New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
January 20, 2011
Ben Roethlisberger hands the Lombardi trophy over to Super Bowl XLIII MVP Santonio Holmes who becomes the third Pittsburgh WR to win the most valuable player honor.(Credits: Graythen/Getty Images)There has never been another play quite like it, not in the entire history of professional football title games. Yes, Adam Vinatieri won a couple of Super Bowls on kicks at the final gun, and Jim O’Brien did that for the old Baltimore Colts 40 years ago.
Alan (The Horse) Ameche ended the greatest game ever played by plowing into the Yankee Stadium end zone. Joe Montana found John Taylor. Eli Manning found the side of David Tyree’s helmet before lofting one to Plaxico Burress.
And yet none of them were quite the equal of this one: Ben Roethlisberger taking a snap, 50 seconds or so left in left in Super Bowl XLIII, the Cardinals bearing down on him, firing the most perfect pass you ever will see, any time, any situation . . .
. . . to the extreme back corner of the end zone . . .
. . . and Santonio Holmes getting both hands on the ball, squeezing it, falling out of bounds just as he’s throttled by a Cardinals safety named Aaron Francisco . . .
. . . and holding on. And getting his left foot in bounds. And his right foot. And still holding on.
A brilliant throw. A better catch. A three-point deficit in the Super Bowl, replaced by a 27-23 victory. It is impossible to craft a better moment than that, impossible to imagine a better moment than that, the kind of moment that remains frozen in the mind’s eye forever.
“When you look at that catch,” Mark Sanchez said last week, a few days before he would be the beneficiary of another holy-bleep catch from Holmes, “as a quarterback, you realize there’s no ball you can throw to him that’s an uncatchable ball.”
Santonio Holmes makes the game-winning catch in Super Bowl XLIII (James Borchuk, St. Petersburg Times/AP)But life has no pause button. The quarterback and the wide receiver were hailed for months after the play. You win a Super Bowl in a football town like Pittsburgh, you never have to buy a beer or a steak within the town limits again.
Only, in this case, something happened. The quarterback found trouble that offseason, and then again the next. He was never charged. Never arrested. But there were stories, lurid stories, involving alcohol and young women, and though he was never charged and never arrested, Roethlisberger was given a six-game suspension to start the year. He served four.
He is no longer a bulletproof icon in Pittsburgh, but he still is a quarterback in Pittsburgh.
The wide receiver found trouble that offseason, and the next offseason, and had found trouble before. There was a suspension for pot. There were chargers of domestic abuse. There were other charges, other rumors. He was given a four-game suspension for violating the league’s substance-abuse policy. He was also no longer an idol in Pittsburgh.
But by then, he was no longer a receiver in Pittsburgh, either. The day his suspension was to come down, he got a call while walking his dog. He had been traded to the Jets. For a fifth-round pick. A fifth-round pick.
“I just wanted him,” Jets coach Rex Ryan said yesterday. “I never cared about the compensation. Let [Mike] Tannenbaum figure that out.”
Said Holmes: “I really didn’t ask any questions. I just accepted what was going on.”
The Steelers made their decisions. It is foolish to throw the race card at them. This is the organization that invented the “Rooney Rule,” after all. Clearly, they needed to send a message. But dealing a receiver sends a less painful one, because franchise quarterbacks are far harder to replace than sure-handed, nimble-footed receivers. They just are.
Holmes has been a model citizen as a Jet. He has had huge parts in no fewer than five victories among the 14 games he has been eligible for and says whatever hard feelings he may harbor, they were dealt with the last time the Jets were in Pittsburgh, last month. He Swears that’s true.
But he also says: “If we win the Super Bowl, then everything is personal. That’s a slap back in those guys’ face for trading me.”
Three years after owning the world — or at least Pittsburgh’s football-mad corner of it — the quarterback and the wide receiver meet again this weekend, chastened, humbled, each hoping to replicate a forever moment that must seem like it really did take place forever ago.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com
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