New Orleans is the thanks he gets for sleeping on one shoulder because the other hurt too much. It's for the screw in his knee that his body rejected, for the 14 months of his 23 years he has spent fixing broken parts of himself so he could keep playing football.

It's for the bright career light that dimmed when the injuries hit, for the lowered expectations and the hours he spent wondering who he could have become. Ben Piening says he feels "a little hollow" about his football career at the University of Cincinnati.

He has it all wrong.

The best lessons are the hardest won. The best lives are sculpted with a little pain, because without pain, pleasure is an empty room. Piening is a fifth-year defensive tackle, part of the stout senior class that rallied UC from a 2-5 start to its first conference title in 38 years. Piening wasn't Antwan Peek or Jonathan Ruffin or DeMarco McCleskey or LaDaris Vann. He was just out there every day, never giving into himself.

The New Orleans Bowl is a tribute to his character.

This is how sports is supposed to work. This is where the good clichÈs come rolling home. Athletes learn things about the world and themselves the rest of us don't discover in books or classrooms. Piening's UC career didn't go the way he'd have liked. But he will leave it after next Tuesday's game a better person than when he began. That's the point, isn't it?

Moeller defensive lineman Ben Piening, center, works during this 1997 photo. (Gary Landers photo) | ZOOM |

Piening came to UC from Moeller, where he was an all-district defensive tackle who weighed 250 pounds and ran 40 yards in 4.6 seconds. Tennessee and Boston College offered scholarships, but Piening stayed here. He started six games as a freshman and made the C-USA all-freshmen team.

Then he got hurt the first time. During practice before the second game of his sophomore year, he mashed his shoulder in a collision. Piening played with it the rest of the year, even as the shoulder popped out of the socket "probably 30 times."

Postseason surgery - "They had to staple my cartilage back to my shoulder, cut the ligaments and tendons, and pull them closer together," is how Piening describes it - mandated five months of rehab, four to five days a week, two or three hours a day. The shoulder was bad enough, he took a redshirt season.

Then Piening blew out his right knee in the seventh game of his junior year, covering a punt. Several weeks later, after "pain you wouldn't believe," doctors decided Piening's body had rejected the screw they'd inserted in his knee.

"They cut me open, threw the drill in reverse and took the screw out," Piening says. "It was just a nightmare." This time, the rehab lasted nine months. He wasn't the same player after that. "It took away my speed, agility, explosive power," Piening says. "I can't jump."

Instead of sacking quarterbacks and building toward an NFL career his coaches said he might have had, Piening was covering punts. "How much have I thought about what might have been? Every day," he says.

"Every time I see my friends running out on the field. It makes the conference championship a little hollow. Did I really earn this? Or am I just reaping the benefits of what others have done?

"I'm glad I stuck with it. The friendships. Seeing the guys you came in with, and the guys you're going to leave with, do well. You only get four or five years to live the experience," Piening says. "I didn't want to waste the years."

He will graduate in June with a double major in marketing and finance. And a conference championship ring. All it took was persistence, guts and a little tolerance for pain. "I hope I've done well, left a little bit of a legacy," Piening says. You have. The best kind.