Willie Parker was right about one thing: he was the best they had. That is what his father, struggling to keep Willie from quitting, kept reminding him. Parker would tell his parents they did not have to attend the games, because he was not going to play.
“When I wanted to go in there and blow up the building, I would breathe really deep and said a little prayer and held back,” Parker said. “My dad was always thinking positive. He’d say: ‘You’re going to play this game. I feel it.’ He had me thinking, I probably will play. He’d play mind games with me the whole season.”
Parker has not spoken to the coaches since; Bunting was fired from North Carolina in 2006. At the Tar Heels’ Pro Day, Parker ran the 40 in a mediocre 4.51 seconds, according to Gil Brandt, the former Cowboys personnel chief. He has since run it in 4.28.
But Rooney, the son of the chairman of the Steelers, had kept tabs on Parker all those years. And after Parker was not one of the 16 running backs drafted in 2004, the Steelers signed him as an undrafted free agent.
As a low-rung rookie, he was practice fodder for the starting defense, whose players started complaining about how tiring it was to chase him around.
When the Steelers’ former coach Bill Cowher first saw Parker in camp, he wondered aloud why he had not played in college.
“The more we saw his ability to get to the corner, you were waiting to see what the kid’s weakness was,” said Cowher, who told Parker that all those hits he had saved in college were a blessing in disguise. “From that time on, I didn’t look at the North Carolina stars. I looked at the backups.”
