Off the Bench will be a weekly column devoted to local sports issues beyond just basketball and football. Columns, ideas and questions for Off the Bench can be submitted to sports@idsnews.com.
OK, do this for me. Pick your 2004 Men's Hermann Trophy winner (that would be the nation's top soccer player).\nCandidate A has 22 goals, 11 assists, for a total of 55 points on the season.\nCandidate B has 2 goals, 4 assists, for a whopping point total of eight.\nEasy choice right?\nRight -- candidate B.\nOne of my favorite things about sports are those players who command respect even if they're simply mediocre. The guys you just can't help watching. I'm talking about the Steve Taskers and Steve Wojciechowskis of the sports world.\nThe cliches about "giving 110 percent" and "leaving it all on the field" get tossed around all the time, but when you see players actually doing those things, you can't help but respect them. There are a select few who simply play on a seperate level than everybody else on the field. To use another cliche, they just want it more.\nWell, on a sunny weekend in California, another player literally fought his way on to that list.\nNow keep in mind, on a soccer field there are roughly 9,000 square feet to account for. "Leaving it all" on a field of that size is a pretty tall task. But in a semifinal game against Maryland, when things started getting tight, a sequence of events seemed like it kept repeating itself.\nFree ball in the midfield -- Danny O'Rourke wins it.\nLoose ball in the defense-- O'Rourke wins it.\nShot about to be given up-- O'Rourke stops it.\nKeeper punts a ball to midfield -- well, you get the picture.\nThen, with penalty kicks looming only a minute away, something happened that decided the fate of the National Player of the Year trophy. \nIU mounted its final offensive attack along the right side of the field. Of course, O'Rourke was right in the thick of it, but a Maryland defender stepped in and seemingly blew up the Hoosiers' last chance. Yet by the time you were finished sighing at the lost opportunity, O'Rourke had somehow won the ball back and was flying back toward the corner.\nHe lofts one up in front of the net, John Michael Hayden is there to answer, and the rest is history. The statlines read one assist for O'Rourke, but what won the game -- and ultimately the Hermann Trophy -- was the effort.\nIn the days where bling, posses and rap albums are more common in sports than pure, unrelenting effort, there are no words to describe how it makes me feel to see an old-fashioned scrapper get recognized as the best player in a given sport.\nIt's not to say O'Rourke doesn't have skills or isn't as good of a soccer player. Simply, it is a step in the right direction to see a guy who wears a tattoo on one shoulder and his pride on another receive the honor he deserves. \nAll too often fans look to the numbers to decipher the best of the best when sports go so far beyond the numbers. Sixty home runs don't win titles, 49 touchdowns don't ensure a Super Bowl, and winning a scoring title doesn't even guarantee a winning team. It's the other things.\nIt's watching Tasker play special teams for an entire career, making it his duty to the team simply to haul ass up and down the field trying to hit somebody. It's Wojo slapping the floor like an enraged chimp just because it's all he can do with his excess of adrenaline. It's O'Rourke winning every loose ball and challenging every shot just because he wants it more than the other guy. The type of things that don't make it into the stat books.\nThose are the things that make a team contagious and create champions. And there's no better example than Danny O'Rourke.
