(8 of 10)
The right guard, Steinkuhler, is the quintessential Nebraska football player. Under the hometown column of the team roster, occasional entries from New Jersey and Texas, California, Colorado or even Connecticut are fairly obliterated in a hailstorm of small Nebraska towns. It reads like the appendix of an almanac: Plattsmouth, Scottsbluff, Bell wood, Fremont, Waterloo, Dix, Ponca, Shelby, Wahoo, Hildreth, Crete, Burr... Steinkuhler is from Burr.
He cuts a giant figure, although he is not even close to being the most humongous man on the team. Several of the Nebraska linemen resemble telephone booths with 19-in. TV sets on top. At 6 ft. 3 in., 270 Ibs., straw-haired and bottle-jawed, Steinkuhler is the tobacco-spitting image of "Herby Husker," Nebraska's mascot in bib overalls. Pro-football scouts are afraid to say how good he is, because he may be the best offensive lineman they have ever seen. "In Steinkuhler, Fryar and Rozier," says Dallas Cowboy personnel man Gil Brandt, "Nebraska might have three players drafted in the first ten." That such a player could come out of Burr (pop. 101 and getting smaller—"I don't look for it to last much longer," Steinkuhler sighs) is more than farfetched. When the All-America teams are announced, Burr will become the smallest town to have produced an All-America. It is a place without a policeman, or a need for one. From kindergarten through eighth grade, Steinkuhler attended country school in the company of three classmates, one of them a girl. "We had to round up everybody in town to play any sort of sport," he says. "We drank a lot of pop in Burr and mowed a lot of lawns."
Journeying twelve miles to high school in Sterling (pop. 526), Steinkuhler played only eight-man football. Perhaps the larger emphasis on versatility in this game is what made him a faster, nimbler, smarter big man, and not just a mauler, though Steinkuhler is that too. He is gentle-spoken, all the same. With his glasses on, he seems too decent for trap blocking. "Every kid in Nebraska dreams of playing football for the Cornhuskers," he says. "Everything seems so big here, and it is big. I don't even know some guys' names, and that's pretty embarrassing. I guess I don't know more than about 60 players personally. But you kind of know where they're from and what their dreams are. To me, I expect this is about the best time I'll ever have, and about the best memories. When the last few seconds are on the clock now, I've been hashing over what happened and realizing that it's one less Nebraska game for me. Even when the crowd is not there, I'm looking around the stadium a lot these days and remembering."