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Jerry Rice took the football field on Monday. If you want to know why, just look at how he entered the game, with his arms raised to call all the attention to him. "Look at me, everybody!" was the message, "Didn't I do something great? Aren't I the best ever?"
Clearly, the only reasons for Rice to run out on the field were the most vile reasons -- to hear Chris Berman worship his name, to hear Al Michaels call him a miracle, to hear those magic words, "the best ever." The choice of nights was no coincidence. Monday night football and Montana's jersey retirement, where all the world could see his triumphant return. And the objective was reached: the show garnered a season-high rating.
Yes, the show. The television program. Note that lost in the discussion is that a football game was supposed to take place. At this point in his career, there's no doubt that Rice is more concerned with putting on a show than putting up numbers. That's why in every interview, Rice will say outlandish things about himself, about how much he works out, about how he's "Superman" or "the bionic man." Truly, the guy is the Don King of football.
Yet, can you blame him? After all, if the media is going to go along with the show, why not? While guys like Deion Sanders and Ricky Watters get vilified for promoting themselves, the media heaps love and adoration on Rice. Every Rice interview portrays him as great and lovable, usually including shots of the interviewer laughing along with him, which is a time-honored sales tactic. When the audience sees the interviewer laughing along and agreeing when Rice insinuates he's the best ever, the viewer is sold and buys into his image. So, in classic style, the average fan was sold on the "miracle" comeback.
To be precise, one local "Bay Area" paper ran the headline "Self-made Miracle" to describe Rice's comeback. They were trying to be cute, giving Rice all the credit for shaping his own supernatural occurrence through hard work. Read another way, the "self-made" refers to his self-promotion, his "self-made" image, a process that stems from his super-human ego.
When most athletes come back from serious injury, they are thankful. Many, even teammate William Floyd, give thanks to God or a higher power. And Rice? He believes he is a force greater than any lesser deity -- he believes he is that higher power. To this day, Rice still maintains that the decision to return was "based on my hard work." He's said, "I don't think there's anything I can't do." And what does history teach us about those that place themselves above God?
That the media built on Rice's own P.R. work and called the comeback a "miracle" is not surprising. But that didn't stop William Floyd from chastising the media for creating "unrealistic expectations" for Jerry's return. While it's humorous to see Floyd have the gall to criticize the media that has protected him all these years, the more important note is that all the blame doesn't fall on the media. Much of it falls on Rice himself, because while he sold everybody, even himself, on the "miracle", the truth is that it fell far short.
(1) his return barely beat the doctors' conservative estimate: The doctors' original estimate for Rice's return was 4-6 months. Yes, four months. And do you think when the doctors made that estimate, were they being conservative at all? You better damn well believe it. After all, if somebody comes back early, it looks great on the doctor, but if an injury lingers longer than the doctors' originally say, guess who gets the blame?
In layperson's terms, being conservative is known as "CYA", or "cover your ass." The doctor may have had three months in mind but just made a conservative estimate of four months to cover his ass. If so, Rice did nothing special.
That we'll never know, so let's give Rice the benefit of the doubt and work with the 4-6 months. Rice came back 3 1/2 months after the injury. Three and one-half versus four. Better than expected, yes, but a "miracle"? If several days' difference amounts to a miracle, then it's time to rethink the definition of the word.
Another possibility regarding the doctors' original estimate is to frame the time in weeks. Often, people consider there to be four weeks in a month. If so, the four month estimate would work out to be 16 weeks, and Rice returned in 15 weeks. Fifteen versus sixteen, again, not exactly biblical, epic proportions that should be termed a "miracle."
(2) it's been done: Rice was not the first person to come back early from this type of injury, he's simply the first professional, high-profile athlete. Kids in high school and college have come back early in a similar fashion with similar injuries. So should we be terming something that high-schoolers have done as a "miracle"?
Sure, there will be lay people across the nation that are in awe of the early return. They have had the similar surgery and marvel at the accomplishment. "It took me seven months!" said one such caller into a local sports talk radio show. Remember: people in the real world aren't getting paid millions of dollars to have only one job -- rehab their knee -- like Rice. So before these folks are ready to sell their souls to the Almighty Jerry, maybe they should consider the setting he works within.
(3) the logic of healing: The force of nature controls humankind. There are simply some things that cannot be overcome, no matter what certain arrogant people may believe. Healing is one. While hard work may have an effect on rehab times, it's sway on the total equation is tiny. There are times when the hardest work in the world simply cannot make a difference.
Take Rice's teammate, Marquez Pope, for instance. Pope missed most of the season due to a nagging, minor foot injury. Is Marquez Pope lazy? Does he sit around on the couch eating potato chips? Our guess is that Pope, like Rice, worked hard to rehab himself, yet, sometimes, it just doesn't matter. If nature says an injury will last a certain amount of time, then you better believe all the hard work in the world isn't going to change nature.
Yet Rice and his media would have you believe that the primary reason he came back early was his "work ethic." Said the San Jose Mercury, "(The comeback) is a product of hard, painful work." The gist is that they are turning healing into some sort of game that, if skilled and you work hard, you can "win". If so, then the door should swing both ways: if we're going to heap love and praise on Rice for coming back early, then every time an injury lingers, we should call that player, like Marquez Pope, a loser, a lazy, good for nothing bum. That doesn't make any logical sense. Clearly, calling Rice's return a "miracle" or attributing it to skill or his work ethic is inaccurate, illogical, and irresponsible.
We aren't the only ones of this opinion. For example, in his Sporting News column entitled, "Rice's Accomplishment is No Miracle", Buddy Ryan said the following:
"I'm not as surprised as most people by Jerry Rice's comeback. For example, Mark Brunell came back from his knee injury sooner than expected. Even though it wasn't as serious as Rice's injury, his example shows that some people just heal faster than others."
It's a sad day when the media's voice of reason is Buddy Ryan.
Rice has gone off the deep end -- he truly believes that his comeback was due to his hard work and skill that are superior to anyone on this planet. But it's that belief in his false image that led to his downfall. He took the field in self-manufactured glory, a facade that was cracked as his kneecap cracked.
No more talk about miracles. No more Nike ads about how Rice is above the rest of the human race. No, just a broken kneecap and the most human of all pictures -- a frail, hobbling person humbled by a force greater than he.
How far has Rice fallen? Get this: coach Steve Mariucci was asked who would he rather have for the playoffs, Jerry Rice or Garrison Hearst? Mariucci didn't answer, instead, he termed it a "loaded" question and said, "we should remove the hypothetical."
That's right -- Mariucci couldn't choose between Rice, supposedly the "greatest receiver of all-time", and Hearst, a guy who's scored four TDs, eight in his career. That's how far Jerry Rice has fallen.
Quickly the 49er spin doctors released the news: the break was totally unrelated to the surgery! Yeah, that's the ticket! Not even their own media would buy that joke of a story. Of course, the interplay between the 49ers' constant lying and the media that happily accepts it is a whole other story. Here, the fact that the 49ers are sticking to this story and have forced formerly respected doctors into going along with it is pathetic.
And what about Rice? What's going on privately, behind the scenes, in his own mind? That, we'll never know. One would hope that this will give him the opportunity for self-reflection. One would think that he would bow out with grace. Instead, publicly, he hasn't shown one iota of humility. Even after he was done for the year he was still speaking to the media about how it was the right choice and his great work ethic -- still a vain attempt to deny that, in his personal little game to defeat the injury, he was defeated.
So you can see, it's not too hard not to feel sorry for Jerry, who throughout this whole affair has shown arrogance, narcissism, and now lies. But then again, remember, Rice is part of the 49er family so will always have those family values. The Rice story is a microcosm of the bigger picture; just like Rice, so to will the 49ers ultimately fall. And just like Rice, their image will die poorly.
Update 2/13/98:
In our original story, we hoped that when Rice re-injured his knee, it would knock some sense into him. Maybe he'd wake up and lose his god-complex and show a little humility. Maybe he'd show a little recognition of reality, that some things in life, like the force of nature and healing, are, gasp, actually bigger than Rice.
RICE'S INABILITY TO GRASP REALITY
ALMOST REACHES MENTAL ILLNESS
It was too much to ask.
Instead, Rice went further off the deep end, once again backing up his lie that the knee injury was unrelated to his ill-conceived comeback, claiming, "I don't think a guy at 100 percent could have survived that, just from the angle that I fell on it."
So there you have it. It wasn't Rice's fault for coming back too soon, it wasn't that the knee was previously weakened by a previous injury -- it was all this magical angle, and if any body else fell the same way, they would have been injured, too.
Naturally, anyone who saw the play realizes that's a crock. There was no mystical angle, it was your average NFL fall. In fact, considering that 3Comdlestick is a soggy, natural grass field that's as soft as a sponge, it was less than your average fall. The truth is that Rice could have landed on a pillow and still cracked the weakened knee, because he simply came back too early.
The continued gall of Rice to deny this is so appalling that it defies description. What words can describe when a person is so wrapped up in being perceived as "the best ever" that he refuses to acknowledge he made a mistake? What do you call a person who refuses to admit one crack in his armor, a person who refuses to believe he's nothing less than super-human? So you screwed up, Jerry. You came back too early and re-injured your knee. Is admitting you're only human that great of a crime where you'd resort to lies?
Now, if you're a 49er/Rice fan who also happens to be smart (a rare breed indeed), what you're thinking now is, "Hey, Rice was given a six-week timetable to return -- that would be January 25th, the day of the Super Bowl -- so it's not a stretch of the imagination to say Rice could have been back."
But we're not here arguing over whether Rice could have been healed in time. Instead of going around in the imaginary, let's focus on the reality: Rice was placed on the IR, so he had no chance to come back. In other words, the discussion is moot.
Therefore, the real question becomes, why is Rice talking hypothetical? Why is he telling reporters he could have come back again when it was an impossibilty? What relevance is a "could have" to the general public so that it gets printed in the sports pages?
First, the obvious. The papers print it because it makes Rice look as "the best ever" to the average fan. The average fan thinks, "Wow, he could have come back again, isn't he great?"
But the critical point we're concerned with here is, once again, Rice's mentality. His Super Bowl claim backs up everything we pointed out in our previous article above, that Rice is lost so lost in a sea of vanity and narcissism that he simply has no grasp on reality anymore.
The final kicker to back up this point is an advertisement that ran in local newspapers reading, "Jerry Rice . . . February 8th . . . Limited Public Portrait Session . . . Option A $179, 1-4 People in photograph with Jerry. Option B $249, 1-4 People in photograph with Jerry plus (his autograph)."
The money-making scam had even local 49er smoochers like KNBR's Ralph Barbieri aghast. Barbieri got a publicist associated with the photo session on his show and asked why Jerry was doing this. According to the publicist, Jerry was doing it as a favor to the public.
That's right, a favor. It had nothing to do with making money whatsoever, right? So wrapped up in being perceived as Saint-like, Rice can't even admit he shares any common threads with us lesser humans, like the simple notion that he's interested in making a buck.
The question turns to asking when is it going to end? Will Jerry wake up and realize what he's become? Will the media ever print the truth about him? As long as the answers to both remain no and the public is duped into believing his fake image, NHS will be there carrying the banner of truth.
Return home.
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http://www.49erhaters.com/return.html -- Created: December 20, 1997
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