Nobody saw this coming from Kurt Warner

Barry Horn, Dallas Morning News - ATLANTA - The smartest minds in the NFL didn't see it. Neither did the dumbest ones. Nobody did except Dave Jensen.

"He just came in and did his work. He was calm and patient," Jensen said. "He looks the same now. He just stands back there poised."

Publication Date: 01/30/2000

Who knew the way a stock clerk stacked peanut butter jars could indicate pro football greatness?

They suspected as much at the Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa. That's where the Kurt Warner fairy tale began five years ago.

It has taken him around the Arena Football League backwoods, through the European football theater, past a gantlet of cold shoulders from NFL teams and landed him here Monday. At the Super Bowl, as quarterback/mythical figure of the St. Louis Rams. America has been catching on to the life-and-death-and-everything-else story.

From the Hy-Vee to the killer tornado to the dropped baby to the Billy Graham Crusade, it has everything. As Warner put together one of the greatest seasons in NFL history, reporters were dispatched to faraway places to make sure it wasn't the feel-good publicity stunt to end all stunts.

"I've had about 10 or 11 talk to me," said Jensen, who was the Hy-Vee's night stock manager. "I should have been taking better notes five years ago." David Whitley, Orlando Sentinel Kurt Warner fades back, a can of beans in his hand, and looks for the receiver sprinting between the cheese table and the meat freezer.

Before he hurls the beans and risks smashing a display case of gourmet foods, he wakes up. It's not Kurt Warner at all, it's just a supermarket stock boy, or, if you prefer, stock person.

Stocking shelves at night in a supermarket was what Warner was doing in 1994 in Cedar Falls. Jan. 30 - it says here - he will be playing in the Super Bowl as quarterback for the St. Louis Rams and telling a huge television audience that he's going to an amusement park.

Kurt Warner is a flesh-and-blood dream realized. Ed Schuyler Jr., Associated Press Kurt Warner's time arrived with the St. Louis Rams on the evening of Aug. 28 in a torrent of anguish, regret and disbelief.

Quarterback Trent Green had just gone down with a season-ending knee injury in an exhibition game. The Rams' aggressive off-season makeover suddenly looked pointless.

The losingest team of the decade seemed consigned to lose some more. Embattled Coach Dick Vermeil cried, perhaps sensing his time in St. Louis was up. Into the middle of this maelstrom of emotion stepped Warner, 28, a veteran of NFL Europe (a league for marginal players) and the Arena League (eight-man football on a tight, 50-yard field), and an unknown commodity at quarterback.

The Rams hoped for survival. Miraculously, they found salvation. Ken Murray, Baltimore Sun ST. LOUIS - Explain it again. Slowly. Use graphs, overhead projectors, subtitles, anything you can to make me understand the NFL, and Kurt Warner, and how one never knew about the other.

Tell me why Ryan Leaf and Dan McGwire and Rick Mirer and Heath Shuler and Trent Dilfer and Daunte Culpepper and Akili Smith are taken in the first round, and Kurt Warner is not taken at all.

Tell me why Brett Favre and Terrell Davis and Warner have won the past three Most Valuable Player awards - a third-round pick Atlanta took and traded, a sixth-round pick by Denver, and the proud pilot of the Iowa Barnstormers and the Amsterdam Admirals.

Mark Whicker, Orange Co. Register ST. LOUIS - This is exactly how 28-year-old Kurt Warner always believed it would be. He'd be the starting quarterback on a NFL team in the hunt for a Super Bowl title. He'd be a leader of men, the toast of a town, a winner in the end.

Why couldn't he be the National Football League's Most Valuable Player? He had the arm, the savvy, the guts.

So what if five years ago the other guys stocking shelves on the night shift at the Hy-Vee in Cedar Falls, Iowa, thought their co-worker, who shared his football beliefs, a bit of an eccentric.

It never really bothered Kurt Warner that he was a prophet without a flock. After all, he believed in Kurt Warner.