Super Bowl Week commences with amazing Cards-Steelers connection
TAMPA — I’m dizzy from all the connections between the Cardinals and Pittsburgh. There’s Ken Whisenhunt, who didn’t get the Steelers head-coaching job two years ago, now coaching the Cards. Ditto Arizona line coach Russ Grimm. The new Cards coaches basically created Steeler West in Sun City.
Arizona wideout Larry Fitzgerald cut his football teeth at Pitt; a huge poster of the biggest star of this year’s playoffs is 25 feet from the front door of the Steelers facility on the South Side of Pittsburgh — in the Pitt Panther practice facility, walled off from the Steelers’ practice home.
But the best story is Arizona offensive coordinator Todd Haley. Partly because his dad was a prime architect of the great Steelers teams of the ’70s. Partly because young Todd, a training-camp ballboy, roomed across the hall from Terry Bradshaw in late-’70s summers, and because he worked the chain gang on Three Rivers home games through his high school years.
si.com
1/26/09
