Along for ride

DETROIT -- The Bus has become ubiquitous.

Everywhere you roll around this windy city, you find Jerome Bettis and his mom, Gladys. They are harder to miss than Corey Dillon.

One minute they're hawking Campbell Soup to raise awareness for homeless shelters. Next they're accepting the key to the city. Soon after, Bettis sends his father, Johnnie, to pick up his soon-to-be-retired football jersey at Mackenzie High in a part of the city that is far away from the orgiastic glitter of this week's Super Bowl celebrations.

Last night, Bettis was bowling for dollars at The Majestic Theatre to raise funds for his charity, The Jerome Bettis Bus Stops Here Foundation. Every day he signs autographs whenever he steps out in public, which seems to be most of the time he's awake. The foundation is not just feeding the underprivileged. More than half of Bettis's teammates were at his parents' home, which has two kitchens, for a pre-Super Bowl feast Wednesday night.

It is a homecoming for Bettis, who was born in Detroit, and, as always, his parents are by his side. Not front and center, but not far away, just as they've been since he first picked up a football his freshman year at Henry Ford High School before he transferred to Mackenzie and launched a career that has taken him to three cities, beloved status, and eventually to the Hall of Fame.

The latter will have to wait. When the Steelers square off against the Seattle Seahawks Sunday at 6:30 p.m. in Super Bowl XL, Bettis will be in his familiar place and so will his parents. He'll be on the field and they'll be in the stands, where they've been for every game he's played.

That's four years of high school and four years at Notre Dame and 13 years in the NFL. That's preseason games and postseason games and all the games in between. That's day games and night games and wet games and dry games and many cold games. That's home games and away games and neutral-site games such as Sunday's, although Detroit is not a neutral site for the Bettis family.

Considering how many games Bettis's parents have watched (they estimate 400, which includes hockey games and bowling tournaments), maybe instead of buying his parents a new house when he signed his first contract with the Los Angeles Rams, Bettis should have bought them a bus.

Bettis's parents went to all those games for two good reasons: because they are his parents and because he asked them to, and there are no better reasons.

The man Gladys and Johnnie Bettis raised is almost 34, the fifth-leading rusher in the history of professional football. He can live anywhere he wants and with retirement from the NFL likely after Sunday's game, he can do pretty much whatever he wants. And what he wants to do most of the time is what they taught him to do on all those road trips in the dark of night with Al Green singing ''Love and Happiness" on the car radio. He wants to do the right thing.

''I'm living a dream," Bettis said earlier this week. ''Because I'm in this game, it gives me a medium to really talk about Detroit. I think it's great. If I'm an ambassador, I'm willing to carry that flag. I love the city."

He loves a city that is as blue collar as Archie Bunker, with more broken neighborhoods than whole ones. A city with high unemployment and low self-esteem. A city that even seems to have issues when it gives a man the key to the place.

On Tuesday, Bettis was handed the key from mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was wearing Bettis's white Steelers jersey when he gave him the same award that was once handed to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. When Bettis and his mom learned of this, they both seem shocked but Bettis is seldom lost for words.

''I think they canceled [Hussein's] key," Bettis said. ''They changed the locks on that one. But it's a great honor to be receiving the key to the city. It's a city that I love, so this means a lot to me. I'll definitely cherish it."

Kilpatrick declared it Jerome Bettis Week in Detroit that day, and the Steelers hope it will be. Gladys and Johnnie do, too, but if it doesn't end that way, they can all live with it because they'll still have what they've always had. They'll still have each other.

They had that long before anyone outside of the Bettis home had heard of young Jerome. They even had it the day Bettis remembers most clearly from growing up in a hard part of a hard city where he was surrounded by folks whose hearts were soft but whose backbones were not.

''I was a pretty good kid," Bettis recalled. ''I had a pretty good head on my shoulders but I got into a little mischief.

''Once I stole $20 out of my mom's purse. She found out and they told me, 'Assume the position!' They put me up against the wall to give me a search. It was a month of my brother coming out, every time something was missing, and putting me against the wall. It was like, 'I don't have the clock.' But what they were doing was reinforcing that if you do that kind of thing, you'll be considered a thief."

What they were doing was being parents, which is not always pleasant or easy. It's not always pleasant making all those long drives, like the night they got lost trying to find Beaver Stadium at Penn State. Even all those flights after their son was earning the kind of money that got his parents off the road weren't easy.

Johnnie and Gladys had jobs and their own lives to live, too, including taking care of two other children. So they had to juggle their schedules and their kids and their luggage and their Al Green tapes to get there, but they never missed.

They are the Cal Ripkens of parenthood, owners of a string of game appearances and even a few memorable pregame ones such as Wednesday night at the Bettis's, where Gladys and her sisters, Gloria and Phyllis, whipped up enough food to feed 35 of Jerome's teammates.

There were ham and turkey with cornbread dressing, string beans, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, potato salad, greens galore, and cornbread. There was so much food it led defensive back Michael Logan to say, ''That plate was the best thing that's happened to me since I set foot in Detroit." There's a few people around town who feel the same way about Gladys and Johnnie's boy.

''When I tell people I'm from Detroit they say, 'That's not the greatest place in the world,' " Bettis said Tuesday. ''I always say, 'You're right, but it's my place.' "

The room erupted in cheers. Chief among the throng was, naturally, Gladys Bettis, her other son, John Jr., and Bettis's business manager, Jahmal Dokes. Dokes, also a Mackenzie graduate, helps Bettis run what is rapidly becoming a financial empire built on hard work and good work. It is a charitable operation designed to build homes for people who need them as part of a redevelopment project on the riverfront east of downtown Detroit, and create jobs for people who want them. It is the kind of work his parents are proud to see Bettis do, just as they've been proud to watch him run with a football.

''I'm committed to this city," Bettis said. ''Not only speaking about it, but I'm willing to put my resources into the city and make it the city it can be because it definitely made me into the man who I am, in the sense that I became well-rounded. I learned a lot of the core values that I have today here, but also the toughness and physical nature I go out and try to play football with. I believe it all started here. That's why it's a special place in my heart always."

Yet when the journey started more than 20 years ago, when Gladys and Johnnie Bettis first sat in the stands at Mackenzie High and all Detroit's Public League schools, there were few thoughts of what might come beyond the moment. They were there to support their son because Bettis has struggled with asthma, an illness for which he now does public awareness advertisements and speaking engagements. Back then, his parents were there to make sure he came home the way he'd left the house -- healthy.

''What if something happened to him?" Gladys said. ''That was always in the front of my mind. I always held an inhaler in my hand in case he needed it. I didn't do anything any other parent wouldn't do. I had to be there just in case."

Three weekends ago was nearly such a case, but not because her son had an asthma attack. The Steelers were coasting in for a final touchdown to secure an AFC divisional playoff win over the Colts in Indianapolis when suddenly her son was on the ground and so was the ball. One second their boy was on his way to a game-sealing score. The next, the Colts' Nick Harper was running free on his way to what would likely be the winning score for the Colts.

And then Harper was down, tackled by the guy who'd promised a year ago he would take Bettis to the Super Bowl after the Patriots shattered Bettis's dream in the AFC Championship game.

That guy was a dinner guest Wednesday. It was quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who delivered on his promise not only with his arm but also with the hand that grabbed Harper's ankle and saved The Bus's bacon.

''I was praying, 'Don't let his career end like this,' " Gladys recalled. The Steelers ultimately moved on to Denver and now, after another win, they are in the town where Jerome Bettis grew up, trying to make his last game a memorable one.

His teammates began that process when they arrived in Detroit Monday, 30 of them sporting replicas of the No. 6 jersey Bettis wore at Notre Dame. That was the idea of linebacker Joey Porter, who fronted the money for the jerseys. Bettis was shocked and moved by the gesture. Bettis did the same for his city when he arrived at Metropolitan Airport wearing a Tigers' cap and jacket.

Across town, Gladys was learning what people thought of her and her husband when several neighbors opened their homes to out-of-town relatives of the Bettises. With most hotels jammed and many residents asking up to $20,000 to rent a condo for Super Bowl week, the Bettises needed what they've often dispensed. They needed a helping hand and they got it from their neighbors, including one who let them use their four-bedroom home while they were on vacation in Florida. What goes around comes around. At least sometimes.

''I was surprised," Gladys told the Detroit News Monday. ''I've heard from people I didn't even know had my number. I guess I forgot that people can be so nice. I thought it was a gracious and beautiful thing to do."

Those are words that seem to fit everything that's gone on this week for The Bus and his family. Their story could easily have become tedious and overdone. It could have become hokey or politicized or turned into a marketing extravaganza. But Jerome Bettis wouldn't allow it because he knows what would have happened. Gladys and Johnnie would have hollered, ''Assume the position," just as they did so long ago when a kid needed a lesson about life.

Their son has heeded not only the words but also the deeds of his parents. They were in the stands for a reason all those years. Not to be on center stage in some far distant Super Bowl, but for the only reason that counts. They were there because that's where they wanted to be and that's where they knew they should be, and the fruits of that love have blossomed inside their son.

''I'm just very lucky to have a mother and father who have been to all of my games and support me through thick and thin," Bettis said this week. ''They're my biggest fans."

Like their son, they may be in the stadium for the last time Sunday. Behind them will be a lot of miles and a wild week in which Johnnie often stayed in the background where he likes it, but where Gladys stood by as always, ready to run in when needed. They joined him along with Donovan McNabb and his mother, Wilma, at a Campbell Soup tailgater competition that sent a million cans to homeless shelters around the country. Mom and The Bus's team won that competition and several hours later Bettis was on stage again in a Detroit sports bar broadcasting his TV show back to Pittsburgh. Gladys and Johnnie Bettis were in the seats watching then, too.

''I really think it's great that my mother and father are able to capture a moment for themselves," Bettis said. ''Thirteen years following me all around this great country of ours, they deserve it. They've been incredible parents to me, my brother, and sister. I believe it's due. I like to think that it's due that I get to play in this game as well.

''I like to think that everyone is getting their just due."

And a well-deserved home game.