Dominic Dondrell Rhodes didn’t have any rings. His best shot passed when his high-school team in Abilene, Texas, lost the coveted 5A state championship game to a team quarterbacked by a kid named
Drew Brees. He later broke every school rushing record at Midwestern State, a Division II school in Wichita Falls, in just two seasons.
But no NFL team drafted him six year ago, and he was signed by the
Indianapolis Colts .
He mostly watched from the sidelines as the team’s star rusher,
Edgerrin James, carried the load. And when James was shipped out prior to this season, he saw the Colts use their first-round pick to select running back
Joseph Addai out of LSU.
Addai had a ring, earned as a member of the 2004 Tigers, who shared college football’s convoluted national championship with USC. Though he started 16 games this season (15 more than he started in the previous five seasons), Rhodes mostly sat again as his rookie backup became the team’s new transcendent star rusher, and the Colts starter once the playoffs began.
No matter. At 28, Rhodes finally has a ring. One he earned for being much more than a supportive observer and steady backup. Rhodes was the Colts’ hammer in their
29-17 triumph over the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI in Miami. Beneath heavy clouds that drenched the field, Rhodes rumbled and rolled for 113 muddy yards and scored the second-quarter touchdown that gave the Colts the lead for good.
After averaging fewer than 10 carries per game during the final 11 games of the regular season, Rhodes carries the ball 21 times on Sunday. Addai added 19 carries and 77 yards, as well as 66 yards on 10 receptions. "It's just awesome to win a Super Bowl ring,” Rhodes said after the game. “It's great for all my team-mates after we worked so hard. It's a credit to everybody and I love my teammates. We came out and played hard today. We played through the weather, through everything. It's awesome."
The Colts were often disparagingly called a “domed team,” incapable of winning football games in football weather. That was just one of many misconceptions cast aside on Sunday evening by a team also that doused the belief that a black head coach could never lead a team to a Super Bowl triumph and slayed the monkey that clung to
Peyton Manning’s back.
Rhodes and Addai were the reasons why the
Colts beat the Bears like the Bears were supposed to beat them. They ran, ran and ran the ball again until the spirit of the defense was bruised and beaten. Their performances prevented Manning from having to shoulder too much with a painful thumb injury suffered two weeks ago in the AFC championship game.
It’s intriguing that an athlete can be largely anonymous for so long, and then emerge on a sport’s grandest stage; a stand-in who’d been waiting for the spotlight to come his way for longer than the span of most careers. Rhodes had no ring, and during last Tuesday’s bustling media day-fest, in which more than 1,000 media types swarmed players from both teams for tidbits and sound bytes, you can bet he was one of the guys reading a paper while waiting for someone to come speak to him.
He’s no longer anonymous -- another “good guy” in a Super Bowl that seemed to have a plethora of such -- and he certainly did not have to wait for anyone to speak with him well into Sunday night. In fact, as he and his head coach,
Tony Dungy, left the field after accepting the Lombardi Trophy for their triumph, the two men looked into a camera lens pointed in their direction and, on cue, said: “We’re going to Disney World.”
And he’s going to finally get a ring.
