Ever Wonder What Life In An Alternate Football League Was Like? A Lot Like What you Expect And A Lot Different.. I'll Tell You How.
Whenever I tell people that I played in four leagues, seven teams over 11 years, and I tell him that I played in the Arena Football League they ask, did you play with Kurt Warner? Yes, I played against Kurt Warner and actually Kurt and I were both rookies coming into the league the same season. He played in Iowa at that time. I played in Miami and then ended up playing in Albany eventually. I played for three different teams in the league.
In 95 I got a call from a guy that I knew when I was playing in Tampa Bay named Bob Hewko. He had become the GM down in Miami with the Hooters. He asked me to come down and play Arena Football. I really didn't know anything about the league. Immediately after that, I got a call from the Orlando Predators. That started a bidding war back between the two and as a guy who had been in several camps, a couple different teams been cut a couple different times. It was kind of refreshing to actually be the commodity out there.
When I got down to Miami our first day of practice we were literally practicing on a sand lot next to a High School parking lot. There were no boundaries, no lines, no walls. We had nothing simulating the AFL field. As a quarterback trying to understand the Arena Football League, I had no marks to go by. I had no reference in terms of what the field was going to be like. On top of that, we didn't have film. This was the first time in my football career since high school, that they didn't have somebody there to film practices. Film study, in terms of what you're doing, is really important to correct mistakes and get on the same page. In Miami we didn't even have meetings.
It turns out that the Miami Hooters was the worst team in the history of organized football. A team's success has everything to do with management. No matter what level of football, you're playing. The team, the character of a team, everything is all about management. That team was horribly managed. The whole time I was there, they were actually trying to get a former player who had been three striked out of the NFL for substance abuse. He was homeless. They were trying to find him to bring him back to play for the team.
About game 10 we played Tampa up at their place. This is when Jay Gruden was the quarterback for Tampa. I literally got hit 32 times, but only threw 27 passes. After that game, they decided that it was my fault the team was so bad and they released me which was a blessing for me because it saved my body.
I got the chance to play for one of my favorite all time coaches, Mike Daily, in Albany New York. I was one of his very first calls to ask me to come back and be the starter in Albany. So I went back to the Arena Football League as a starter in 1997. I absolutely fell in love with the game. I fell in love with my teammates, guys like Mark Valvo, Kyle Moore-Brown, Greg Hopkins, Derek stingley that were just fantastic dudes. We started to form this bond this chemistry in that locker room with that team. I knew that coach Daly was a high character guy. As a result, the team that he was building was a high character team. I had a great year that year.
1999 comes and we put together a very high character team, very good football players. All the pieces were in place. Everybody was there to make it happen. And so that team in 1999 went out and worked their butts off, played hard, worked hard played together. That team really liked each other and built some amazing chemistry. I think we were 13 -3 that year and went on to win the Arena Bowl championship.
People ask me, when I look back over my career, with injuries and everything else. Would you do it all over again? And I said, Yeah, I'd probably try to skip the Miami Hooters.
When people ask me about my Arena Football League experience, yes, it was light Bull Durham and yes, it was like major league in a lot of ways. But it was also some of my favorite time playing football. I love that went on to play in the xfl after that,
I will always remember my time in Albany in the Arena Football League fondly, and especially playing for Coach D and playing with those guys. It made it pretty special.
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