Santonio Holmes Eyes Canton
Posted by Mike Florio on June 27, 2009, 3:50 p.m.
As the annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony approaches, one current player who eventually wants to get in has much more impressive credentials than he did when the current calendar year commenced.
Receiver Santonio Holmes, who didn’t break out in his third NFL regular season, had a stellar postseason with the Steelers, culminating in a championship-winning touchdown catch and a Super Bowl MVP trophy.
And he wants to keep it going.
“Before I started in the NFL, before I got drafted, I told a group of friends that no matter what I did throughout my career, I wanted to be in the Hall of Fame,” Holmes recently told Steve Greenberg of Sporting News. “That is something that would touch me more than everything that comes with being a star. . . . That’s still my goal. Regardless of me winning the Super Bowl, playing in the Pro Bowl, having a 1,000-yard season, I want to be in the Hall of Fame. And whatever it takes to get into the Hall of Fame, that’s what I’m going to do.”
The fact that he’s not in a high-octane offense could make it more of a challenge. Then again, Lynn Swann parlayed mediocre stats into a Hall of Fame career, thanks to being part of four Super Bowl-winning teams and being named Super Bowl MVP once.
So Holmes apparently won’t be looking for a change of scenery to get to Canton — and he won’t need one if the Steelers keep winning.
“I grew up a Steelers fan,” Holmes said. “If I could play here for another 30 years, I would. I don’t really care about the numbers. I play the game because I love playing.”
It had been assumed that he also loves drugs; his 2008 arrest for marijuana possession and his pre-Super Bowl admission that he sold drugs as a youth helped fuel that perception.
But Holmes now says that he doesn’t smoke marijuana. “That’s not me,” he said.
And he apparently is trying to push his drug-selling days so far into his past that his story now seems a bit implausible.
Specifically, Holmes told Sporting News that he sold drugs when he was “about 6, 7 years old.”
Though our guess is that he was slightly older than six or seven when he sold something far more potent than lemonade, Holmes need not worry about past drug selling or current/future drug use from derailing his run for the Hall of Fame.
If NFL fans don’t care about players using steroids, they definitely don’t care about the many NFL players who light up a doobie, either every blue moon or more frequently.
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Originally Posted by PSU_dropout43
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