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DETROIT -- I'm blue-collar," Hines Ward says, by way of explaining everything. He sits down for lunch in the Steelers' team cafeteria, having just finished 90 minutes of football practice. For this rugged manual labor, he's being paid $27.5 million and, though that's the easiest paradox of Ward's identity, it's surely not the last.

Days away from the Super Bowl, Ward is the most uncommon common wide receiver in the NFL. He has reached excellence via his regularity. Lacking ideal height or size -- heck, lacking everything excluding a workmanlike mind-set -- Ward can call himself now, without dispute, a survivor. In the 1998 NFL draft, before the Steelers grabbed Ward with the final pick of the third round, 14 other wideouts disappeared from the board. Now, 10 of those players -- Jacquez Green, Marcus Nash, Tony Simmons ... Ward can name them -- have disappeared from the NFL.

What about in Pittsburgh? Beginning almost a decade ago, upon losing Yancey Thigpen to free agency, the Steelers exhausted their prayers and resources to find another No. 1 receiver. But Ward only noticed that his team ignored the one player it always had. He played on special teams when the Steelers threw their hopes at Will Blackwell, and he faced a demotion to role player when the Steelers drafted Troy Edwards, and even later, when he played alongside Plaxico Burress, he felt slighted by the attention given to his taller teammate's self-evident talents.

"People kept saying, 'Plax is the one taking the double coverages. He's the one who gets Hines open.' " Ward now says. "Well how can you say that? What film are you watching? And if he's getting all of the double coverage, who's getting the No. 1 cornerback? [The sentiment] was kind of like Plax makes Hines. No, Plax didn't make Hines! He ain't catching no balls for me."

On March 8, Ward turns 30, and this means a couple things. First, he is closer to The End than The Beginning, and second, he has climbed to that point of authority -- a career summit -- from where he can now theorize why The End didn't smack him in the face years earlier. So Ward, in the cafeteria on a Friday, loads his tray with two pieces of barely-warm cod and starts talking in between bites. He wears a gray workout T-shirt, the kind that would command $3 at a flea market, and as he talks, he returns again and again to one idea -- his blue-collar identity, which (take your pick) is either a preposterous misuse of terminology or the very secret to why he has grown rich beyond reason while playing the game he loves.

So you have to know the background first, the story of the blue-collar millionaire. He was born in Seoul, South Korea, thanks to a Korean mother and an American serviceman father. Ward's parents divorced two years after his birth, and in the turmoil thereafter, he lived in periods with his grandmother, his father (Hines Sr.) and his mother, who moved to Georgia. At age 7, Ward returned to stay with his mother, who washed dishes at the Atlanta airport, worked a grocery store cash register and cleaned hotel rooms. She earned her blue collar with three jobs.

In high school, Ward, meanwhile, worked at Chick-fil-A, gathering money for his first car, a Ford Escort. By the time he arrived at Georgia for college, his football skills provided coaches with a luxury. They played him at quarterback, running back and receiver, and at the conclusion of Ward's college career, his agent whispered the best words possible -- late first round, maybe early second. Ward waited until NFL teams had taken 14 other wide receivers, and by the time the waiting ended, circumstance all but guaranteed it:

He had convinced himself that the NFL viewed him as a layman, nothing more. "Hines comes a dime-per-dozen," Ward now says, parroting what he calls popular sentiment. "Hines is only a singles hitter, not a home-run hitter." Ward arrived at his first Steelers training camp swearing those around him thought he'd fail and looking for every piece of evidence -- real or self-constructed -- that supported it.

"What discouraged me was that none of the coaches ever came up and told me what I was doing wrong," Ward says. "I just took it that, by them continually drafting wide receivers [in the first round], they didn't think I could get the job done. ... My first three years, yes, I played, but not predominantly. I was a special teams guy. That's really what I was brought in for. For me to work my tail off to become the player I am today, I mean nobody went out of their way to help me out. I had to overcome Plaxico. I had to overcome Troy. That's why it's so gratifying for me today."

Since 2001, Ward has broken the franchise's reception record once, then twice; he earned trips to four consecutive Pro Bowls, doing so while playing with three different quarterbacks; he became the Steelers' all-time leading pass-catcher. But Ward, even now, routinely dismisses the praise and clings to the criticism, though it has diminished to almost zero. He is trying to maintain the me-against-everything mind-set that delivered him here ... to the hearts of fans, to the team record book, to the richest contract, signed in September, in Steelers history. This is Ward's conundrum: How can he still be blue-collar when that very attitude has pushed him away from the rough path where he started?

Not easy. Now that Ward has spent so long with a chip on his shoulder, he is realizing the hardest part is keeping it there. Asked when he feels he finally proved that he could be a No. 1 wideout, he says quickly "This year, man, this year." And along with that newfound comfort, Ward has inverted his humble beginnings. He has finished payments on a 6,000-square-foot dream house in Atlanta, home for his wife and 2-year-old son. He is creating a foundation, aimed to promote literacy in inner-city schools, that will begin operation later this year. He has invested in a new bar, the Locker Room, on the South Side. "Those flat-screen TVs?" he says, grinning. "My idea."

Fans adore Ward. (After every touchdown, he hands the ball to a fan wearing his jersey; he always finds one.) Teammates follow his lead. ("In this place," receiver Sean Morey says, "we have some amazing people -- Hall of Famers, All-Pros -- but I think he's the most respected player in this locker room.")

Ward, then, is torn between two identities. He is an arriviste high roller accustomed to living low. He is a star who grew up believing others thought of him as a scrub. At this moment, he's eating cafeteria cod, but hours later -- if he so wishes -- he can put on a black designer sweater, valet park at Nakama and order a plate of sushi.

"Blue collar, yes," wide receiver Antwaan Randle El says, obliging a question about his teammate. Then, smiling, he places his right hand on the shoulder of an interviewer. "But his contract," Randle El says, "would be a wonderful thing for anybody to have."

Fame and success blend unnaturally with Ward's view of himself. As he tells it, he developed the attributes that define his game -- wrecking-ball blocking, a will to catch passes across the middle -- because talent evaluators ignored him otherwise. But now, Ward searches desperately for new obstacles.

OK, so here's one: He overhears some inane roto league banter and can't shake it off. "It's discouraging when I hear people say they'd take a Chad Johnson over a Hines Ward," he says. "It's a little hurtful sometimes." Here's another: He gets the feeling a few people don't think he'll be able to play into his late 30s, as he desires. "People keep saying, 'Well, how much more can his body take?' I can't understand how people say that."

Then, there is the Super Bowl itself. The Steelers are favored by four, but Ward still insists on calling Pittsburgh the real underdog, because the point spread doesn't truly reflect the long odds his team faced all season.

You want obstacles? Fine, one more. Ward's biggest comes from within: his discomfort with comfort, or at least his unwillingness to embrace what comfort might do to him. It is the paradox of his fame. He starts talking about his luxury cars, but then stops, arriving at the point toward which he long has been angling.

"I have a couple cars, but I don't like to talk about it," he says. "Because they're too... I mean, yes, I like nice things and I'm blessed to be in a position to do that, but my mom always says, 'Don't go out and show off the stuff you have.' Sometimes people have a misperception about people with the bling-bling and the cars. Those are material things. They don't have a thing to do with who I am."