Don’t Count Out Woodson

There being no pity in the National Football League, the Dallas Cowboys will pick on a cripple in the Super Bowl.

“I expect them to come right at me,” the one-legged says.

“I would if I were them. You always attack the softest spot.”

Except this smacks of spiders inviting flies into their parlors.

Because the man with the one wobbly wheel is as good as there has ever been at playing the most difficult position on defense: cornerback.

They used to say you can lose your shadow easier than you can lose Rod Woodson.

And then in the first game of this season just past, Woodson reached to tackle another shadow dancer, Barry Sanders, and nothing gave except Woodson’s right knee. The result was the most frightening abbreviation in sports: ACL.

Anterior Cruciate Ligament.

ACL almost always means RIP.

Woodson begged his coach, Bill Cowher, not to place him on injured reserve. Woodson was certain he would return to play before the Steelers were done playing, and never mind that no football player had ever come back from an ACL in the same season. “Fortunately, Bill saw the same light I did,” Woodson said.

It must have been a divine light, because Woodson has been practicing for three weeks now and will play in Supe XXX, and this brings us to an intriguing moral problem for Woodson and Cowher. Woodson is one of those players who deserves to be in a Super Bowl. He is good enough that he was one of only five active players chosen for the NFL’s 75th anniversary team. He is one of those players on whom a ring would look especially appropriate.

Cowher, having been a player himself, knows this may be Woodson’s only chance. So do you play him and hope that his knee doesn’t buckle when he’s trying to cover Michael Irvin?

And as for Woodson, the questions are equally discomforting: Am I letting ego take over? Have I put personal wish ahead of team welfare?

Cowher and Woodson and the Steelers, apparently to a man, think Woodson should play.

Had I a vote, it would have been the same, though mine admittedly would have been based mostly on emotion and sentimentality. Woodson and Cowher and the Steelers arrived at their decision a bit more pragmatically. They have watched Woodson in practice. More important, they have tested Woodson in practice.

And he can cut and he can plant and he can pivot and he can brake and he can accelerate and he is back to, oh, what percentage of the old Rod Woodson would he say? “Eighty to eighty-five,” he estimated, squinting into the desert sun.

“Really, if I had any doubt, any doubt at all, about what I can and can’t do … if I had any concern that I might be hurting the team, I wouldn’t even chance it.”

And I believe him. I take him at face value, and that isn’t very wise, except that Woodson strikes me as one of the rare ones, a talent for the ages who still has the best interests of the group in his heart.

You talk to the other Steelers, and they always bring up the way Woodson remained a part of the team through the season. He was on the sideline for games, he was at practice, and when they’d clump into the locker room, he’d be there, gritting through the rehabilitation drudge and pain, and his presence bespoke his commitment, and for athletes, that is sacred.

So the story of Rod Woodson brings a glow to this Super Bowl. But the Cowboys want to hear no drivel about inspirational wounded. They want to know if Woodson and his cut-upon knee can go stride-for-stride, bump-for-bump, with the push-off physicality of Irvin.

Irvin, who rarely allows his mouth to remain unopened, is on record that it is plain foolish for a man only four months removed from surgery to think he can keep up with Michael Irvin.

“I’ll tell you what I think I have in my favor,” Woodson replied. “The weather here. The fact that the field is grass. The fact I haven’t played 16 games and been beat up - my legs are fresh. The fact that I’ve played in the league for nine years and I have a feel for the game. And one other thing: I’ve had four months to think about this.”

There was a time in his life, when he was in college at Purdue, when Rod Woodson remembers eating beans from a can and having exactly one quarter in his pocket.

Sometimes you can make those kinds of memories work for you. You can put them on as surely as if they were a helmet and pads.