This is Part 3 of a five-part series on Steelers legend Troy Polamalu, in advance of his scheduled Aug. 8 induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
Today: PITTSBURGH? ... REALLY?
Troy Polamalu hadn't given a lot of thought to playing in the NFL. He was too busy concentrating on being a star football player at USC while balancing being a student to think that far ahead in his life.
But given his play on the field, the NFL was going to come knocking.
Polamalu played football because he loved it. Playing in the NFL? He didn't give it a lot of thought.
"After my junior year, people asked me, ‘Are you going to enter the NFL Draft?’" Polamalu told me. "At that time, I honestly thought it was ridiculous that they thought I could play in the NFL. To me, I was immature in my mind. I thought my body was immature. I thought, ‘Those guys are grown men with families.’ In my mind, I’m just a kid. I’m a kid in my mind. I’m a kid in my body. I never considered that.
"After my senior year, I never thought about it throughout the process. I never felt the pressure. It goes back to high school. I never cared about going into high school. Going into my senior year in high school, I never worried, ‘I’ve got to do good so I can go to college.’ It was all just part of the process. In the NFL, it was the same way. So after my senior year, I was just training for the combine. It really just evolved naturally for me. I didn’t feel any pressure to feel I had to go to the next level."
"I think they started learning each other," his uncle, Kennedy Polamalu, now running backs coach for the Vikings, told me. "You know how much he studied. They started giving him indicators and that allowed him to play fast. He got to learn from the safety in front of him, Mike Logan. He got a chance to learn. The NFL is different from college. There was a point after the season, I told him to stay there in Pittsburgh, and he went to the Rooneys and they told him if they were him, they’d be in Hawaii.
"It’s one of those things, he grew up and matured. I don’t think it’s anything in terms of anything [more than], yeah, everybody wants to do good. It wasn’t effort. It was just him maturing. His second year, he really shined and grew."
