Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (25 page)

Holmes will tell you stories about chasing rabbits for dinner. You want to become quick, that’s a way to do it. Before the Super Bowl in the 2008 season, Holmes admitted that he sold drugs when he was a teenager growing up there, but he quit when his mom told him he had a future to worry about.

Holmes had his problems right off the bat—he was involved in an incident even before he got to the Steelers that started his challenges there—but on the football field, you could tell right away that he was special. He’s a skinny, little dude at 5-foot-11, 192 pounds. You’d think you could break his skinny ass in half, but to do that, you have to catch him first … and that’s the problem.

In this kid’s career, he has averaged 5.8 yards after the catch. In football lingo, we call that YAC. You always hear quarterbacks telling their receivers, “Get me some YAC.” Oh, those greedy quarterbacks, they love those five-yard throws that turn into 25 yards when the receiver breaks a tackle. For those quarterbacks, Holmes is the guy. Most people will think, “What’s the big deal about 5.8 yards after the catch?” Put it this way: That’s better than the career numbers for Chad Ochocinco (3.3), Larry Fitzgerald (3.4), Randy Moss (3.9), Wes Welker (4.6), Andre Johnson (4.9), and Terrell Owens (5.3). Now, I’m not a huge stat guy because a lot of stats in football don’t mean much, but if you’re taking a stat and comparing it to some great players, that is when the stat means something. If Holmes keeps himself straight, he’s on the way to being a truly great player.

Trust me, I saw it coming firsthand. As I was saying, in 2008, this kid started dominating. You didn’t see it right away in the stats, because the Steelers aren’t this big passing team. They throw it pretty well with Ben Roethlisberger, but that’s not their bread and butter. They play hard, brutal defense and they want to run it. In the AFC North, you have to play what we call December football—ground-and-pound
style, as I call it here. When the weather gets cold and you’re playing outdoors like they do in Pittsburgh, New York, and Baltimore, throwing a bunch of deep passes gets harder and harder. Yeah, New England still does it, but they do it because they have Tom Brady. When you have one of the greatest of all time, you can do stuff like that.

So when Holmes was in Pittsburgh, he wasn’t getting eight or 10 throws a game going his way on a regular basis. He had to make do sometimes with four or five opportunities per game. He was also splitting the chances with guys like Hines Ward and tight end Heath Miller. In Baltimore, we played them three times that year, and in those three games he caught a total of eight passes for 152 yards. Nothing out of control, right? Wrong. That kid killed us. He scored one touchdown in every game against us and they beat us by three points the first time, four the second game, and nine in the playoffs. The worst part is that in the 2008 AFC Championship Game between Pittsburgh and Baltimore, he turned a broken play into a 65-yard touchdown—ran right through our defense at the beginning of the second quarter to give the Steelers a 13-0 lead. The thing about Holmes is that he never stops running and he understands how to play the game when things break down. He knows how to hustle to come back to the quarterback. He knows how to find open areas when the quarterback scrambles, which was big with Roethlisberger, who loves to get out of the pocket and extend the play.

So after Holmes got done beating us—that game is going to bug me for the rest of my life—he went to the Super Bowl and dominated. You’ve probably seen his game-winning catch … every Sunday for the past two years, six or seven times a day. It’s only maybe the greatest catch in Super Bowl history. He was MVP of Pittsburgh’s win over Arizona, catching nine passes for 131 yards. Most importantly, he was amazing on the final drive.

The next year he was even more dominant, catching 79 passes for 1,248 yards, living up to everything people thought he could be. All the crap from earlier in his career seemed to be fading.

Then, as everybody knows, Roethlisberger got in trouble down in Georgia in the 2010 off-season. On the heels of that, Holmes was in the news twice. First, he was accused by a woman in Orlando of throwing a glass at her. Then Holmes was suspended for the first four games of the season for violating the NFL’s substance-abuse policy. You put that all together and the Steelers felt like they had to do something. Hey, the quarterback isn’t going anywhere. I know there was some talk about them getting rid of Roethlisberger, but are you kidding me? Do you know how hard it is to find quarterbacks in this league? So the Steelers decided, at least in my opinion, to send a message by dumping Santonio. I think they wanted everyone, including Big Ben, to know that they had limits.

Just before we made the deal, I was checking around about Holmes. Mike Tomlin, the Steelers’ coach, was done with Holmes by then, tired of dealing with everything. He told other coaches around the league that Holmes would never play another down of football. The whole league believed him, which is part of the way we worked out the deal. Nobody was offering anything for the guy. Look, we were definitely in the market for a receiver. We wanted to put more guys around Sanchez to make the job easier for him. At the time, we were talking about getting Brandon Marshall, who Denver eventually traded to Miami for two second-round picks. The Dolphins also gave Marshall a new contract: five years at $47.5 million.

We could do that or get Holmes for a fifth-round pick. Are you kidding me? We kept our second-round pick and sent that to San Diego for Cromartie. Some people in New York were saying it was a bad deal, but I don’t know what they were thinking. We gave up a fifth-round pick for Holmes. On good teams, you’re lucky if your fifth-round pick makes the roster half the time in the first year. I’m just talking about making the squad. I’m not even talking about whether the guy contributes. This was a no-brainer.

Could it have blown up on us? Sure. I’ve been around long enough to know that some guys have a hard time with staying straight. With all the temptations that come your way in the NFL,
it doesn’t matter what kind of background you come from, it’s not easy; but you do your best as a coach to get that guy to buy into the program, to be loyal to you, because that way he has something else and somebody else he’s responsible for.

Santonio bought in. Thanks to a little help from Commissioner Goodell!

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With the other guys, like Cromartie and Edwards, the problems were different. Cromartie has a pretty complicated life. He has a lot of kids with a bunch of women. I’m not casting any stones. Like I said, I have my issues and I’ve made plenty of mistakes of my own. Among the most publicized after my first year with the Jets was the previously mentioned “moment” in Miami. It was bad, but it actually could have been a whole lot worse. I went down there to a Mixed Martial Arts event to see some of the guys who are trainers and to see Jay Glazer, the NFL reporter for Fox who also does MMA training. I had heard that several NFL players were developing themselves by getting into MMA training, and I wanted to see what all this was about for myself.

Well, I was at the event and there were a bunch of fans screaming at me, but this one guy kept getting into it with me. At one point, he spit at me and I really almost went after him. Look, I’m a man, you’re not going to do that to me; but I thought better of it and just let it go. Then, of course, the people running the event introduced me and gave me the microphone. I was in Miami—what do you think I was going to say? “Next year, we’re coming to beat you twice.”

Oh, that went over big. I had to stop them from throwing flowers. The love was just too much for me to handle. Once that was over and I was done meeting with the MMA trainers, Glazer and I were on the way out and who did I run into again but this same guy. Only this time he had a bunch of his buddies, and they were cussing at me and giving me the finger. I’d had enough at this point and flipped
him the bird. The next day, there was a picture of me in the New York
Daily News
and I was thinking, “Oh, crap, what am I going to do now?”

I’d been there before, in even worse situations, which probably hurt my chances of getting a head coaching job in the past. In other words, I know how much a mistake can hurt your career. It can take away your chance to chase your dreams. I know what players who make mistakes go through, and I think I know how they feel. I’m not afraid to share my past with my players because, frankly, it lets them know that I know how they feel and, for some, it gives them a connection to me.

I think Cromartie feels that, because he seemed so comfortable coming to play for us right away. He really settled in here with the Jets; he just needed a change of scenery. From what I hear, he got to the point that he was butting heads with a lot of people in San Diego. The front office (they seem to butt heads with a lot of guys), the coaches, teammates—it just got real sour. Again, that stuff happens. They said he was a bad teammate, but I know otherwise.

Just like Holmes, players like Cromartie don’t come around very often. I remember working him out when he was coming out of Florida State. Now, remember this: He missed the whole season before he was drafted with a knee injury and this guy was so talented, he was still a first-round pick. That’s how great of an athlete we’re talking about. When I saw him way back then, it was the most freakish workout I have ever seen. Ever. He has long arms, long legs; he’s 6-foot-2 and has amazing acceleration. He is one of those guys who can throttle his speed up or down and you don’t even notice it. He just glides. Oh yeah, and his hands are amazing. First, they’re huge. Second, he can catch absolutely anything: tipped balls, leaping one-handed grabs, everything. He had three interceptions in one game against Peyton Manning, including a one-handed grab along the sideline. Then there was that 109-yard return of a missed field goal he once had. Go find that on Youtube someday. He leaps up to grab
the ball with one hand, manages to land inbounds, and then returns the thing. I mean, like I said, he is freakishly good.

Cromartie was just the guy we needed to play the defense we really wanted to play. Yeah, he’s not a great tackler, but he’s fearless when he’s covering a wide receiver. Early in the 2010 season, we put him up against Randy Moss twice, the first time when Moss was with New England after Revis got hurt and then again after Moss was traded to Minnesota. Moss had one big catch against Cromartie for a touchdown, but otherwise Cro was all over Moss—shut him down completely. We needed him badly, because with the way we play defense, we have to have man-coverage guys. I need a guy who can play cover one, which is where you have only one safety behind you. Sometimes you have to play cover zero, where we’re not giving you any help over the top, no safety at all. He matched up on Randy Moss like it was nothing. He just went out there and said, “Okay, I’ve got to cover Randy Moss man coverage. No problem.” Where most guys wouldn’t sleep all week, Cromartie was ready to go.

So we made the deal to get Cromartie. Again, he had one year left on his contract. I knew his agent, Gary Wichard, really well and that helped make Cromartie happy. Now, obviously, he has made some mistakes and made his life difficult with all the kids all over the country, but he’s not hiding from it. He’s not running away from trying to be a good dad. He talks to his kids all the time, either by phone or by computer, doing the video chat. I think he honestly wants to be a good father, but that’s hard in this situation. That has to be pressure on a guy. On top of that, you’re dealing with a lot of women in your life. That’s not easy. You have lawyers and money to pay. Hey, it’s hard to be a good dad even when you remain married to the child’s mother!

The first guy we picked up who people really wondered about was Braylon Edwards, who we traded for in the 2009 season when the Browns wanted to dump him. I heard all the bad stuff about Edwards from the Cleveland coaches, but let me tell you the one person I talked to who really mattered: my brother Rob, who had been there
for about nine months when we made the deal. My brother told me, “Don’t worry about it, Rex, you’ll love this guy.” Rob saw through all the negativity and the anger from the team and from the kid. That was a bad situation with the team trying to retool. That happens. At the time, Cleveland was going through a big rebuilding phase. They got rid of tight end Kellen Winslow before the season, then cleared some other guys out, too. I think Edwards was getting fed up with it and didn’t like the town anymore. At least, that’s what he said. I heard all kinds of stuff about how he dropped balls and didn’t block.

Well, Edwards gets here, and let me tell you, we couldn’t have made the playoffs that first year without him and all the plays he made, especially all the great blocking down the field. Did he drop some balls? Yeah, but all receivers drop some balls, and we continue to work on that with him. We’re going to do whatever we can to help him. In the meantime, he’s doing whatever he can to help us win, sacrificing himself and his stats, and throwing his body around. I’m serious when I say that he is a huge part of our running game. When he lined up for us, he was so dominant that he was getting double-teamed, which was opening up the running game. Then he was blocking, which helped us get some big runs.

He may have looked like a risk to some, but I’ll take a risk on a guy like this every day of the week.

Finally, we went and got Tomlinson and Taylor last year. Again, in my mind, this is not a risk. Yeah, they have some mileage, but this is football. It’s not like I’m re-creating the Over the Hill Gang. You pick and choose a couple of spots. With L.T., we had a tough choice to make on whether we were going to keep Thomas Jones or not, and he ended up at a place where he was earning more money than we thought we could pay. I love Thomas Jones, he’s my kind of guy. He’s going to get you that tough yard, just like he did on that big fourth down we had in the 2009 playoff game at San Diego. We also had Shonn Greene at the time. As much as I love Greene, I wanted Jones in there for that play and he got it.

Unfortunately, when you have money decisions to make, it’s tough. Jones was going to make something like $5.8 million with us in 2010, and it was more than we could afford with all the other moves we had to make, like re-signing Revis, Mangold, and Ferguson. We took a gamble by letting him go and going after L.T., especially when L.T. went up to Minnesota and they offered more than we did. This is where I went on a serious sales job. I called everybody L.T. knows. I even called his wife, LaTorsha, and told her how much L.T. meant to us, and how we needed him so badly. I did the same thing with Taylor. I called and called and called. I knew Taylor wanted to go back to Miami, but Bill Parcells wasn’t going to do it. I respect Parcells a lot, but if he’s going to turn down a guy like Taylor, I’ll gladly take him.