He heard the knock. Now the door to football immortality finally opens for Isaac Bruce | Opinion
He was 7. He remembers everything about that first team. The uniform. That first helmet. His coach’s name. The pop of pads -- the sounds of football that would become the soundtrack of his life.
The Fort Lauderdale Barracudas practiced and played at Holiday Park. Isaac Bruce sometimes drives by there, still. The park has changed. The iconic fighter jet at the entrance is long gone. The memories are not.
It’s funny, but no matter how high the mountain you scale, you always remember the first step.
“I still see guys here locally in town who I played with on that team,” he says.
Bruce reaches his sport’s mountaintop this Saturday when he will be enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, as one of the Class of 2020 whose induction was delayed one year by the pandemic.
The first jacket he ever wore was one his parents bought specially for church on Sundays.
He will wear a different jacket on Saturday. It’s gold.
The Hall mails you your jacket ahead of time to try on for the fit, but you have to send it right back. Bruce jokes that he wore it while mowing his lawn. (I think he was joking).
Bruce is one of four men with strong South Florida ties going in Saturday, along with former Hurricanes and Dolphins coach Jimmy Johnson, ex-Canes star running back Edgerrin James and former Coral Springs High guard Steve Hutchinson.
But none of the locals is as local as Bruce, who was born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, starred at the city’s Dillard High and lives in town to this day along with his wife and two daughters ages 11 and 6..
He would have stayed home and been a UM Hurricane, too, except Dennis Erickson, the coach at the time, didn’t recruit him.
“I guess they missed out,” he says with a small smile.
Neither did Florida State recruit him out of Dillard. He heard from the Florida Gators, but the interest was lukewarm, and too late. He wound up at Memphis. He never forgot that when he got to the NFL.
“Every time I’d face a [defensive back] that went to Florida State, Miami or Florida,” he says, “I turned my game up two notches.”
He would become the first Memphis Tiger to make the Hall of Fame, after entering the NFL as a second-round draft pick and forging a 16-year career from 1994 to 2009 with the St. Louis Rams except for the last two seasons in San Francisco.
Every wide receiver of his era was overshadowed by the incomparable Jerry Rice, but Bruce was as good as anybody else — a mainstay of “The Greatest Show on Turf” Rams who electrified on offense and won the Super Bowl in the 1999 season (Bruce had the winning 73-yard catch), getting back but losing two seasons later.
When Bruce retired his 15,208 career receiving yards were second only to Rice. He caught 1,024 passes, averaged a big 14.9 yards per catch and scored 91 touchdowns, with eight 1,000-yard seasons.
Despite that career resume the oft-overlooked Bruce made the Pro Bowl but four times. Incredibly, he was snubbed even in 1995, when he caught 119 passes for 1,781 yards and 13 TDs. And he was not voted into Canton until his sixth year of eligibility and fourth year as a finalist.
He feels the same way about that long wait as he did about being all but ignored by the major state colleges coming out of Dillard.
“It’s long overdue. I expected the knock [on the door] the very first year I was eligible,” he says bluntly. “Sometimes there are politics in things and the Pro Football Hall of Fame is no different. There’s no criteria for what a first-ballot Hall of Famer is, so it’s left to other people’s interpretation. Maybe something needs to be tweaked.”
That knock on the door, though. It changes everything.
“Once you get selected, all the bad taste leaves you,” says Bruce, now 48. “I’m grateful. Humbled by it. The opportunity to play is a huge privilege. To be compared now with the ultimate greats, it’s mind-boggling at times. When you have a Hall of Fame jacket it’s one of those iconic sports pieces. Now I have an opportunity to publicly say thanks to a lot of people. I’m excited. I got a big crew.”
Isaac is one of 15 siblings. One, older brother Samuel, will present him in Canton.
“He’s the person I wanted to be like ,” says Isaac. “He gave me a love for football that hasn’t waned.”
Isaac’s dad owned a roofing company for more than 40 Years. Mom was a homemaker. ESPN’s Chris Berman nicknamed Isaac “The Reverend” because he wanted to be a minister after football. Today Isaac and his wife do ministry. He also runs the Cross-Fit Increase gym, which folks call the Bruce Zone.
When you are a finalist, the Hall puts you up in a hotel room in the Super Bowl city, where you await the famous knock on the door. (If you don’t make it, you get a sorry-not-this-time phone call).
Three times previous, Bruce was a finalist and waited to hear the knock that never came.
In January of 2020 the Super Bowl was at Hard Rock Stadium, so Bruce could have opted to be at home instead of in a hotel room. He chose the hotel.
“I wanted to experience the knock on the door,” he says.
Finally it came. Six years later than it might have and probably should have, and some 41 years after he first put on that Barracudas jersey, Isaac Bruce heard the knock.
This story was originally published August 4, 2021 at 1:27 PM.
