Steelers' Rookies Steal
Show
 This is the 14th
in a series of postcards Sports Illustrated's Peter King
will e-mail from his annual training-camp
tour.
Posted: Wed August 19,
1998
Aug.
18: Latrobe,
Pa.
TEAM: Pittsburgh
Steelers.
SITE: St. Vincent College, nestled in the heart of the rolling
Laurel Highlands, five miles from the Rolling Rock brewery.
This is the standard by which all training camps are
measured. The dorms are spartan—cinderblock jobs with
the rickety wooden chairs and the simple college twin
beds— and if you don't bring your own air conditioner,
you're a dead man. Nature, a classic small-college Catholic
campus and the hilly St. Vincent Cemetery surround you.
"It's a perfect place for training camp, to set the
right tempo for the season," coach Bill Cowher told me
today.
FOOD: Down home great stuff. Chicken pot pie (with a little too
much dark meat for my liking), wild rice, steamed broccoli
and lemonade. Vanilla yogurt on a cone for dessert. And no,
no Rolling Rock on
tap.
Dear NFL
Junkie:
It's so Pittsburgh here. Lots of camps have mini-NFL
Experience parks set up, with faux tackling dummies and
football-throwing contests and field-goal practice ranges.
This one has all of that. But this one, in western
Pennsylvania, an hour east of Pittsburgh, has a real
hometown flavor. There's a gigantic inflated pierogi on the
side.
So who's the first guy I run into this morning?
Myron
Cope, the best radio voice of any team in pro football. If
you're not from around here, you've heard him voicing over
the video highlights of Steelers games on some late-night
sports shows. The great thing about Myron, with that
incredibly Pittsburgh voice of his, is the game's still fun
for him, even though he's well-nigh 70 by now. He's had a
ball this camp with the new Steelers sixth-round pick,
fullback
Chris
Fuamatu-Ma'afala, the Samoan kid raised in Hawaii and schooled at Utah.
"I asked him if he minded if I gave him a
nickname," Cope told me. "I said, 'I want to call
you Fu.' He said fine, and so that's what I started calling
him. So the Steelers play the Redskins here at a scrimmage.
Biggest crowd I've ever seen here, about 14,000, and I'm
sure a bunch of people gave up because there was so much
traffic. Anyway, I've been calling this guy 'Fu' and he
starts making some big gains in this scrimmage, and the
crowd starts yelling: 'FOOOOOOOOOO!'" Then Myron
laughed his Myron
laugh.
The story of the day is
Bill
Cowher patchworking his offensive line together. All camp, he's
had
Jamain
Stephens, the 1996 first-rounder, and 1997 third-rounder
Paul
Wiggins battling it out for the right tackle job formerly held by
Justin
Strzelczyk, now at left tackle because
John
Jackson took huge money to fly to San Diego. So what did Cowher do
yesterday? Handed the job—for now—to this year's
third-round pick,
Chris
Conrad of Fresno State. Vintage Cowher. With a twinkle in his
eye, he tells me: "You know, this isn't the worst
thing." Translated: Let these guys fight like dogs to
see who's the best, and the toughest, and on opening day
we'll have a player. Stephens is not happy. Somebody asks
him at lunch if there's any way he could get the starting
job back. "Yeah," he says. "If I legally
murder
somebody."
Weird beard on Cowher. It hasn't filled in all the way,
though he's been growing it since the winter. He knows
Steelers president
Dan
Rooney doesn't like it, but Cowher's family does. It stays. So
does he. "I never really thought about going
elsewhere," he said, asked about the
Cowher-to-Cleveland rumors in the off-season.
"I know this is the best place for me." He's right.
There's not a better man for a town, and vice versa, than
Cowher and
Pittsburgh.
Saw
Jim
Sweeney, the old reliable offensive-line fireman at lunch. We
discussed Clinton and agreed on one thing: How about this
guy having to admit on national TV that he's had an affair?
Can this thing please die, and can the guy please try to
put his life back in order in peace? None of us likes the
fact that our commander-in-chief's a philanderer, but
hasn't the man been humilated enough? Let him run the
country.
Well, that's enough politics for the day. I watched
practice this afternoon, and I think Cope's onto
something: Fu's a stud. If Bettis gets hurt, suddenly the Steelers
have his 5'11", 255-pound clone. "I've taken him
under my wing," Bettis told me. One other player to
watch: cornerback
Deshea
Townsend, the fourth-rounder from Alabama. I bet he starts sometime
this
year.
But I must say the best rookie I saw today—maybe the
best rookie I've seen in all my camp travels this
summer—was
Hines
Ward, the receiver/returner/quarterback from Georgia picked
with the Steelers' second third-round pick. He made three
ridiculous catches, two of them over-the-shoulder rainbow
jobs on the sideline that
Jerry
Rice would have clapped
for.
I leave here
thinking: If the Steelers don't make it to the Super Bowl, they're
going to make it very hard on whatever
AFC team gets
there.
So long. I'm home to Jersey for a while
now. —PK
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