Rodgers Knows a Thing or Two About Rejection

For a quarterback once touted as California’s Heisman Trophy candidate, Aaron Rodgers has sure gotten a lot of Heisman stiff-arms over the years.

He got one in high school, when he failed to garner a Division I scholarship offer.

He got one in junior college, when Cal noticed him only when scouting one of his teammates.

And he got one in last spring’s NFL draft, when San Francisco passed on him at No. 1 and he had to wait around for more than four hours before Green Bay selected him 24th.

Things eventually fell into place for Rodgers, who’s now learning behind Brett Favre and trying to position himself to one day replace a legend. After missing the first two days of training camp, Rodgers signed Sunday and began vying with Craig Nall for the backup job.

“I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about where I could have been or how much money I could have made,” said Rodgers, 21, whose reported $5.4 million in guaranteed money is roughly one-fourth of what top pick Alex Smith received from the 49ers. “I know I’m in the right spot.”

Tacked to the wall of the walk-in closet in his new Green Bay home are two rejection letters, one from Illinois, the other from Purdue. They’re right above the lithograph of Joe Montana, and they’re constant reminders of how far Rodgers has come. His older brother, Luke, 23, who shares the house with him, spotted the letters recently while heisting a pair of socks from Aaron’s dresser.

“The competitor he is, the hurdles he’s had to go over -- high school, JC, college, the draft -- that’s really what’s driven Aaron to be where he is now,” Luke said. “He’s got a bigger chip on his shoulder now than ever.”

Luke’s shoulder, meanwhile, is feeling pretty sore. For the past few weeks, leading to Aaron’s signing a contract, the brothers had been working out daily in the backyard. They would throw a couple of hundred passes a day.

To improve his accuracy, Aaron stood at the high end of the sloped yard and fired passes down to his brother. Every time, it was big brother who finally asked for a break.

Missing the first couple days of camp was the most difficult part of the summer for Rodgers. Two years ago, when then-rookie linebacker Nick Barnett was in the final stages of contract negotiations, he got so antsy that he watched practice from the parking lot of a gas station across the street. Rodgers never got that desperate.

“I drove by once because I was on my way to Pier One to get some stuff for my house,” Rodgers said.

“I forgot there’d be a lot of traffic. It was actually between practices. I was trying to keep it low profile.”

*

Improving the 49ers, even by baby steps, would be a remarkable feat for Smith this season.

While Rodgers is learning from Favre, Smith can turn to ... Tim Rattay and Ken Dorsey.

The 49ers gave up 52 sacks last season, one shy of the franchise record, and Kevan Barlow’s per-carry average of 3.4 yards was lowest among running backs with at least 50 carries.

Yes, the 49ers have a new coach, and they spent a truckload of cash on free-agent left tackle Jonas Jennings, but it would be surprising if they won more than four games.

Even Peyton Manning needed some time to reshape the Colts. Indianapolis had identical 3-13 records the season before and after making him the No. 1 pick.

*

Forget pushing blocking sleds. When Steve Young was in high school, he and his buddies tried to bulk up by pushing the family’s dark blue 1965 Oldsmobile around their neighborhood in Riverside, Conn. Behind the wheel was Young’s 9-year-old brother, Tommy, who was barely able to see over the dashboard.

Young tried the experiment after reading about Dick Butkus doing the same thing.

“We decided after about three days of this that there was no way Dick Butkus had done this with a ’65 Oldsmobile Cutlass -- it was too heavy,” said Young, who Sunday will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “We gave up. We figured it had to be kind of a Honda or something.”

*

Dan Marino also will enter the Hall of Fame this weekend. When he was selected by Miami with the 27th pick in 1983, Marino was the last of six quarterbacks to be chosen in the first round -- behind John Elway, Todd Blackledge, Jim Kelly, Tony Eason and Ken O’Brien.

“We never thought we’d have a chance to get him in the first round,” former Dolphin coach Don Shula recalled. “We had targeted two defensive linemen, figuring they were going to be there with the 27th pick. So we hadn’t even looked at Marino that much, other than to know that he was a great quarterback. But he keeps sliding, and all of a sudden he gets down there to 20, 21, 22. And all of a sudden we think that we might have a shot at getting him. Everybody starts getting pretty excited.

“Bill Arnsparger is the defensive coach and he’s saying, ‘No, we’ve got to take a defensive lineman.’ And so it got down to the pick right before us and O’Brien goes off the board and Marino is still there. So I hurried and called Foge Fazio, his coach at Pittsburgh, and I said, ‘What’s going on? Why’s he still up there?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, but take him.’ So we took him.”

*

John “Big Dawg” Thompson is half the man he used to be -- and proud of it.

Thompson, a Cleveland Brown fan who wears the droopy-eyed dog mask and rules the “Dawg Pound,” has lost 280 pounds since having gastric-bypass surgery last August. He’s down to 249 after weighing 529 before the surgery.

“I feel great,” he recently told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “I swim one mile a day. My goal is to get down to 190.”

*

Washington tackle Ray Brown, at 42, is the NFL’s oldest offensive lineman since the 1920s. He has said this, his 20th training camp, probably will be his last. So what kind of retirement gift does he want when that day comes? A Harley-Davidson or a La-Z-Boy recliner -- he says he’d take either.

*

Coach-turned-restaurant owner Mike Ditka has angrily testified at a Chicago City Council meeting against a proposed smoking ban in that city’s restaurants and bars.

“I’m not a doctor. I’m not going to argue with doctors. All I’m saying is, hey, if you can find a cure for cancer, fine. But why attack? Why attack restaurant and bar owners in this city?” Ditka said.

“It bothers me because it would be like me telling you, ‘You can’t practice your religion.’ I know it’s not the same thing. There should be no religious persecution in the country. But when somebody tells you, ‘You can’t do this, or you can’t buy this kind of car’ -- that’s what America was founded on: choice.”

And I thought it was only the patrons who were blowing smoke.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Second stringers

Green Bay Packer backup quarterbacks since Brett Favre became starter in 1992:

*--* Steve Bono 1997 Mark Brunell 1994 Ty Detmer 1993-95 Matt Hasselbeck 1999-2000 Don Majkowski 1992 Jim McMahon 1995-96 Craig Nall 2004 J.T. O’Sullivan 2004 Doug Pederson 1996-98, 2001-04 T.J. Rubley 1995 Danny Wuerffel 2000

*--*