Fresh from a comprehensive ban, the quarterback can start and win a third Super Bowl against the Green Bay Packers
For months now, the NFL Players' Association have been advising their members to prepare for the possibility that the Super Bowl will be the last game any of them play in 2011. The union's negotiations with team owners over a new collective bargaining agreement remain, after almost two years, at an impasse. Without a new deal, there will be no NFL season in September.
If that is a daunting prospect for all then one of tonight's participants will at least be better prepared than most. Ben Roethlisberger, of the Pittsburgh Steelers, has an opportunity against the Green Bay Packers to become the fifth quarterback to start and win three Super Bowls. Yet as recently as October he was experiencing his own personal lockout: banned not only from playing but from training with team-mates or even making contact with the Steelers' coaching staff.
"In your six years in the NFL, you have first thrilled and now disappointed a great many people," wrote the league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, in a letter to Roethlisberger as he handed down a six-game suspension (later reduced to four) for violating the league's personal conduct policy in April. "I urge you to take full advantage of this opportunity to get your life and career back on track."
A month earlier Roethlisberger had been accused of sexually assaulting a 20-year-old student in a nightclub in Milledgeville, Georgia. It was the second time he had been accused of a sexual offence in less than 12 months. Roethlisberger has strongly denied both allegations, and no criminal charges have been brought against him, but the damage to his reputation has been significant.
Goodell's letter stressed that Roethlisberger's suspension was "not based on a finding that you violated Georgia law" and that the league was not questioning the local prosecutor's verdict that there had been insufficient evidence to bring a charge. He added, though, that "you are held to a higher standard as an NFL player, and there is nothing about your conduct in Milledgeville that can remotely be described as admirable".
It would be easy to scoff at the notion of sportsmen being held to any sort of standard off the field, yet in Pittsburgh it was clear that this latest round of allegations had harmed the standing of a player who had already been coloured as irresponsible after a motorcycle accident in 2006. Roethlisberger broke his jaw and nose in that incident, having failed to wear a helmet, and it soon emerged that he had been riding without a valid licence.
When news of his suspension was announced during a Major League Baseball game in the city, fans of the hometown Pittsburgh Pirates cheered. A survey of Pennsylvanians in April found that 56% had a negative view of Roethlisberger, while 24% looked on him favourably.
His team-mates delivered their own verdict, choosing not to elect him as one of the Steelers' captains for the first time in three years. There were even reports that the Steelers' front office were actively seeking to trade Roethlisberger, despite the fact that he had set a personal record the previous season by throwing for more than 4,000 yards.
Roethlisberger stayed and, after returning from suspension, went straight back to doing what he has always done: winning games. The Steelers, built around a strong defence and running game, had hardly fallen apart in his absence, winning three of their first four games, but with him they went on to win their division and then return to a familiar stage ? only the Dallas Cowboys can equal Pittsburgh's eight Super Bowl appearances and no team can match their six victories to date.
Fourteen of the Steelers' 22 starters have won a Super Bowl and 10 were involved in Pittsburgh's victories in 2005 and 2008. The Packers, by contrast, have one player with a Super Bowl ring. The Green Bay full-back John Kuhn was, in a neat twist, on the Steelers' practice squad in 2005, though he did not play in Super Bowl XL.
But if that, allied to the fact that the Packers snuck into the play-offs as the sixth seed in the NFC (Pittsburgh were the second seed in the AFC) would seem to paint the Steelers as heavy favourites then few see it that way. Green Bay's quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, has been in sensational touch, completing 71% of his passes in the play-offs, while their defence ? the second-best in the league against the rush ? is more than capable of slowing down the Steelers' run-first offence.
It is Roethlisberger, though, who has dominated the build-up. Inevitably, a section of the press has sought to portray his season as a story of redemption ? as though sporting success alone is enough to redeem a supposedly flawed character ? but the player sought to bat away such talk, saying that was a "reflective" question and that this was not the time to dwell on it, even if he did add that he felt he had changed as a person in the past year. He was equally reluctant to put himself in the same class as quarterbacks who had won the Super Bowl three times before, such as Tom Brady and Terry Bradshaw, a former Steeler who has been critical of Roethlisberger.
"That's unbelievable company. I don't put myself there; I think they are too good," Roethlisberger said. "It drives [the Steelers head coach Mike] Tomlin crazy because he wants me to put myself in that category but, I don't know, I guess I like being the hunter, not the hunted."
What he would like even more is for people to get back to talking about his antics on the field, rather than off it.
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