Las Vegas’ Horacek enjoys good life in Arena League

Adam Candee

Friday, Jan. 31, 2003 | 10:02 a.m.

Mike Horacek's football dreams do not stretch outside the padded walls of the Las Vegas Gladiators' field these days.

Oh, they have, and they still could. Nothing about his prototype 6-foot-2, 205-pound frame would prevent the star wideout from chasing the National Football League dream. Precious time spent in training camp with Detroit, Jacksonville, and Green Bay already gave some validation to the quest.

Not now, though, Horacek says. Not when life in the Arena Football League is so good.

Horacek sees half the field and triple the pay, half the schedule and twice the enjoyment. He sees a new national TV contract and better exposure. He sees his 2000 AFL Offensive Player of the Year award, not the doldrums of a practice squad hopeful suffering through Wisconsin winters.

Spare Horacek the American dreams of quarterbacks Kurt Warner and Tommy Maddox, who jumped from the AFL to the NFL.

"This is definitely, for me, a better place to be," Horacek said.

The AFL hopes more players -- and more fans -- will appreciate Horacek's thinking. The league longs to shed any public image that it is simply a breeding ground for the next Warner or Maddox.

"This is not a farm league," Gladiators coach Frank Haege said. "This is not triple-A baseball, this is not NFL Europe. This is its own entity."

League officials and owners are left to traverse an interesting gray area: How do you tout the credibility lended by an association with America's most popular professional sports league, while simultaneously attaining sufficient distance from that same business as to develop a separate identity?

Coming off a season in which it averaged nearly 10,000 fans per game, the AFL enters its 17th year in 2003, hoping that the NBC deal will key long-term stability for a league that began with just four teams. Games begin this Sunday (instead of April), as the league hopes to allow football fans to turn on the TV a week after the Super Bowl and still find quality gridiron action.

"We're the major league of arena football, not the minor league of the NFL," Haege said.

Fans continue to search for the next diamond in the arena rough, however, and Haege wishes the perception would change.

"(They ask,) 'Are you ever going to make it into the pros?' " Haege said. "We're in the pros."

No one around the AFL will deny that some players land on the 50-yard field because their physical limitations prevent success in "The Show." Yet with upper-tier arena players beginning to see salaries close to $200,000, and average salaries also on the rise, the new issue becomes whether borderline NFL prospects will begin settling into the burgeoning world of arena football instead of chasing an increasingly scarcer dream at the next level.

"This game is on the rise," Horacek said. "A lot of guys are comfortable and happy in this league."

The determining factor for a player close to making the end of an NFL roster can be one of opportunity as much as one of talent, according to Mike Pritchard. The former Rancho High star spent 10 years as an NFL wide receiver, and he sees plenty of talent on the field for the Gladiators, estimating that about half of the arena players could at least hang on in NFL training camp.

"Here, guys feel comfortable," Pritchard said. "They play here. It gives them the opportunity to be flexible."

Pritchard, who will serve as color analyst on the Gladiators' radio broadcasts, sees the benefits of which Horacek speaks. He also sees how attracting Horacek's caliber of player can raise the quality of play, and subsequently the major league feel of the arena game.

"The way arena ball has expanded, and it's become mainstream, some guys are looking at it as a career path," Pritchard said.

That ability to have a life beyond football, a sort of Generation Y brand of pro sports career, appeals to Horacek.

"It's more player-friendly, the schedule and the fun of the game," Horacek said. "A lot of guys in the NFL aren't having a lot of fun.

"Why go to two-a-days from 7 to 5? Why? Why do it?"

The continued AFL connection to the NFL is inescapable to some degree. Nine NFL owners operate arena teams or own the rights to future teams, and the Warner and Maddox fairy tales are the brand of human triumph stories that resonate with even the most casual football fans.

"It couldn't happen to better guys than Kurt and Tommy," said Horacek, a teammate of Warner's with the Iowa Barnstormers in 1997.

Horacek, and others, will still take a pass as they try to help the AFL develop its own status.

"This league is becoming not only a stepping stone," Horacek said. "It's a home for a lot of players.

"If you're not going to be in the NFL, this is the best place to be."