When you think about a Steeler who has won a Super Bowl, your mind probably gravitates toward some of the all-time greats like Terry Bradshaw, Joe Greene, or Troy Polamalu. But football is a team sport, and there are several unheralded names who sport the same Super Bowl ring as the rest of them. Perhaps no name is more unheralded in Steelers’ Super Bowl lore than long snapper Jared Retkofksy.
Originally signing with the Steelers in 2007 as an undrafted free agent, Retkofsky faced an uphill battle while trying to unseat incumbent Greg Warren. He had only been on the team for a couple seasons at that point, but Warren went on to be the Steelers’ long snapper from 2005 all the way until 2016. After failing to make the roster, Retkofsky was looking for work and ended up moving furniture for a brief period of time.
“I was kind of down and out, didn’t know what I was gonna be doing with my life. I couldn’t get a job at the time,” Retkofsky said via Sports Spectrum’s Get in the Game podcast. “I literally took a job on a moving truck moving people’s furniture.”
The year after being on the Steelers’ offseason roster, Retkofsky was watching football at home with some friends and saw Warren suffer an injury.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, maybe this will be something,'” Retkofsky said. “Not even five, 10 minutes later, the game was over and I had a phone call from the special teams coach. He’s like ‘Alright, I’ll fly you out in the morning.'”
Little did he know that it would put him on a path to winning a Super Bowl.
The Steelers didn’t just hand him the job because they had worked with him the year prior. They brought him in to compete against three other veteran long snappers who had more experience than him in the league.
“We basically had a snap-off right there in front of Coach [Mike] Tomlin and the GM at the time,” Retkofsky recalled. “I remember Tomlin pulling me up into his office afterwards. I wasn’t sure what was going on or how it was gonna happen. Tomlin pulled me in there and he is like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna sign you. Don’t mess this up.'”
The stakes are always high in the NFL, but they were even higher for the 2008 Steelers. They knew they had something special with one of the best defenses of all time and Ben Roethlisberger had entered the prime of his career with one Super Bowl ring already on his hand.
The road wasn’t perfect for Retkofsky. He recalled a couple bad snaps he had and the feeling that he was likely going to be cut. Luckily for him, Tomlin stuck with him.
Fast forward to the Super Bowl, and Retkofsky described that experience as being surreal, “almost like it’s another world.”
Just a few months earlier he was literally moving furniture in a job that he fell back on because of a poor economy in 2008. Now he was on the world’s largest stage surrounded by celebrities and TV personalities all week leading up to the game.
When it came time for the Steelers to take the field, it meant a little extra to him.
“Even though I was a long snapper, I felt like I had the longest road to travel to get there,” Retkofsky said. “I didn’t have a lot of the abilities that some of those guys had, and on that day I just knew that nobody was gonna beat me out of that tunnel.”
Lo and behold, the footage confirms exactly what Retkofsky was saying. He was the first out of the tunnel alongside Anthony Madison when the Steelers took the field at Super Bowl XLIII. A few hours later, he was a champion immortalized in the NFL history books.
