Youth football players come to learn from former Burlington standout Tony Romo
BY PETER JACKEL
Journal Times | Posted: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 12:00 am
BURLINGTON - He's an "A" list celebrity, someone whose face you regularly see in the tabloids at grocery store checkout lines and on your television screen during "Entertainment Tonight," "Access Hollywood" and "Inside Edition."
He's the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, a marquee position in professional sports that might be paralleled only by playing center field for the New York Yankees.
But Tuesday morning, Tony Romo was just good old Tony, a kid at heart who was giving back to his old high school football program and community with his fifth annual football clinic.
Under a blazing July sun that pushed the thermometer to near 90 degrees, Romo intermingled with about 275 kids on practice grounds that weren't even designed when he starred at Burlington in 1996 and '97. With the assistance of a large staff headed by Burlington football coach Hans Block, Romo tried to reach as much of his awe-stricken audience as possible with motivational words interspersed with fundamentals.
Later Tuesday, he gave a free clinic for about 600 younger kids at the same practice field. He will wrap up the camp this morning with the same 275 athletes who were on hand Tuesday before playing in Racine's Tri-Course Golf Tournament later this week (he was champion of the event in 2004).
When Romo talked, you could hear a pin drop. After all, how often do kids get to associate with a professional quarterback, let alone one who has attained a celebrity status that rivals Joe Namath and Tom Brady?
Just how huge is Romo in the Burlington community?
"In Burlington, if you go down to Veronico's (restaurant), they have a wrap named after him," said Joe Baumeister, a senior-to-be running back for Burlington. "He's pretty big in Burlington. He's all over the place."
How about you, Ben Burling? Just how huge is Romo?
"Everybody around here knows him, everybody talks about him," said the sophomore-to-be defensive end at Burlington. "It's a big deal when he comes into Burlington. Everybody is glad that he's still in touch with his hometown."
Every summer since 2004, which was Romo's first offseason with the Cowboys, he has held a clinic at the school to benefit his high school's football program. There were fewer than 100 campers that first summer, but as Romo's stature grew with the Cowboys, so did the number of kids attending this clinic.
"This is the fifth year that Tony's come back and he's done a terrific job with this," Block said. "In the first year that we did this, we had 72 or 73 kids. The second year, I think it grew to 120. The last couple of years, we were over 200 and now it's 275.
"It's getting a little bigger every year and we're getting a little better organized with it. Overall, I just think it's a tremendous experience. This afternoon, with 600 kids, that means there's going to be 900 kids who are going to have a chance to meet Tony Romo."
And chances are, each of those kids took home something meaningful.
"He said, 'If you bring it on every play, that's the most important thing,' " said Andrew Smith, a returning starter at right guard for Burlington this fall. "You've got to work hard during the offseason, of course, and, obviously, technique is important, but if you work hard on every play, that's the most important thing."
Has Smith remembered that advice during games?
"Yeah, definitely," he said. "When you get tired at the end of games, you think, 'Tony Romo told me this and look how far he's gotten, so he's obviously doing the right things.' "
For Romo, doing the right thing means remaining a fixture in his community and remembering from where he came.
"It's such a neat thing to show the kids some of the things you've learned along the way," Romo said. "I feel that I would have just hung on every word if a really good college player would have come back and talked to us when I was at Burlington. So I can only imagine what it would have been like if an NFL player would have come back and talked to me about certain things about the sport when I was in high school."
And when Romo wrapped up his camp early Tuesday afternoon, he left his campers with words of wisdom. He told them that, while playing golf with Michael Jordan at Lake Tahoe last weekend, he asked Jordan, "what made you tick as an athlete?"
Romo went on to tell the campers that Jordan told him, "I just wanted to get better at everything. I asked myself what my weaknesses were and I tried to work on them. And every year, I found myself getting better than the year before."