Kurt Warner gets his gold jacket

CANTON, Ohio — Iowa places its first native in the Pro Football Hall of Fame Saturday night, and Kurt Warner may bring a lot of friends from the state along during his induction speech.

That will likely include people from his days at Regis High in Cedar Rapids, the University of Northern Iowa, and Arena Football's Iowa Barnstormers.

'For me,' Warner said here Friday, 'there are just so many people, so many fan bases, so many groups that went into, to me, getting here.

'Tomorrow is more about being inclusive with everybody, letting everybody know as a whole that they're a part in this. Not necessarily one person or one group or one team more than another.'

Friday was a full day here for Warner. He was at the Hall's annual Ray Nitschke Luncheon, with about 80 of the football heroes in the exclusive club he'll join Saturday.

'Us rookies were told to shut up and not say anything,' Warner said. 'We got to hear from different guys, guys you watched growing up, guys you wanted to be like.'

Warner had media obligations Friday afternoon. He guested on a 'town hall' broadcast on Sirius/XM satellite radio.

Finally, he and this year's other six Hall inductees got their special piece of football-related attire at Friday night's Gold Jacket Dinner at the Canton Civic Center. They walked through a gauntlet of several dozen gold-clad Hall of Famers on their way to center stage, legends of their sport including Jim Brown, Joe Namath and Gale Sayers.

Saturday night's ceremony at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium will fete former players Kenny Easley, Jason Taylor, Morten Andersen, Terrell Davis, and LaDainian Tomlinson and Warner, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Warner's will close the event with words he said he has worked hard to craft this summer.

'There were a number of drafts,' Warner said. 'I would take it paragraph by paragraph, point by point. … More importantly, it was about getting the wording right more than anything.

'I put a lot of time into it down the stretch. I really went over it, thought about it, prayed about it. You want to make sure you cover everybody, and cover it the right way.'

Warner expressed regret he probably wouldn't be able to focus on listening to the other inductees' speeches because he'll be thinking about his own.

'I always believed nerves come from something being important,' he said, 'something you want to do right, putting that expectation on you to make sure you live up to what it is you want do at any particular moment.

'Every game I played in, I was nervous. Going into tomorrow, I wouldn't say I'm really nervous now. But I know I'm going to be nervous from the standpoint that I want to do justice to what I'm trying to do on the stage.

'It's important to me. It's not just go up there and whatever happens, so what, you're in the Hall of Fame.'

Almost as much as his three Super Bowl appearances (he has three of the top four passing-yardage games in Super Bowl history), a world championship and two NFL regular-season MVP awards, Warner got here because of his oft-told story that he says will eventually be made into a Hollywood movie.

It certainly became American sports lore. Warner was undrafted out of UNI. He stocked shelves at a Waterloo-Cedar Falls Hy-Vee between the end of his college career and the start of his Arena Football days. He played a season for Amsterdam's NFL Europe team. He signed with the St. Louis Rams in 1998 and became their starting quarterback in 1999 because of an injury to starter Trent Green late in the preseason.

Five months later, Warner was the Super Bowl MVP for the league-champion Rams.

'I covered a lot of ground,' said Warner, 'and want to make sure I use that ground to encourage and inspire other people that you can do it as well. You can keep going, find yourself on the mountaintop (after) you get to those moments there's that fork in the road and everybody else is saying 'You've got to go this way, you may as well give it up,' and you believe you should go the other way.

'That to me is what is important about my speech tomorrow.'

Warner reaches football's mountaintop Saturday night.