Unlucky Grant limited to spectator role

DALLAS - Ryan Grant will have a lot of pent-up energy before the Super Bowl tonight, so he plans to do some running and jumping on the field during pregame warm-ups. But he also has an ulterior motive.

"I want everyone to see me," said the Packers running back, who has spent the season on injured reserve. "I want Pittsburgh to know: You're lucky I'm not playing."

Grant is not feeling so lucky about it. In the first game of the season, he tore ligaments in his ankle and required surgery. He was the first of a handful of Packers starters who wound up on injured reserve. He's been rehabbing since then and said he's now feeling about 85 percent healthy. That means he would have been able to play in the game had the Packers been more patient.

In 1998, Packers running back Dorsey Levins suffered the same injury in the same week and had the same procedure. The team did not end his season and he wound up returning for the playoffs.

"It makes it tough," Grant said. "Luckily, I've had about four months to prepare myself for this. But it's going to be hard because you know how much work you put into this and this is it. This is why you do it, why you go through all the bumps and bruises and all the pain."

It also isn't the first time the Nyack product - who played high school football at Don Bosco in New Jersey - has come close to a Super Bowl appearance. In 2007, when he was part of a crowded and talented Giants backfield, he was traded to the Packers for a sixth-round draft pick and became a starter in Green Bay. He and the Packers made it to the NFC title game before losing to the Giants, who of course went on to beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.

And now this year, he has spent every game but one as a spectator.

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"I don't think anybody has anything in their life that has worked out exactly the way they wanted it to," Grant said. "If you had told me that I would have gotten traded to Green Bay and the year I get traded, the team I was with wins the Super Bowl, I would have said you're lying. If somebody would have told me that my first Super Bowl experience, I'd be watching from the sidelines, I'd have said you're crazy."

Grant said he has no regrets, though. And he's focused on coming back 100 percent healthy next season, "faster and stronger than ever."

But unlike the others who will be warming up on the field before the game tonight, that's when Grant's day will end. He'll be as much a spectator as the 105,000 in the stands.

"When you have guys saying before the game while they're warming up, 'We miss you, R.G.,' that's hard," he said. "Just because you want to be out there with your guys . . . Seeing those guys excited about what they're able to do, it's hard not being a part of that."