He's Just Not In Warner's League

By BILL PLASCHKE

Jan. 28, 2000 12 AM PT

ATLANTA —

Kurt Warner shuffles in front of 200 journalists, cameras rolling, pencils poised, a nation watching.

Five questions swoop down at once, cutting each other off like angry birds.

“Do . . . Would . . . How . . . Is . . . Why . . . ?”

He smiles like an 8-year-old. He picks the question about perseverance.

“This is how I expected to play,” he says. “I have not surprised myself. I have surprised only other people. All I needed was a chance.”

Willis Jacox answers a reporter’s phone call at his home in small-town Minnesota, nobody watching, nothing poised but a cocker spaniel named Reebok.

Only one question, the only one that matters to the man who has caught more of Kurt Warner’s passes than anyone.

Jacox sighs. It is one about perseverance.

“Sure I could have made it, I could have been an NFL punt returner easily,” he says.

“But you have to get the chance. Guys like me don’t often get the chance.”

Kurt Warner knows he is perhaps the great un-story in Super Bowl history.

Undrafted. Unwanted. Unfulfilled by football such that his first professional job was working nights at a grocery store.

Unable to play in anything other than the Arena League, then NFL Europe, then the Ram bench.

Unsuspectingly picked to replace injured Trent Green as the Rams’ starter this fall in his sixth year out of college.

Unbelievably, five months later, named pro football’s best player while leading its best team to its biggest game.

Kurt Warner knows we don’t understand, can’t understand, maybe will never understand.

“Obviously . . . it wasn’t very realistic to think that I’d be the starter in the Super Bowl,” he says.

But he would like to see us try. He would like to see us learn.

“There are people out there nobody knows, people just like me,” he says. “People just waiting. . . .”

Willis Jacox was one of those people.

To understand what Warner has become is to understand what Jacox once was.

For three years with the Iowa Barnstormers in the Arena League, he was Warner’s favorite receiver.

Together, from 1995 through 1997, they set league records and nearly won two league championships.

It wasn’t Warner who led Jacox. It was the other way around.

“At first, I wasn’t impressed with him at all,” Jacox says. “He had a strong arm, but his technique was way out there.”

Warner would throw balls that would cause Jacox to dive way out there, against the arena sideboards, over the boards, into somebody’s lap.

Jacox would stagger back to the huddle soaked in beer and anger.

“I would yell to him, ‘You’re gonna get me killed out there!’ ” Jacox recalls. “He would just chuckle and laugh. It was his way of dealing with it.”

Jacox remembers catching passes from Warner in parking lots during the day. He remembers sleeping on duffel bags at night.

Jacox remembers the most important part of the game often occurred not on the field, but in the hospitality room, where afterward players shook hands and sold tickets.

“I remember a lot of things,” Jacox says. “Kurt and I, we were a pretty good team.”

Like Rice and Young, or Irvin and Aikman.

Except one day, just like that, Jacox cut left, and Warner threw right.

Warner serendipitously landed with the Arena-like Rams.

Jacox played for the New Orleans Saint strike team. But he hurt his shoulder, and they never called him back.

He was given a tryout by the overcrowded Minnesota Vikings.

“They gave me a call, I went up there, ran routes, caught balls,” he recalls. “But they were going to draft a punt returner. They never called me back.”

Warner waited until somebody found him.

Jacox waited until he realized nobody would.

The best statistic involving Kurt Warner on Sunday will not be his 4,353 regular-season passing yards or 41 touchdowns.

It will be the five inches that his career once veered from that of Willis Jacox.

Who, today, is the coach of the La Crosse River Rats, a minor league arena team in Wisconsin.

And you thought Arena Football was the minor leagues.

He is being paid $30,000 a year to lead his team into tiny arenas in front of tiny crowds.

So battered from his days of catching Warner’s passes, he requires a 15-minute whirlpool every morning just to find the strength to do it.

“I’ve made a good life with what I did,” says Jacox, 34. “Now I’m shooting to make the NFL as a coach. Trying to work my way up to a chance.”

He continues to draw inspiration from his former teammate, whom Jacox had the foresight to draft first in his fantasy football league this year.

“Everybody laughed at me,” he says. “I ended up winning $450.”

He also defends his teammate in bars, during televised Ram games, when the world continues to wait for Kurt Warner to fall to earth.

He hasn’t talked to Warner in about a year, but some relationships don’t require talk.

“The other day during a game, everybody was yelling at Warner, and I just told them all to shut up, that they didn’t know what they were talking about,” Jacox recalls. “They told me I should shut up because I never played pro ball. I told him, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I did play pro ball.’ ”

Last question from the 200 journalists.

“Kurt, can you tell us about Willis Jacox?”

Warner starts laughing, shakes his head, an old friend suddenly showing himself in this strange place.

“Willis Jacox was a great player,” he says. “Back then, he was my Marshall Faulk.”

Last phone call to Willis Jacox, who answers the phone after returning from walking Reebok.

Willis, do you know that Kurt Warner compared you to Marshall Faulk?

“Kurt said that, huh?” he says, pausing, a long pause, perhaps filled with memories and regrets and ultimately, hope.

It is a pause that probably describes the importance of Kurt Warner better than any words could.

“You see him, could you tell him I said hi?”

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Armed, Dangerous