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COPYRIGHT 2005 Sporting News Publishing Co.
It happens almost every day they are together. They can be on the practice field or playing golf or pool or basketball. Doesn't matter. "Hey, Jon," Carson Palmer will say to Jon Kitna. "Bet I can beat you." And Kitna will smile and tell him, "No way." And they'll start going at it, big kids unwilling to concede anything, whether it be making a 3-foot putt or hitting a crossbar with a football from 50 yards.
It's most intense in basketball. "That's a foul," Kitna says. "It's not," Palmer says. They glare at each other and play even harder. "He cheats," Kitna says. None of the bets ever seem to be resolved, either; the two are always grumbling about the unfinished business.
Their extreme competitiveness has led to this. "He's my best friend on the team," Kitna says. "He's a role model for me," Palmer says.
And to this: Without Kitna as part of Team Palmer, the support group Bengals coach Marvin Lewis has assembled to develop his quarterback protege, the stunningly quick emergence of Carson Palmer after a mere 19 NFL starts would not have happened this rapidly. Along with Ben Roethlisberger, Palmer has distanced himself from the other young quarterbacks taken early in the first round of the past four drafts. Even more telling, he looms as the saving face of a franchise that had wallowed so long in mediocrity. He has given the Bengals consistency and glamour. And he has gotten Cincinnati excited again about football--no easy feat.
The Bengals haven't had a winning season since 1990. Only three times since then, including the past two seasons under Lewis, have they even finished .500. Standing now at 5-1, they have the team's best start since 1988, when they won their first six games. Stores are having problems keeping in stock T-shirts sporting Lewis' training camp slogan: Do Your Job. It's typical Cincinnati--nothing flashy, just a reflection of Midwestern work ethic.
At 33, Kitna can relate to that. Hard work as much as skill has enabled him to carve out a nine-year career that began as an undrafted practice squad player with Seattle in 1996. He's a hardscrabble quarterback, short on elite talent but unwilling to concede to his weaknesses. In Palmer, 25, he sees everything he's not: An incredibly gifted 6-5,230-pound prototype, a Heisman winner, the No. 1 pick in the 2003 draft, a man created to be a star. It is Kitna who first understood the depth of the immense competitiveness that fires Palmer. It's certainly well-disguised. Palmer describes himself as laid-back, and it's an accurate surface tag. But Kitna found this blanket label misleading, a disservice; if you equate laid-back with lazy or complacent, you've misjudged Palmer.
"He...
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