Long snappers do cry
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TAMPA, Fla. -- The narrative that delivered a Jared Retkofsky of Wichita, Kan., to the media-choked floor of Raymond James Stadium yesterday might not be the most compelling of any player in Super Bowl XLIII, but the spoken-word version brought him to tears, and the record should show that he was the only Steelers player who cried a little bit on media day.
Unless of course Hines Ward did and I missed it.
Retkofsky became a Steelers player as the solution to a stunning combination of gore and slapstick that went down Oct. 26 against the New York Giants.
Long snapper Greg Warren mangled his left leg running under a punt. Tried to walk to the bench only to have his knee fold at the grotesque angle that works only for flamingos. On the next punting situation, Steelers MVP and emergency long snapper James Harrison snapped the ball over Mitch Berger's head in the end zone for a safety.
"I was shopping with my girlfriend," Retkofsky said. "My dad said, '[Greg] Warren just went down.' "
Most every person in America would respond to that bulletin with "Who's Greg Warren?"
So it goes with long snappers. Nobody knows 'em until the football flies over the punter's head or hits the holder in the ear hole. Then a mob forms and runs him out of town. Warren has been with the Steelers since 2005, snapping most reliably until he started snapping body parts that Sunday in October.
"I never thought I was playing a position where I could get hurt so badly," said Warren, who only started walking again four weeks ago and faces another 10 or 11 weeks of rehab.
But even in his fourth year with the Steelers, Warren could hang out in any Giant Eagle without so much as clogging an aisle. That's withhis Super Bowl ring. In uniform.
Almost nobody knows the long snapper. On Oct. 27, Steelers personnel chief Kevin Colbert brought in four players, including Retkofsky, whom he'd cut from the roster twice in the previous 15 months, to compete for Warren's job.
Of the other three, Colbert could name two yesterday.
"Boone Stutz," he said, "Derrick Rackley, and uh, Tim something."
See? They're long-snappers. Nobody can remember them.
But are they important?
"Toward the end of the AFC championship game, I was a little nervous," Retkofsky said. "I mean I control a lot when you think about it. I could cost this team everything. As a snapper, that's the kind of thing you don't want to think. But, when I went out on the field, that all went away. I was very confident and I just looked around at all the people going crazy and thought, 'You're playing in the AFC championship game.'
"I love this job. I'll take the pressure of snapping the football any day rather than moving a couch."
Retkofsky was working for a small moving company when the Steelers had to look for his phone number again. The work was unforgivingly hard, but at least it was sporadic. Retkofsky wasn't making much, but he always had the opportunity to make even less.
"I never broke anything, but one of my crew did," he said. "One day we were moving this really expensive table top. The truck had a lift gate on the back, and it kind of bumps when it stops, so the other guy lost his footing and dropped the table top. The deal with the [company] owner was that if we broke anything, the replacement cost was half his and half ours. I remember thinking there is no way I can afford this table top. I just worked the whole day for nothing."
From the time the Steelers cut him a second time in June until Oct. 28, mover was probably the most stable position Retkofsky held. He considered taking a glorified janitorial gig for a chain of nursing homes, but that paid even less. He applied to police and fire academies, but nothing was happening.
It wasn't hopeless. Retkofsky had seen hopeless, and this wasn't it.
"My mom had a real bad drug problem, in and out of rehab," Jared said. "I had a best friend growing up in Wichita, and I stayed at his house a lot because of that. Then, my best friend's dad killed his mom and himself. He went to live with his uncle and aunt, and I started staying there, too.
"My mom didn't want that. She had a real bad relapse. I couldn't take it anymore. I was 12. They finally convinced her that they should take care of me."
Eric and Kelly Dennis, the people Retkofsky now calls his mom and dad (he never knew his biological father), got him into a better school, where he played football and learned to snap. He wound up at Texas Christian University.
Even among specialists, who are very close on every football team, Warren didn't know all this until fairly recently.
"I thought I'd been through some adversity because I was a walk-on at North Carolina," Warren smiled. "But what Jared has battled through is a great story. Most snappers have a way of being able to focus so you don't stress out; we have a way of forgetting the last play."
Retkofsky's had to forget plenty, but the day he likely never will was that Tuesday after Warren's injury, when all four potential replacements had completed their snapping auditions. Doug Whaley, the club's pro personnel coordinator, came into the locker room and said to Jared, "C'mon; let's go upstairs and sign some papers."
"It's a long hallway to the stairs," Retkofsky said as the sun baked the grass stage of the Super Bowl, "and I thought, 'Ya know, I might just collapse on those stairs and bawl.' I am so blessed, so thankful. It's just surreal to be here."
And then he cried a little.
"I'm sorry," he said.
His mom and dad will be there Sunday.
First Published January 28, 2009 12:00 am
