The Pittsburgh Steelers teams of the early 2000s are the stuff of legends.
Those teams went to multiple Super Bowls, winning two. Over the past several years, Steelers fans have had to bear witness to a painful changing of the guard.
It felt like those teams, those players had some kind of magical bond with each other and it makes for a great time, with fantastic stories when they reminiscence.
However, not all memories are happy ones, as we heard when former legendary center Maurkice Pouncey joined offensive guard Ramon Foster on his podcast, The Ramon Foster Show on DK Pittsburgh Sports. Foster was an undrafted free agent signed by Pittsburgh in 2009 and Pouncey was drafted in the first round of 2010. They played together in black and gold until 2019 and became inseparable friends.
Pouncy shared his draft-to-rookie story with Foster on the show. He said that he came out as a junior so he had to do every combine activity there was and he also had to meet with more teams. He recalled meeting with 28 teams but the Steelers stood out immediately.
"I'm telling my strength coach I just hope the Steelers come talk to me, come down here to meet with me because the meeting I had with them was just so organic. It just made me feel like everything was right. I'm like this might be the team. When they came to Gainesville it blew my mind. Honestly, it was a dream come true."
Foster points out that there was already a Super Bowl-winning center, Justin Hartwig, on the team in 2010 when Pouncey arrived. He suggests there might have been some hard feelings about the team drafting his replacement.
"Yeah it was such a weird thing because I was the player that always had tough love on everybody and I put a lot of accountability on players but I was also the player that taught everybody everything that I knew and I expected that. I expected him to try. I tried to learn from him, but he was so standoffish about it. It just kind of rubbed me the wrong way."
"You know how I am, I'm such a big-hearted dude, I stepped back and I felt bad for him because he came up to me before we played the Denver Broncos in our fourth game, and that's the game I ended up starting, and he came up to me and was like, 'Man Pounce I see it now, I just want to be here.'"
Pouncey also showed his softer side by empathizing with Hartwig.
"I get it too you know, you're sitting there, had a lot of success in your 12 or 13 years, and just come off a Super Bowl, it wasn't like he was a bad player, Hartwig was a good player. For that to happen, there's a lot of pride that comes with it. You know how awkward it was, it's just like meeting and stuff and they're all laughing, at practice and no one's really talking so it was a weird process. But I understood both sides and now looking back on it there are no hard feelings at all."
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