More than a decade has come and gone since he last blasted a shoulder pad into anyone, last crumpled some luckless defender to the floor of an NFL stadium, last carried his helmet into that Hall of Fame sunset.
You won't be surprised, but they are still putting Alan Faneca back together again.
We were going over his surgeries on the phone the other day from Virginia Beach, where the great Steelers guard is coaching high school football, and he thinks there have been eight of them, a relatively modest number for someone who got through 13 autumns of wicked Sundays.
"I been putting off my shoulder for years, even before COVID," he said. "I never once thought along my journey that I wasn't gonna need some bionic parts at some point down the line to repair some of the damage that I was doing. At the NFL level, if you don't think that's comin', you're fooling yourself because it's a very brutal game."
So the guy Steelers teammates and coaches used to call Big Red for his flowing red hair and his outsized influence on some of their greatest successes got his bionic shoulder only this spring at Vanderbilt University, one of the primary medical centers partnering with the Pro Football Hall of Fame in a venture called Hall of Fame Health, a program to help post-career footballers with health-related issues, of which there are many.
That right shoulder, the trigger for countless full-menace collisions going back to high school, had unavoidably been destabilized, disclocated, and ultimately in need of the Vanderbilt implant ("a new shoulder" Big Red called it), and thus it joins the reconstructed left shoulder, the left ankle, right wrist, several fingers, and various other parts whose surgeries have faded from memory.
What hasn't faded very much at all is his football memory, especially as he looks in on the current Steelers and identifies some stunning parallels.
"You hate to use the word, the 'T' word, but it's a bit of a transition year," he said. "They're takin' their lumps and you just gotta learn from them. The offensive line has picked it up from last year. With an offensive line, there is always stuff we can do better, and I always look at it from that framework. We could have given the quarterback more time, kept him cleaner. Even when an offensive line is hitting on all cylinders and everybody's patting 'em on the back, they're in the room talkin' about what they all can do better."
When Faneca looks up and sees the Steelers dragging around a 3-7 record, he knows too well the feeling. He and his 2003 teammates had the same predicament and it hasn't happened since.
"We had a couple other slow starts, but anytime you're 3-7 or anything near that, you just have to remember one, this is a job and it is a profession. And you still gotta come to work and you gotta put in the time and you gotta put it in with the same enthusiasm as you did if you were 7-3.
"And it's hard. It's not an easy thing to do. You gotta focus on yourself. How can I make things better? Then, how can we be better as a group? If everybody does that, that's when you'll start seeing tighter games, better results, that's how you turn the tide."
That 2003 team steadied itself to finish 3-3, but the tide didn't fully turn until the offense was turned over to a rookie quarterback who happened to be the club's top draft pick. Faneca famously dreaded it, famously saying "No, it's not exciting," about the prospect of Ben Roethlisberger starting in just the third game of the 2004 season. "Do you want to go with some young kid out of college?"
It was fortunate that team was so talented everywhere else that Roethlisberger had little choice but to learn fast; they went 15-1 and won the Super Bowl a year later. But what Faneca feared back then, and had every right to, is what you're seeing now — a rookie quarterback and a first-round pick who's learning at a more conventional pace on a team that not talented enough to cover for him.
"Every young player, regardless of position, is going to come in and make mistakes," Faneca said. "Even if you play at a Pro Bowl, All-Pro level, you're still going to make the occasional mistake that the guy that's been there a couple of years is not. Those lumps have to be taken and they're just most visible when you've got the ball in your hand most of the time. You've just gotta kind of grin and bear it and move on."
Faneca eventually moved on to the Jets for a couple of seasons, then another with the Cardinals before finishing his career. He started every single game of his final nine seasons and 201 of 206 in a career that included nine Pro Bowls and a Super Bowl, where his crunching block on Seattle linebacker LeRoy Hill catapulted Willie Parker toward a 75-yard touchdown run, longest in the game's history.
He still gets excited for the Friday night lights at Cox High in Virginia, and you'd think if you're carrying a Super Bowl ring and another that says Hall of Fame Class of 2021, teenagers might listen to you.
Faneca won't even be 46 until next week, so it's imperative that he can be fully active with his wife, Julie, and his three young children. It'll be better now that he's essentially back in one piece.
