SteelDad
12-07-2010, 01:23 PM
Have you really grasped what took place Sunday night in Baltimore? Did you lean back and really think about it and find yourself even more amazed than you originally were after what you had witnessed? I’m not talking about the fact that the Steelers defeated the Ravens or how we did it necessarily, but I’m talking about one guy in particular. So did you? Did you think about exactly what Ben Roethlisberger was dealing with Sunday night? I did, eventually, and found myself being pretty damn awed by what Roethlisberger managed to do in Baltimore.
He showed up to M & T Bank stadium in the walking boot he had been wearing all week. He arrived to a stadium full of Ratbird fans calling him a ‘rapist,’ a ‘molester,’ and a ‘convict’ amongst other fashionable Baltimore-spun terms and phrases. While very few will ever know what happened in Lake Tahoe and in Georgia, it doesn’t matter because the other 31 fan bases and even portions of our own believe him to be guilty of much more than just ‘bad judgment.’ Ben knew full-well going into the season what would be awaiting him at other stadiums and I think we all sometimes too easily dismiss the trash he would have heaped upon him as ‘just part of the game’ and a mess he put himself into, but he is still human after all. So now you throw in the broken foot factor and the extremely huge stakes of this game and what you have is a guy that needs to be tough, but how tough? How much can one guy handle? Just because he’s a pro athlete are we to just completely cast aside any thoughts that maybe everything he has brought on himself has been too much? Perhaps, but if Roethlisberger knows anything its’ that he’ll get very little sympathy from Steelers’ fans and zero from the rest of the free world. It wasn’t so long ago that we found out just how emotionally and socially messed up our former 4-time super bowl champion QB was ya know….
So onto the field he went where it was clear in the early going that he was struggling with his timing and ability to get the ball out in his usual fashion. Then let’s discuss the fact that on the first series of the game for his offense, he took a ‘paw’ from Haloti Ngata to the nose which instantly broke sending blood streaming down his face from both nostrils. You did not have to be a medical professional to know that nose of his was broken. Nor did it take a genius to know the pain he must have been in had to have been excruciating. So at any point did you stop to consider just how freaking tough this so-called ‘prima-donna’ was? A broken foot, a broken nose, a porous o-line, a vicious defense and yet still people wanted to throw him under a bus as being soft. There are many quarterbacks in this league who would not have attempted another snap that night let alone allow the training staff to re-set the nose right there on the sidelines.
Tory Polamalu’s strip of Joe Flacco will be the play most remembered from this game and maybe even Isaac Redman’s tackle-breaking score, but to me, this game was about definition. This game finally defined our QB as a guy who can handle adversity. A guy who can handle pain and blood, broken bones and bad throws and a hostile crowd. Yes, this game will be remembered for key plays, but for me it will be remembered as the game when our QB put a lot of doubts to rest and put his best foot, or nose, forward.
Marc Uhlmann
www.steeleraddicts.com
He showed up to M & T Bank stadium in the walking boot he had been wearing all week. He arrived to a stadium full of Ratbird fans calling him a ‘rapist,’ a ‘molester,’ and a ‘convict’ amongst other fashionable Baltimore-spun terms and phrases. While very few will ever know what happened in Lake Tahoe and in Georgia, it doesn’t matter because the other 31 fan bases and even portions of our own believe him to be guilty of much more than just ‘bad judgment.’ Ben knew full-well going into the season what would be awaiting him at other stadiums and I think we all sometimes too easily dismiss the trash he would have heaped upon him as ‘just part of the game’ and a mess he put himself into, but he is still human after all. So now you throw in the broken foot factor and the extremely huge stakes of this game and what you have is a guy that needs to be tough, but how tough? How much can one guy handle? Just because he’s a pro athlete are we to just completely cast aside any thoughts that maybe everything he has brought on himself has been too much? Perhaps, but if Roethlisberger knows anything its’ that he’ll get very little sympathy from Steelers’ fans and zero from the rest of the free world. It wasn’t so long ago that we found out just how emotionally and socially messed up our former 4-time super bowl champion QB was ya know….
So onto the field he went where it was clear in the early going that he was struggling with his timing and ability to get the ball out in his usual fashion. Then let’s discuss the fact that on the first series of the game for his offense, he took a ‘paw’ from Haloti Ngata to the nose which instantly broke sending blood streaming down his face from both nostrils. You did not have to be a medical professional to know that nose of his was broken. Nor did it take a genius to know the pain he must have been in had to have been excruciating. So at any point did you stop to consider just how freaking tough this so-called ‘prima-donna’ was? A broken foot, a broken nose, a porous o-line, a vicious defense and yet still people wanted to throw him under a bus as being soft. There are many quarterbacks in this league who would not have attempted another snap that night let alone allow the training staff to re-set the nose right there on the sidelines.
Tory Polamalu’s strip of Joe Flacco will be the play most remembered from this game and maybe even Isaac Redman’s tackle-breaking score, but to me, this game was about definition. This game finally defined our QB as a guy who can handle adversity. A guy who can handle pain and blood, broken bones and bad throws and a hostile crowd. Yes, this game will be remembered for key plays, but for me it will be remembered as the game when our QB put a lot of doubts to rest and put his best foot, or nose, forward.
Marc Uhlmann
www.steeleraddicts.com