By Lori Shontz
Of the Post-Dispatch
He slipped into town so quietly, so unobtrusively, that barely anyone noticed. Kurt Warner's arrival was heralded, if that's the word, in the Post-Dispatch on Christmas Day 1997, his name buried in a list of seven other free agents the Rams signed after their season ended.
Nothing hinted at Warner's improbable rise that would captivate the city - and, for that matter, much of the country - or at his fall, nearly as swift and sudden, that would trigger such strong emotions as well.
So insignificant was Warner that he warranted only one sentence, and that sentence wasn't even correct. He was identified as a college quarterback at Northern (ital) Arizona (end ital), half a country away from his true alma mater, Northern Iowa.
Nothing indicated that he would lead his team - which had finished 4-12 the season before he took over - to victory in the Super Bowl. That he would win the league MVP twice in his first three seasons as a starter. That his wife would stir up controversy by calling a sports-talk radio show to criticize his coach. Or that he would eventually tell an audience at a religious convention that his strong faith - not his lack of production - was the reason he lost his starting job.
Nothing could have predicted all that came to pass. Who would have believed it?
Warner's sojourn in St. Louis had enough highs and lows, enough twists and turns, to fill an opera. And like many heroes, the characteristics that made him a star were essentially the same ones that led to his fall.
Confident Kurt
This is an athlete who never once lost confidence that he had the skills to play in the NFL, not even while stocking grocery shelves at Hy-Vee for $5.50 an hour or toiling for three seasons with the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League. So with that kind of faith in himself - and a strong religious faith as well - how could he be expected to characterize his struggles in 2002 and 2003 as anything other than an aberration?
In his first lengthy interview with the Post-Dispatch, in December 1998, Warner gave this answer when asked the biggest myth about the NFL: "Because I've played in so many different leagues and have had so many people tell me that I didn't belong here, that I wasn't good enough to play here, to me the biggest myth has been that I can't compete at this level or that the NFL athletes are so much greater than all of the other professional athletes out there."
In January 2003, after a season in which Warner went 0-6 as a starter, missed much of the season with broken finger problems and weathered a controversy sparked by his wife's outspokenness, he had the same attitude. "Did I play at a 'way' lower level than I did in the past three years?" he asked. "I don't believe I did. There were just different...
-06-03-2004, 10:59 PM
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