Rams All-Time Top 5 QBs: Friends, Romans and Dutchmen
Kurt Warner stacks groceries, Roman Gabriel lights up the silver screen, Norm Van Brocklin sets an unbreakable record and Bob Waterfield outkicks the coverage.
We have about eight decades of pro football AND Hollywood history to cover. So let’s get right to it.
1. Kurt Warner
It’s a story from a turn-of-the-20th-century dime novel. Part Horatio Alger, part Damon Runyon. Too corny to be anything but an inspirational tale for schoolboys in short pants.
Who is he? Warner, 28, started just one season at Division I-AA Northern Iowa and had a brief tryout with the Packers in 1994 before landing in the Arena league. In guiding the Iowa Barnstormers to two Arena Bowls in three seasons, he threw for 10,465 yards and 183 touchdowns while sharpening his reads and his confidence. When he moved back outside and joined the Amsterdam Admirals of NFL Europe in 1998, he led the league in yardage, completions and touchdowns, prompting St. Louis to sign him. Warner threw only 11 passes last year, but when Tony Banks and Steve Bono left town after the season, he was promoted to backup. – David Fleming, Sports Illustrated, September 1999.
A kid from Iowa. A literal barnstormer. He stocked the shelves in a small-town grocery store while working his way through the “minors.” Seriously? A small-town grocery story in Iowa? That backstory would make Frank Capra blush.
What's he about? With a crew cut and a goatee, the 6'2", 220-pound Warner has a look to match his 1950s-style work ethic. While it would be nearly impossible for him to match [Trent] Green's take-charge attitude and accuracy, Warner has endured some off-field hardships that may have enhanced his on-field poise. In 1996 the parents of his wife, Brenda, were killed in a tornado in Mountain View, Ark., and the couple's oldest son, 10-year-old Zachary, has been blind since suffering a head injury in an accident when he was a baby. "I've been through some pretty rough stuff," says Warner. "So maybe I know better than to get hyped up over starting a football game." – Fleming.
The kid with the 1950s haircut and work ethic earns an NFL look by impressing Dick Vermeil, himself literally a character from a sports-inspirational yarn. The kid (already 28) gets his big break when the starter gets hurt just before the beginning of the regular season. His coaches put their faith in him rather than pursuing some veteran.
C’mon, this is not 1956. This is not how the NFL operates.
Next thing you are going to tell me the kid becomes an overnight sensation.
There's no way to quantify Warner's commanding pocket presence, his ability to release the ball just before the rush arrives or the amazing array of passes he can throw with chilling accuracy. Somehow Warner, a player so lightly regarded that the Rams exposed him in last February's expansion draft, is playing like a natural-born thriller. "He's in a zone, and I've never been around anybody who's this hot," Dick Vermeil, the Rams' 62-year-old coach, said after the game. "[Rams owner] Georgia Frontiere believes in astrology; maybe that's the only way to explain it."
To Warner it's far less mysterious. "I've been doing all these interviews lately, and people are looking for the secret to my success," he says. "I tell them it's my faith in Jesus Christ, and they don't want to hear that. So they ask me the same question, again and again, even though they've already gotten the answer. The Lord has something special in mind for this team, and I'm really excited to be a part of it."
Such proclamations serve as a red flag for even the mildest of cynics, but once you meet Warner and hear his story, it's awfully tough to question his faith. He is as grounded and solid as a redwood, and it's certainly no accident that he has emerged as the anti-Ryan Leaf, a quiet leader who exudes maturity, was handed nothing and is grateful to be earning a '99 salary of $250,000, the league minimum for a second-year player. By overcoming doubt and adversity at every turn, he has also earned the right to have his faith taken at face value. – Michael Silver, October 1999.
Theology and astrology? Adjectives like commanding, chilling and amazing, one month into his career? What’s next? A clutch fourth-quarter touchdown to get his team into the Super Bowl?
Warner, who was not a starter until his fifth and final year at Northern Iowa, has been learning the game with the Iowa Barnstormers, with the Amsterdam Admirals in Europe. Going into this season, he had thrown only 11 passes in one game in the National Football League. Now he had to read a defense under pressure with the Super Bowl in the balance.
Recognizing that [Ricky] Proehl would be racing down the left sideline, one-on-one with a cornerback, Warner unleashed a perfect pass. Proehl stuck out his right elbow, holding off Brian Kelly, and caught the ball over his shoulder, leaving his feet and tumbling into the end zone.
Handed a microphone in a stadium gone mad with victory, Warner would give witness to his Christian faith. However, he had made his own contribution to his craft, stacking shelves at night because he was helping out at his old high school during the day, keeping his arm warm for his next arena football gig.
He hasn't been back to the supermarket or his Iowa hometown of Cedar Rapids recently. He won't make it this week. The improbable quarterback is going to the Super Bowl. – George Vecsey, New York Times, January 24 2000.
Might as well have him win the Big Game, too. And wrap things up with a Disney-worthy moral.
Warner is living proof that dreams need not be put aside at an early age. There may always be a second option, and a third option, even when life's brutish linebackers come blitzing.
Kurt Warner never gave up. He knew what he loved, and he wanted to keep doing it, and he might still be pitching footballs in the Arena Football League if he had not just won a Super Bowl with the St. Louis Rams, and that would have been all right, too. – Vecsey, New York Times, February 1 2000.
What hokum. The backstory became a refrain, the stock phrases that described him turned into Homeric epitaphs: Warner the Grocery Clerk, the Arena Baller, the Man of Faith. He even had his own apostles/argonauts, dubbed The Greatest Show on Turf. They might as well be the Knights of the Round Table or Merry Men of this folktale.
But every scrap of it is true.
This is no sepia-toned newsreel. These are not Red Smith quotes. Many of us lived through every moment of Warner’s rise. You might remember making a fantasy waiver claim on him. It was 25 years ago, but it happened yesterday, and also long ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The sequels get messy. Vermeil opts out of appearing in them. Mike Martz goes from helper to heavy. A broken hand fells our hero in 2000. He returns in 2001: a comeback tale that doesn’t quite live up to his come-from-nowhere origin. The 21st century demands a more modern unheralded champion: less gee-whiz old-time religion, more fitness regimens and secular humanism.
The tale gets grittier. More injuries. A losing streak. A quarterback controversy with Mark Bulger. Mark Bulger? It doesn’t matter: the crowds will chant his name as they turn against Warner. Perhaps Brenda Warner, the former small-town sweetheart, can be recast as Yoko Ono-meets-Lady Macbeth, just to spice things up.
Heck, let’s restage the Agony in the Garden while we’re at it.
Kurt Warner angered Rams coach Mike Martz when he said on Super Bowl Sunday that religious beliefs might have contributed to his benching last season.
The two-time NFL MVP apologized Thursday, saying the speech was almost totally about the power of positive thinking. Warner's agent said the remarks were taken out of context.
"It was my intention to give an inspirational message about keeping the faith and fighting through adversity," Warner said in a statement. "I simply wanted to encourage people to stay true to themselves in good times and bad.
The Web site baptistpress.com on Monday quoted Warner, who gave a speech in Houston on Super Bowl Sunday, as saying that "[Rams] coaches say I was reading the Bible too much and it was taking away from my play. People were saying I had lost my job [as Rams starter] because of my faith."
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch picked up on the story Wednesday and quoted Rams coach Mike Martz as saying Warner's remarks were "off the wall" and "incomprehensible."
In an interview Thursday with ESPN Radio affiliate KFNS in St. Louis, Warner said he did not believe his faith was a factor in Martz's benching him.
"Never did I make the statement that my faith was the reason I wasn't playing," Warner told KFNS. "I don't know if that was the case, [but] I don't believe that. The statements I made over the weekend were just to bring up the fact that there were insinuations and speculation I heard from a number of people that things off the field could have had as much with this as things on the field."
"I regret any controversy this has created. My intentions were to send a positive and uplifting message." — ESPN Wire Story, 2004.
A legend in 1999, a comeback kid in 2001, a self-proclaimed martyr by 2004? This passion play is a little out-of-order, and far too on-the-nose. Even the Christian bookstores might want something a little more plausible and subtle.
Yet this is no young-adult inspirational novel. We lived through it recently enough to remember every detail.
There’s a legasequel, set in the desert, with Warner as the wise sage who must replace a callow youth, take the field and save the day. No, he doesn’t quite win the Big Game in that one, which makes it a more gripping, relatable redemption tale. The kid from nowhere takes his place among the pantheon and lives happily ever after. Go in peace.
Warner’s story was the most implausible of the 20th century’s real-life sports inspirational tales. It was also the last. Today’s Kurt Warner would portal from Northern Iowa to Iowa State in search of the NIL money that would keep him from needing a grocery-store job. College football reporters and draftniks would track his journey and never lose sight of him. No quarterback within 50 miles of the NFL languishes in so much obscurity that we don’t hear his feel-good story until he is halfway to the Super Bowl. And if an even remotely similar tale unspools in our cynical and media-oversaturated age, it grows moldy quicker than Tommy DeVito’s mother’s cutlets.
Heck, we barely have neighborhood grocery stores anymore.
We’ll soon have to tell Warner’s story to a younger generation that only knows him as a television personality and Pro Football Reference entry. Why didn’t he play until he was 28? How did he rise and fall so quickly? The tale we will tell them will sound fake and manufactured. But it’s true. Every word of it.
2. Norm Van Brocklin
The Dutchman has been sailing backwards through time throughout our All-Time Top 5 QBs series. We met Van Brocklin as an Eagles quarterback and a Vikings head coach. He made a cameo in the Falcons feature.
“He’d get down your throat screaming if you messed up,” said teammate Ron Paul.
"If you dropped a pass, you wouldn't see the ball for another quarter,” said Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, one of his best receivers.
Yep, that’s our Dutchman: the best passer of his era and one of the biggest pains in the ass in NFL history.