Tuesday, February 07, 2006Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
DETROIT -- On the 15th day of his 15th year in the Steelers organization, Bill Cowher finally closed his fingers around the Vince Lombardi Trophy and presented it to Dan Rooney, the man who hired him Jan. 21, 1992 to pursue that very obelisk of Tiffany hardware.
This is the kind of spooky numerology that carries with it the unmistakable aura of predestination, but as Cowher stood ramrod straight in a dark suit behind one last downtown podium yesterday for some parting words on the import and the legacy of Super Bowl XL, he had no time for destiny delayed or destiny delivered, much less the destiny of timeline happenstance.
On the morning of what was merely the 16th day of his 15th year then, the guy with the best winning percentage in Steelers history resisted any calcification of his image or of his place in the game or the game's history.
"Are you defined by winning a Super Bowl?" he asked as the preamble to an answer. "I don't think that the destination defines you. It's the journey that defines you."
Ten hours before this, the journey had taken him to the only place he hadn't been, to the platform in the middle of a storm of confetti at the closing vortex of the Super Bowl, and though Sunday night's 21-10 victory against the Seattle Seawhawks did not appear to have altered his demeanor by even one molecule, it had left him exhilarated enough or just tired enough to reflect upon some things, among them: reflection.
"I am going to sit back and reflect," he said, almost seeming surprised those words could come out of his mouth in that order. "I always tell players never reflect, and I try to practice what I preach, but this next week, I'm going to do a whole lot of reflecting."
For a second there in the Renaissance Ballroom four stories above the Detroit River, I linked that statement to all the postgame talk about the beatitudes of going out on top, about how there's no better way for Jerome Bettis to walk away from this game than first, being able to walk, and second, by finishing with a Super Bowl victory.
"Why not Cowher?" came the silent question.
Right now this is a pretty decent little coaching career, is it not? It's produced a bunch of division titles and a roster of All-Pros and a couple of AFC championships, and now a Super Bowl victory and even talk of a square jawed Cowher bust in Canton one day. Will there be any better days than the 15th day of his 15th year?
"I'm going to do a lot of reflecting."
No. Ninety-nine chances in 100, Cowher will be back, but something definitely ended overnight Sunday. Cowher still may not believe you are defined by destinations in this game, but when you are for so long and with so much vitriol maligned for destinations unreached, a lot of things change when you finally get there.
And you could see the evidence in Cowher's candor yesterday. Some things he hadn't said and hadn't dreamed of saying publicly came out in his typically measured way, but came out nonetheless against his tradition of rhetorical minimalism.
"Those AFC championship losses are tough; they wear on you," he said of four home title games that dragged his postseason record to 8-9 as of last January. "When you go through those, it makes this all the more special. I told guys last week, you've been through those losses, but when you lose the Super Bowl, it's twice as bad."
There is no calculating the psychological price to Cowher had his brilliant defense not arisen to bail out his jittery offense over the final three quarters at Ford Field the other night, but the man who now has won more postseason games than any active coach except Washington's Joe Gibbs let it be clear yesterday that he had a very high regard for this team even as it drew the sixth seed in the AFC playoffs, a post position from which no horse ever fled to the winner's circle.
"We were a six seed," he said, "but we could have been a one seed."
Cowher never would have said that kind of thing with first getting his mitt on the Lombardi.
In fact, the main reason I went to the post Super Bowl news conference was just to see if Cowher would come out with the same material: "We haven't accomplished anything yet. All we've done is given ourselves an opportunity to focus on minicamp and the improvement we can make there just by taking it one day at a time and having everyone take responsibility for the best interests of our football team."
Or something.
But that's over now. You can say what you think a little more when you're a world champion. For now, Cowher's still not really sure what he thinks.
He'll reflect.
"The team of the '70s put Pittsburgh on the map," he said. "They created a tradition and legacy. We're proud of that tradition, and for us to say that we kind of did that, too, in 2005, well, it was neat to be a little part of that tradition this year."
(Post-Gazette sports columnist Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette or 412-263-1283.)
No comments:
Post a Comment