Hard work key to Lincoln-Way Central grad's NFL stardom

Consider his job at a landscaping company the last time Rob Ninkovich didn’t finish something he started.

“I remember walking into the office and the owner asked me what I wanted to get paid an hour,” Ninkovich recalled. “I said ‘seven dollars an hour?’ He said ‘fair enough.’

“I thought instantly in my head I should have asked for more, because that day of working consisted of filling up buckets of rock and transporting, so that was not the easiest seven dollars an hour job. I didn’t work very long at that, only a couple days and decided it wasn’t worth it.”

That was the summer after Ninkovich’s sophomore year at Lincoln-Way Central High School in New Lenox. It was just one of his summer jobs that also included helping build a bridge and hanging beams on buildings 20 stories high.

Ninkovich hasn’t gone about things the easy way in his life, but while he didn’t last long with that landscaping company, he has become an ironman for the New England Patriots in a league known for attrition, showing an ability to sustain success year after year, and it can all be traced back to his start outside Chicago.

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Ninkovich admits he was “pretty bad” during his first experience in football, which wasn’t until freshman year in high school. He played offensive guard and defensive end as a sophomore, and then he started getting noticed.

“Junior year, we saw it. We knew he was going to be a great ballplayer,” said Rob Glielmi, then Ninkovich’s head coach at Lincoln-Way Central and now an assistant at Lincoln-Way North. “We knew he was really good. We knew he was a D-I type kid his junior year, he was just good with his hands, he could turn his hips when he pass rushed, could really turn the corner.”

The Ninkovich that hasn’t missed an NFL game since Nov. 22, 2009, reached the brink during his senior year in a game against Carl Sandburg High School, days after Sept. 11.

“You hear coaches say, ‘Play so hard, if we have to carry you off the field, we’ll carry you off the field.’ Well, he’s the only player I’ve ever had that literally collapsed from exhaustion at the end of the game,” Glielmi said. “That’s the one guy in my career where I can say ‘Yep, he literally left it all on the field.’ If we had to play one more play, he didn’t have it because he went to exhaustion, literally.”

When Ninkovich looks back on his high school playing days, he remembers the no-nonsense coaching from Glielmi, part of the formula that has turned Ninkovich into the player he is today.

“He was very blunt with you, got you to do your job,” Ninkovich said. “If you weren’t doing it the right way, he told you about it. I had no problem with that. I respected that. I think that he prepared me well for the next level, then Purdue, the NFL.”

Glielmi remembers Ninkovich as one of those “coachable” players, someone who makes a coach’s life easier.

“He would do whatever you asked,” he said. “He was smart and just kept getting better and better. Very likable guy, so it was easy to coach him. It’s a lot more fun coaching the guys that have high character and maturity.”

Ninkovich often gets labeled as a player “whose motor never stops.”

Effort is never an issue for Ninkovich, who admits he’s not your prototypical player in terms of size and speed, and it’s that effort that helps him get to the quarterback, and Glielmi saw that 14 years ago in New Lenox.

“We graded their effort in high school, and he always got great effort grades,” he said. “He was never getting marked for dogging it or doing extra running for doing something other than full speed. He plays that way still. Besides his athleticism, his attitude and the motor he has really carried him a long way.”

Those attributes formed at Lincoln-Way Central got Ninkovich ready for the next step – not the most ideal, but the JUCO route at Joliet Junior College.

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Ninkovich drove to and from school and practice every day. He bought his own cleats and wore his high school pads.

“That whole experience gave me a lot more of my work ethic and drive to be where I’m at now,” he said.

He remembers “maybe 100 people” at his first home game. “I had more people watching my high school games,” he said, but Ninkovich wasn’t deterred. In fact, he didn’t have a Plan B as he continued his football career.

“I was pretty much all in the whole time. I never really thought of an alternative plan,” he said. “I’m a big believer in putting all your eggs in one basket. Everyone says don’t put all your eggs in one basket, I’m opposite of that.

“The only way you’re going to be better at something is if you go all-in at it. I knew that I had talent, I knew that I had the ability. I just had to continue to work and put up with the ups and downs of a football career and how it goes.”

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The next part of the Ninkovich story was a little more, well, normal, compared to his NFL teammates.

He went from Joliet to Purdue, first as a tight end, but after one practice, back to defensive end – “they never moved him again,” Gleilmi said. Ninkovich had 16 sacks in his two seasons in West Lafayette, approximately 120 miles from his hometown, and was a fifth-round pick by the Saints in 2006.

Between his rookie season, where he appeared in three games, and August 2009, when he first joined the Patriots, Ninkovich spent time with the Saints and Dolphins as a special teamer and on their practice squads, being shuffled on and off rosters. He tried to make the Saints in ’09 as a long snapper, but was waived in late July. For most players, that would be it for an NFL career, but the Saints and Dolphins missed something.

2010 was Ninkovich’s breakout season, when he had 58 tackles, four sacks and three fumble recoveries. He received a two-year, $4 million extension at the start of the 2011 season and went on to start every game for New England, including the three playoff games.

In 2012 back at defensive end, after having played linebacker in the Patriots’ 3-4 defense, Ninkovich had eight sacks, and was named a team captain in 2013, the year he also received his latest new contract – a three-year, $15 million extension with $8 million guaranteed. He’s the only player in the Belichick era with back-to-back seasons of at least eight sacks.

This season, Ninkovich has started all 14 games heading into the 11-3 Patriots’ Sunday game against the Jets and has 54 tackles and eight sacks.

Since the Saints gave up on Ninkovich and Bill Belichick gave him a chance, Ninkovich has appeared in 84 consecutive regular-season games, which leads all active defensive ends. His 63 consecutive starts are also tops at his position. He is a mainstay in the front seven of the Patriots’ defense, a stalwart up front on the best franchise over the past decade and a half.

Ninkovich credits all the success to the work ethic he learned in New Lenox. You see, the ironman learned from the ironworker, Mike Ninkovich.

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“I pretty much give him credit for all the things that I’ve been brought up with, all the credit for my work ethic,” Ninkovich says of his father. “My mom as well. They’re both very hard-working people, my whole family.

“If you want things in life, you have to go out and work for them. Nothing’s given to you. At a young age, I realized my dad’s working seven days a week for a reason, that’s to put food on the table, give us the house that I was in, the things that I needed growing up, sports equipment, all that stuff you need to raise a family. You’ve got to work.”

Ninkovich’s mother was a teacher, and both his parents are retired now. He said that his dad retired after having logged 74,000 hours.

“He learned work ethic from them, they’re good people,” said Glielmi. “They instilled in him the work ethic. Somewhere along the line he learned that success is not always right around the corner, that sometimes it’s a delayed thing.”

“In my family, everything has been worked for,” Ninkovich said. “My grandfather was an ironworker, my mother’s father was an ironworker who, to this day, is as tough as they come.

“Growing up and seeing both my grandfathers, my dad, I think it’s just listening to them talk, their stories and all the things they’ve done in their lifetime, it just kind of makes you … if you ever think that something’s hard, you think of what they’ve done in their life.”

Despite two contract extensions, Ninkovich has never forgotten his roots and how he got to where he is today. He explained what he means when he calls himself a “blue-collar NFL football player.”

“I don’t have the 4.6, 4.5 speed. I’m not 6’6, 285 pounds. I don’t have that ‘it’ factor when you look at me as far as ‘this guy played nine years in the league.’ But I think all that comes back to the work ethic, and outworking people. That’s what it comes down to.

“However long the game’s going, I’m going to outwork you the whole game. I’ve been able to make a bunch of plays in this league that I knew I could make, that I just needed an opportunity to make, and the Patriots were the ones that gave me that opportunity to get on the field and show everybody that I could do it at a high level.

“I think it all comes down to having that same mentality – I’m a worker, I’m going to work. The harder you work, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. As far as the contract goes, if you’re in it for that, you’re in it for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t matter what you’re playing for, you’ve got to have pride in what you’re doing. If you’re just playing for a contract, you’re not going to be in the league that long anyways. It takes a lot to stick around and stay in this league for a long time.”

Bears defensive end Trevor Scott spend only one year in New England on the same defensive line with Ninkovich, but says he still stays in touch with him and appreciated that work ethic.

“He is a great story from where he started from, being a long snapper and a backup guy,” Scott said. “Kept working over the years, worked his way up. He doesn’t take it for granted. Every day he came in and busted his butt in the weight room and the practice field.”

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Ninkovich gets back to New Lenox for a few weeks every year and stays with his parents. He said the restaurant he always hits up is Pizza King – “that’s some of the best stuff around.”

The former Lincoln-Way Central Knight has gone back to visit his school and help out his former coaches as well.

“He’s come back here and talked to the high school kids,” Glielmi said. “He should be a coach, he says all the right things. He’s very well spoken. He’s a great guy for the Patriots not just on the field, but off the field. I’m sure of it.”

Ninkovich actually grew up a Cowboys fan – “In the 90s, the Bears weren’t too hot” – and while his parents are Bears fans, he said they’ve become “Rob Ninkovich fans.”

Glielmi and Ninkovich’s other coaches from New Lenox joke that they are “iso-camming” on their former pupil, a reference to an isolated camera they’ll use during games to zoom in on one player.

“It’s been exciting watching him grow and excel and being a captain. I followed it as much as I can,” Glielmi said.

When back in New Lenox, Ninkovich can get reminders of those odd jobs – at least, odd for a professional football player – and he does clarify that the well-circulated story of him being suspended while helping build a bridge was a safe situation.

“I was suspended, but I wasn’t like 1,000 feet in the air,” he said. “I was working, helping build a bridge, doing things, but I was tied up and safety was huge for me. My cousin was actually the boss at the job, and my Dad told him, don’t get him killed, don’t get him hurt. He was keeping me safe.”

It’s just another building block that helped form Rob Ninkovich, a nobody as a freshman in high school, a junior college player, someone trying to be a long snapper in the NFL to one of the current longest-tenured Patriots, a symbol of durability in a sport known for its short careers.

Ninkovich has fans at every stop he’s made along the way to an impressive NFL career, especially back home.

“We’re pulling for him all the time and it’s great to see a guy...” Glielmi said, “you like to see good people have good things happen to, and he’s a good example of that.”

Note to readers: This story first published in the most recent edition of the Chicago Football magazine. For subscription info, go to ChicagoFootball.com.