Good article on Simeon Rice

[FalconsFanatic]

I don't spend much time slumming, so I don't know if this has been posted or not here, but I thought this was a good article on Simeon. It's not really football related & it's not from a football source, so maybe nobody has seen it yet. I saw it when flying Delta this week in their sky magazine.

link to article

With homes in three time zones, his own business, a screenplay in the early stages of development, an exercise and conditioning regimen that would put a drill sergeant to shame, and a charity that benefits sick children, one could fairly call Simeon Rice a busy guy.

Oh, and he also plays football for a living.

“I’m on the road a lot, basically,” the Delta Gold Medallion flyer tells me—via cell phone, naturally. It’s a Chicago number, but when I call he happens to be in Phoenix, getting ready to put in a little time on the track as part of a morning workout.

The 30-year-old Rice, a two-time Pro Bowl defensive end, this month begins his ninth season in the National Football League and his fourth with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Known as a speed rusher of uncommon tenacity who can embarrass the most talented of offensive linemen and bring down the shiftiest of quarterbacks, he has never missed a game in his career because of injury. Sure, luck plays a part in that, but you can’t discount Rice’s dedication to fitness. His off-season workouts range from six to eight hours—daily. Putting himself through such rigors helps sustain him once the grind of a 16-game regular season arrives. To maintain his mental edge, his “therapy” includes long drives in the desert or the mountains. But if Rice is at the wheel, there’s a good chance that he’s heading for an airport.

“Flying is the most advantageous way to go,” he says, “and when I fly, I’m living out of a suitcase. I travel light. I can often buy what I need once I get where I’m going.” And just because you’re 6-foot-5 and 270 pounds doesn’t mean you can’t get clothes right off the rack. “I don’t have a problem with that,” he says.

One thing he does have a problem with—and this may seem odd coming from someone born and raised in Chicago—is the cold, especially when it gets in the way of his performance on the field. “Growing up, I always wanted a remedy for being uncomfortable in the cold,” he recalls. “I don’t care how many pairs of your grandfather’s thermals you put on, it’s not cutting it. That stuff gets wet, and then you get cold.”

Necessity—or, perhaps, strong desire—being the mother of invention, about four years ago as he was preparing to play the Green Bay Packers on a frigid winter day, Rice fashioned some makeshift “thermals” out of a wet suit, wore them under his uniform and went on to have one of his best games of the season, sacking Packer quarterback Brett Favre twice.

Then it hit him, he says: “Wow, this just might work.” So he drew up a prototype of the top and bottom, adding polyester and spandex to reduce stiffness and improve flexibility, and had a seamstress construct the garments. Soon after, the T3K (Thermal 3000) line was born (www.t3kwear.com). The gear is made from Neoprene to hold in warmth, with polyester and spandex added to wick moisture away from the body. This breathable fabric lets some heat escape for comfort while retaining enough to keep muscles warm.

“The looser you feel, the more flexible you are, the less susceptible you are to injury and the better you perform,” says the former NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year. But what’s substance without a little style? “It’s high-end fashion sports apparel,” he adds, “so you look good in it, too.”

No doubt Rice’s other foray into the apparel industry, a still-evolving line of “upscale men’s loungewear” to be called, fittingly, Sackmasta, will be equally fashion-forward.

Not surprisingly, Rice has taken to his role as an entrepreneur with the same determination he displays while wearing his No. 97 football jersey. With about 50 employees, including several dozen sales reps, he can’t help but note some parallels between running T3K and his other job, in which he runs down quarterbacks.

“This is the first time I’ve had to be coach of my team,” Rice says, noting that he has put his communications degree from the University of Illinois to good use. “I’ve always been a captain or a leader, but I’m trying to pull off all three: player, coach and general manager. It’s definitely an interesting process. Time management is everything for me, especially now.”

A big reason Rice is even in a position to have dual careers is his free-agent status. That came in the 2000 season after he left the Arizona Cardinals for Tampa Bay. His contract? A five-year, $41 million deal that made him the highest-paid defensive player in NFL history. He still calls Phoenix his primary home, though he also has a place in Tampa, Florida, and, as his bio innocently notes, has “a bedroom still assigned to him in his parents’ home in Chicago.

In just his second season with Tampa Bay, Rice earned a Super Bowl ring when the Bucs beat the Oakland Raiders. His performance was the stuff of highlight reels: He tallied three sacks, including one on an attempted two-point conversion. Although the Bucs stumbled last season, missing the playoffs, and the team’s roster went through the inevitable off-season shake-up, Rice insists his enthusiasm for the game hasn’t diminished. Yet he also concedes that he’s the sort of person who, barring a career-ending injury, will simply know when the time is right to hang up his cleats.

“I’m the type who can wake up one day and say, ‘OK, I’m retiring,’” he says. “I don’t think it’s going to come to that point in my career where my game is getting old. . . . It’ll be because I’ve done it, I’ve accomplished this. I’m in this game because I love it, and I’ll leave it because the love is probably going to be displaced or absent.”

It seems unlikely that his aforementioned cinematic aspirations—he says he’s still trying to raise the necessary money, and that he would help produce, not star in, the film—would be enough to get him to leave the gridiron. “It’s loosely based on my life and a collection of Iives I’ve been exposed to,” he says of the movie concept. “It’s a character based on [my] circumstances, someone going from Illinois to Arizona and being completely out of place and uncomfortable.”

More likely is that his passion for football would be transferred full-time to his burgeoning business interests and to philanthropy, the latter through the Phoenix-based Simeon J. Rice Charitable Fund. It currently helps fight sickle cell anemia and cancer—with special emphasis on children with the disease—but Rice says his “lifelong dream” is to develop a foster home for kids who have either been orphaned or who don’t have the benefit of a stable, nurturing domestic life.

“I want them to have a family and love and opportunity,” says Rice, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side with five siblings. He says he wants the beneficiaries of his charitable endeavors to be able to look back and say, “Wow, I never knew I didn’t have a family, because I have so much love and so much opportunity.”

Rice figures it could be five or 10 years before his charity is running—as its namesake tends to do—at full speed, but it’ll get there. He himself has never been personally affected by a serious disease, and he says that’s what drives him to help others: “I value the life that I have, the things I’ve been blessed to do. The good fortune I’ve had is the reason I want to make other lives brighter. It’s extremely important to me to give back.”—Brian Cook

[Dwight Smith]

Great article... thank you for posting that.

[PhillyBucFan]

Good read, Thanks.

And, aside from the slumming comment, nice post.