Bucs' finest hour painful for Gruber Gary Shelton, The St.Petersburg Times, published 3 January 2000 By the time the dancing began, he was on his back in a cold, stark room beyond the playing field. A team was moving toward the future, and a warrior had been left in the past. Outside, there were Gatorade baths and high-fives, backslaps and embraces. The Tampa Bay Bucs kept calling each other names. "Champion," one would say to another, letting the word slide off the tongue as if it were something magical. For years, Paul Gruber had dreamed of a day like this. All those rotten final weeks to all those rotten seasons, he had hoped for a final regular-season game when there was a goal to be won, when there was something to be celebrated. Now, it was here, and his career might be gone, as if the two somehow passed along the way. As the Bucs finished a 20-6 victory over the Bears, Gruber lay inside the training room of the visitors locker room - a small, bleach- colored alcove a million miles from left tackle. When the Bucs celebrated the Central Division title, he listened to the noise with his broken right leg wrapped from thigh to toe. Even as his teammates whooped and hollered in the locker room next door, he had to ask general manager Rich McKay to bring him one of the NFC Central championship hats and T-shirts that were being handed out to the players. Is this how it ends? With your team finally healed, and your right leg in two pieces? Is this how you leave? In the bed of a toy truck, hauled away like yesterday's equipment? Is this the last chapter? Just when the book is getting good? This stinks. This is rotten. This was an awful contrast to the finest day the Bucs have had in two decades. No one deserved to enjoy the glory of the moment more than Gruber, the quiet rock of the Bucs offensive line. No one was better served to remember the squalor of what this franchise used to be, so no one should have smiled wider at how far it has come. Instead, Gruber lay in the training room, his tibia broken, his season and perhaps his career complete. One by one, teammates filed in, shaking his hand. Gruber, ever the pro, managed to smile. Then he lay back and looked at the ceiling. "I'm disappointed," he said, his face betraying little of his pain, his voice even but quiet. "There's a great opportunity ahead for this team. But it's a team thing, and I've been blessed throughout my career not to have any serious injuries. I trust God, and I believe this happened now for a reason." What part hurts worse, he was asked. The physical or the emotional? Gruber paused for a long moment. "Physically, I can handle it," he said finally. "Emotionally, I'm disappointed." The play happened late in the third quarter, with the Bucs driving. On a second-and-10 pass play, Chicago's Jim Flanigan dived toward Tampa Bay's Shaun King and rolled up the back of Gruber's legs. Gruber said he heard a loud pop and went down hard. He tried to stand because, by golly, he was proud of never having been carted off a field. But the pain shot through his leg, and when he looked down, "it wasn't straight. It was kind of off to the left." He collapsed. Immediately, his teammates knew it was serious. Gruber is not a player prone to flop around to milk applause. When a warrior goes down, it is only because that is the only alternative. Mike Alstott knelt beside him. Hardy Nickerson, the linebacker, came running onto the field "so the first face he would see when he looked up was mine, supporting him." They ended up loading Gruber onto the back of a cart and taking him from the field. When you consider his age, and the stage of his career, it could have been the final time he left the field as a player. Where is the justice in that? And, for goodness' sakes, could someone get this man a hat? "It's terrible," Brad Culpepper said. "As good as you feel about winning this game, you feel almost that bad that someone like Paul works so hard to get into this position and then gets hurt. It's tragic." "It's crazy," Warren Sapp said. "This is a dirty game sometimes." Often, the best part of good times is remembering how long they took to arrive. It was impossible to watch the Bucs' first division title since King was 3 years old without thinking of the horrible times. Was this like watching hell freeze over? If so, Gruber saw the hell up close. He played left tackle for it. "I'd tell you to look at the tapes and defy you to show me when he played bad," McKay said. "Most guys have off days, but not Paul. He never got the recognition he deserved, because we were so bad. He never made the Pro Bowl, and we all know he should have made it a bunch of times." He didn't. Still, Gruber showed up every week, every down. He was this team's ironman, the only dependable rock in a franchise built on a fault. Other draft picks turned into McCants and McRaes and Thomases. Only Gruber gave the team excellence every play, every day. Lately, what you have heard about Gruber is how he was no longer what he had been. Which is true. His shoulders have been banged up for most of the year, and he has hinted at retirement, and the Bucs have hinted about new left tackles. To some, this was his final hurrah. He was two victories from the Super Bowl, for goodness' sake. And then his leg snapped, and his teammates were celebrating without him. "This was probably the worst injury to anyone I've ever seen," Culpepper said. "But the silver lining is that we are division champions, and he was a big part of it. He can hold his head up high. If this was his last play, he went out on top." Culpepper paused for a minute. "But maybe this will give him incentive to come back again," he said. "I know I'm going to start egging him on. I'll say 'Hey, you can't stop on an injury.' " Gruber grinned at that. As for the future, he says he'll have a lot of time on crutches to think. He's not going to make a decision yet. He leaned back on the table again. He looked at the clothing on a nearby table. Beside him, there was a black NFC Central Champions cap and white T-shirt. Finally, they had arrived.