Bush's high school highlights

I don't know how long this link will survive on their website, and you need a login, but the New York Times put up an eight minute video of Reggie Bush high school highlights nearly two weeks ago.

Here is the link.

They're stunning.  I had actually seen some of Bush's videos when he was still in high school, and pretty much knew he'd be special.  What had sealed it for me was watching the high school football equivalent of an all star game, the US Army All America game.  Bush's Western squad was getting destroyed by a better-coached Eastern squad.  It was a horrible effort on the West's part, but their only productive player was Bush.  He didn't have any jaw-dropping highlights, but I saw a spark, what was really the first sign of the amazing internal fire that drives him.  He was upset and did his level best to make something out of himself that game and help his sorry teammates.  It didn't work, but I saw a guy who was not only a great athlete, but someone with a competitive fire well beyond that of his peers.  It was Jordanesque.

Only now is everyone else realizing his greatness.  I know we all love his highlights, but that game showed me something else, something we'd later see in Bush's iron willed bail-outs of USC in games against Virginia Tech, Stanford, Oregon State and UCLA in 2004 and Arizona State, Notre Dame and Fresno State this year.

Right now the press and the public are just coming around to realizing the heights of his physical greatness.  I see something greater, beyond the highlights, and it's something many of us won't realize until much later in his NFL career, that the guy is an all-time great athlete.  He has transformed himself as a back, showing a physical toughness people didn't expect after he was initially dogged as a flashy back with no inside carry abilities.  He attacked that image by getting stronger and changing his physical approach to the game in the offseason.  We're seeing the results this year.  The transformation is just another sign of the great internal fire the guy has.  Football is too complex a sport to have a player as dominant as Michael Jordan (11 players to a side versus five, for starters), but Bush may be as close as we'll get.  Just watch.