Want a taste of taking on Warren Sapp? Read at your own risk
This is virtual reality, magazine-style. For the next few pages of your life, without lifting a weight or sweating a drop, you get to be an NFL offensive lineman. We can do that. We're ESPN, you know? So here is your helmet, and here are your shoulder pads, and here's an all-access pass that will get you into everything from the film room to the huddle. We're going to show you, close up, what the view looks like through that face mask. We're going to put you on the line of scrimmage, so close to greatness that you'll hear it breathing. You can even be really, really muscular if you want. Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, it's not. Because the man you are assigned to block happens to be named Warren Sapp. He looks soft but he plays hard, and you are in for a hell of a lot of hurt, brother. The trash-talking Sapp is 300 pounds of swaggering menace, and when he squats down in front of you and starts his incessant jabbering-I'm going to be here alllllll day; I'm going to build a house right here, motherf...-it is neither a promise nor a threat. It's just the God's honest truth.
Sapp covets your quarterback, and he'll chase him like a lit fuse looking for a place to explode, even if it means stepping on your head. And he'll do it on every down, every quarter, every game, from sideline to sideline, until your coach sounds as exasperated as Mike Holmgren did in last year's playoff game. Sapp had made seven tackles, produced three sacks, forced two fumbles and recovered one, and now Packers quarterback Brett Favre was groggily pawing at his face, thinking Sapp had broken his nose, when Holmgren screamed, "Can't we get this guy blocked?" into his headset, and the meek but honest response from the coach's booth was, "Sometimes."
Sapp arrived last year. It wasn't through a back door, surrounded by whispers and shadows. No, no, no. That's not how Sapp makes his entrances-not into backfields, not into strip joints, not into the NFL's elite. Sapp arrived the way jumbo jets do, all big and loud and obvious (and perhaps a little late, because drug tests revealed there was some smoke in the engine). The rumbling sound you heard echoing throughout the 1997 football season was nothing less than the man's career taking off.
So let's meet him now. Let's break from the huddle. You are walking to the line of scrimmage, toward the 6'1", 300-pound, cornrow-wearing Sapp for the first play of the game. What is it that you see staring back at you?
"What I see," San Francisco guard Ray Brown says, "is scary."
Not on the surface. Atlanta guard Robbie Tobeck is asked to describe Sapp's body type, and he laughs for a full 10 seconds before saying, "The first thing that popped into my mind, I'm not going to say. I've got to face the guy. I don't want to make him mad. How's stocky?" Well, stocky is nice, but it's also wrong. Sapp is a couple of desserts past fat. Which will fool you for exactly as long as it takes for the quarterback to request that football from center.
"The gut is not what you should be looking at," says Chicago offensive line coach Tony Wise. "The gut is not what makes all those plays."
So now your quarterback flips the towel off his center's rump, Snake Stabler-style, and starts barking out those signals. His hard snap count isn't working on Sapp, though. Sapp's first move ranks right up there with Minnesota defensive tackle John Randle's as the quickest in the game. It's disciplined, too. Amazingly, Sapp jumped offsides only once in 18 games last s e a - son, which means he is never, ever guessing. Sapp knows when to come, knows it every bit as naturally as you know when to breathe.
So now the ball is snapped and your quarterback is dropping back and wait, wait, wait. Rewind for a second. You've studied Sapp's quickness all week-seen so much intimidating film on him that, if you are Dolphins guard Mark Dixon, you are asking yourself out loud, "Can I compete against this guy?" And, if you are Minnesota's Jeff Christy, your teammates have already begun teasing you that the introduction to next week's film session is going to be, "The Warren Sapp Show with a special guest appearance by Jeff Christy." So are you sure you are ready for this?
Carolina center Frank Garcia, who played against Sapp in college, thought he was, but "It was the first play of the game," Garcia says. "I had barely moved the ball off the ground-I mean, barely made my hand twitch-and he already had his hands on my head."
Garcia isn't sure of the physics at work here (strength + speed = heat?), but he swears he felt a warmth next to him on one play. A warmth? "You know," Garcia explains, "like when you are near an explosion."
So, okay, because this is virtual reality, we're going to snap the ball and allow you to survive Sapp's first explosive move. Congratulations. And you're welcome. But, sorry, Sapp has about nine more dastardly moves where that one came from, which is why he is so much better than he was that first year, when he had only three. So now you are backpedaling into pass protection position, trying to get yourself into Sapp's chest, trying to stabilize something that does not wish to be stabilized, and it's like trying to stop a rockslide with your hands.
"I'll tell you what I felt," says New York Jets guard Lamont Burns. "The scouting report said he was 289 pounds, but I realized it was wrong on the first snap. I was like, 'Whoa!' If I had closed my eyes and not known who it was, I wouldn't have thought what I was feeling against my chest was 289. I would have thought 350." guard Dixon says: "Amazing quickness. Amazing. Amazing. Once he gets an edge, he's as gone as a ghost. His burst of strength, it shocks you. You absorb the shock and fight to recover. You always get the feeling he's on the verge of making a play. There's fear there. It's a feeling of hanging on, like on an amusement ride."
This is how it is with Sapp, who plays right up to exhaustion and then goes a couple of steps beyond it. Dolphins guard Anthony Redmon says Sapp"comes equipped with a nonstop motor," and Tampa defensive line coach Rod Marinelli says, "I've seen Warren gassed, totally gassed, and still dominating. He's as good as anybody, and we're just tapping into him."
His first two years in the league, Sapp would stay blocked when he got tired. That was the biggest knock on him, that he was more sudden flash than sustained flame. But he seems to care more now. Sapp always has had too much off-field fun (he failed at least two drug tests as a collegian at Miami and so often frequented Rol-exx, a local strip club, that he referred to it as "my office"), but he got married at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii last winter and has an 8-month-old daughter. Says Sapp's friend, raunchy rap star Luther Campbell: "He's all grown up. It's like night and day. Before, I could call him and say let's go to the club, and he'd be there all night. Now I tell him I'm coming into town, and he tells me he has to babysit."
Family man? Babysitter? You aren't exactly thinking about those things as Sapp thrusts his forearm under your chin. He's trying to crush more than your quarterback. He's trying to crush your spirit, too. Sapp grew up poor in Ply mouth, Fla., a town so tiny that it can be breezed through in a blink if both stoplights are green. Plymouth has but one restaurant, and it closes at 2 p.m. every day-maybe a little later if Sapp, Plymouth's rock, is particularly hungry. As a kid, he was driven to school in his mother's 1970 Impala, which tilted so much that Warren's embarrassed sister hid ducked-down the whole ride. So now Sapp is bringing all that into your backfield with him. Can you feel it? Can you feel that hunger and how hard it is to hold it back?
"He keeps coming and coming and coming, and he's set on killing you," says Redskins guard Tre'
Johnson. "Have you seen those specials on TV? Where they show one mouse, and it doesn't look like much? But then they show 2,000 mice running through fields together, eating up cows and pigs, just devouring them? That's Tampa's defense. And Warren is the lead mouse.
"Detroit offensive line coach Jack Henry coached against Sapp in college. Even in weeks he wasn't preparing for Miami, even in the off-season, Henry would put in a tape of Sapp and force his Pitt players to watch it. "You don't have this talent, but this is the way I want you to play," Henry would tell his kids. "With this kind of passion."
Fast forward to August 1997. On behalf of his team and himself, Sapp has made his big announcement-we're here now-in Tampa Bay's season opener, a 13-6 upset of San Francisco. Sapp knocked Steve Young out of the game with a concussion and knocked Jerry Rice out for most of the season with a torn-up knee. The second half hadn't even started.
"Disruptive and overwhelming" are the words Niners guard Ray Brown chooses to describe Sapp's performance that day. Between plays, while San Francisco huddles, Sapp steps over the ball, to the offensive side, and shouts at the 49ers. In his third NFL season, he is demanding to be heard. "He made himself millions and millions of dollars that game," says Sapp's agent, Drew Rosenhaus. "I got to Tampa Bay the next day, and their negotiating position on a long-term deal had literally changed overnight. It was that immediate."
Sapp's 1995 drug controversy? It drifted away like so much pot smoke. Turns out, in fact, that Sapp's draft-day slide, from certain top-five pick to 12th, was actually good for him. He didn't get locked into one of those long-term deals, which allowed him to renegotiate in this, The Absurdly Bountiful Year of the Defensive Tackle, when teams are throwing $6 million a season at the likes of Sean Gilbert, who hasn't played in a year, and Chester McGlockton, who has taken to wearing fur coats to practice. Sapp, 25, signed for $33 million.
Now he feels vindicated because, as he once said, "a lot of players they were [drafting ahead of him in 1995] couldn't hold my jock in a month of Sundays." As you can see, Sapp is one hell of a talker, on the field and off. In college, he alternately referred to offensive linemen as "slobs, clowns, fools or fat guys," and that's the positive stuff. Sapp said back then, "I fear snakes, heights and alligators, but I don't fear any man on a football field. As long as he's flesh and blood like me, he can be beaten. When they invent the man who starts his morning by pouring motor oil into his system, then I'll worry."
Do you fear him now? Do you fear him as he thunders into your backfield, having traded that 1970 Impala for a different kind of drive? Sapp, absurdly athletic for his size, can dunk a basketball behind his head and punt a football 60 yards. For two years running, he has won the NFL Lineman Challenge, outmaneuvering and outlifting his peers in a made-for-television King of the Hill competition. Your terrified quarterback is scrambling out of the pocket now, trying to avoid this genetic menace, but he is done, buried under Sapp's 300 pounds. In just one play, you have seen up close what Minnesota offensive line coach Mike Tice is talking about when he says, "We're sorry that we have the misfortune of playing Sapp twice a year. He won't stay blocked, the son of a bitch."
You? You can go now.
Thanks for playing. Just leave the helmet and shoulder pads here and go back to the real world, where things feel so much safer.