Zach Frazier is joining the Pittsburgh Steelers

You kind of knew what was coming as the words came through the airwaves “Making the 51st pick in the 2nd round, the Pittsburgh Steelers have picked Zach Frazier.”

The cheer from the Frazier house in Fairmont could have been heard in Martinsburg.

They’d been saying for weeks that the Steelers needed a center, now they have one.

You can bet that Frazier, at home with family in Fairmont, inched just a bit closer to the TV as the Steelers began announcing their pick. His grip on himself tightened, much as his grip on defensive linemen had tightened all these years of opening holes for West Virginia running backs or protecting quarterbacks like Garrett Greene, Jarrett Doege, Nicco Marchiol or JT Daniels.

He knew the Steelers needed a bodyguard the likes of which he had proven himself to be while becoming a two-time All-American at West Virginia ... but there is always that doubt whether they will put your name up on the screen.

So many players, so many needs. Could it be that one of dreams you don’t ever want to wake up from, a dream where you are at this door that opens only into the club you had spent your life trying to gain membership into. If he were a golfer, which he is in the other dream he has, this would be Augusta National and there would be a Green Jacket awaiting him, would it really come true?

OK, it wasn’t Augusta, but you can bet Oakmont will open their doors to the Steelers newest center.

The analysts on the draft show happened to know a little bit about Frazier and about Fairmont. He was a recently retired football coach you may have heard of, name of Saban; Nick Saban.

“You know I played my high school football at Monongah, just a little town,” Saban said to a nation that barely has an idea of where West Virginia is, let alone Monongah. “Fairmont was the city school, but we beat the heck out of them. One thing I know, we would have recruited him to play at Monongah.”

They laughed about that, but the memories Frrazier got out of Fairmont Senior and with what it had to do getting him ready for West Virginia, and now the NFL, probably would have taken a lot of NIL money to get him to Monongah.

He’d taken the path that was laid out for him to reach this moment.

Frazier had left behind an ocean of sweat in striving for this moment, aches that seemed like they’d never end after an afternoon or evening of sumo wrestling with a 320-pound defender. As hard as the opponents hit, he knew that he’d been hit as hard or harder over and over in practice during the summers, during Wednesday contact drillss, during how many scrimmages from grade school through Fairmont Senior and into WVU.

He’d suffered broken dreams and a broken leg in quest of this moment, but how many dreams of opponents had he broken as he dominated game after game in the interior of West Virginia’s offensive line, a line that was not very good when he arrived and that was one of the nation’s best as he left.

You want to know how you become a second-round draft pick as a center in the National Football League?

To steal a line from an old joke, “Practice, practice, practice.”

And a whole lot more.

He did it by being durable enough to make 37 straight starts at center, by allowing just one sack of his final two years and only four over his entire WVU career.

He did it by being intelligent enough and dedicated to academic excellence a National Football Foundation Scholar -Athlete Academic All-American first team member and three-time member of the All-Big 12 Academic first team.

He was smart enough to do that and tough enough to have compiled more than 170 knockdown blocks over the last three years. There’s more if you want to go back four years, for he started for the Mountaineers as soon as he came on campus.

That first year WVU needed a guard, not a center, so he began his career there for nine games, but he knew, they knew and every scout who ever saw him knew that he would spend his football life looking upside down between his legs.

Zach Frazier had faced difficult moments on the football field, tight games, losses, but it was nothing compared to the two days of having no control over the outcome of the NFL draft. Ever been to a pizza restaurant to pick up a to-go order and been told it wasn’t ready yet, so you had to stand there like some goofball waiting for the order, wondering if maybe you might be unknowingly an actor in a documentary name “Waiting for Pepperoni” or some such stuff.

That’s how it has to be as you await hearing what direction your future will take.

And now he knows where he’ll be playing his professional football. Hope he knows where his Terrible Towel is.