Ferris Finds Fitting Salvo For Robinson
The number now retired at Ferris High School in Jeff Robinson’s honor is instructive in itself.
It was his football jersey number. No. 14.
An odd digit for an All-American defensive end, which is what he was at the University of Idaho, or for a long snapper and tight end for the Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams, his current career track.
Fourteen at Ferris? Wassup?
“Well, I was a backup quarterback originally,” he said. “I played behind Mike Pfeifer and he was always throwing touchdown passes. So I ended up at outside linebacker my junior and senior years, and playing a little tight end.”
High school backup. Super Bowl champ.
They might want to make that the inscription under the jersey display. Because if you’re trying to inspire high school kids, you want to steer away from the overly hokey - but there’s no payoff in being overly subtle, either.
In that respect, the spring sports con at Ferris on Friday morning hit all the right notes, and we’re not just talking about the pep band.
Five students in Nancy Hough’s leadership class took on the project of honoring the Saxons’ three big-leaguers - Robinson and the Yarno brothers, George and John, who collectively have played 24 seasons in the National Football League and who, until this bit of business, may have been anonymous to most of the current student body.
“I’d heard of Jeff Robinson and there’s people in my family who know of the Yarnos,” said sophomore Ali Bolich, part of the project team, “but I had no idea they went to Ferris.”
Hey, a little slack, if you please. What did you know about your school’s heritage when you were a teenager?
“You know how that goes,” said activities coordinator Bob Crabb. “Anything that happened two years before is a mystery. It could be the Revolutionary War or the Vietnam War - it’s all the same.”
But having an alum in the Super Bowl can work wonders for awareness. And seeing as it was a group of students - Bolich, Bryan Brumwell, Christy Gorman, Desiree Lozier and Lorraine Montellier - who carried the ball on this one, it ranks as a tribute of the most sincere kind.
Not all of them are. For instance, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays this season retired the number of Wade Boggs. The Devil Rays have been in existence for all of three years. Boggs had affairs that lasted longer.
Meanwhile in Cincinnati, Ken Griffey Jr. heartily endorsed retiring Tony Perez’s No. 24 - also Junior’s number - until a slump ensued, at which time Mr. Family First wanted it unretired and hung in his locker.
What the young leaders at Ferris had in mind was something that lasts.
“The idea of their spirit projects,” Hough advised, “is to leave Ferris better in some way than it was when they came. This is to celebrate what these people accomplished, but it’s also to be an example of what you can do.”
Alas, neither of the Yarno brothers was able to find his way back to Ferris - George now coaches at Arizona State, John is in the Lexus business in Bellevue - for the ceremony. Nos. 73 and 51 were retired in absentia, but No. 14 showed and was suitably dumbfounded.
“I can’t believe they’re doing this,” Robinson said. “I had a nephew graduate from here two years ago - that’s dating me - but I’m sure none of these kids ever heard of me.”
That bit of self-effacement worked until four third-graders - Benny Baird, Garrett Dellwo, Jackson Gilles and Josh Schmidt - from Roosevelt Elementary came through the door. Not even born yet when Robinson was schlepping from biology class to English, they adopted him as a pen pal last season - in no small part because their teacher, Laurie Anderson, was a couple of years behind Robinson at Ferris.
“They’ve been writing to him since the beginning of the year,” she said. “They tell him jokes and ask him what he likes to do - what he liked to do when he was in third grade.”
What he liked to do in the third grade was go to Ferris games.
“I had a better sense of the history here because four of my five older brothers and both older sisters went to Ferris,” Robinson said. “I’d followed Ferris since I was old enough to walk.”
Now Ferris follows him.
His old football coach, Pat Pfeifer, noted that it was the athletes of the Robinson era who “put Ferris on the statewide map” - getting the Saxons to state playoffs in football “after 10 losing seasons in a row” and to the title games in basketball and baseball.
Robinson’s favorite memory?
“I guess it would have to be the state basketball tournament my senior year,” he said. “My friend Jeff Wear hit the shot that beat Foss in the first round and we ended up beating Garfield and getting to the finals when everyone was saying we shouldn’t be there.”
Somebody’s always saying something like that. They said it about him when he took the last football scholarship available at Idaho, and obviously they said it about the Rams right up until the time they beat Tennessee in the Georgia Dome.
“I was just glad we won it,” Robinson said, laughing. “Really, I feel for Tennessee because I would hate to get that far and lose. Everyone says we’re going to repeat and I’m thinking, `You know, that’s pretty hard,’ but at least we’ve got that one - and it’s something I’ll always cherish.”
And now so will his old school.