Both are indications that the Chiefs don't anticipate a prolonged recovery. Nevertheless, it's the first time in Green's six years with the Chiefs that he'll be out of the lineup, and Edwards is prepared.

"You can make it," he said. "You just have to play differently. You can't ask Damon Huard to do what Trent Green does. It's not fair to the player, and it's not fair to the team. But what you have to do is play a different game. I look at this team, and it has veteran people in the middle of the line, a heckuva running back and two good tight ends. So, all of a sudden, you tell your team, 'We have to play a little bit different, and we'll be OK.'"

If he wants to draw on someone else's history he can go back to 1992, when Bobby Ross first coached the San Diego Chargers. He lost his starting quarterback in his first game, a preseason loss to Arizona, then dropped the first four starts of the regular season.

But that was it. Ross won 11 of his next 12 and became the team's first head coach in 11 years to reach the playoffs.

Edwards could also point to the 2004 Pittsburgh Steelers, a club that ousted the Jets from the playoffs. They were forced to turn to rookie quarterback Ben Roethlisberger in the third quarter of their second game after starter Tommy Maddox was injured. I think you know what happened.

"I'll probably talk to the team about (overcoming adversity)," Edwards said. "You can do some different things, but the important thing is you can be OK."

You better trust him. He's been through this too many times not to know.

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Posted on Tue, Apr. 18, 2006

CHIEFS COACH IS RUNNING TEAM HIS WAY

HANGING with HERM

Edwards likes to have things organized

By ELIZABETH MERRILL The Kansas City Star

he day started 12 hours ago, before the roosters and Katie Couric, and Herm Edwards is resting in a swivel chair with one foot on his desk. But only for a minute. The NFL is a workingman’s game, move it or lose it, and Edwards has the Chargers game on his flat screen and two months from now on his mind.

Forty-five minutes ago, he was hunched down in a one-on-one blocking drill. Gotta do it on the grass, he says. Now he’s inside his immaculate office on the fourth floor at Arrowhead Stadium on Monday, gazing at his perfectly stacked papers, and someone asks Edwards whether he’s a neat freak.

“Take a look at the bathroom in there,” he says sheepishly.

A wooden door slides open, and somewhere, Martha Stewart is jealous. Five hand towels are neatly folded, and the floor sparkles. A fat, red scented candle by the sink gives off a whiff of sophistication.

The motif comes courtesy of his wife. The upkeep is totally Herm.

“When you sit in this chair,” Edwards says, “five things are going to happen that you didn’t anticipate. If you’re not organized, it sends you in a panic.

“I like things in order. Then you know where they are. You know what to do. There’s no indecision.”

Take a quick jaunt around the complex these days, and it’s obvious Edwards, in three months as Kansas City’s football coach, has done some major redecorating to put his stamp on the program. The pool table in the middle of the locker room is gone, and so are a handful of televisions that hung on the walls.

A sign says, “No cell phones.” A fresh coat of paint is being splashed in the players’ lounge, where a 6-foot NFL shield willsoon be plastered on the wall.

Edwards has his hands in everything, even on this seemingly mundane Monday in mid-April. After an early-morning workout, he reads a Bible passage before dashing into a meeting. It’s from Job.

“One thing about Job is that he had a lot of patience,” Edwards says. “You go to Job this time of year because there’s a lot of things flying around.

“Be really patient today, partner.”

Nothing — be it rain, snow, or locked doors — keeps Edwards from his early-morning workout. One time in New York, when he was coaching the Jets, he scaled an 8-foot fence when his pass code didn’t work.

In Kansas City, Edwards usually arrives at the workout facility around 4:45 a.m., early enough that the Chiefs had to change their security system to accommodate him.

Dressed in a blue T-shirt, black shorts and Pumas, Edwards, who turns 52 later this month, still looks fit enough to play cornerback. He’s gathered his staff on the practice field Monday for their first clinic, a sort of Football 101 by position.

Each assistant will give a hands-on fundamentals lesson this week to the staff. It’s nerve-racking for some because they’re doing it in front of their new boss.

Tim Krumrie, an old-school defensive-line coach who looks as if he just stepped off the set of “The Longest Yard,” is unfazed. He picks up a one-man sled and tosses it like a rag doll. He barks a few expletives and tells everybody to listen because he has the floor. He has Edwards run through ropes and simulate a defensive tackle.

Krumrie, it seems, has always been fearless. Back in his playing days with the Bengals, he suffered one of the most

T

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gruesome football injuries ever televised. He shattered his leg in the Super Bowl against the 49ers trying to tackle Roger Craig. For six years, Krumrie played with a 15-inch steel rod in his leg.

He dives on the ground Monday, his long, moppy locks flying, and scoops up a fumble in front of a collection of middle-aged coaches.

“This is the baby right here,” Krumrie says as he holds up a football. “Never let it go.”

By 3 p.m., Edwards is back in the weight room, giving a tour. He points to a sign above the entryway that says, “Check your ego at the door.” On a wall next to the windows is another message:

“Your habits form who you are.”

In the next few months, two symbols will be tattooed on the Chiefs’ collective psyche — the NFL shield and the arrowhead logo. Both are everywhere on the complex now, from the floors to the walls to the windows.

The pool table in the locker room was removed, in part, because it was covering an arrowhead on the carpet. It also symbolized something that Edwards doesn’t want in his locker room.

“I don’t want guys to get comfortable,” Edwards says. “I really don’t. I think you have to have a feeling in your gut when you walk into this building of a little bit of anxiety. Because that keeps you alert. That keeps you alive. That keeps you wanting to get better.”

Ever since he was a kid, Edwards was never comfortable. He grew up the son of an Army sergeant and was an undrafted rookie cornerback at Philadelphia. Edwards gets uncharacteristically sentimental when he talks about the NFL shield. He says its stars and stripes represent America. He wants it painted everywhere to remind the players that they’re in an occupation that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

He likes the arrowheads because they represent team.

Edwards recently pulled out the list of locker spaces, traditionally assigned by position, and switched everything up. He moved the offense with the defense, the quarterbacks with the defensive linemen.

“You create team unity and (the idea) that we’re all in this together,” Edwards says.

“Generally, the defensive backs don’t hang around with the offensive line. Because they’re out of the way, you don’t think about that. Now all of a sudden, you sit next to a guy and he’s been on your team for five years and you’d be surprised. He may have some of the same things in common that you have.”

Three months ago, when Edwards was settling into Dick Vermeil’s old office, the place was so empty that it almost echoed. Now Edwards has added his own touch, albeit with a white glove.

He has a collection of mini-NFL mugs that are lined up perfectly on a shelf. He has three bobblehead characters — one of himself, one of his good friend Tony Dungy and one of Vermeil.

“Dungy and Dick,” Edwards says. “The two wise men.”

Edwards, who played for Vermeil in Philly, doesn’t want a few coats of paint to cover everything his mentor put together in five years. He’ll just do things a little differently.

He’s handed the team a schedule through June, and the players are bracing themselves for a more disciplined, regimented training camp. Edwards was already working on that schedule Monday. He likes to work at least two months ahead.

And on Monday, there was no slowing down. There are draft meetings and staff meetings and film to watch. Edwards hopes to hop into his Chiefs-red Chevy SUV and be out of the office by 7 p.m.

He grabs some of the neatly stacked papers. Be patient, partner.

To reach Elizabeth Merrill, Chiefs reporter for The Star, call (816) 234-4744 or send e-mail to [email protected]

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GRETZ: FOCUS ON - THE OFFENSE SEP 06, 2006, 8:47:02 AM BY BOB GRETZ - FAQ

Herm Edwards calls it “the vaunted offense” that he inherited when he took over as head coach of the Chiefs.

There’s no question that when the Chiefs have had the ball in the last few seasons, they’ve been very productive, whether it was in producing yards or touchdowns. And there’s also no question that one of the major reasons for that statistical success has been the continuity of the offensive roster, especially the starters. Here’s a look:

This year there are three new starters on the offense: left tackle Kyle Turley, right tackle Kevin Sampson and fullback Ronnie Cruz. That’s major turnover for this group. The last time there were that many new starters came in the first year of the Dick Vermeil’s Era, when six new faces were in the opening lineup.

As the Chiefs begin the Herm Edwards Era, the offense is very much in a transitional phase in attitude and approach. The playbook and most of the weapons remain the same; the head coach and play caller are different and that will bring change. What was considered the unit’s major strength – the offensive line – now has question marks and some of those weapons are a year older.

A breakdown of the offensive roster:

QUARTERBACKS: The transition affecting the entire offense can be seen at quarterback. Trent Green remains the starter and he ranks among the league’s top 10 quarterbacks. His greatest strength has been his availability; Green has started 80 consecutive games, which is a franchise record. Todd Collins is gone, Damon Huard has moved up from No. 3 to No. 2 and this year’s No. 3 is a rookie Brodie Croyle.

Last year, the Chiefs were one of the few teams in the league that had a No. 3 QB that had actually started an NFL game. This year, the Chiefs have just six NFL starts behind Green, which will be one of the lowest totals in the league (San Diego has only two quarterbacks in Philip Rivers and Charlie Whitehurst and neither has started an NFL game.)

RUNNING BACKS: There are few teams that have two Pro Bowl backs on the roster, as the Chiefs do with Larry Johnson and Michael Bennett. That duo replaces the duo of Priest Holmes and Johnson. While Bennett has run for 1,000 yards in his career, he’s never produced like Holmes did in his time with the Chiefs. Because he joined them with a hamstring injury, the Chiefs are still feeling their way with what Bennett can do, but understand this: he’ll be active in a number of different offensive roles. The Chiefs have traded veteran Tony Richardson for the untested Ronnie Cruz in what is a diminishing fullback role in this offense.

RECEIVERS: There’s the “old” guys in Eddie Kennison (33), Jason Dunn, (33 in November) and Tony Gonzalez (30.) Then there are the youngsters like rookies Jeff Webb (24) and Chris Hannon (22.) In between are Dante Hall (soon to be 27), Kris Wilson and Samie Parker (both 25.)

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At tight end the Chiefs have one of the best receivers and best blockers in the league in Gonzalez and Dunn. Wilson remains an unknown factor. On the outside, Kennison is a proven commodity, but the rest of the group has not made a place for itself as a go-to receiver. Hall remains a big-play option, but his snaps must be limited because of his value as a returner on special teams. Parker has gotten better each year he’s been in the league and that trend must continue.

This group is not fantasy football friendly, but they’ve gotten the job done well enough in the last three years that only Indianapolis can match the passing numbers the Chiefs have put in the books.

LINE: As Will Shields comes back from his sprained ankle, the interior trio of the starting group remains the best in the business. Shields, Casey Wiegmann and Brian Waters are the true engine of this offense, not only in the running game, but pass protection.

The question marks are suddenly at tackle. Kyle Turley is not Willie Roaf. But he’s a veteran NFL player, who has seen a lot of football action, albeit not in the last two years. The real question is at right tackle, where Kevin Sampson will open. He’s been inconsistent and troubled in pass protection. The first backup is Will Svitek, untested in the NFL. The next backup is Jordan Black, who has been tested at tackle and been found wanting. The only experience inside behind the starters is Black, who is a better guard than tackle, and Chris Bober, who struggled through the pre-season with extended playing time.

Like just about every other team in the league, the Chiefs problem is depth. Their vaunted offense may be on shaky ground already, but if they can keep their core on the field (Green, Johnson, Shields, Wiegmann, Waters, Gonzalez) they should remain productive, although maybe not nearly with as much explosion.

But, if Parker, Turley and Sampson can solidify their positions and Wilson and Bennett add some new wrinkles, this offense is capable of great production and capable of doing it within the concept of a full-team.

The opinions offered in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Kansas City Chiefs.

A former beat reporter who covered the Pittsburgh Steelers during their glory years, Gretz covered the Chiefs for the Kansas City Star for nine years before heading up KCFX-FM's sports department. He is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Board of Selectors. His column appears three times a week during the season.

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Johnson is so old school, he's new school August 15, 2006

Dennis Dillon

You're all thumbs. Your opposable digits move at rapid-fire speed as they punch the controller's buttons. Video game face firmly affixed, you're not about to lose this match. Playing as the Chiefs, of course, you call your own number. A lot. By early in the second quarter, you have rushed 14 times for 191 yards and four touchdowns and have built a 41-7 lead. Gushing with superiority, you take a football and spike it on the floor inside the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Hold on. Something is wrong with this picture. It doesn't jibe with the image of a throwback who has an appreciation for pro football's history and the players who have come before -- all of which is exhibited on the level above.

Didn't your father, a longtime high school coach in the Washington, D.C., area who now coaches the defensive line at Penn State, stick a football into your crib on the day you were born? Didn't he wean you on old NFL Films tapes? Together, you watched them over and over. You played the NFL's greatest running backs tape so often, it corroded and got tangled in the VCR.

On the night before you received the Doak Walker Award as college football's best running back in 2002, didn't you listen attentively, respectfully, as Earl Campbell told you how he used to annoy Texas coach Darrell Royal by sneaking on to the Longhorns' special teams -- once even blocking a punt? You never mentioned how you blocked two punts and scored three touchdowns when you played special teams at Penn State.

Didn't you pay tribute to your NFL forebears by spending thousands of dollars to have miniature jerseys embroidered into the leather upholstery of your 2002 custom blue Mercedes-Benz G500 SUV? Among the 30 players represented are Dick "Night Train" Lane, Sam Huff, Marion Motley, Jim Parker, Lance Alworth and 15 Hall of Fame running backs.

Now, on this Friday morning in late June, you're in Canton, Ohio, inside football's hallowed Hall, and what has your juices flowing? Artifacts such as the brace that protected the fragile knee of Jets quarterback Joe Namath and the square-toed shoe of Saints kicker Tom Dempsey and the specially padded helmet worn by Chiefs linebacker Willie Lanier? How about the enshrinement gallery featuring the Hall's 229 busts? The team-by-team displays? The memorial to NFL players who served in the military?

No, you're geeked up about beating Kyle Motts, the 15-year-old son of the Hall's vice president of marketing, in Madden football, a game you can play in any other place on any other day. Explain yourself, Larry Johnson.

"Very rarely do I beat anyone younger than me in Madden."

Try again.

"Being here so many times, I might as well get a bed down here."

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OK, so this is your fifth trip to the Hall. You probably could lead a tour if asked. Your dad brought you and your brother, Tony, here when you were in high school. And you made three pilgrimages while you were at Penn State, driving four hours each way from State College, Pa.

Still . . . there's trace evidence of old-school.

Like the way you run. Other backs spin, twist or dance to avoid tacklers. If there's a defender in your path, you'll muscle up your 6-1, 230-pound frame and try to run over him. Collisions are you. "He's a beast," Vikings fullback Tony Richardson, a former Chiefs teammate, says. "He loves running in between the tackles. He likes mixing it up in there and getting hit and knocked around. With Larry, the more you hit him, the more times he comes back."

Like the way you dress. Other backs wear extra protective equipment, such as elbow pads, shin guards and knee braces. You accessorize only with tape on your wrists -- you have jammed them using stiff-arms -- and gloves when it's cold. You've watched teammate Priest Holmes before a game. As he put foam pads on his knees, calves and ankles, you wondered if he might as well put on a bulletproof vest, too.

Like the era you would like to have played in. "In the '50s, before they had all that unnecessary roughness stuff," you say. "Where anything could go. Guys were clotheslining, tripping, leg-whipping, scratching, biting."

This may not be your decade, but it is your year. After standing in Holmes' shadow for 2 1/2 seasons, you are now the Chiefs' No. 1 running back -- a designation Herm Edwards made as soon as he was named the team's coach last January -- and every fantasy player's No. 1 draft pick. And why not? After sharing the running load for the first seven games last season, you stepped up big when Holmes suffered a season-ending neck and spinal injury. You rushed for 1,351 yards and 16 touchdowns in the final nine games, finishing the season with 1,750 yards, 20 TDs and a trip to the Pro Bowl.

Your football career has been marked by a quadrennial pattern. In high school and college, you didn't become the starter until your senior year -- and then, when you got your chance, you produced prodigiously. This will be your fourth NFL season. The rest of the league has been warned.

It's easy to prescribe patience, but it can be a vexatious virtue when you're the one trying to swallow it. You've had so many doses, it has stuck in your gullet and left a bitter aftertaste.

God, there were times you hated being a coach's son. It wasn't fair the way some of your youth league coaches treated you. They went out of their way to curtail your playing time in football and basketball rather than risk showing preferential treatment. Before your junior season in high school, Larry Sr. joined Joe Paterno's staff at Penn State and you transferred to State College Area High School, where you sat behind two other running backs. Then, as a senior, you rushed for 2,159 yards and 29 touchdowns. At Penn State, you were part of a committee of running backs that spent three seasons behind Eric McCoo until you were a senior and Paterno finally let the leash out. All you did was score 23 touchdowns and lead the nation in rushing with 2,087 yards.

Even your arrival in the NFL came amid controversy. You were the highest-rated player on the Chiefs' board when general manager Carl Peterson took a risk and made a trade with the Steelers, dropping from the 16th to the 27th spot in the first round of the 2003 draft. Dick Vermeil, then the Chiefs' coach, wanted to take Colorado defensive end Tyler Brayton at No. 27. But Peterson wasn't about to pass on you again -- especially given his concern about a hip injury Holmes had suffered late in 2002 -- and overruled Vermeil.

Talk about a prickly beginning. You couldn't understand why a team that already had Holmes -- he had rushed for 1,555 yards in 2001 and 1,615 yards in '02 -- would draft you. And the coach was miffed about not getting the defensive player he wanted. It was a tossup whether you or Vermeil was more discouraged.

As a rookie, you were inactive for 10 games and rushed only 20 times for 85 yards. You felt frustrated and isolated. There were many late-night phone calls to your father. After Penn State's season ended, he even flew to Kansas City for a face-to-face, heart-to-heart weekend.



It didn't get much better in 2004. Vermeil uttered his infamous quote about it being time for you "to take off the diapers" -- it became known as Diapergate throughout the organization -- which only deepened the chill between you and him. You were the No. 3 running back, behind Holmes and Derrick Blaylock. Finally, you went to Peterson and asked to be traded.

"I'm not going to trade you. You're too valuable to the Chiefs," Peterson told you. "Whether you like it or not, you and I are attached at the hip. You will always be my choice, and I will always be the guy who chose you. . . . You've just got to hang in there."

After consecutive rushing performances of 118, 104 and 151 yards late that season, you came into training camp last summer and energized the line with your fierce competitiveness. That attitude carried over into games. "There were times when he was as physical as we were running the ball and getting after the defensive players," left guard Brian Waters says. "You'd see him get in a lot of verbal confrontations, which sparked us because he's our guy."

You aren't just a steamroller. You have a distinctive characteristic that separates you from other punishing, downhill runners. "Typically, when you have a bruising back like that, they don't have the speed to run away from you," says Texans general manager Rick Smith. "Once he breaks a tackle, he has the speed to finish a run off and take it the distance. That's what makes him special."

Last season was exceptional, but with only 476 carries and 12 starts in three seasons, your career barely has lifted off. There are things you must do to reach cruising altitude and become a premier back. Improving in pass protection is foremost. Your missed blitz pickup of Cowboys linebacker Scott Fujita last December was costly; it resulted in a sack and fumble by quarterback Trent Green and wiped out a scoring opportunity in a game the Chiefs lost, 31-28. Becoming adept at picking up blitzes will increase your chances of staying on the field in third-down situations and give you more opportunities as a receiver. Although you're righthanded, you've been working on carrying the ball in your left hand, to protect it from being stripped on runs to the left.

The running landscape has changed in Kansas City. Holmes' career is on hold -- he's on the physically unable to perform list -- Michael Bennett was recently acquired from the Saints, and now you're the man.

About damn time.

You often wear a scowl on your face and a chip on your shoulder. You're moody --definitely not a morning person -- and aloof. You don't trust many adults. That's the persona you portray. But if the public could chip away that facade, it might be surprised by what it would find underneath.

You're happiest when you're around kids. You volunteer as a coach in the Junior Player Development program, which teaches football fundamentals to pre-high school players. You were the host for an Easter egg hunt at the Chiefs' practice facility. You have adopted and donated equipment to a Kansas City T-Ball team, "L.J.'s Young Lions," whose games you attend and whose players you invite to your practices and games. You undergo a change of character around children, for whom you are a ray of light in worlds filled with too much darkness. Once, during your rookie season, a young boy knocked on your door, soliciting contributions for a school fundraiser; you wrote him a check for $2,000.

You love to dance -- on the football field. Whether you're playing at home or away, standing on the sideline or in the huddle, when music plays through the stadium sound system, you start wiggling.

"We called him 'Mr. Boogie,' " Richardson says.

You take a hands-on approach when it comes to interior decoration. Each picture, wallpaper pattern and piece of furniture inside your suburban Kansas City house was personally selected by you. Among the contents that might catch a visitor's eye are several paintings by neo-mannerist artist Ernie Barnes, a former AFL player; a collection of jazz music featuring Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Etta James; a bookcase lined with organized crime novels; and a freezer door filled with boxes of Popsicles.



Copyright © 2006 All rights reserved.

Your brother now lives with you on a quiet cul-de-sac 20 minutes south of Arrowhead Stadium. Tony, who played wide receiver at Penn State and is two years younger, had just joined a Pittsburgh law firm as a paralegal when, at the behest of your father, he put his life on hold last September to come to Kansas City and help manage yours.

His role is part business manager, part travel agent, part adviser -- but mostly he is a friend and confidant.

You'll turn 27 in November, but your body has absorbed moderate punishment and you haven't had any major injuries. You figure you can play another nine or 10 years. Compared with the running backs enshrined here in Canton, you barely have started on your journey, but you aspire to a grandiose ending.

"When I leave the game," you say, "I want to be known as the greatest ever at my position."

If that happens, you'll make many more trips to the Hall of Fame. They'll never give you a bed there, but you might get a bronze bust.



GRETZ: LARRY JOHNSON #1 - RUNNING TO 2,000 YARDS JUL 03, 2006, 8:43:55 AM BY BOB GRETZ - FAQ

In his fourth season of scholastic football at State College High School, Larry Johnson ran for 2,159 yards over 12 games for the Little Lions.

In his fourth season of playing college football at Penn State University, Johnson ran for 2,087 yards over 13 games for the Nittany Lions.

This is Larry Johnson’s fourth year of pro football.

Will the four-year trend of 2,000-yard seasons continue in 2006 with the Chiefs? Will L.J. join what is a very exclusive group of backs that have run for that magical total?

First, understand that Johnson knows there will be plenty of talk about getting to 2,000 yards based on how he finished up last season with his remarkable run of nine-games with 100-plus yards.

But know this: reaching 2,000 yards is not a pre-season goal for the Chiefs running back.

“Two-thousand yards is very reachable, but everything has to click. It has to be the right time for the running back and it has to be the right time for the team,” Johnson said.

“I really want to get to the Super Bowl. I want to walk around with my Super Bowl ring like everybody else does, and kind of sit on the plane, and put my arm on the arm rest and have that big Super Bowl ring and have somebody ask ‘Oh, OK you were part of the Super Bowl champs.’

“You get more respect being a Super Bowl champion than you do for being a Super Bowl champion of somebody’s fantasy league.”

A year ago this kind of talk about Johnson’s production would have been considered fantasy. He was just looking to get on the field. A season with 1,000 yards seemed an unreachable goal.

Then came the neck injury suffered by Priest Holmes and Johnson’s ascension to full-time status. He grabbed his opportunity and ran hard with it, showing the entire NFL that there was a new offensive force in Kansas City.

Last year, Johnson’s nine-game run produced 1,351 yards, or an average of 150.1 yards per game. Now, project that over a full 16-game season and L.J.’s total yardage would reach 2,401 yards. That would shatter the NFL record for rushing yardage set by Eric Dickerson in 1984 of 2,105 yards.

Over 16 games, a back would have to average 125 yards per game to hit 2,000 yards. To break Dickerson’s record, a back would have to average 132 yards per game.

After what he did over the second half of last season, it all seems very doable for Johnson.

“Looking at what he (Dickerson) did in that season and looking at what I did, they were so similar, maybe it (2,000-plus yards) could have happened last year if I started the whole season,” Johnson said. “As far as Eric Dickerson’s record, I don’t know if I really want to break it because I have so much respect for Eric Dickerson.

“When they bring those records up, those guys names stay alive. As soon as you break them, nobody talks about them. When Walter Payton was approaching Jim Brown’s record (career rushing yards), everybody talked about Jim Brown, Jim Brown, Jim Brown. Then when he broke it, all the talk was about Walter Payton and nobody wanted to talk about Jim Brown.

“I have so much respect for those guys, Dickerson, Payton, Brown, Earl Campbell. I shouldn’t be on a list with those guys. Put me on a separate list of guys who have done things like that in the last five years.”

More math: Johnson averaged 5.2 yards per carry last season and over his NFL career, his average is 5.08 yards per

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carry. If he maintains that rate in the coming season, it would take 394 carries to reach the 2,000-yard plateau.

Last year, he carried the ball 336 times, so he would need about four more carries per game. Understand that he averaged just eight carries per game over the first four weeks of the season and that would seem to be an easily reachable number. In fact, it would break down to 25 carries per game over the 16-game season.

Over the last nine games of the ‘05 season, Johnson averaged 29.5 carries per game.

The rest of the Chiefs think 2,000 yards is very possible.

“Can he do it? Absolutely,” said guard Brian Waters. “But there’s a lot of things that have to go right. And he needs some help, not just from the offensive line, but from Eddie Kennison, Tony Gonzalez and the passing game.

“Getting everything to fall together isn’t easy, or you would see it happen all the time.”

Coming on Wednesday: It’s not easy to run for 2,000 yards. We’ll look at those backs and teams that have made rushing history.




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GRETZ: LARRY JOHNSON #2 - HISTORY OF 2,000 YARDS JUL 05, 2006, 8:56:24 AM BY BOB GRETZ - FAQ

Since the merger of the AFL and NFL that was completed in 1970, there have been 36 seasons of pro football. In that time, the league has grown from 26 to 28 to 30 and finally to the 32 teams.

Do the multiplication of the teams and in 35 full schedules (not counting the strike shortened nine-game season of 1982) that works out to exactly 1,000 seasons among all those individual teams.

In those 1,000 seasons, NFL teams have produced 429 where a running back has gained 1,000 yards or more. That’s 43 percent of the seasons.

In those same 1,000 seasons, NFL teams have produced five where a running back has gained 2,000 yards or more. That’s one-half of one percent of the seasons.

That’s how tough a 2,000-yard season is for an NFL running back. Those are the odds Larry Johnson faces as the Chiefs head into the 2006 season. It’s been done by five running backs over those 36 seasons, or once every seven-plus years.

Here are the greatest rushing seasons in league history.

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As these numbers show there is no single formula for a running back to reach the 2,000-yard mark and there’s no prototype of a back that has achieved that mark. Here’s how each back got the job done.

DickersonIn just his second NFL season, Dickerson needed 15 games to break Simpson’s record that was set over 14 games. He averaged 23.7 carries and 131.6 yards per game. Dickerson was the Rams offense that year, as his rushing total was 74 percent of the rushing yards (2,864 yards) and 42 percent of the Rams total offense (5,006 yards.) Despite his season, the Rams did not lead the NFL in rushing, as their 179 yards per game average was second behind the Chicago Bears. They were 27th or next to last in passing yards per game, averaging just 133.9 yards per game. The Rams defense that year finished 14th in yards allowed.

Dickerson had two things going for him that season: his head coach John Robinson, a man that believed in the running game, and a talented and veteran offensive line. At tackle were Bill Bain, Jackie Slater and Irv Pankey, with Dennis Harrah and Kent Hill at guard, Doug Smith at center and David Hill as the tight end. With the exception of Pankey, all of those guys were six years or plus in NFL experience (Pankey was in his fourth season.) The offensive line coach was Hudson Houck, who is still considered one of the best line coaches in the league (he now works for the Dolphins.) Jeff Kemp was the starting quarterback.



In 16 games that season, Dickerson ran against nine defenses that finished the season ranked in the top half of the league. The best defense and best run defense that year was Chicago, and he ran for 149 yards against the Bears. The No. 2 defense was Cleveland and he ran for 102 yards against the Browns. New Orleans was the No. 4 defense and he ran for a total of 313 yards in two games against the Saints.

There were only four games were he did not gain at least 100 yards, with his worst performance coming against San Francisco, when he had 38 yards on 13 carries.

The Rams finished 10-6, making the playoffs as a wildcard team. They lost at home in the first round to the New York Giants 16-13. Dickerson ran for 107 yards on 23 carries.

Dickerson played nine more seasons after his biggest season, but never came close to reaching that level, although he did run for 1,821 yards in the 1986 season for the Rams. He is currently ranked as the sixth leading rusher in NFL history with 13,259 yards.

LewisAmong all those runners who have cracked the 2,000-yard mark, right now Lewis looks like the one that does not belong. After running for his 2,066 yards in the 2003 season, he’s produced just 1,912 yards in the two seasons since. Lewis has battled injuries, NFL suspensions and jail time in trying to get his career back on track.

In his big season, he averaged 24.2 carries and 129.1 yards rushing per game. Lewis was the Ravens offense that year, as he finished with 77 percent of the rushing yards (2,674) and 42 percent of the Ravens total offense (4,929 yards.) Baltimore led the league in rushing, but finished 32nd and last in passing yards, averaging just 140.9 yards per game. That was Kyle Boller’s rookie season and he started nine of the 16 games. The Ravens defense was ranked third in the league in fewest yards allowed.

That defense and a mammoth offensive line is what Lewis had going for him in his run to the 2,000-yard mark. Led by Ray Lewis, the Baltimore defense was not quite up to the standard it set three seasons previous in a run to a Super Bowl title, but they allowed the second fewest first downs and only 25 offensive touchdowns. The offensive line was massive and experienced, averaging 339 pounds across the board. Tackles Orlando Brown and Jonathan Ogden were both in their eighth seasons. Center Mike Flynn was in his sixth season and guard Edwin Mulitalo was a fifth-year player. Guards Bennie Anderson and tight end Todd Heap were the youngsters, both in their third seasons.

That season, Lewis ran against seven defenses that ranked among the top half of the league’s units. Denver finished fourth that year in fewest yards allowed and Lewis ran for 134 yards against the Broncos. Cleveland was the 15th ranked defense that season, but Lewis ran for 295 and 205 yards against the Browns. There were four games where he did not gain at least 100 yards and his lowest output of the season was 68 yards against Jacksonville.

The Ravens finished the season 10-6 and won the AFC North division title. In a first-round game in the playoffs against Tennessee, Lewis ran 14 times for 35 yards and Baltimore dropped a 20-17 decision.

SandersNobody would have thought Sanders was going to run for 2,000 yards based on his first two games of the 1997 season. He ran for 33 yards in the opener against Atlanta and then had just 20 yards in Game No. 2 against Tampa Bay. With 14 games to play he was 1,947 yards away from the magical figure.

Over those last 14 games, he ran for exactly 2,000 yards, finishing with 2,053.

Of the five backs to crack 2,000 yards, Sanders was the oldest, playing that season as a 29-year old in his ninth season of NFL action. Before the 1997, he had come close to the 2,000-yard mark only once, when he ran for 1,883 yards in 1994.

Sanders averaged 20.9 carries and 128.3 yards per game. In the Lions offense that season, Sanders accounted for 83 percent of the rushing yards (2,464 yards), but only 35 percent of the offense (5,798 yards.) Detroit was second in rushing yards and second in overall offensive yards gained. The Lions defense finished 14th in fewest yards allowed.

Bobby Ross was the Detroit head coach that year, with Sylvester Croom as the offensive coordinator. The Lions offensive line was a veteran group led by center Kevin Glover, guards Mike Compton and Jeff Hartings, tackles Ray Roberts and Larry Tharpe and tight end David Sloan. The quarterback was Scott Mitchell.

Over the season, Sanders ran against only six defenses that finished among the top half of the league. Tampa Bay was third in fewest yards allowed that year, and Sanders ran for 20 yards in one game, but came back and ran for 215 yards in the second meeting. He also ran for 216 yards against an Indianapolis defense that finished 10th in fewest yards allowed. Those first two games were the only time he failed to eclipse the 100-yards mark during the season.



Despite his performance, the Lions finished just 9-7 and ended up tied for third in the NFC Central division. They made the playoffs as a wildcard team but lost in the first week, falling to Tampa Bay 20-10. Sanders had 65 yards on 18 carries in that game.

Sanders played just one more season and finished his career with 15,269 yards on 3,062 carries a remarkable career average of five yards per carry. He’s currently the third ranked rushing in league history behind Emmitt Smith and Walter Payton.

DavisNo back as ever put together an entire season like Davis did in 1998 with the Broncos. He rushing total for 19 games (16 regular season and 3 in the playoffs, including the Super Bowl) was 2,476 yards. That’s an average of 130 yards per game from September 7th through January 31st.

In the regular season, he averaged 24.5 carries and 125.5 yards per game. One of the biggest factors in Davis’ favor that year was the offense around him, led by Hall of Famer John Elway. He was 81 percent of the Broncos running game (2,468 yards) but was just 33 percent of the offense (6,092 yards.) Denver was second in rushing and third in offensive yards.

Davis also had a veteran and stable offensive line to run behind. Head coach Mike Shanahan and line guru Alex Gibbs constructed a group that was lightweight and mobile and the starting five opened all 16 games during the regular season. Tony Jones and Harry Swayne were the veteran tackles, Dan Neil and Matt Schlereth were the guards, Tom Nalen was the center and Shannon Sharpe worked at tight end.

In 16 regular season games, Davis ran against only four defenses that ended that season ranked among the top half of the league in fewest yards allowed. San Diego was the No. 1 defense in 1998 and Davis ran for 69 and 74 yards against the Chargers. He ran for just 29 yards in a game No. 15 loss to the New York Giants as he was held under 100 yards five different times. He ran for 208 yards against Seattle.

In the playoffs Davis ran for 199 yards against Miami, 167 yards against the New York Jets and 102 yards against Atlanta in the Super Bowl. All three of those defenses were ranked in the league’s top 10 in fewest yards allowed.

That season was really the swan song of Davis’ career. Over the next three seasons he started just 16 games because of various injuries and closed out his career with 1,655 carries for 7,607 yards.

SimpsonWhat Simpson accomplished during the 1973 season must go down as the greatest regular season rushing performance in pro football history. It would just be regular season, because despite the fact he was the first back to pass the 2,000-yard standard, Simpson’s Buffalo Bills did not make the playoffs.

Over 14 games, Simpson averaged 23.7 carries and 143.1 yards per game. To say Simpson was the Bills offense that year would be an understatement. He accounted for 67 percent of the rushing yardage (3,008 yards) and 49 percent of the total offensive yards (4,085 yards.) The Bills were 1st in rushing in the NFL that season and 10th in total offense. They were 26th and last in passing, as starting quarterback Joe Ferguson threw for just 939 yards during the season. Overall, the Bills quarterbacks had a 42.7 passer rating.

Simpson’s offensive line became known as “The Electric Company” although they will not go down in history as one of the great offensive lines. Guard Joe DeLamielleure is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and he was a rookie that season, who started all 14 games. The other guard was Reggie McKenzie, with Dave Foley and Donnie Green at the tackles and Mike Montler and Bruce Jarvis handling the center duties. Paul Seymour was the tight end. Lou Saban was the head coach.

Buffalo faced four defenses that ranked in the top half of the league in fewest yards allowed that season. Miami was No. 3 and held Simpson to 55 yards. The Chiefs were seventh, but Simpson ran for 157 yards in a mid-season Monday night game in Buffalo. He was held under 100 yards three times, but ran for 200-plus yards three times, including 250 yards in the opener against New England and then 219 yards against the Patriots in Game No. 13. In the last two weeks of the season – in freezing cold, on field that were snow covered – he ran for a total of 419 yards

The Bills were 9-5 and in second place in the AFC East that year and out of the playoffs. Simpson played another six seasons with the Bills and San Francisco and finished his career with 2,404 carries for 11,236 yards. He currently ranks 14th in NFL history.

Coming on Friday: based on his ability, his teammates, his opponents and history, can Larry Johnson run for 2,000 yards in the coming season?

GRETZ: Larry Johnson #1 - Running to 2,000 Yards



GRETZ: LARRY JOHNSON #3 - IS 2,000 POSSIBLE? JUL 07, 2006, 4:18:38 AM BY BOB GRETZ - FAQ

So, can Larry Johnson run for 2,000 yards in 2006?

“It’s certainly possible,” said Chiefs head coach Herm Edwards. “But a lot of things have to fall together for that to happen.

“I don’t think you plan to run for 2,000 yards. It just happens.”

The ingredients are certainly in place with the Chiefs for Johnson to reach that magic mark. That starts with Edwards, a head coach who believes in getting a lead, controlling the clock and running the football.

Here’s how Johnson compares to the five men who have done the deed:

Here are other key factors in the run to 2,000:

WINNING TEAMIt’s just about impossible for a back with a losing team to reach a standard like 2,000 yards. The previous five backs were all on winning teams, even though only one of those five saw victory in the post-season (Davis with the ‘98 Broncos.)

Teams that are losing games are generally behind in the second half of games. They aren’t trying to kill the clock with the running game. They are throwing the ball all over the field in hopes of cutting the margin on the scoreboard. Games like that limit the opportunities for a running back to carry the ball.

AVAILABILITYEvery back that has reached the 2,000-yard mark played every game of that season. That does not mean that they weren’t hurt, because considering the number of carries they had in those seasons, there’s no way they didn’t have bothersome bumps and bruises.

Johnson has not had the opportunity to prove yet that he can carry the load for 16 games. His nine-game run last year where he averaged 32 touches per game was impressive.

With the exception of Sanders, all of the previous backs did the job early in their careers, which is just where Johnson is at this point. He’s got just 476 carries in three seasons, so there are not a lot of running back miles left on this machine. He’s also the right age compared to previous 2,000-yard backs; the average age was 25.8 years. Johnson will be 26 in November.

VETERAN OFFENSIVE LINENot only does a back need some experienced blockers opening up holes for him, he needs

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them to be available. Davis in his ‘98 season with the Broncos had the same five blockers start each of the 16 games.

Johnson certainly has a veteran group in front of him. The quartet of Willie Roaf, Brian Waters, Casey Wiegmann and Will Shields is unmatched in the league right now for ability, productivity and longevity. To reach 2,000 yards, he needs them to stay healthy and needs Kyle Turley, Kevin Sampson or Jordan Black to step up and solidify the right tackle position. He also needs a healthy Jason Dunn to help in the two tight end alignment.

HELP FROM THE PASSING GAME OR DEFENSEA running back can’t do it all alone. A balanced offense that can throw the football effectively takes defensive attention away from stopping the running game. It is no coincidence that the only Super Bowl season for a 2,000-yard rusher was Davis, when he was just 33 percent of the Broncos offense. As much as Davis helped John Elway finally win the Super Bowl, it was Elway’s presence that helped Davis to his best season.

If help doesn’t come from the passing game, then a back needs a defense that’s going to be able to keep the other team off the field and off the scoreboard. Of the previous 2,000-yard runners, four of the five had defenses that finished in the top half of the league in fewest yards allowed. It was the Ravens defense that allowed Jamal Lewis to overcome a poor Baltimore passing game to reach 2,066 yards.

The only back able to reach 2,000 without passing help and one of the league’s better defenses was Simpson. He was nearly half of the total Buffalo offensive output and the Bills’ defense finished in the bottom half of the league that year, although they were 14th out of 26 teams.

Johnson can’t ask for better help than Trent Green at quarterback, Eddie Kennison at wide receiver and Tony Gonzalez at tight end. Improvement from the Chiefs defense will only help his chances at reaching 2,000 yards.

THE OPPONENTSThe other guys get paid to stop a running back like Johnson. Based on last year’s numbers, the Chiefs will face eight of the 16 defenses that allowed the fewest yards last year: Pittsburgh (4), Baltimore (5), Jacksonville (6), Arizona (8), San Diego (13), Denver (15), Cleveland and Seattle (t-16.) They will also face five of the 10 defenses that allowed the fewest rushing yards in ‘05: San Diego (1), Pittsburgh (3), Seattle (5), Baltimore (9) and Arizona (10.)

In today’s NFL, numbers do not always translate from one year to the next. But recent history has shown us that defenses in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Jacksonville and Denver are almost always among the better units in the league.

The difference this season for Johnson is that he will begin the season with a bull’s eye on his back. He may have caught some teams by surprise last season. That won’t be the case this year. The Broncos and Chargers have been working all through the off-season on how to stop the Chiefs and Johnson. It’s a sure bet that Marvin Lewis and the Bengals coaching staff have done the same for the regular season opener at Arrowhead, especially after the way Johnson dented them for 200 yards in the finale on New Year’s Day.

Ultimately, the question must be asked: is 2,000 yards by a running back a good thing for an NFL team? Consider that of the five teams that had a back run for that type of yardage, only one had post-season success: the 1998 Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl. A 2,000-yard back may come because he’s the team’s only offensive weapon (Simpson, Lewis and Dickerson.) That creates an imbalance in the offensive attack that makes it hard to achieve the type of success that wins division titles, creates home-field advantage and instills the type of confidence needed to win a championship.

If the Chiefs could write a script, they would prefer that Johnson ran for about 1,500 yards and a healthy Priest Holmes was around to contribute another 800 or so rushing yards. Throw in about 3,500 passing yards for Trent Green and about four touchdowns per game from the offense and Edwards would be a very happy and successful coach.

But there are no advance scripts in the NFL, and there’s nothing to say the Chiefs couldn’t follow the path of the ‘98 Broncos and have their cake (a 2,000-yard back) and eat it too (a Super Bowl trophy.)

Johnson has proven he has the ability. Now, he must prove he has the consistency, that he can do it for 16 weeks.

“That’s what I want to see from Larry, the consistency, that’s the next step,” said Green. “He had a nice run at the end of last year. Now, the next goal for him is to do that over 16 games. That’s twice what he did. It’s not easy.”

Not easy, but an achievable goal according to his blockers:

Wiegmann – “We have to have the offensive line healthy, L.J. has to stay healthy and he takes a pounding back there. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. Hopefully it comes down to a point where we are blowing teams out and he doesn’t have to play. The best thing is, I don’t think it’s something that he’s really shooting for.



I’ve heard him talk about the Super Bowl, not 2,000 yards. But it’s do-able for him.” Waters – “First, you have a head coach who wants to run the ball. Defensive minded coaches know that the more you run the ball, the more you eat up the clock and the less time the defense is on the field. The offensive coordinator is the former offensive line coach and he’s going to want to run the ball and you have a young back, who hasn’t been beat up over a long period of time. It’s very possible.” Shields – “He’s a young back, so I think under the right conditions he can do it. But I’m interested in having just enough yards to win games. If that’s 1,000 yards, or 2,000 yards, whatever it takes to get in the playoffs that’s what matters.”

All conditions appear good for Johnson to achieve 2,000 yards. But it’s not a goal he’s running towards. He’s also not running away from it.

“Two-thousand yards is very reachable, but everything has to click,” Johnson said. “It has to be the right time for the running back and it has to be the right team for the team.”

Next: If Larry Johnson runs for 2,000 yards, it will be because he has one of the best offensive lines in football blocking for him. Just how good are the Chiefs blockers. We’ll take a look starting on Monday.

Related:GRETZ: Larry Johnson #1 - Running to 2,000 YardsGRETZ: Larry Johnson #2 - History of 2,000 Yards






Johnson readies to go the distance in 2006

By Jim Corbett, USA TODAY

Better watch your back, Eric Dickerson. Chiefs running back Larry Johnson is poised to make a run at your 2,105-yard single-season rushing record.

"After what he did in nine starts last season, imagine what Larry could have done if he started all 16 games?" Chiefs analyst and Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson says. "You never know. But he was running with a vengeance. I didn't realize how fast Larry is. Nobody caught him from behind. The future looks great for him."

Dickerson's record, set in 1984, suddenly looks vulnerable. While he played in all 16 games in 2005, Johnson started just nine and racked up 1,750 rushing yards and 20 touchdowns. In his nine starts, Johnson gained 1,351 yards — over a full season as a starter, that projects to 2,402 yards. Johnson ripped off nine consecutive 100-yard rushing games after Priest Holmes suffered a career-threatening spine injury following a helmet-to-helmet hit in a game Oct. 30 against San Diego.

"They told me I could have had 2,400 yards over a full season, and that's never been done before," Johnson says. "Obviously, it'd be so hard to touch Eric Dickerson's record. But doing that would definitely open a lot of eyes.

"I was just starting to hit my stride. I wasn't banged up. I was really just getting going."

Johnson ran like a raging wildfire, burning up the NFL last season. If there were a vote for a second-half MVP, Johnson would have run away with the award.

"I'm excited to see what I can do as far as getting a full 16 games," Johnson says. "I don't know what I can do. Our offensive line is

Larry Johnson left numerous oppoenents in his wake after a breakout 2005 season.

By Dino Vournas, AP

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back, and guys are ready to rip it up and play under a new coach and new system."

Johnson is contemplative, almost mellow for a guy who ran so angry in his bid to make up for waiting his turn behind Holmes, a three-time Pro Bowler.

The 26-year-old showed he belongs with the league's other Pro Bowl running backs: Edgerrin James, LaDainian Tomlinson, Shaun Alexander, Tiki Barber and Warrick Dunn. Only Alexander and Barber gained more yards than Johnson last season, and only Alexander scored more rushing touchdowns.

Johnson's 5.21 yards-per-carry average tied Barber for the NFL lead among running backs with at least 150 carries. But Johnson is far from satisfied.

"As soon as I get a full season under my belt, then I can say I really arrived," Johnson says.

Chiefs president Carl Peterson has watched Marcus Allen and Holmes during his seven-season tenure in Kansas City. But he's rarely seen Johnson's combination of pile-driving power and breakaway burst, comparing Johnson's punishing style to former Saints and Chargers running back Chuck Muncie.

Johnson ran like a man possessed because there were so many misperceptions to run from.

"Larry's running with an attitude, with an anger," Peterson says. "Whatever we do, I don't want to stop that anger. I'm going to have to tell him he's going back to the bench."

Just kidding on that last part, L.J.

It's been well-documented how former Chiefs coach Dick Vermeil set this bonfire when Holmes was sidelined the last eight games of the 2004 season with a sprained knee.

Vermeil made his "time to take the diapers off" comment regarding Johnson's assertion that he deserved more playing time even before Holmes' injury.

Vermeil might as well have lit a book of matches under Johnson's feet.

Larry Johnson Sr., Johnson's father and Penn State's defensive line coach, says it was part of a big misunderstanding.

"Coach Vermeil was trying to say something to motivate Larry, and it just came out wrong," the elder Johnson says. "Larry took it personally. He was ready. For some reason, Coach Vermeil was trying to motivate him by saying Larry had been crying about not getting more time.

"He wasn't crying. He just wanted a chance. But he's grown from that. And certainly he's a better person today for having all that happen. He took all the jokes and barbs that came with that comment. He's not talked about it since. It hurt him. But Larry's since proven that comment was nonsense."

None of the five other Chiefs voted to the Pro Bowl — quarterback Trent Green, tight end Tony Gonzalez, guards Will Shields and Brian Waters and tackle Willie Roaf— drew a bigger, more heartfelt ovation than Johnson.

"Without any question, Larry was the most popular, well-received player by his teammates when it was announced he made the Pro Bowl," Peterson says. "Not only were the offensive linemen happy for him, but the defensive guys were also because they've seen him for the last few years. He's done a great job imitating the opponent's back —LaDainian Tomlinson, for instance — the last two-and-a-half years."

Now the 6-1, 230-pounder has been anointed the starting running back by new coach Herman Edwards, no matter if Holmes is medically cleared to return for a 10th season.

"Larry is totally different from Priest," Peterson says. "He's bigger, stronger and faster. We thought he was a talent when we drafted him three years ago. I'm glad we got him because of Priest's unfortunate injury problems. When he hasn't been able to play a full season the last couple of years, Larry's proved to everybody what he's capable of.



"What he did this past season was phenomenal."

Larry Johnson Sr.'s roots in the game run deep. He played offensive and defensive tackle at E.J. Hayes High in Williamston, N.C., under coach Herman Boone, the fiery motivator and subject of the film Remember the Titans.

The elder Johnson instilled his appreciation for greatness in his son when Larry started playing Pop Warner football at age 7.

He suggested Larry watch an NFL Films video, a homage to running backs such as Jim Brown, Marion Motley and Gale Sayers titled 50 Greatest Running Backs.

Young Larry was fascinated and became an eager, respectful student of NFL history, watching those tapes repeatedly in his father's coaching office.

"It was old-school stuff that I was brought up on by Coach Boone, the appreciation for the game and its history," the elder Johnson says. "I tried to show Larry, 'Hey, this is the path you need to follow if you want to be great.'

"He was 7 when I showed him that video. I was fascinated by those guys. Then Larry really got into studying and asking about the history of those guys. He has a great appreciation for the old guys, what they went through; and they helped him get where he is today. He's more excited about meeting the old guys at a banquet."

The kid taught by way of Boone, his father, Joe Paterno, Vermeil and now Edwards is a composite of some of those great backs.

"Larry's a cross between Jim Brown and Eric Dickerson in the sense of how he runs with power and speed," his father says. "He's fast like Jim Brown. He takes a shot and he walks back to the huddle real slow just like Jim Brown did. It's the same mind-set that he never wants a team to feel like they got the best of him.

"He watched a lot of Gale Sayers, a lot of Emmitt Smith. Larry changes direction, but he does it with power. Jim and Eric are more downhill runners that way like Larry. Larry's a combination of both those guys."

High praise, indeed. But it's not just a father boasting about his son.

"Larry thinks he runs like Marion Motley," Dawson says. "He's studied him on film, and he's the same size as Marion Motley. But to me, Larry's more like a Jim Brown.

"He learned to be more patient as a runner last season, waiting to set up his blockers. That has something to do with what he learned from watching Priest Holmes.

"Thing is, the people who believe most in Larry are his offensive linemen. They loved blocking for him during those nine consecutive 100-yard games."

"He can be as good as he wants," says Shields, an 11-time Pro Bowler. "If he decides to become one of the best backs in the league, he can do that. It just depends on Larry's mentality."

The coaching change from the wide-open Vermeil to the more run-oriented, conservative Edwards should play to Johnson's strength.

Edwards is one of the game's best motivators, and he's already prodding Johnson to take his game to another level.

"The thing about Larry is he's got the bull's-eye on him," Edwards says. "He did it for half a year. That's what I told him. 'You won't sneak up on anybody anymore. Everyone will know who No. 27 is and know what kind of player you are. Now we've got to play 16 of them and more than that. You have to learn how to be a starter now — the whole year. That's tough. It's a different responsibility.'

"That's what Priest Holmes had to do. That's what the great runners do. They understand, 'I'm the starter now.' What's going to happen when you make only 50 yards? How is he going to react? I think he's going to react in a positive way ... he's going to have to deal with all those things being a starter. It's a good thing he went through a half a year. But a whole season is different."

Johnson is prepared to train harder this offseason.



"I wanted a coach who could match my attitude and spirit, and Coach Edwards has that," Johnson says. "(He) just told me: 'Get ready for a full load. Get ready to be The Man and a leader and step up and take control on and off the field.'

"I'll do a little bit more work than I'm used to doing this offseason. I'll cut out most of the going out just before training camp. I used to go out and party all night and hang out. I have to assume more responsibility now because my role is not only as a starter but as a leader, too."

"I think Herm will be a great coach for Larry," the elder Johnson says. "He's the kind of coach who says: 'OK, great job. Now go run through four more walls.'

"Larry is the kind of guy who will run through walls. He takes pride in somebody appreciating what he did. He's self-motivated. But pat him on the back, and he takes it to another level."

The only question with Johnson is: Can he be as productive and stay healthy carrying a full-season workload? His offseason training regimen will factor into the answer. So will luck. But running style plays into the equation as well.

"The thing that concerns people here is the way Larry runs through people; how long can he last?" Dawson says. "He runs angry. When he was going into a pile, he moved the pile back a couple of yards."

Johnson is all about proving people wrong. He did it at Penn State, convincing Paterno he deserved the starter's role as a senior. This past season, he earned a rotational role with Holmes by answering lingering questions about his pass protection and receiving skills with a sensational training camp and preseason.

"L.J. has developed very well," Green says. "When you're an All-American, a first-round pick and then, all of a sudden, you're playing behind one of the best backs in the NFL and he's setting all kinds of league records — it was really hard for Larry. There's been a growth process.

"But two years ago when Priest got hurt, Larry stepped in and played well. He got a taste of it, so when he came to camp last year, his approach was so much different than in the previous two years. He had a great attitude, and the coaches rotated he and Priest.

"Then, unfortunately, Priest got hurt. Larry just took that opportunity and ran with it. He's really grown as a player, understanding the blocking schemes and the patience you have to have with your linemen. It's exciting to see his growth."

No one can predict what Johnson will do over a full season with defenses stacked to stop him. But his sights are on Miami, site of Super Bowl XLI, not Dickerson's record.

"Everybody's talking about it, saying I should get 2,000 yards next season," Johnson says. "But I really want to get a Super Bowl ring for Trent Green and Tony Gonzalez, Tony Richardson, Will Shields. Those guys who haven't touched a ring yet, I want to get one for them."

Spoken like a true leader.

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Where's the Chief? C'mon, you still can't miss Gonzalez

June 24, 2006

By Rick Dean Special to CBS SportsLine.com

The question had been posed by a knowledgeable football guy who sensed its flawed premise in less time than it took him to say it.

"Does it seem to you," he had asked, "that with all the good new guys coming in, that Tony Gonzalez has become the overlooked tight end?"

The suggestion is not completely without merit.

During most of his nine NFL seasons, and especially in the years after the retirement of Denver rival Shannon Sharpe, Gonzalez was the hands-down choice as the league's best tight end. The 6-foot-5 former Cal basketball player enters his 10th season with 648 career receptions, third-most in league history among tight ends. Only Sharpe (815) and Hall of Famer Ozzie Newsome (662) have more.

No other tight end in history, though, has eight consecutive seasons with 50 or more receptions, or seven straight at 60-plus. And no tight end ever caught as many passes in a single season as Gonzalez did in 2004, when the Kansas City Chiefs star hauled in 102 balls for 1,258 yards -- the league's second-highest single-season yardage total at the position.

But no one stays on top forever.

It was only a couple of years ago that the Giants' Jeremy Shockey was supposed to usurp Gonzo's position as the league's best tight end. But Shockey hasn't stayed healthy enough to pass a player who has started 111 consecutive games and caught passes in 84. Baltimore's Todd Heap also was deemed an heir apparent.

Then last year, rising young San Diego star Antonio Gates, another converted hoops star, put together a second strong season to back up his 81-catch, 13-touchdown breakout year in 2004. His 89 receptions for 1,101 yards and 10 touchdowns easily beat Gonzalez's 78-905 year, one in which he caught only two touchdown passes, tying the career lows of his first two seasons.

So, has Gonzalez been overtaken in his desire to be acknowledged as the league's best tight end? Perhaps.

But overlooked? Forgotten?

Are you kidding?

NFL defensive coordinators who double-team his every step in red-zone situations certainly aren't overlooking him. And certainly not the league's public relations and international development machines that feature the Spanish-speaking Gonzalez as their point man for increasing Latin American interest in football.

ESPN certainly didn't forget Gonzalez when it invited him on a fishing excursion in Guatemala as part of the network's reborn New American Sportsman series. NBC remembered him, too, when it cast Gonzalez with actress Alison Sweeney (Days of Our Lives), model Cindy Margolis, singer Patti LaBelle, Miss USA 2005, Tom Arnold and Big Kenny (of Big and Rich) for its short-lived Celebrity Cooking Showdown.

(OK, so that lowly rated show was eminently forgettable. So too, apparently, was Gonzalez's Caprese salad, vodka penne with salmon and affogado Italian sundae. He was the first celebrity voted out of the kitchen, a rare rejection he explained by suggesting that, "It might have been self-sabotage.")

No, when he turned 30 late last February, Tony Gonzalez took stock of his life and found himself pleased by what

Do defenses still pay a lot of attention to Tony Gonzalez? What do you think? (Getty Images)

Page 1 of 2


he saw.

"Life is good," said the personable tight end, still an A-list celebrity at Playboy Mansion parties.

The priorities in his life have changed some, to be sure. His dreams of playing NBA basketball have long since faded. His young son, Nikko, just turned five and has started T-ball, and Gonzalez suddenly has a new interest in baseball.

And while he still lives a jet-set lifestyle -- in Kansas City for a minicamp one weekend, in Barcelona sharing a table with Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson at the Laureus Sports Awards the next -- Gonzalez also knows he must make the best of whatever time he has left in football.

"It's about finding balance in your life," he said. "It's still all about the work. Even if I'm overseas in a hotel someplace, I'll always get my workout in first. I know where my bread is buttered. I'm a football player first. But the other things are the experiences in life you want to enjoy."

Ignoring the above food reference, let's note instead that Gonzalez is keenly aware that his stock slipped in the fantasy football world last year.

Catching only two touchdown balls frustrated him more than it did any fantasy team owner.

There are explanations for the drop-off.

Foremost is the aforementioned extra attention Gonzalez gets in the red zone. Quarterback Trent Green's favorite, biggest end zone target no longer runs goal-line drags with only one escort.

Gonzalez also took on new, less glamorous duties last year.

When veteran left tackle Willie Roaf missed much or all of six games with hamstring problems, Green's once-solid blind-side protection became an injury waiting to happen. Hoping to help young replacement tackle Jordan Black, Kansas City frequently shifted Gonzalez to a strong-side blocking position. And though he took great pride in his dramatically improved ability as a blocker, Gonzalez says he can help his team more when his touchdown numbers are closer to

those of Antonio Gates than Bill Gates.

In 2006, with longtime offensive line coach Mike Solari promoted to the offensive coordinator position under new coach Herm Edwards, Gonzalez hopes for another run at his once undisputed title as the league's best tight end.

"As soon as he got the job, I flew back here to meet with (Solari) and coach (Jon) Embree, my new position coach," Gonzalez said. "He asked me straight-up what routes I thought worked best for me, and he said he'd get them called. We'll see what happens, but I have no doubt that he'll get me the ball."

Rick Dean covers the Chiefs for the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Which tight end will have the best season in '06?

Todd Heap BAL

Antonio Gates SD

Jason Witten DAL

Tony Gonzalez KC

Alge Crumpler ATL

Jeremy Shockey NYG

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Page 2 of 2


Posted on Sun, Sep. 03, 2006

Shields remains on guard for KC

Chiefs’ Pro Bowler returns for another year, but he isn’t saying that much about it.


Go find Joe. He’ll tell you what’s eating at Will Shields. The clock hand clicked past 3 on Saturday afternoon, Shields emerged from the training room, and in seven days, one of the longest streaks in the NFL could effectively end because of a bum ankle.

How do you feel, Will? Is it ready?

Shields let out one, “Can’t complain,” several, “I can’t tell yous,” then conceded after 13 years in the league, he’s grown a little grumpier.

The awkward pauses never really change. But at some point, you understand him.

Joe Linta tried to take Shields out to a fancy dinner once when he was at Nebraska, because that’s what prospective agents do, and Shields said no, he was going to the gym. Linta got his gear, played one-on-one and lifted weights with Shields, and 14 years later, they’re still together.

“I would assume he’ll be fine,” Linta said.

“He’s the old sage. He listens, and when he says something, it’s powerful stuff. When he yells at his kid, it’s like the Lion King. By his very nature, he commands respect, and you’ve got to be around him more to understand that.”

The king’s followers, at the moment, are getting restless. Pro Bowl tackle Willie Roaf retired, the Chiefs offense has struggled, and Shields has been out for two weeks because of a high ankle sprain. In times like these, Kansas City turns to its veteran, an 11-time Pro Bowl guard, an iron man who’s started in 207 straight games, for some sort of pulse.

And Shields is a difficult read. Ask him about his health, and he’ll say that for the first time in years, he isn’t starting the season tired and sore like he did after Dick Vermeil’s two-a-day grind. Ask him about anything else — the ankle, a season in which in the Chiefs are picked everywhere from AFC West champs to big-time busts — and Shields is vague.

“You go into every season thinking you’re going to be pretty good,” Shields says. “I don’t think in any season you ever face you say, ‘Oh, we’re going to suck this year.’

“There are a lot of little new things we’re learning about each other, especially having a new coach. There are going to be those growing pains, but I think we’ll be OK.”

•••

At 17, Shields left the wide-open spaces of Lawton, Okla., for the blank prairie in Lincoln, Neb. His daddy told him to go to Nebraska because it was a good place. His coaches say Shields went home just once in the next four years, loading up on homework in the summer so he could graduate in four years.

“When he got here, he had no fear,” said Milt Tenopir, his offensive line coach at Nebraska. “He was a very mature young man, but he didn’t have a boisterous bone in his body.”

Get-r-done and shut-it-up. That was always Shields. And you never knew when he was hurt. Most offensive linemen, Tenopir said, get injured when they flop around on the ground. In four years, Tenopir never saw Shields hit the ground. His balance was that good. But being a 13-year starter in the NFL carried a whole new set of demands. Shields developed arthritis in his knees, then his back.

Page 1 of 3Shields remains on guard for KC

9/4/2006http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/football/nfl/kansas_city_chiefs/15428214....

The end looked imminent during training camp last year in River Falls, Wis., when Shields had to leave town because of his back. He’ll spend as much as 12 hours a day at Arrowhead getting treatment for his various ailments, and he was in the training room for roughly four hours Saturday to work on the ankle.

“I know he’s hurting,” Tenopir said. “Anybody who’s played that game as long as Will’s played it has got to have pain. But Will’s never complained to me personally about it. He just loves the game and will play as long as he can. I don’t know how long that is. Hopefully, he can stay healthy a while longer.”

With a long, painful future in mind, Shields and Linta had a long talk about the end in early 2005, during the Pro Bowl. Atone point, Shields said he knew it was near, but he also knew he was in good enough shape to still compete.

The 2005 season started slow and was tough on Shields’ body, and many speculated that he’d announce his retirement after the season. Then came new coach Herm Edwards, who promised to limit Shields’ practice load. Shields said he felt better this summer than he had in years.

“You think about (the end) before the season even starts,” Shields said. “When your back is out, you try to find different ways to get it back. You think, ‘Man, I hope I can keep my body together to get through this one.’ That’s the nature of anyone.

“But there’s always that competition factor. Those young guys can come in and take your job, and other guys want to prove they can beat you. As long as I have that … it works pretty well for you.”

•••

After the final preseason game Thursday night, Chiefs president/general manager Carl Peterson stood in the locker room,talking about the final cuts. But the conversation eventually drifted to the status of Roaf, which, for more than a month, hasn’t changed.

Nobody asked about Shields.

They’ve been friends for a while, and word has it that Roaf was the one who talked Shields into playing again in 2006. Shields won’t confirm or deny that. Roaf went weeks without talking to his teammates, but Shields said he didn’t hold it against him.

“I just sort of stay out of it,” Shields said. “I don’t worry about it. I don’t worry about Willie. Willie’s gone doing his own thing, and I’m here to play football.”

That’s the main reason Shields is back, people close to him say. He loves to play football. There is the championship that eluded him at Nebraska, and the two national titles that came shortly after he graduated. There was the 2003 season in Kansas City, the one that ended with a 13-3 record but no Super Bowl.

Roaf’s absence means Shields, who’ll turn 35 later this month, is the elder statesman on the line. The title, in some ways, was already there. Shields has always been the quiet banker, the grownup in a little-boys dream.

He said he doesn’t feel alone as the last old sage.

“I’ve got Trent Green,” he said. “I’ve got Eddie Kennison, Eric Hicks on the other side … a bunch of guys who have been here a long time, been in the league a long time. You have to do some things to get some guys prepared. But you’re never really alone on a team. I think a whole bunch of guys are doing that.”

•••

The first couple of years of the Linta-Shields relationship were sort of a your-wish-is-my-command banter.

Linta was happy to have the Outland Trophy winner as a client. And Shields? Rumor is, he was happy sometimes, too. Shields said his mystery demeanor is the nature of an offensive lineman. They’re paid to work in the trenches, be the grunts, blast the holes.

Linta doesn’t understand it. He turns on the NFL Network, watches the Terrell Owens hype, and wonders when the love will come for Shields. Do they see how active he is in the community? Do they watch him around his three kids?




“There’s been times we’re out socially and I’m the kid and he’s the father,” Linta said. “You cannot find a person within the 816 or 913 area code who does not respect him. Why is that? Because he doesn’t make himself known. Because he does what he says.

“He doesn’t deviate from that. The guy doesn’t get drunk, has never done drugs, doesn’t run traffic lights, doesn’t beat his kids. He does everything the way the American dream should be lived. This guy should be on the tip of your tongue.”

Only Shields’ tongue, like always, is slightly bitten. He’s not saying whether he’ll be ready for the Bengals, though Edwards expects him in uniform. He won’t tell you if this is finally the season the Chiefs do something in the postseason.

Just before he was getting ready to watch the second half of the Nebraska-Louisiana Tech game late Saturday afternoon, the lion was asked for a Sunday prediction.

“Nah,” Shields said. “I don’t have anything to say.”

CUTDOWN DAY

Junior Siavii among Chiefs cut from roster Saturday. | C15




Posted on Sun, Aug. 27, 2006

Natural born protector now defending Trent Green’s backside By J. BRADY MCCOLLOUGH The Kansas City Star

2001 PHOTO

As a Saint, Kyle Turley didn’t like how the Jets’ Damien Robinson twisted his quarterback’s helmet. So Turley ripped off Robinson’s and tossed it.

Page 1 of 6Natural born protector now defending Trent Green’s backside


RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Kyle Turley is trying to enjoy his lunch. At the same time, a bee is trying to get a sniff of Turley’s Subway sandwich. It buzzes and whizzes around the picnic table on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Turley flicks it away with his big right hand and doesn’t give it a second thought. But the bee is persistent. It lands on Turley’s sandwich. Those anger management classes Turley once took are long forgotten.

This bee might as well be wearing a New York Jets helmet.

“You’re going to die,” he sings softly to the bee, mimicking a demented voice. “You’re going to die …”

He grabs his napkin and sizes up the correct angle. He swoops in, misses once, and then quickly squishes the bee into the sandwich.

“I wouldn’t have killed him if he wasn’t bothering us so much,” Turley says, taking a bite.

Say this for Kyle Turley: The man doesn’t walk away from a fight. This is the guy who once ripped a helmet off another player and famously threw it downfield. The same guy who, in defense of a teammate, started what would later be dubbed “The Brawl at the Falls” when the Saints and Chiefs scrimmaged here a few years back.

The big man wants you to know something else: He doesn’t regret any of it.

“Every fight I’ve been in,” he says, “has been in defense of someone or something.”

That’s good news for quarterback Trent Green. Turley is his bodyguard now, shoved into the starting lineup at left tackle to replace the suddenly retired Willie Roaf. After two years away from football, the Official NFL Bad-Ass has something to defend again. And the instincts are still sharp.

Turley looks up from the picnic table. A second bee is zooming in.

“We’ve got another one,” he says.

•••

So how does an art major who loves to surf become the bad boy in a league filled with bad boys?

The story starts in 1982, Kyle’s second-grade year, in the principal’s office. Kyle had gotten into a fight, and the school had called his father, John Turley. When John arrived, he asked Kyle what happened. Kyle was mum, looking as if the world had just ended.

The principal explained to John that Kyle had beaten up a classmate because that child had stolen another kid’s lunch money.

John thought for a second, and said, “Well, good. Good for him.” John patted Kyle on the back, and they went home.

“It wasn’t because he was going around picking fights,” John says. “Bullies were picking on little kids that couldn’t defendthemselves. Kyle would step in and defend them.”

That’s what the Turley men did. John Turley, now chief deputy of the Grant County (Wash.) Sheriff’s Department, was a policeman for many years, the first guy through the door on drug raids. Kyle’s great-great-great grandfather, Theodore Turley, was tarred-and-feathered twice for practicing Mormonism in Missouri. He would later escape persecution and helpstart a Mormon community at the urging of one Brigham Young.

“You look at the pictures of them,” John Turley says, “and they’re almost spitting images of Kyle. He comes from a hardy stock of defenders and people that try to take care of other people.”

Kyle took on his family’s legacy. In high school, after moving to Southern California, he and his buddies would go to the beach and start bonfires at night. Inevitably, the fire marshal or park ranger would arrive and try to kick the gang out. It was Kyle who would stand up for them.

“Kyle would be the one to talk him out of it, change his mind,” says Adam Conley, Kyle’s high school friend. “He was



always passionate. He’s never been a violent fighter.”

•••

The creation of Kyle Turley, the football player, began the summer before his senior year of high school. He had never played football before, only wrestled, played baseball and surfed.

He had the right temperament for the sport. He was also 6-feet-5 and 225 pounds. Turley excelled immediately at defensive end, and he earned a scholarship to San Diego State. There, he moved to offensive line, a position more befitting his makeup. He spent his first year eating and lifting constantly to gain weight, and he started at tackle as a redshirt freshman.

“He wasn’t content to just make a block,” says Ed White, his line coach at San Diego State. “To him, making a block was physically annihilating somebody. His helmet would pop off, and he’d block guys with his face if he had to.”

White played 17 years in the NFL as an offensive lineman. He had played in the same era as Conrad Dobler and the renegades of old. White could tell that Kyle Turley was a throwback, willing to do anything to clear a path for his teammates.

So he taught Turley the art of the cut block, considered by defensive players to be one of the dirtiest moves in the book. White used to cut Dick Butkus. Turley perfected it, and by the end of his senior year, he was an All-American and coveted by NFL scouts. In 1998, Turley was drafted No. 7 overall by the New Orleans Saints.

“Kyle plays offensive line like a defensive lineman,” White says. “Most offensive linemen grow up as offensive linemen. They don’t have quite the edge that Kyle has.”

•••

Off the field, Kyle Turley had always been a referee, doling out his judgments of right and wrong. Everything was black and white. And if you were “wrong,” Turley would let you know it.

“I don’t go around picking fights with people,” he says. “Inside of me, there’s definitely a line that can be crossed. For me, there is right and there is wrong. I try to be a good citizen. There’s a saying I like to go by: ‘Respect everyone, but be disrespected by no one.’

“In a fight-or-flight situation, I’m a fighter. I don’t run.”

On the field, there were plenty of chances for Turley to fight. He’d often get in scraps with his own teammates at practiceand became one of the most feared — and despised — players in the league.

So, on a Sunday afternoon in early November 2001, the stage was set for a moment Turley will never live down. The Saints were trailing 16-9 late in the fourth quarter of a game against the Jets. Saints quarterback Aaron Brooks was taken to the Superdome turf by Jets safety Damien Robinson, who proceeded to twist Brooks’ helmet. Brooks let out a shriek, which made the hairs on Turley’s neck stand up.

It was as if a siren had gone off in Turley’s head. He attacked Robinson like he might have that bully from second grade. Turley yanked Robinson’s helmet off, tossed it into the air and saluted millions of people with a middle finger.

Thousands of miles away, on his couch, John Turley was cheering for his son. He would have done the same thing. “That was a lousy throw,” John would later joke with Kyle.

“The only thing I ever regretted,” Turley says, “was throwing that helmet. If I had done it all over again, I’d still beat that kid down as much as I could have. It was a definite moment of blindness, where you’re like, ‘What just happened?’ ”

•••

Anger management classes didn’t go as the Saints had hoped. For one, Turley didn’t believe he had anger issues. Then, Turley says, the people who ran the classes were Saints fans. They loved the way Turley played. Unfortunately, the Saints didn’t.

The team cut its losses with Turley after the 2002 season, sending him to the Rams. The fans of New Orleans mourned.



After the helmet throw, “Turley for Mayor” signs had been posted all over the city.

The Rams did not provide the fresh start Turley was hoping for. He started to feel pain up and down his right leg during the 2003 season. The Rams sent him to a specialist at season’s end, after the playoff hunt was over. The specialist diagnosed a herniated disk in Turley’s back.

“The Rams knew exactly what I had all season long,” Turley says. “They wanted me to push through it until the season was over. They used me completely. It just blew my mind.”

Rams officials did not return phone calls for this story.

Turley had back surgery in March 2004 and rehabbed with the idea of trying to play that season. But when training camp arrived, he knew he wasn’t ready. He says the Rams told him to play through the soreness, and he re-injured the disk three days into camp. Turley was furious.

He went to Los Angeles to see spinal specialist Robert Watkins. Turley says Watkins couldn’t believe the Rams had let him into full-contact drills only four months after major back surgery.

Turley met with Rams coach Mike Martz that fall. Turley says Martz accused him of “taking the money and running,” questioning his desire to play football. Turley blew a gasket, issuing a few strings of expletives to Martz. Later, a report surfaced that Turley, already seen as the league’s Neanderthal, had threatened to kill Martz.

“He thought he could take advantage of my reputation,” Turley says. “I’ve never missed a practice, a down, until this injury happened. After that, I took off.”

•••

Turley and his wife, Stacy, landed in Mexico, at their seaside home. Turley wanted to stay there permanently. It would be just him, Stacy, his board and the ocean, no one he couldn’t trust.

“Kyle is completely honest to everyone,” Stacy Turley says. “He doesn’t beat around the bush, and I think that he believes everyone is the same way with him. He’s been burned several times by friends and employers.”

Stacy understood why Turley needed a break, but she also wasn’t going to start a family south of the border.

“If it weren’t for Stacy,” Turley says, “I’d be a Mexican right now. I could have easily been content walking away. I had a great career the first six years. At the same time, I’m not built to quit. As much as I wanted to stay in Mexico, I said, ‘Screw that. Let’s go back. Let’s do it again.’ ”

The re-creation of Kyle Turley began in January 2005 at Athletes’ Performance in Tempe, Ariz. He weighed 230 pounds and looked just like he did when he first learned to play football.

“He felt better the lighter he got,” says Luke Richesson, Turley’s trainer in Arizona. “He wanted to start from scratch, a blank canvas.”

Turley’s back was in pain when he first arrived, and his right leg had lost most of its muscle tissue. But after a few weeks of 3 1/2 -hour training sessions, the pain had alleviated, and Turley could focus on building back the muscle in his leg. Soon, Turley began thinking about coming back as a tight end or defensive end.

But Turley didn’t pass his physical in early June, and the Rams released him, a formality at that point. Turley decided to take the year off from football and continue training, this time in Los Angeles.

Turley had big plans for himself in Hollywood. Always a heavy-metal fan, he started hanging out with heavy-metal producer Mikey Doling, whom Turley had seen as the lead guitarist of bands with names like Snot and Soulfly. It wasn’t long before Turley and Doling started their own record label, Gridiron Records.

Turley even earned a starring role as the killer in a slasher film called “75.” In the movie, he gets to wear a ski suit and chop college-aged kids’ heads off. He was a natural.

But despite all the fun he was having, Turley’s time in LA was about getting ready for a return to the NFL. It was about getting away from all the noise he’d created for himself in New Orleans and St. Louis. Turley and Conley, his childhood




friend, spent hour upon hour out on the Pacific, where there was a different kind of noise.

“Kyle’s an artist,” Conley says. “There’s an incredible connection between that type of personality and the ocean. You’re sitting out there, in the middle of the water, it’s so calm and peaceful, it’s easy to meditate. I think he did a whole lot of that while he was out there the last couple of years.”

Turley says getting away from the game for two years helped him mature. He says he won’t take things so personally anymore. Carl Peterson and Herm Edwards saw the same thing when they met with Turley earlier this summer. The Chiefs signed him to a two-year contract, hoping Turley could at least serve as a backup tackle this year and be ready to start next year.

“First and foremost,” Turley says, “I wanted to walk out of that tunnel one more time and have the announcer say my name.”

Turns out, Turley will get much more than that.

•••

Trent Green’s new bodyguard is still mean. Just ask Chiefs defensive end Jared Allen.

“He’ll do anything to block you,” Allen says. “One time, he boxed me out like it was basketball.”

Or ask Edwards.

“Ohhh, I don’t think that left,” he says. “When you’re mean, you’re mean.”

Or ask Turley.

“As soon as I go out of that locker room, there is a switch that flips on,” Turley says. “It’s a focus and determination that supersedes anything outside of that field. It’s a gladiator sport. It’s a fight, it’s a battle in itself, a war, if you will, a very primitive one. There are no weapons, outside of fists and the helmet you have on. Nothing has changed as far as that’s concerned.”

Or ask the bee population of River Falls. That second bee has just met the same fate as the first.

“Two down,” Turley says.

In a few minutes, Turley gets another. That’s three.

“Don’t mess with a lineman and his food,” Turley says.

A fourth bee takes its place in line. This is getting ridiculous.

He doesn’t want to kill any more, so Turley tries putting his food away. The bee lingers.

It’s fight-or-flight time again. Annoyed, Turley slowly gets up from the bench and walks away. The bee will live today. Turley will finish eating inside.

To reach J. Brady McCollough, call (816) 234-4363 or send e-mail to [email protected]



GRETZ: FOCUS ON - THE DEFENSE SEP 08, 2006, 8:56:50 AM BY BOB GRETZ - FAQ

There’s one thing that can’t be said about the Chiefs and their attempts to improve the defense: they’ve sat back and done nothing.

Take a look at the chart below of the defensive starters over the last seven seasons. Check out the defensive starters from the 2003 season, when the Chiefs last went to the playoffs. That 13-3 season blew up in the playoffs with a pitiful defensive performance against Indianapolis.

That was just two full seasons ago (2004-05) and today, there’s only one defensive starter still with the team: safety Greg Wesley. Since the end of the 2004 season, there have been eight new starters, with only Wesley, Kawika Mitchell and Jared Allen still in their places (and Allen was a rookie that season.)

Here’s a look at the turnover on defense:

Yes, there has been great change in defensive personnel and that’s been coupled this year with a change in most of the defensive coaching staff. Maybe the quality of individual changes can be questioned, but the Chiefs have not sat back and done nothing. Will this overhaul produce results on the field? That remains to be seen. Position group by position group, here’s how it looks.

LINE: This season has seen more turnover along the defensive line than any season in the last decade. There are three new starters in rookie Tamba Hali, and defensive tackles James Reed and Ron Edwards. Only Jared Allen has kept his starting spot.

The lynchpins of this defensive season will be Reed and Edwards and what they can produce. Results so far has been mixed. Reed is active and seems to be able to play a lot of the time on the other side of the line of scrimmage. Edwards eats up a lot of space, but so far hasn’t been a consistent presence in moving forward. If Edwards production improves, it will have ramifications up and down the line of scrimmage and with the linebackers.

Right now, the problem the Chiefs have is that their third best defensive end is also their third best defensive tackle: Jimmy Wilkerson. He’s going to get on the field at both positions.

LINEBACKERS: the Chiefs have four good players at linebacker in Mitchell, Derrick Johnson, Kendrell Bell and Keyaron Fox. If each member of this quartet continues to raise the level of his performance, that will makeup for other deficiencies on this defense.

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Johnson and Bell need to produce more big plays. Last year as a rookie, Johnson got his feet wet, learned a lot and seems primed to step forward to be the playmaker he was in college. Bell came to the Chiefs injured and was never really 100 percent last season. He’s better now and needs to show up more with plays behind the line of scrimmage. When he was signed as a free agent, the Chiefs talked about him being a north-south player and more of that needs to be seen from No. 99.

SECONDARY: Does Ty Law have another good season in him? That’s the major question mark in the secondary. If Law can play close to the level he’s displayed over his career, the Chiefs defense will improve significantly. The combo of Law and Pat Surtain gives them a chance to do different things with schemes, things that could not have been attempted with last year’s duo of Surtain and Eric Warfield.

Wesley has shown signs of being the player he was early in his career and that can do nothing but help this unit. Rookie Bernard Pollard and Jarrad Page will push for playing time and while they may make a mistake or two, by mid-season that will do nothing but help this group.




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RAND: DEFENSE REMAINS IN THE RIGHT HANDS JAN 17, 2006, 3:58:03 AM BY JONATHAN RAND - FAQ

Chiefs defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham decided he could help his unit more by staying on the sideline last season than by taking the conventional play-calling spot upstairs in a booth. He’s never spent a lot of time trying to be conventional.

That’s why Cunningham’s return to the Chiefs as defensive coordinator in 2006 shouldn’t come as a shock, though it’s unconventional by NFL standards.

New head coaches usually clean house because they want their own assistants, especially coordinators. You wouldn’t expect a new coach who’s known as being defensive-minded to keep a strong-willed defensive coordinator. Especially not if that coordinator had been the team’s head coach for two years.

So Herman Edwards’ retention of Cunningham, in that respect, comes as a surprise. It’s less of a surprise once you consider that there’s probably nobody better suited for the job.

Cunningham has a long track record as one of the NFL’s top defensive coaches, though he’s had his work cut out lately trying to recreate the defensive magic of the Derrick Thomas era. He also has a knack for persevering through some complicated career moves. When you see how explosive Cunningham can be on the sidelines, it seems amazing that he’s able to avoid burning his career bridges.

When he was fired as Chiefs head coach after the 2000 season, you would think the last job in the world for Cunningham would be as the defensive coordinator for the head coach who replaced him. Yet, Cunningham returned to the Chiefs in 2004 and next season will be spending his ninth season coaching in Kansas City since 1995.

He also experienced a setback as a Raiders assistant before he joined the Chiefs. Cunningham was the defensive coordinator in Oakland in 1992 and ‘93, then was demoted by owner Al Davis to defensive line coach. A year later, he came to the Chiefs and took over a defense that was among the league’s elite through 1997.

Now, Cunningham will see if his defense can prove as resilient as its coach. The Chiefs were asking too much of him in 2004 when they hoped his scheme and fiery

edit | staff

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personality could turn around a weak defense that, in fact, needed more talent.

The Chiefs ranked 31st in total defense that year and realized they needed more help. Cunningham got five new regulars in 2005 and his defense improved, especially against the run. But it finished only 25th in total defense and the pass rush was poor.

Given Cunningham’s track record, the Chiefs’ chances for a defensive breakthrough are enhanced by his return. You’d have to worry about the defensive direction of a franchise that was bringing in its fourth coordinator in eight years. Though we shouldn’t make too much of only two games, the Chiefs’ defense was dominant in season-ending home victories against the Chargers and Bengals.

Linebacker Derrick Johnson had an impressive rookie season and should develop into a Pro Bowl player. More production is needed from two of last year’s newcomers, linebacker Kendrell Bell and defensive end Carlos Hall. And the Chiefs will have to come up with a defensive tackle who can collapse the pocket.

There’s no guarantee Cunningham can bring the Chiefs’ defense back to the top. Just as there was no guarantee that Vermeil would make the Chiefs his third Super Bowl team.

But Cunningham has proved that he knows what he’s doing. And you have to think that given a little more time and a little more talent, he will build a playoff-caliber defense that can survive and thrive under adversity just as much as its coach has.


A former sportswriter and columnist in Kansas City and Miami, Rand has covered the NFL for three decades and seen 23 Super Bowl games. His column appears twice weekly in-season.

Copyright © 2006 Kansas City Chiefs. Send this page to a friend!

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Posted on Wed, May. 10, 2006

DRAFT PLEASES CUNNINGHAM

He’s D-lighted

Chiefs put pieces in place on defense


The second part of the story began with a call from Herm Edwards in early January. He’d just signed a contract to coach the Chiefs. Defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham was on the other line.

“Are you ready?” Edwards asked.

“You betcha,” Cunningham said.

The first part is still evolving. Cunningham sat down for a 30-minute conversation on Tuesday about the defense, and on at least three occasions, he was on the verge of getting misty.

He’s not like this. Normally, Cunningham is making 310-pound tackles cry. But the 2006 draft is in the books, a promise was kept and Cunningham is in late-season pep talk mode.

“What we’re trying to do,” he said, “is build this thing for the long run, build the kind of defense that this city needs, that Carl and Herm are proud of. You can tell I’m getting emotional. Because that was my thing in 2005.”

Cunningham’s “thing” started in January 2005. He placed a call to Chiefs president/general manager Carl Peterson and wanted to talk personnel — actually, lack of personnel. Cunningham was hired back to resurrect the Chiefs’ defense, but his once-proud unit finished 31st in the NFL.

He did some research, and it confirmed what he suspected — the defense was stuck in a major talent drought. Five of his starters in 2004 were second-day draft picks. Two of them weren’t drafted at all.

Peterson promised an upgrade, and, two years later, the Chiefs have added six first-day draft picks on defense. Cunningham will get his first look at some of the additions when rookie camp opens Friday morning.

He smiles occasionally and appears at peace … at least for a few weeks. When the Chiefs selected Penn State defensive end Tamba Hali and Purdue safety Bernard Pollard in last month’s draft, it was just the second time in 10 years that the top two picks went to defense.

Others have been committed to that for a while. AFC West champion Denver has picked a defensive player first in five of its last eight drafts. San Diego has loaded up in recent years by drafting Shawne Merriman, Luis Castillo and Quentin Jammer. Drafting for defense is trendy throughout the NFL. Fourteen of the first 20 picks of the 2006 draft were defensive players.

“This draft killed me,” Cunningham said. “This year, defense came off the board at 100 mph, and I panicked. I went, ‘My God, we can’t get our guys.’ And fortunately for us, Tamba was there at 20.

“And really, the safety we drafted in the second round, he has some issues, but they’re all my kind of issues. He plays the game angry. I love the kid. He’s a hard-and-heavy hitter. One of the things that you’ve got to have on defense is you’ve got to have a pacesetter, the guy that’s going to put the hit on tape like John Lynch. Bernard Pollard has that ability.”

Peterson, who asked Cunningham to make a wish list before free-agency began in 2005, added Pro Bowl linebacker Kendrell Bell, traded a second-round pick for Pro Bowl cornerback Patrick Surtain, then drafted Derrick Johnson with the No. 15 overall selection in the 2005 draft.

It was a huge swing of the pendulum for a franchise that hit a serious low at the end of the 2003 season. The Chiefs gave up 38 points at home in a playoff loss to the Colts. More than half of the starters from that defense are no longer with the franchise.

“I needed to make some changes,” Peterson said. “That probably crystallized the point that ‘Hey, we’ve got to start doingsome things with our defense.’ ”

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Along came Cunningham, but he’d have to wait a year for a personnel fix and another season to help pick his own defensive staff. Cunningham raves about working with Edwards and is simpatico with his new staff.

He had tears in his eyes recently when he watched one of his new coaches, David Gibbs, work with veteran safety Greg Wesley. Cunningham said Gibbs had Wesley doing things he hadn’t seen since 2000.

Edwards is a defensive guy to the core, and he’s had a longtime connection with Cunningham. The “Are you ready?” comment undoubtedly referred to Cunningham’s desire to resurrect a defense that had been knocked around for the better part of the Dick Vermeil era.

“I think the pieces are being put in place for real football, not for stopgap,” Cunningham said. “People can say, ‘Well, you could’ve done this or could’ve done that.’ But when you try to outscheme people, you’re going to bat .500.

“No, what you’ve got to do is line up 11 guys who can play defense. Because if you bat .500 in the NFL, you’re going to get fired.”


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The great escape Hali travels amazing road to achieve football stardom Posted: Saturday February 25, 2006 7:16PM; Updated: Saturday February 25, 2006 7:16PM

INDIANAPOLIS -- By day three of the NFL Scouting Combine, after listening to the wave after wave of prospects who take the podium in the media work room at the Indiana Convention Center, their stories start to sound the same and the details of their backgrounds begin to blend together in the mind.

And then a Tamba Hali comes along, and reminds you that some players have traveled a truly unique road to get here, and have a story that sounds like nobody else's.

Hali, the Penn State defensive end who is expected to be a top-15 pick in April's NFL Draft, kept reporters spellbound Saturday with the tale of his childhood in Liberia, where he and his family were caught up in the bloody civil war that ravaged that nation on Africa's West Coast, a country roughly the size of Tennessee.

"It's hard to explain to somebody what it's like on the other side when you haven't really gone through it," said Hali, who grew up in the capital city of Monrovia, before going into hiding and eventually immigrating to the U.S. in 1994, at the age of 10. "It's hard to explain to people what it's like to be actually be in that situation, and feeling like maybe today I could die or see other people get killed."

Hali said he had many days when he saw a life taken before his eyes, by the rebels who regularly terrorized the city.

"Sometimes it would be a lot [of people killed]," he said. "Sometimes it would be just one. Some times you'd see a stack of bodies sitting on the side of the road while you were walking. A lot of kids [in Liberia] weren't educated. A lot of them would be running around killing people for no reason."

Hali's saga renders your standard combine fare almost meaningless by comparison. Somehow, discussion of his 40 time and performance in the bench press just doesn't seem quite so significant when Hali is explaining his ongoing fight to get his mother and sister out of Liberia and to the U.S.

And members of the media weren't the only ones blown away this week by Hali's story. In each of his interviews with NFL teams, he painstakingly retold his tale, gaining a host of new admirers each time.

"I was just overwhelmed, not only with his story, but the way he told it," Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi said, after meeting with Hali on Friday night. "He's such a thoughtful, intellectual, moving person.

Before becoming a star at Penn State, Tamba Hali had to survive years of civil war and eventual escape from his native Liberia.

David Bergman/SI

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You could hear a pin drop in our interview room when he was done telling his story."

Hali has applied for U.S. citizenship and is waiting to take the necessary exam. He hasn't seen his mother, Rachel Keita, since leaving Liberia in 1994, and said she still lives in a hut, in a Monrovia that is calmer than it was in the years that the civil war raged, but far from safe. A couple years ago, Hali's mother was shot in the leg while walking in the city.

"She was walking with three or four other friends in Monrovia, and she got shot in the knee," Hali said. "What I hear is that the three other people got killed. By God's grace, she's still alive."

Hali's escape from Liberia was one of intrigue and danger. He, along with three other siblings, crossed the Cavalla River -- the country's eastern border -- and fled to the safety of the Ivory Coast. From there, he was eventually reunited with his biological father, who left Liberia in 1985 and is now a teacher at both Fairleigh Dickinson University and Teaneck High in Teaneck, N.J.

"The first time we got attacked [by rebels], the plane came down,'' said Hali, remembering the start of his country's civil war. "We were sitting there. I remember my mother was cooking. Gunfire just started erupting all over the place. That started happening all the time. So we went into hiding.

"My step-dad got a car and we went to a village far away from the city. We'd spend six months there and then come back, and things would ease a little bit. Then they would start again. After a couple of times of that, [my parents] thought we should flee the country. So certain people would hide us. We'd have places to stay in little huts. You find ways to manage. You find ways to eat, cook, all of that."

Upon arriving in the U.S., Hali found more than a way to manage. He discovered football in high school, and eventually earned a scholarship from Penn State. Today he's a 6-foot-3, 275-pound pass-rushing force who is the consensus second-highest ranked defense end in the draft, trailing only North Carolina State's Mario Willams, who is projected as a top-five pick.

Football became Hali's escape.

"I found myself enjoying myself when I was playing the game," he said. "Just being out there, having fun with my teammates, and being able to go out there and hit other people without getting fined for it. But I didn't even know about college scholarships. I was just playing to play. When I first got offered [a scholarship] by Boston College, I went to my coach and said, 'What am I supposed to say to the guy?'"

After the experiences of his childhood, and his family's ongoing struggle to reunite, there's no way Hali could ever view football as anything but the game it is. There will be no war-like metaphors ever coming from Hali in regards to football. No talk of a do-or-die game. He has seen war. He has lived war. And football is far from war.

"It's been tough, first, going through life with your mother [in that situation], and then going through the second half of your 22 years without her," Hali said. "You deal with it and work through it. That's how life is. Full of adversity."

Adversity, of course, can mean different things to different people. Every player at this year's NFL Scouting Combine has a story. But nobody else has Tamba Hali's story. His road here was longer than most, and far more life-changing. And he remembers it in vivid detail.

Once you hear it, you do too.

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You can find this article at: http://www.sportingnews.com/yourturn/viewtopic.php?t=82586

'By the grace of God, I am alive' April 13, 2006

Paul Attner

They are identified as government sympathizers. The rebel soldiers line them up along the road, near a ditch. They point their guns and shoot them and drive away and leave them, piled dead.

Some of the killers are young, no more than 9 or 10.

Some of the onlookers are young, too. Tamba Hali is 8. He probably should cry. But he can't. He already has seen too much killing, and all he is now is scared.

The soldiers are always saying to him, "Join us." He is eager to be one of them. He is hungry, and they have food. And guns. What youngster wouldn't want a gun?

But his older brother tells him no. "You will have to kill me first," his brother says. It takes guts to say no because every day friends and relatives are killed, even while just walking to the market for food.

Ten-year-olds with AK-47 machine guns don't hold discussions; they just pull the triggers.

It is 1991, two years into the civil war in Liberia. There is no electricity, no infrastructure, no sanity. Gbarnga, a small town in north central Liberia where Tamba and his family live, is headquarters for Charles Taylor -- the most powerful of the warlords trying to overthrow the government. There are no schools, no police force, no laws.

Henry Hali, Tamba's father, is in the United States. Troubled by increasing government corruption and growing political unrest, he fled Liberia in 1985, leaving four of his children with Rachel Keita. She is the mother of two of them: Tamba, almost 3 at the time, and his sister, Kumba, who had just been born. Henry is a teacher with a master's degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University; he tells his children he will bring them to the United States. It is the only way they will have a better life.

But in 1991, six years after Henry's departure, life in Liberia is even worse. To protect her family, Rachel decides they must escape Gbarnga and go into the countryside. They are not alone; before the fighting ends in August 2003, more than 1 million Liberians will be displaced from their homes and another 300,000 will be dead. The family leaves in a truck, passing through a series of checkpoints manned by soldiers. As they drive away from one, gunfire erupts. Tamba stands up. "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" he yells.

The bullets dance around him. His brother grabs him. "What are you doing?" he screams. "They will kill you."

When you are 8, why would anyone shoot you?

Today, Tamba Hali is 22 and an All-America defensive end from Penn State, a first-day draft talent who

Page 1 of 5SportingNews.com - Your expert source for 'By the grace of God, I am alive'


could not read or write a word of English 11 years ago when he first arrived in the United States. His is an almost unfathomable journey cluttered with obstacles so immense it is remarkable he is alive, much less an athletic standout who is on schedule to graduate this spring after four years. And he is weeks from having the financial means to realize another improbable goal: bringing his mother to the United States to end a separation that has lasted since 1994.

When she was last with him, before he came to the U.S. to live with his father in Teaneck, N.J., he was a skinny 11-year-old with glasses who never had seen football or shopping malls or computers and hadn't been to school in years. He has grown into a 6-2, 270-pound hunk with upper arms the size of a normal person's thighs and with interests reflective of his generation. He talks with a New Jersey accent, writes rap

songs, produces minidocumentaries for one of his college classes. And he is about to become a millionaire.

He looks now at Liberia and can only imagine what life once was like there, before the war destroyed his homeland.

Hali's father has been fortunate. Henry was educated at a school run by Christian missionaries and worked part time for Peace Corps volunteers, doing chores for $1 a week. The missionaries helped cover his tuition to Cuttington College outside Gbarnga. He graduated with degrees in math and chemistry, then received his masters before returning to Cuttington to teach. In a country where even now the average income is $110 a year and life expectancy averages 42 years, his salary provided a quality life.

But that changes after he moves to the States. Rachel and he aren't married, and now, besides Tamba and Kumba, Rachel must care for two boys from Henry's previous relationships -- Saah, 3, and the oldest, also called Tamba, 13. There are two Tambas because of a custom in the Kissi culture. The second son born to a woman is always named Tamba, the first Saah. When this family is together, they call the eldest Big Tamba and his half-brother Little Tamba. In Liberia, they live in a house that has electricity only part of the day. It has no indoor plumbing; they bathe in nearby rivers or with water brought in buckets. And, because of the heat, they cook outside.

Then, on Christmas Day 1989, the civil war begins.

Previously, Liberia and its 3 million people avoided the unrest that disrupted so many African countries. Founded by American and Caribbean slaves, Liberia's official language is English and many of its national symbols are modeled after American ones. But when William Tubman, its longtime president, died in 1971, a different Liberia evolved, with increasing corruption and discontent that finally led to terrible upheaval.

"You would look at someone wrong and they would shoot you," Big Tamba says. "It was unimaginable, the horror. You would see bodies everywhere, all the time." Big Tamba has learned from Henry how to operate a short-wave radio; he can provide some protection to the family by serving as a radio operator for the Taylor forces. Still, they are not sheltered from hardship. In the countryside, they eat fruits, cassava roots and game they hunt. In 1992, after neighboring countries become involved as peacekeepers, the family feels safer in Gbarnga. Then the planes start coming.

The first time, the planes are gliding over Gbarnga before they restart their engines. They open fire, ostensibly targeting rebels but shooting at anyone who moves. Rachel is cooking dinner outside; her children scramble. Little Tamba, who has been singing gospel songs, grabs the food, heads into the house and hides it.

Other days, they can hear the growing roar of the approaching jets. People dive into ditches, bushes, anything to escape the bombs and machine gun fire that rip apart bodies. For years after they are in the States, the children duck and hide every time they hear a jet overhead.

For Rachel, this new terror is too much. In early 1993, she decides they must escape to the Ivory Coast, a half-day's journey by car to the east.



Because Liberia's phone system and banking network are disrupted, Henry has little contact with his family during this period and must rely on Liberians traveling home to carry the money he sends as frequently as possible. While getting his green card in 1988 and his U.S. citizenship in 1992, he initiates attempts to bring his children to Teaneck, where he teaches chemistry and physical science at the local high school and general chemistry and lab two nights a week at Fairleigh Dickinson. But he is stalled by a government in ruins.

When Rachel and the children near the Ivory Coast border, no one is being allowed to cross. But Big Tamba convinces a colonel in the Taylor forces to drive Rachel and Kumba out of Liberia. Both Tambas and Saah stay behind. For weeks, Big Tamba plans how he will talk his way past rebel guards who protect the bridge. "I had to go through with it," he says. "I was running out of time. I was afraid. I knew we could die." He practices acting perfectly calm; any sign of fear and they all could be shot.

He negotiates with the guards. If they let him take the children to their family in the Ivory Coast, he will return with food for them.

They go over the bridge. "I was really frightened," says Little Tamba. But the guards don't stop them. They are free.

Henry, married to another woman, flies to the Ivory Coast to visit his children for just the second time since 1985. He also hopes to persuade the U.S. Embassy there to issue the visas needed for them to come to America. He is turned down. Desperate, he arranges for the family to stay in a monastery in neighboring Ghana and hopes to have better luck with that U.S. Embassy. He does; after blood tests, visas finally are granted. In December 1993, U.S. Immigration approves the relocation of the four children. On September 15, 1994, they board a plane and fly to Newark. Fifteen months later, the family is tragically reminded of the horrific danger they escaped. Rachel's son, Joshua, 5, who is Little Tamba's half-brother, is found dead at the bottom of a well in Ghana. The family is convinced someone tossed him in.

"My father lived up to his word," says Little Tamba. "Most fathers from our country, once they get to the United States, don't try very hard to bring over their children. But he promised he would not forget us, and he didn't."

Still, Little Tamba wonders about his new home. He likes television, and he wears out his dad's computer playing Doom. But he misses his mother. His father is strict. The milk and orange juice are not sweet enough, the pizza tastes awful, and the pace is too frantic. School makes it worse. He is enrolled in the fifth grade. On his first day, he fights with a student who calls him "Kunta Kinte." Although he speaks English, he hears words every day that have no meaning to him. Until he learns to read and write, he has no chance of succeeding.

Henry buys "Hooked On Phonics," a popular at-home method of teaching how to write and speak. The kids begin with basic sounds: met, hat, cat, max. They learn simple songs. They receive more drilling during English as a second language (ESL) classes in school. Tamba is quiet, shy; if he doesn't speak, no one can laugh at him. It takes him two years to catch up with his peers.

One day in 1998, Dennis Heck receives a phone call from Ed Klimek. Heck is the football coach at Teaneck High School; Klimek, one of his assistants, is a middle school teacher. He tells Heck about this student, Tamba Hali, who is 6-0 and 160 with big hands and feet. "You have to see this kid," says Klimek.

They want Hali to play football next year, in the ninth grade. Tamba thinks football is stupid. "I saw a game on TV and thought it looked too easy," he says. "I looked at the running back and wondered, Why can't he just run around everybody? Why is that so hard? And what was the point anyway? Everyone rushes to one spot and piles on." He played soccer in Liberia but fancies himself a future NBA star. Still, football lets him hit people legally, which seems fun. As a lineman on the freshman team, he doesn't realize he has to



memorize plays. He can't understand why teammates are upset when he asks out loud what to do on every snap.

"He was OK as a freshman, but as a sophomore there was something about him," says Heck. "The way he worked, the way he practiced hard, his effort -- it was better than anyone we had on the team." Hali starts and begins attracting attention as a defensive lineman. Boston College offers him a scholarship. Until then, he has no idea he can attend college free as a football player. He asks Heck, "Should I tell them yes?"

By his senior season, he is a high school All-American pursued by more than 60 major colleges. He chooses Penn State over Syracuse; he and his dad are impressed with the former's high graduation rate. He knows Henry expects him to graduate in four years; education is first, playing football is a bonus. Besides, Tamba likes Penn State coach Joe Paterno. The day Paterno visits Hali's high school, a classmate doesn't finish braiding Tamba's long hair. So he meets the coach sporting a Mohawk, with only part of his remaining hair in braids. Paterno never says a word.

Tamba's early days at State College are frustrating. He reluctantly moves from end to tackle, where he plays as a true freshman and starts as a sophomore. But early on, he considers transferring. He also switches majors twice. As a junior, he makes second-team

All-Big Ten. As a senior, he has 11 sacks, including four against Wisconsin, and helps Penn State reassert itself as a football power. "He practices 100 percent, and he plays that way," Paterno says.

"He has a lot of talent. He is a 260-pounder who has quickness and strength. He has everything you are looking for in a defensive end."

Hali is relentless, too talented for most college offensive tackles. His name appears in the first round of some early mock drafts. But the last few months have been stressful. He's usually high-energy, even-keeled, level-headed, sometimes too loud. Now, he's tired a lot. Time is an issue. Most top draft prospects quit school in the spring to train for the NFL Scouting Combine and private workouts. But he is taking a final 15 credits, living in a dorm room.

He knows what it means to his dad for him to get his degree on time. They laugh that he has spent almost all of the past four years at Penn State going to class and changing interests and accumulating 21 extra credits he can't apply toward his major, broadcast journalism. He also is working with Scott Paterno, Joe's son and a lawyer, to bring his mother to the United States. Liberian officials want to know whether Hali has the resources to care for her; his NFL earning potential has eased their concerns. Rachel could be here before the draft, but more likely, she will arrive this summer. At some point, Hali also will take a test to become a U.S. citizen.

There is urgency behind these immigration efforts. In 2003, Rachel and three friends are walking in Monrovia, Liberia's capital. They are caught in a gunfight; she is shot in the knee. The family is told some of the friends died.

Recently, Rachel didn't feel well and was hospitalized. Even though there now is an uneasy calm -- in November, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was elected president -- Liberia still has U.N. peacekeepers, overwhelming poverty, unemployment and disease. Tamba wants his mother to be safe.

For years, because of communications problems within Liberia, mother and son talked only about once every six months. But now Rachel has a cell phone, and they have frequent conversations. "She has no clue about football," Hali says. "And she just doesn't understand what is taking so long to get her here. I tell her, 'Mama Rachel, be patient. It will happen.' "

Still, it is a joyous time for Henry and his children. Besides Little Tamba's accomplishments, Kumba, 20, who graduated from high school last year, will attend college in the fall, and Saah, 23, will graduate in May from Caldwell (N.J.) College, where he played soccer. And Big Tamba, 33, is an assistant manager at a local Walgreen's. They have felt the American Dream.



Copyright © 2006 All rights reserved.

Inside the football building at Penn State, a long hallway leads to the practice locker room. On each side of the hallway are pictures of 86 Penn State All-Americans. Soon, Tamba Hali's picture will be added to those of John Cappelletti, Jack Ham, Lydell Mitchell, Matt Millen, LaVar Arrington.

"Pretty amazing," he says, looking at those pictures. "I never thought anything like this would happen. When I came up here, I didn't know about All-Americans or the Combine or anything like that. Now all this."

Rachel is a minister in Liberia. Her son refers frequently to God in his conversations. He knows he should be dead, another victim of civil war. "By the grace of God, I am alive," he says. He remembers what it was like in Liberia. "Sometime, you knew you were going to die. If you did something wrong, death was at hand because people were all around the place, shooting guns, killing people. Battles would erupt within the town and planes would come and people on the ground would just start killing each other. It was just how it was. Chaos all over the place."

He understands he sees life differently than his peers. "He has a maturity level that I think is a result of what he has been through," says Heck. "What happens with him in the NFL will be gravy. How far he has come, to be here, it blows you away."

For sure, Hali pushes himself a little harder, realizing he has opportunities he needs to appreciate. "It is," he says, "a gift. I just want to make sure I don't blow it."



Posted on Mon, Aug. 28, 2006

CHIEFS PRESEASON | Rookies Hali and Pollard make their presence felt

SUDDEN IMPACT

Team’s No. 1 and No. 2 draft picks are a hit with their turnover-causing performances against the Rams,

pumping up a defense that needed it.

By ADAM TEICHER The Kansas City Star

Seldom does one draft produce such results so early, so forgive the Chiefs their sense of satisfaction today over the play of their two top picks in Saturday night’s preseason win over the Rams.

The first-round choice, defensive end Tamba Hali, was selected to help improve a feeble pass rush. In his first game aftermissing the first two because of sore ribs, Hali had a sack and strip of St. Louis quarterback Marc Bulger and the Chiefs recovered.

Second-round safety Bernard Pollard, drafted because of his taste for physical play, blasted wide receiver Brandon Middleton in the game’s final moments. The contact forced a fumble that was recovered by Benny Sapp and allowed the Chiefs to preserve their victory.

Pollard also had an interception on a deflected pass, meaning the rookies accounted for all three of the Chiefs’ takeaways, their first on defense in the preseason.

“We’re both Big Ten guys,” Pollard said. “One thing our coaches in college instilled in us was to go out there and play hard and just be a player and have fun with it.”

The Chiefs were obviously having fun with Hali. He lined up as the starting left end in regular down-and-distance situations but often as a stand-up rusher in the middle of their line on passing downs.

“That’s a package we put him in because he’s an athletic guy and we’re trying to get him in some one-on-one matchups and win,” coach Herm Edwards said. “He’s a relentless guy. He brought pressure.”

Hali brought an immediate presence to a defense that had struggled to rush the quarterback without blitzing.

“That was good to see because we have to rush with four guys and get to the quarterback,” Edwards said. “You want to be able to do that. You don’t want to have to blitz all the time to get to the quarterback. I thought we put pressure on the quarterback and covered them pretty well.”

The Chiefs liked Hali’s versatility in college at Penn State, where he often played as a tackle in obvious passing situations.

“I think that’s why they wanted me,” Hali said. “I can come around the edge and they want to utilize that on the field. There are going to come times when I’m going to have to get on the edge and rush the passer but I don’t mind playing different positions.”

The Chiefs thought their safeties were too timid, so they jumped on Pollard when they had the chance. For now, he’s backing up starters Greg Wesley and Sammy Knight, but it’s only a matter of time before he’s a regular.

Games like Saturday’s will speed the process.

“He’s a force and when he hits people, you can hear it on the sideline,” Edwards said. “He’s going to get better, and he’s a rookie. We had a pretty good draft, and we drafted some players that can help us on defense, and maybe even a few on offense as the season goes on.

Page 1 of 2SUDDEN IMPACT



“We drafted him because we thought he was a tough guy, a good tackler and he makes some plays on the ball and that’swhat he did at the end. That’s what he did in college. It was a good pick for us.”

Pollard’s interception was the first turnover created by the Chiefs. It brought some life to a beleaguered defense that had showed little in the first two games.

“It was a promise I made when I was selected in the round I was,” Pollard said. “I just wanted to come in and compete and contribute to the team and help everybody out.

“You could see the whole sky light up. All of the veterans are high-fiving you, tell you it’s a good job.”

With Pollard, the Chiefs had to take the bad with the good. He also allowed a St. Louis tight end, Jerome Collins, to turn a short pass into a 54-yard touchdown when he ran around Collins.

He also took a 15-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness that led to a Rams field goal.

The Chiefs might have even more to look forward to when their other rookie safety, seventh-round pick Jarrad Page, returns. Page didn’t play against the Rams because of what he said was dehydration concerns.

“I’ll be there Thursday,” Page said, referring to the final preseason game against New Orleans at Arrowhead Stadium.

To reach Adam Teicher, Chiefs reporter for The Star, call (816) 234-4875 or send e-mail to [email protected]

Page 2 of 2SUDDEN IMPACT


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