FMIA: Ja’Marr Chase Is On A Quest For Greatness And How Aaron Rodgers Learned to Love Himself

CINCINNATI — I hear this a lot, or something like it, from family and from friends in the business:

Why do you still go on that training-camp trip? Killing yourself, zipping from camp to camp. You’re 65 now. Cut it back.

This story is why.

What separates the great players from the very good players? I saw it the other day on a lonely field in the Midwest under a summer afternoon broiler, 92 degrees with 85 percent humidity, when the 2021 NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year was the only football player at work.

Ja’Marr Chase was the last of 90 players on the field for the AFC champion Bengals on this dog-day Cincinnati afternoon, prepping to catch footballs shot out of a Jugs machine at short range at 40 mph. Chase started catching them with running back Chris Evans providing some distracting defense to make the catches tougher, but then Evans had to hustle inside for a meeting. So now, other than one other Bengal signing autographs 100 yards away for a few fans, and two equipment guys, the place was Bengal-free. Players and coaches were inside the air-conditioned locker room and offices.

Chase now had one problem: He needed a DB to play defense. He saw the stoop-shouldered boss of Bengals.com, Geoff Hobson, waiting for him to finish the drill so he could ask him a few questions. Hobson asked if Chase needed him to play defense.

“If you want to,” Chase said.

In his last football game, the Super Bowl, Chase was guarded by all-world corner Jalen Ramsey.

Now he’d be guarded by a gray-haired 63-year-old scribe who last played football in the Carter administration.

The object of this drill was not only for Chase to work on catching line-drive throws, but to have someone distract him with a tug on the jersey or wave a white