Scorched Rice

Jerry Rice can grab anything thrown his way, but he hasn’t caught on to what is happening--cannot grasp how his legacy has been scarred, the greatness of Jerry Rice now secondary to the selfishness of Jerry Rice.

“I have no control over that,” he will explain later, but right now he’s walking up and down the 49er locker room screaming obscenities at an elderly Bay Area columnist who had suggested a while back Rice be traded.

He has pushed away the consoling hands of the team’s public relations director, and now others are stepping in to prevent bloodshed as Rice shouts at the writer, who is escorted from the room, “I’ve been here for 14 years and you can’t [mess] with me.”

It is two days since the San Francisco 49ers beat the Green Bay Packers in one of football’s most exciting games, one in which Rice had almost no impact, and given his current state of agitation, wait until he hears what they are saying on a nationally syndicated radio show.

“The most disappointed person in 3Com Park following Terrell Owens’ game-winning catch was Rice because Rice was not the one soaking in all the glory.”

Running a pass pattern to the corner of the end zone and ignored by Steve Young much the way he had been all day, Rice was late to join the Owens celebration.

Wait until he reads a newspaper’s explanation for that: He’s a step slower.

In his own town, on yet another radio show, they are talking about who might be considered the greatest 49er of all time, immediately eliminating Rice because “of that little baby act of his.”

There might be no greater mystery in sports than Jerry Rice’s uncanny ability to get wide open every week without exception until injuring his left knee in the 1997 season opener at Tampa Bay. He was the Super Bowl most valuable player and is the game’s leading touchdown scorer, the greatest wide receiver in NFL history, but now the edges of a career that should have ended unchallenged are frayed.

“Uh-oh, here we go,” says Rice, a few minutes after berating the Bay area columnist, agreeing to a Los Angeles Times interview in a private room without boxing gloves despite having been warned he’s going to be asked about his selfishness and hear the suggestion he’s finished as a wide receiver.

Let’s start with being selfish:

“I can’t believe this stuff,” he says, told what’s being said on the radio. “I’m standing there, eight seconds in the game, I’m way over on the other side of the field and I’m having the chance to watch this. And I’m standing there in amazement: ‘Damn, he caught that--he caught that.’ I’m looking around for flags, and it’s a touchdown.

“Then I ran over and got down on the ground with [Owens]. Damn, the most spectacular catch I had ever seen. This is more than ‘The Catch’ [by Dwight Clark]. I’m in awe. Now you’re telling me this guy on the radio says I didn’t react quickly. You look around and everybody was pretty stunned. Look at the bench--you would think everyone would flow onto the field. They couldn’t believe it: We finally beat Green Bay.”

A plausible explanation, but on reflection one that lacks credibility because of Rice’s rantings earlier this season. Acting contrary to what every third-grade peewee football player has been taught, Rice complained--twice after victories--that he wasn’t getting the ball enough.

He yelled at Coach Steve Mariucci on the sideline the second week of the season in a 45-10 win because the ball was going to Owens and J.J. Stokes, his understudies. He threw another tantrum after a 31-20 victory over New Orleans on Nov. 22.

“I feel like I got misquoted,” Rice says, really meaning to say he feels he was misinterpreted. “I was asked if I was frustrated catching only three passes in a game, and what receiver wouldn’t be? I’m just a competitor.”

A competitor or a whiner?

“I don’t think of myself as a whiner,” he says, but that’s what he’s becoming as his impact on the game has diminished.

He hinted at retirement after the New Orleans game--his way of saying he would take his ball and go home--if he didn’t start getting more passes thrown his way.

Now he says he was just being sarcastic, suggesting “the man upstairs might be trying to tell me something.” Once again, misunderstood.

“Everything was blown out of proportion,” he says. “It surprised me.”

The same thing happened after he was selected Super Bowl XXIII MVP a decade ago, raising a Bay Area ruckus by suggesting he had not received the recognition Joe Montana would have received.

“I would say it’s the media, the media’s fault, because they’re not getting my name out there,” Rice told a TV announcer a few days after the Super Bowl. “I don’t know if I’ll get any recognition in commercials or anything, but right now, the way things are looking, I’m not going to get nothing out of being MVP. Just the name, the MVP, and that’s it.

“If it were Joe Montana, Dwight Clark, it would have been headlines all over. And, no, I’m not saying it’s racism or nothing like that, you know, I’m really just speaking from my heart.”

Now he says, “It was not about getting endorsements or getting my due. It was about the recognition of being the MVP.”

Maybe it’s clear in his head, but the distinction seems petty. There can be no arguing Rice’s heroics on the field, but off it he has been unapproachable for the most part, difficult and, depending on the point of view: the uncompromising competitor or the relentless whiner.

Among the reporters who follow the 49ers it has become a joke, because cornered for a comment, Rice almost always will begin, “Well, you know me, guys.” And they sure do, knowing he will plead humility, but before putting a period to that sentence, will raise some doubt about the way he is being treated.

“I watch Tim McDonald and Steve Young talk to the media every day and I say to myself that’s just unbelievable--how can they do that?” Rice says. “But I don’t have to be like Steve Young.

“I’m a very private person and I’m not going to let people get close to me. And I didn’t play this game for a legacy. I played this game because I loved it. I don’t have to have the recognition, all the endorsements. I get my fulfillment putting on a uniform and going on the field.”

If that were more evident in the way he conducts his business, the Jerry Rice Fan Club would be slinging the obscenities at that Bay Area columnist. But it’s like last year, staging his return from a knee injury to coincide with Joe Montana Night. Had there been no reason for doubt, he might have been admired for using that date as a goal to return faster from a knee injury than any other player.

But the reputation already has been tarnished, the selfish seeds planted, and so maybe Rice was really coming back then not because his knee was ready, but because it was Monday night TV, Joe Montana’s night and a chance to be in the spotlight.

“Maybe I have had so much success over the years this is an opportunity for people to really go after me,” he says, missing the point. “It hurts to read I am not a team player, that I am selfish.

“I know now no matter what you achieve in life it can be taken away from you because that perception is out there. I can blame myself for that in part, yeah, but you know I’m at a point in my life where I feel I really don’t have to prove myself to anybody.”

That brings us to the final point: He’s finished.

“No, I’m not,” he says. “I’ll be back and I’ll be even better.”

He will never be back, not the Jerry Rice who will be remembered upon his induction into the Hall of Fame. Owens, when he can catch the ball, is now the best receiver on the 49er roster.

While recovering from surgery on his left knee, Rice is playing on a right knee with a partially torn posterior cruciate ligament. The knee must be drained so he can play, and once it is repaired, he still won’t be the Rice that could not be covered.

Nothing wrong with that. John Elway can’t play like he used to, either, handing the fate of the Broncos for the most part to running back Terrell Davis. Jack Nicklaus can’t hit a golf ball the way he did in his glory days, but put Nicklaus on the leader board for an afternoon or Elway in a Super Bowl handing off to Davis, and as a reward for a career well done, there is almost universal support.

Rice is right there too, but working hard in recent years to sabotage his support with selfish-sounding suggestions. “I have heard this perception that I am the greatest receiver to ever play the game, but now that perception is that he is not the greatest anymore. . . . I probably brought that on myself,” he says, and there’s a breakthrough.

Maybe it was difficult for him, or maybe it wasn’t, but a day later Rice walked into the locker room just to chat with the media, a refreshing departure from having to chase him down.

He apologized to writers for yelling at one of their colleagues, praised Owens, said he considered earlier this week not playing against Atlanta because of the pain he felt in his knee and said he would step aside if his body kept him from being as effective as Owens and Stokes. He couldn’t have been better--the frayed edges for a day looking a lot smoother.

Rice’s legacy no longer has much to do with what he does on the field. He caught a bunch of passes in a passing offense this season and made it to the Pro Bowl on reputation. Jerry Rice is right, at this point he no longer has to prove himself on the field.

Now is the time to bask in the applause for what he has accomplished instead of running scared about what he no longer can do. He has caught a pass in every 49er game since Dec. 1, 1985, but there was less than a minute to play against Green Bay--in San Francisco’s biggest game of the year--before they got him the ball.

There will be more games like that, football fans everywhere, though, hoping they never see the day he’s shut out--so long as it’s the Rice they marveled at in earlier years and not the Rice, who if even misinterpreted, can sound so selfish.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Rice’s Drops

How Jerry Rice’s numbers in the 1998 season compare to the combined average of the 12 before his knee injuries in 1997:

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1998 Avg. Receptions 82.0 87.5 Yards 1,157 1,365 Yards/Rec. 14.1 15.6 Touchdowns 9 13.8

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