An Exercise In Diligence
From an old college bio of Robbie Tobeck comes the nugget that he was once his team’s “comeback player of the year.”
Except that it was actually 10 months short of a year.
At the time, he was a defensive end at Kilgore, a junior college plenty good at football but substantially more famous for the Rangerettes drill team, not to mention the East Texas Oil Museum (just oils, no watercolors) and the Texas Shakespeare Festival (“Where for art thou momma ‘n’ them, Romeo?”). In the first game of the 1990 season, Tobeck tore a medial collateral ligament - not exactly your garden-variety scabby knee, and which for a JC player lusting after a scholarship at a four-year school would seem to be grounds to go into a prolonged rehab.
Tobeck was back in the lineup for Kilgore’s final game, a victory in the Texas Shrine Bowl.
The moral here is that if you’re weighing the odds on this year’s Seattle Seahawks comeback player of the year, a couple bucks on Robbie Tobeck would not be money ill-wagered.
All you see of Tobeck at Seahawks camp in Cheney is him decked out in his jersey, hands jammed into his blue shorts, intently watching drills involving his fellow offensive linemen.
You were hoping for more, and so was he.
He and safety Reggie Tongue were Mike Holmgren’s two big splurges in the free-agent woofest over the winter - Tobeck forsaking Atlanta for a five-year, $6.8-million contract and the chance to return to the Northwest, having followed his Kilgore stay with two years at Washington State.
He was the accomplished veteran who would stabilize the tender right side of the Seahawks line - either as a guard, or by allowing Chris Gray to shift from center. He was the player so eager to be a Seahawk that he and his family had made Issaquah their home for three years, and had broken ground on a new house in February, a month before he signed.
That was in March. In May, doing some routine lunges to loosen up his legs at a workout in Kirkland, he ripped up the patellar tendon in his left knee.
“Doing something I’ve done a million times,” he said Saturday as the rest of the Hawks prepared for today’s 1:30 p.m. scrimmage at Woodward Stadium. “It was a freak thing, a crazy little accident - and as soon as it happened, I knew I had a lot of work in front of me.”
As soon as it happened? Didn’t he bother to get angry first?
“Well, there was disappointment,” he admitted, “but I’m not the type to cry over something. I’ve been through rehabs before. I knew that the better my mental outlook was, the better off I’d be. It makes more sense to focus on what I had to do and not on what happened.”
This was the unadvertised part of the package the Seahawks got in Robbie Tobeck.
Call it undue diligence.
What will likely bring Tobeck back sooner rather than later in the 6- to 8-month window being projected for his rehabilitation is a unique brand of want-to. It got him from a tiny private high school in Tarpon Springs, Fla., across the south to Kilgore, and from Kilgore north to Washington State - with a recommendation from former Cougars quarterback Jack Thompson, who had met Tobeck at a charity basketball game in Tampa.
Often as not, JC linemen recruited to Wazzu redshirt their first year rather than have a season of eligibility squandered by a fitful transition. Not only did Tobeck not redshirt, he shifted from defensive tackle to offensive guard in midseason and actually started the season’s next-to-last game. He was the Cougs’ come-from-nowhere player of that year.
The following season, 1992, he started 12 games pushing the ball through his legs to Drew Bledsoe as the Cougars went to the Copper Bowl.
This highlight on his resume enticed exactly no NFL teams into using a draft pick on a smallish - 265 pounds at the time - offensive lineman.
“I had some calls after the draft and I thought Atlanta was my best opportunity - but, yeah, I was a long shot,” he said. “I just knew if I hustled and worked hard, I could get my foot in the door and play.”
A foot in the door is a pretty good description of a spot on an NFL practice squad, which is where Tobeck spent 1993. A year later, he played in five games for the Falcons. Since then, he’s put on 30 pounds, started 78 games, played in a Super Bowl and caught a touchdown pass.
If he was once among Wazzu’s not-particularly-likely-to-succeed pro prospects, Tobeck certainly found a balance between nothing-to-lose abandon and something-to-prove determination.
“I just knew this was something I’d wanted all my life and I wasn’t going to let opportunity pass me by,” he said.
“When I came to Atlanta, Jerry Glanville was coaching and it was always the No. 1s vs. the No. 2s in practice. I was going against Pierce Holt, who was a Pro Bowler then who’d just signed a big free-agent contract. I remember the first practice I had - I did great. The coach is patting me on the helmet and I’m feeling pretty special. And then from that afternoon on, Pierce tore me a new one.
“But I got better. And by the end of the year, I was blocking Pierce.”
And before the end of this year, he’ll be blocking some other Pro Bowler, you can bet.
“Heck, I’d like to play in the opener,” he said, laughing. “You get really antsy, seeing the team out here and knowing what the guys are going through and wanting to be part of it. But the most important thing is to push yourself hard enough to where you’re at the limit, but not have a setback.”
Or a sit-back - not that there’s much danger of that. Running, lifting - Tobeck is beyond knee braces and taking it slow.
“My goals are set,” he said. “They’re not paying me not to play football.”