REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: Pre-Season Week Two

REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK

Pre-Season Week Two

Colts at Steelers

Michele Tafoya

Luck is where Preparation meets Opportunity

Andrew Luck has a huge opportunity, and his preparation has given him the skills and smarts required to make the best of it.

During a meeting with the NBC Sunday Night Football crew at a Pittsburgh hotel conference room, Luck told us that his dad, Oliver, taught him how to throw a ball when Andrew was three years old.

He also credits his high school quarterbacks coach, Jeff Green, for influencing his throwing technique.

Luck took advantage of Jim Harbaugh’s pro-like organization at Stanford.

And before the NFL Combine, Luck worked out and worked in.  For three weeks Luck spent hours each day in a small classroom with Tom Moore, the former Indianapolis Colts offensive coordinator.

Moore tutored Peyton Manning throughout the quarterback’s record-setting career.  Moore knows a good QB when he sees one, and particularly when he works with one.  

Moore told me by phone, “In the classroom (Luck has the things you’re looking for.  You go over something on Monday, and on Friday when you put the tapes in he has instant recall.  If I was still coaching I’d love to have him because he can do all the things I like to do: audibles at the line of scrimmage; no-huddle.  He has a great awareness of what’s happening.”

“Andrew’s special,” said Moore.  “And I thought Peyton was special.  A lot of people want to be good. But do they want to do what they have to do to BE good?  There is no doubt in my mind that Andrew is willing to do what it takes.”

Moore knows Luck will be compared to Manning but told me, “I know Andrew’s a strong enough person that he’s going to handle the comparisons, and he’ll handle it perfect.”

The Courage of a Running Backs Coach

In early January, 2012, as the Steelers were preparing to head to Denver for their playoff game against the Broncos, Pittsburgh running backs coach Kirby Wilson got caught in a house fire.  Severe burns covered about 45-percent of his body.

The fifty-year-old Wilson was hospitalized for weeks – at times on a ventilator and even in a coma.  At one point doctors didn’t think he was going to survive, but he pulled through and returned to work on April 16. 

I visited with the coach during practice at the Steelers’ Latrobe training camp last Thursday.  He was comfortably seated in a shaded golf cart which had been labeled “The Kirby Express.”  The cart helps Kirby move a bit faster than his burned legs can do on their own.

Still, Wilson told me his pain is now “manageable.”  But his skin is so sensitive he has to stay out of the sun as much as possible and wear compression garments.  He smiled when he told me that those garments will help his skin turn “beautiful” again.

Wilson, now in his sixth season with the Steelers, can’t exercise like he used to.  While he’s beginning to lift weights again, he can’t walk the sixty minute cardio treks like he used to.  But he has worked his way up to walking for 30-minutes at a time, and he can jog a bit with his players during practice.

It was with a bit of pride that Wilson told me he has not suffered psychologically from his ordeal.  “The doctors and nurses at the hospital warned me before I left that I would be nervous.  I haven’t had any nightmares, I’m not afraid to grill burgers for my kids, I’m fine!  God made me different!”

His positive outlook and sense of humor sustain him. Describing how difficult the whole experience had been he told me, “I wouldn’t even wish this on a member of the Baltimore Ravens!”