Columns

Man, did Tampa Bay love this guy

The hardest thing for Mike Alstott to do on a field is to leave it.

By GARY SHELTON, Times Sports Columnist
Published August 10, 2007

Mike Alstott fights back tears during a Thursday afternoon news conference at One Buc Place in Tampa in which he and general manager Bruce Allen announced that Alstott had been placed on the injured reserve list after another neck injury.
	[Brendan Fitterer | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [AP photo] Tampa Bay Buccaneers fullback Mike Alstott picks up a first down in front of Washington Redskins' Shawn Springs during an NFL football game in 2006.

He scored a lot of touchdowns. When you tell your children stories of Mike Alstott, however, that is not where you should begin.

He gained a lot of yards. Perhaps he could have gained a few more, but again, that should not be the defining memory of the man.

He caught a lot of passes, and he blocked a lot of linebackers. He made defenders go backward and he made the first-down marker go forward. He made a lot of pro bowls and he filmed a few commercials.

Today, all of those are details. As he walks away from a season, and perhaps away from a career, the lasting memory of Alstott should be this:

Man, did Tampa Bay love this guy.

And, man, was it hard to say goodbye.

The Bucs placed Mike Alstott on injured reserve on Thursday with a second serious neck injury. Officially, that means he is gone for the season, and for a community that loved him, that is difficult enough. But this feels worse. This feels like farewell.

Alstott wouldn't, couldn't, talk about retirement on Thursday. Losing one season was emotional enough. Admitting that the door has just closed on his career seemed as if it was too much for him to consider.

Still, you get the feeling that down deep, Alstott knows. This time next year, he will be 34 with two major neck injuries behind him. As much as Tampa Bay has enjoyed watching him run, it should now encourage him to walk away.

It's a strange thing, the way love works. There have been better athletes than Alstott, faster ones, stronger ones. But there was a passion that bubbled out of Alstott and poured into the stands. With every tackle he would break, Tampa Bay liked the guy a little more.

This was an affair that went beyond statistics, beyond stardom. Alstott touched this community at a level that no other local athlete has ever reached. There was a little bit of you in the way Alstott played, and when you watched him, it was hard not to imagine that there was a little bit of him in you, too.

Alstott was the player for Everyman. He played football the way a bricklayer builds walls, the way a roofer tars houses, the way a ditch digger handles a shovel. These days, there are athletes who act like rock stars or ballet dancers, like movie actors or supermodels.

Not Alstott. He was the full-day's-work-for-a full-day's-play sort of fullback. He was all effort and toughness and attitude, and almost every one of his yards came the hard way. Watching him, you never felt he was driven by money or by numbers. It was as if he had been torn out of an old black-and-white game film from the 1930s.

Alstott proved that you don't have to be a 1,000-yard rusher to be admired, and you don't have to be on your way to the Hall of Fame to be beloved. You just have to play with a little blood on your jersey. Much of the time, it should be said, it was someone else's blood.

No one ever put a highlight tape together quite like Alstott's. There was the bouncing, spinning, driving touchdown run against Minnesota in '97. There was the run against Detroit in the '97 playoffs and against Washington in the '99 playoffs and against Cleveland in '02. There was the two-point conversion against the Redskins that is still being debated.

My personal favorite Alstott run came back in 2001 in a late-season game against the Saints. It was a 15-yard run around left end, one of those numbers where Alstott plows through the defense breaking one tackle after another. Nothing unusual there. But when the replay was shown on the scoreboard afterward, the crowd began an impromptu count of the broken tackles. "Five ... six ... seven ... eight." It was a rare appreciation of a rare athlete.

The bond between Alstott and his community never changed, not when the years did, not when the coaching staff did, not when his yardage did. There was never a play his fans didn't think he could make. There was never a game they didn't want to see more of him. There was never a coach they felt who appreciated him enough.

This was Alstott's town, and these were Alstott's people. It is easy to understand, then, why the hardest thing for Alstott to do on a field is to leave it.

Every year since 2003, some have expected Alstott to retire. When his neck was first injured in 2003, some thought that would finish him. When his role was reduced over the past two years -- 94 attempts and a 2.7 average -- some thought that would lead to his departure.

For all of the debate, however, Alstott was neither a tailback nor a fullback. He was a ballplayer. He liked running out of the tunnel. He liked the feel of a huddle. He liked the sound of the crowd. And so his career was much like one of his runs; he was determined to get every inch out of it.

If this is goodbye, and yes, it should be, what stories do you tell of Alstott?

You tell them all.

You tell every one.

Gary Shelton can be reached at (727) 893-8805.

[Last modified August 10, 2007, 00:35:56]