Here's a little story about Ben Roethlisberger, one that hints at the skills required to make the kind of precision passes the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback made in the Super Bowl last Sunday.
It happened a few hours after the divisional playoff victory over San Diego, when Roethlisberger was unwinding at a Pittsburgh pub with a group of family and friends. They were playing the arcade game "2 Minute Drill," the object of which is to throw junior-sized footballs through holes for points over the course of two minutes. There are three holes, with the top being the smallest and most valuable. It takes a pinpoint spiral to squeeze through that one.
On his first try, Roethlisberger set a new record for the machine.
Whump. Whump. Whump. Whump. Pass after pass zipped through the top hole.
On his second try, he broke his own mark. On his third, he scored so many points that the three-digit counter rolled over. Two minutes without a miss.
The whole pub erupted in applause.
"You get kind of competitive when it comes to things like that," Roethlisberger said in a phone interview this week. "I wasn't going to let anybody beat my score. It started with me competing with the guys there. But then it got to the point where, well, let me shoot for the high score. So that was the next competition and I blew it away."
(Roethlisberger, by the way, won't be in the Pro Bowl today, not even as an alternate. It's more evidence voting for that all-star game is a joke, but more on that in a moment.)
Among the things separating Roethlisberger from other quarterbacks are his incredibly skilled hands. Those allow him to zip passes on target, whether he's throwing off his front foot, back foot, twisted the wrong way, or with would-be tacklers dangling off him like Christmas ornaments.
"As a quarterback, especially in the NFL, you can't just drop back every time and throw a regular pass perfect," he said. "There's always going to have to be a different angle you're throwing the ball, someone's rushing you, you've got to drop your arm a little bit and throw through lanes, whatever it might be."
The steel-city grip of his right hand also allows him to execute more complete and convincing pump fakes, the kind that can fool an entire secondary into shifting out of position, as he did in the winning drive against Arizona. Whereas other NFL quarterbacks might flinch a fake, Roethlisberger gets three-quarters of the way through his throwing motion before resetting, the ball crazy-glued in place.
