OPINION — WATCHING TV, seeing Jack Youngblood play, then meeting him up close and personal were not one and the same for Bob Gruber. Having grown up in Greenville, Gruber recently recalled his Welcome-to-the-NFL moment.

“When I got drafted in 1980 by the (Los Angeles) Rams, they still had 12 rounds and I was a 10th-round draft pick.The Rams had already drafted three or four offensive linemen ahead of me,” Gruber ruefully recalled, “and here I am, a (Pittsburgh) Steelers’ fan growing up as a kid and watching the 1979 Super Bowl — Steelers and the Rams. The next thing you know I’m out on the same field with guys like Jack Youngblood and all those guys, and I’m like, ‘Do I really belong here?’

“Back then, rookies always came in two weeks before the veterans,” Gruber continued. “My first play I lined up against Jack Youngblood. ... Well, the first thing he does coming off (the line of scrimmage) is punch me in the face. The only thing I’d been told is, ‘Hit him back.’ So I ended up rolling around on the ground with an All-Pro defensive lineman, Jack Youngblood.

“Well, when we got done, he looked at me and said, ‘You’re gonna be all right, you’re make it.’ From then on we became great friends.”

Gruber’s gridiron “graduation” back on that summer day was not the pinnacle of his career, but part of a progression.

“It was something I dreamed about since I was a 10-year-old kid. I wanted to play pro football and was blessed to have the opportunity to do that — maybe not quite get to where I wanted, a Super Bowl — but I got to experience some things, meet some great people and phenomenal athletes,” Gruber said, later adding,

“But there’s a total difference with each level (of competition). I look back and never thought of myself as being somebody special; I just did what I loved to do and enjoyed the game and loved the game so much.

“For me,” a gleeful Gruber related, “between those white lines is holy ground. I still get the chills walking on a field, to be around the game.”

He recently was rewarded with induction into the Mercer County Hall of Fame’s 66th anniversary class.

After Gruber graduated from Greenville High, where he played for coaches Bob Ballock, Bob Stone and Gary Hull and basketball coach Fred Kiser, he matriculated at the University of Pittsburgh.

“I didn’t see myself as one of those top athletes. All of a sudden I had (teammates) who were a Big 33 members, ‘Mr. New York,’ ... and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m just from Greenville.’ But the one thing I learned very quickly was, they may have been talented, but sometimes you see people with such phenomenal talent, God-given talent, but they never worked through it to get to the next level. While myself, I always felt like I had to work harder than anybody else to get just to where they were. So that work-ethic carried me a long ways.

“And the other thing that always meant a lot to me is, I was always afraid to let my teammates down,” Gruber related. “Even back at Greenville, my thought-process always was, ‘I want to be the best I can be because I don’t want to let these guys down.’

“Same thing at Pitt. I mean, c’mon. When you’re playing with the likes of Tony Dorsett, Dan Marino, Russ Grimm, Ricky Jackson — they’re all in the Hall of Fame — how can you not do your best just to play with guys like that?

“It was an amazing opportunity to play with those guys, and to look back on them and say, ‘It really was special.’

‘When I went to Pitt we won the national championship my freshman year, Heisman Trophy winner in Tony Dorsett. I was one of only three freshmen to make the traveling squad and letter. And I thought, ‘Oh, so this is how it’s all supposed to be.’ It wasn’t like, ‘Wow, this is really something!’

“But the realization later is, you don’t get the chance to win a national championship very often, you don’t get the chance to play with a Heisman Trophy winner.”

Back in Greenville, Gruber got off to an auspicious start in athletics.

“I was 12 or 13 years old, trying to play Little League, and I wasn’t very good — uncoordinated, arms and legs going everywhere at the time,” Gruber recalled, “and the coach came to me and said, ‘I just don’t think you’re an athlete; you need to go find something else to do.’ It really devastated me at the time.

“My grandfather (Robert Jones) grabbed me. We were over at the farm one day stringing up barbed wire, and he said, ‘If nothing else, I’ll work you so that if they tell you to run 10 sprints, you run 11; you do more than everybody else so that they have to keep you around.’

“He helped me get through that. He was a farmer all his life, plus he worked in the coal mines until he was seventy-two years old. Great example. My uncle (Chuck Jones), worked sixty years for the same company before he retired.

“My family ... We were farm people, grew up on the farm and had to work. Both of my grandfathers were very dedicated, hard-working people, taught me about the idea of working hard. ... Just a lot of strong work-ethic that came from my family. They taught me to just go for it, don’t ever stop, push yourself a little bit further and harder than anybody else,” the gargantuan he related.

Gruber is grateful that, post playing career, his “health, overall, is good. I do have to get both shoulders replaced. They’re shot, so we’ve got some surgery coming down the road on those.”

He’s been tested for any lingering concussion symptoms.

“It does scare you. You always think about it. I tease the employees who work for me. I said, ‘Hey, if I start having those memory lapses, being forgetful ...

“But I’ve had some dear friends that I’ve played with that I saw have just gone downhill rapidly, some of them from the concussions, some of them from just the overall beating they’d taken. Others — you see Junior Seau, probably one of the greatest athletes who ever played the game — and you see what happened with him. So it is a little scary, and you don’t know. That’s the thing: You really don’t know how it’s going to affect you. You start looking back and saying, ‘Hey, how many concussions did I have? How many times did I get ‘dinged’?

“The problem,” Gruber related regarding his pro football career, “is if you showed even a little bit of a weakness, they’re finding somebody else to take your spot. We always made the joke that, the minute you made the team, they’re looking for somebody to replace you. So you’ve gotta stay in the game.

“ ... Just to get in the NFL, if you’re not workin’ hard, you’re not stayin’ around,” he admitted.

“Compared to a lot of my friends and people I played with, I’m blessed to be where I am at this point and healthy as I am at this point,” he admitted.

The NFL is a meat-grinder, Gruber acknowledged.

“It really is, in a lot of ways. But also in a lot of ways it’s a family, because the guys have to rely on each other and have to be partners and teammates to get things done. So it’s really an odd balance.”

Gruber gave thanks for the people who supported him. In addition to his Greenville coaches, citing, his mother (Ruth), who attended the induction ceremony, “my dad (Robert), who passed away nineteen years ago. ... my wife (Debbie), God bless her. For the first six years of our marriage I had her going coast to coast, moving. It was getting pretty rough a couple of those years where we were bouncing from team to team She always believed in me and told me to ‘Stick with it, go for it, finish out your dream,’ and I retired in ’88 at age 30.”

In spite of his grandson’s pre-teen snub by a shor-sighted Little League coach, Gruber’s grandpa was not one to gloat.

“He was a very humble individual, so he’d probably give me a hard time about (being inducted), saying, ‘What’d you think you really did to deserve this kind of honor?’ But I think he’d appreciate it, knowing the work-ethic and things we had to do to get to where we are. Because one of things that always kept me me humble was, you look around and there’s always somebody better than you are, and if you wanted to stay with them, you had to do the work.

“Last year I was supposed to be inducted, but my wife passed away in January,” Gruber related, “so the opportunity came again this year. I really didn’t know what to expect. I started talking with people who’d been inducted, like Bonnie Dickson ... and she was telling me what a phenomenal thing it is.

“One of the dreams of a professional football player is you always want to be in the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton. I’ll never make that,” Gruber admitted, “but I’ll take this any day. This is close enough. I love it!”



Ed Farrell is assistant sports editor for The Herald