As Jerry Rice prepares to enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame next weekend, certain phrases will echo through the Bay Area and the Hall’s home of Canton, Ohio.
“Greatest Receiver of All Time.” That one’s a given.
“Greatest Football Player of All Time.” More than worthy of debate.
“Most Maniacal Perfectionist in Sports History.” Pretty much beyond debate.
But the words that really explain Rice don’t add up to a superlative. They represent an unofficial statistic.
Yards After the Catch.
They defined him as an athlete and a person. In many ways, they define who he is today, at age 47.
Rice had hands of Velcro, but what he did once the ball nestled in his gloves set him apart from every other receiver, if not every other player, in the game. He slipped away from defensive backs surrounding him, as if he’d momentarily become a ghost, and turned 5 yards by air into 10 or 15 or 20 or more.
Rice wasn’t bigger than most of his peers, and stopwatches famously measured him as very ordinary for an NFL receiver. Those yards after the catch meant something else. They meant that a job is never really done. They meant that a bricklayer’s son from Crawford, Miss., could see the whole world in front of him every time he wrapped his hands around a football.
Rice made his final catch almost six years ago, and now those yards have to come from another source. He knows that it will be impossible to find anything that can absorb and reward his ambitions the way football did. So unlike the Jerry Rice who won three Super Bowl rings with the 49ers, the 2010 model occasionally lets himself get caught from behind.
Increasingly nostalgic
As the induction in Canton approaches, he finds himself growing increasingly nostalgic and rather concerned that he will cry during his speech. Looking back, he feels grateful for his 20 years in professional football and as besotted with the game as ever.
“I miss it every day,” he said. “I still can’t believe it went by so fast. … It’s hard, it’s really hard.”
When Rice came out of Mississippi Valley State in 1985, he did not impress the scouts gathered at a workout session in Arizona. “Everybody thought I was slow,” Rice said. “No way that I would be able to make it in the NFL.”
Rice more than made up for his lack of pure speed. He traveled light, increasing his mobility. He eschewed knee pads and thigh pads, wore the smaller shoulder pads of a quarterback and monitored his body weight like a jockey. For a couple of years early in his career, he set 189 pounds as his ideal.
His ideal weight
“It had to be 189,” he said. “I’d get up in the morning of the game go to breakfast (at the team hotel). It might be some cereal and some toast, that was it, nothing bigger than that. Then I’d go to the stadium and get on the scale. If I weighed more than 189, if I’m 191, I’m on the treadmill.
“So my teammates would come to the stadium, I’d be all sweaty, and they’d say, ‘Man, what are you doing?’.”
Being compulsive. Being Jerry Rice.
His uniform always had to be perfect. The shoes had to be new, not broken in, the jersey snug and pristine, changed at halftime. A selection of socks had to be available, so he could find the right fit. Vanity alone didn’t explain the compulsion. Rice happily wore goofy-looking nasal strips during games in the ’90s, believing that they gave him maximum access to oxygen. All those little details, he believed, gave him an edge.
“If you timed me on the stopwatch, I wasn’t anything special,” he said. “But when I put on my uniform, I was ready to go. I felt like Superman.”
Rice hasn’t changed all that much. Even now, he eats sparingly, sometimes getting by all day on a banana, forgetting to replenish until he finally sits down in the afternoon and exhaustion overtakes him. He still runs the famed hill in San Carlos where the 49ers of his era tested themselves. He’ll play 36 holes of golf with Bruce Blair, a high school friend from the Mississippi days, then say: “I’ve got to go work out now.”
An avid golfer
Rice took up golf in the early ’90s, and it became a surrogate challenge when his NFL career ended. He plays regularly in celebrity and charity tournaments, and he took a quick, humbling spin on the Nationwide minor-league tour this spring. He is invariably the most stylishly dressed player on a course; his clothes still have to feel perfect. The game, however, isn’t an ideal fit. The pace doesn’t suit him. It’s evident when Rice strolls down a fairway or, more accurately, everyone else strolls and he strides like a Manhattan commuter approaching a subway entrance. His caddie, Andy Miller, often has to tell Rice not to rush things, reminding him that breathing properly is part of the game.
At the American Century Championship celebrity tournament at Lake Tahoe two weeks ago, three longtime wingmen accompanied Rice. Miller, 30, has caddied for the football star since he was 15. Shawn Rogers tried out for the 49ers in Rice’s rookie season and roomed with him at training camp. Blair and Rice played high school basketball together.
They’re not exactly stereotypical hangers-on. Miller owns his own janitorial company. Rogers is a sergeant on the Sacramento police force. Blair is a retired Navy man.
“Jerry trusts very few people,” Miller said. “But once he does trust you, he trusts you completely, and he’d do anything for you.”
How does one earn that trust? Apparently, blind idolatry doesn’t work. As a teenager, Miller would bicker with the 49ers superstar if they didn’t agree on strategy at a tournament. “There are pictures at my parents’ house of me throwing a putter at him from a distance or deliberately not looking at him,” Miller said. “It was pretty childish, but I got mad when he didn’t play as well as I thought he could.”
‘Flash-80′
Rogers, the former training-camp roommate, got to know Rice before he became the renowned “Flash-80.” Rice went through a brief, excruciating period with the 49ers when he kept dropping passes. He also didn’t quite understand what it meant to live outside a small Mississippi town.
“He kept all his money in a cassette deck in the trunk of his car,” Rogers said, smiling as he looked back 25 years. “We told him, ‘Man, we need to get you a credit card.’ ”
Blair was two years behind Rice at high school in Crawford and looked up to him as the star of their basketball team. But he also knew Rice as one of eight siblings in a family that didn’t have a lot of money. The six brothers, including Jerry, followed their dad to work in the summers, laying bricks in the Southern heat from sunrise to sunset. “There was no way I was going to do that for the rest of my life,” Rice said.
For Blair, the perks of knowing a superstar went beyond the obvious. “Being around Jerry helped me keep going in the Navy,” he said. “I wasn’t always sure what I wanted to do, but watching him – I wanted to have his work ethic.”
Image making
Even after he became a star, Rice never let himself believe that he’d arrived. For the first 13 years of his career, he refused to take a vacation. He knew he couldn’t sit on a beach without imagining some other receiver or defensive back grinding away, preparing to outdo him the following season.
Early in his career, Rice also worried about his Southern accent and expressions. In interviews, he didn’t want to come across as the shy country kid he still felt like. So he asked Sylvester Jackson, the host of an A’s pregame show, to help refine his speaking style. “I did it for a little while, but I thought it didn’t sound like me,” Rice said. “And I knew I had to be myself.”
For most of his playing career, he kept the media at a distance, an approach he now regrets. But at the time, he said, he thought he needed to cocoon himself in the game, focusing on little but the intensity and preparation it required of him.
In retirement, Rice has bloomed, becoming more at ease in interviews, more playful at public appearances.
“My old teammates, they’ll tease me,” he said. “They say I didn’t say anything all those years we were playing together, and now I won’t stop talking.”
Fan base is growing
His fan base, meanwhile, continues to grow. When he walks through an airport, the fans most likely to approach him are older women. They don’t ask about football. They want to be dipped.
Four years ago, Rice agreed to appear on the second season of ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars.” The decision meant risking ridicule from old-school football fans, and possibly his peers. But once he accepted the challenge, Rice, as usual, went deep.
He practiced eight hours a day, four in the morning and four more in the afternoon. In the end, he very visibly had a great time, finished second and became a recruiting tool for the show. Former Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith, who will be enshrined alongside Rice this weekend, accepted an invitation for the following season.
When he went to the Super Bowl in Detroit that winter, Rice said his fellow former MVPs kept congratulating him on his disco and his foxtrot. “They kept coming up and telling me, ‘Hey, Jerry, you were great on “Dancing With the Stars,” ‘ ” he said, savoring the memory with a big smile. “All those macho football players.”
In his second stage of life, that had to count as big yardage after the catch.
After “Dancing With the Stars,” he signed on as a client of the William Morris talent agency. He has appeared in commercials and TV shows, including the teen drama “One Tree Hill.” He also works with younger football players through the marketing agency of former 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo.
The extended family
A Hall of Fame inductee picks the person who will formally introduce him in Canton, and Rice chose DeBartolo. Rice’s father, Joe, and 49ers coach Bill Walsh, whom he has called his second father figure, did not live to see this moment. But somehow, having DeBartolo as his presenter seems like destiny. Rice’s mother is named Eddie B., and his eldest sister is Eddie Dean Harris, named for their great-great-grandmother, known as Eddie D.
The audience will include Rice’s TV dancing partner, Anna Trebunskaya, and her husband, as well as the occupants of two charter buses from Mississippi. One will depart from Crawford, where most of Rice’s seven siblings still live, and the other from Greenville, hometown of his former wife Jackie Rice. The couple split up about 3 1/2 years ago and formally ended their 23-year marriage this winter. But divorce papers can’t erase Jackie’s part in her husband’s football legacy, and their lives remain enmeshed.
‘We’re a team’
“We’re not a couple anymore, but we’re a team, and our goal as a team is to make sure our kids are great,” Jackie said last week from Dallas, where she was visiting former Raiders receiver Tim Brown and his wife, Sherice. After Rice crossed the Bay to play in Oakland in 2001, the families became very close.
The Rices’ elder daughter, Jacqui, has recorded music under the name “Qui,” sung the national anthem at a 49ers game, and been crowned Queen of the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival. She recently graduated from Georgetown University and, not content with one career dream, is now studying for the Law School Admission Test while working at a legal firm in San Jose. Jerry Jr. attends UCLA, where he is a sophomore and will play football this fall after redshirting last year. The youngest of the Rice children, Jada, will enter ninth grade at the Menlo School, and she plays volleyball, softball and basketball. They will accompany their parents to Canton this weekend.
Rice has been refining his Hall of Fame speech for a while now, with help from his assistant, Sasha Taylor, and his girlfriend of almost two years, Latisha Pelayo, the owner of a San Carlos skin-care salon. The two met at their gym, and he has introduced her to his workout routine, which, as he so romantically said recently, “can make you throw up the first time you try it.”
Stream of tributes
In the weeks leading up to the induction, Rice has been swimming in a stream of tributes from former teammates, coaches and reporters. He sometimes responds to praise as if he has never heard it before. Call him the greatest football player of all time, and he’ll turn a little squirmy.
“It kind of scares me,” he said. “You think about football as a team, and I played with so many great players.”
Scary? Maybe it is for a man who doesn’t understand the word “enough.” After all, if he fully accepts that he has arrived, finishing at the top, he might not be Jerry Rice anymore.
Hall of Famer
– Jerry Rice, 47, will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, on Saturday.
– Rice played for the 49ers from 1985-2000, winning three Super Bowls.
– Rice played for the Raiders from 2001-04, reaching one Super Bowl (a loss).
– Rice holds dozens of NFL records, including most career touchdowns and pass receptions.
Life beyond football
It’s been six years since Jerry Rice spent his days dodging would-be tacklers on the football field, but he’s moving as fast as ever. Here is a sampling of his post-NFL activities.
Television
Rice’s biggest moment was finishing second on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2006. He’s appeared on many other shows, including “The Biggest Loser” and the Miss America pageant (as a judge).
Golf
Rice is an avid golfer and took on professionals (unsuccessfully) when the Nationwide Tour stopped in Hayward in April. He says he won’t pursue a pro golf career.
Family
Rice and his ex-wife Jackie have three children – Jerry Jr. plays football at UCLA; Jacqui is a singer, a Georgetown graduate and an aspiring lawyer; Jada is entering ninth grade.
Gwen Knapp – SF Chronicle