When Charles Moore first got into the game -- a freshman at an Ohio institution renowned as a football factory -- teammates were skeptical. At 5-foot-7 and 130 pounds, no one around him thought he was up to a job that demanded strength, toughness, speed, and finesse.
"It was rough. I was small," he remembers. "Other workers would laugh and say, 'He's too little.' So I took it as a challenge. I said I'll either do it or die -- one of the two, we'll see. And here I am."
That kind of determination has made ordinary men into National Football League immortals. And Moore, in fact, has had a hand in more
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games than Joe Namath, Terry Bradshaw, Joe Montana, John Elway, and Brett Favre -- combined.
But unless you're kin to Moore or toil alongside him, you've never heard of him. His contribution takes place inside a manufacturing plant far, far from the scene of championship action. He does a job that combines endurance with simple technology to produce an artifact key to every Super Bowl. Moore works in a football factory.
Along with 29-year veteran football lacer Rita Rowe and six others, Moore is part of a special Wilson Sporting Goods team flown to the Super Bowl in Miami this week from the company's facility in Ada, Ohio, to demonstrate how footballs are made.
Moore is a turner. He's one of 15 men at the plant who have the job of seizing a partially sewn ball -- the plant makes 11,000 a day -- and turning it right-side-out. And he's not kidding when he says it's tough work.
In 35 years on the job, he's never missed a day because of injury. That's rare in his line of work. The job of wrestling a stiff piece of steerskin -- handling one ball roughly every 30 seconds -- results in pulled tendons in turners' arms, shoulder, and wrists.
"A lot of them, when they come in there, they want to do it by muscle instead of learning the technique," Moore says. "When you learn the job you do it by muscle, but soon you should learn a technique where you don't have to use as much muscle to do it."
He says that staying fit -- he's bulked up to 160 pounds from his rookie weight of 130 -- is key. "I do a lot of walking, a lot of hunting, and stuff. I keep in pretty good shape," he says.
What would it be like to arrive as a first-year turner, one with a writer's soft hands?
"It would be rough," Moore says. "You gotta have pretty tough hands. It takes you one year for your hands and arms to get used to it, where you could really put out production."
But once you do, a place in the starting Super Bowl lineup is nearly guaranteed.
