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polamalubeast
08-06-2015, 07:22 AM
Ben Roethlisberger called it “the dumbest promise I ever made.”

This goes back to the AFC championship game after the 2004 NFL season. Roethlisberger, finishing a marvelous rookie season as Steelers quarterback, found aging running back Jerome Bettis on the bench. The final few horrible seconds of a 41-27 loss to the New England Patriots were ticking away. For the second time in four seasons, the Patriots had beaten the Steelers at Heinz Field in an AFC title game. Bettis thought he was out of chances of getting to a Super Bowl.

“I felt so bad,” Roethlisberger recalled a few days ago. “I felt like I had let down one of the best teammates I ever had. I felt like it was my fault we lost that game. I’m thinking, ‘Is this how it’s going to end for him? It can’t end like this. That’s crazy.’ So I told him, ‘If you come back for one more season, I promise we’ll get you to the Super Bowl.’ ”

Bettis smiled this week at that memory.

“I was like, ‘Huh? C’mon! You’re a rookie. What are you talking about?’ ”

As bad as the loss was, the next day might have been worse. The 2004 Steelers gathered one final time at their South Side headquarters. Bettis spoke to the team, thanked the players and coaches for their efforts and said what an honor it was to go to work with them each day.

“I was done,” Bettis said. “I was getting old. Twelve years in the league. My body was starting to break down. It was difficult. I didn’t think I had another year in me.”

Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward emerged from that meeting with tears running down his face. It was one of the most emotional moments in Pittsburgh sports history.

“It hurts. It hurts. It hurts,” Ward said that day. “I wanted to win more for Jerome than anything. He deserves to be a champion.”

It wasn’t until later that week that Bettis first began to think about playing in 2005. Teammate Clark Haggans told him Super Bowl XL would be played in Detroit, Bettis’ hometown, the next February. That intrigued Bettis. At the Pro Bowl, where Bill Cowher and his Steelers staff coached the AFC squad, teammates Ward, Alan Faneca and Casey Hampton put on an all-out blitz to get Bettis back. “Everyone still was very gung-ho about it,” he said. “I talked to my wife. ‘I think I want to give it one more shot. What do you think?’ She told me to go for it.”

It hardly seems like enough to say the rest is history.

That would exclude all the great fun Cincinnati wide receiver Chad Johnson, later Ochocinco, had at Bettis’ and the Steelers’ expense after the Bengals’ 38-31 win at Heinz Field left the Steelers all but eliminated from the 2005 playoff chase with a 7-5 record. After desecrating a few Terrible Towels on the sideline, Johnson said, “It’s time for a change. It’s like going from black and white TV to color TV. It was Pittsburgh. It’s Cincinnati now. It probably will be that way for a while.”


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http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/ron-cook/2015/08/06/Ron-Cook-Jerome-Bettis-teammates-make-good-on-their-Super-Bowl-vow/stories/201508060040

86WARD
08-06-2015, 07:06 PM
Good article!

Nadroj 20
08-06-2015, 07:35 PM
That's cool. Good article!