The nearest thing to The Natural Spokane has ever seen is Mark Rypien.

Name the game. Football, baseball, basketball -- his jersey numbers from all three sports have been retired at Shadle Park High School. Ping-pong, hockey, golf -- he got himself down to a 1-handicap, good enough to win one of those celebrity tournaments they use for filler programming on ESPN.

"You get him in any sport," said Spokane basketball great John Stockton, "and he's unbelievable the way he can pick it up and be very good at it."

Well, almost any sport. He's never been much at politics.

"I was student body vice president at Shadle," Rypien once recalled. "I got impeached."

But athletically, he was already something of a local legend in junior high school; and by his sophomore year at Shadle, you couldn't find a fan in Spokane who wasn't convinced Mark Rypien was bound for the National Football League.

It was just the NFL that wasn't convinced.

That's how a quarterback who would go on to become the Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXVI and play 12 years in the NFL wound up as merely a sixth-round draft choice of the Washington Redskins coming out of Washington State University in 1986.

"When Mark Rypien was drafted in the sixth round, I was shattered," remembered his WSU coach, Jim Walden. "It bothered me to no end that they thought one of my kids wouldn't be able to compete.

"I mean, he's a guy who is 6-foot-4, 230 pounds, is mobile, who can throw the ball the length of the football field and can put touch on it when he has to. And he was green and raw as a gourd, so they could fill him up with all the good things they wanted to teach him. We had barely scratched the surface of all the things he could do."

Walden had topped off the tank in one area: patience.

In an episode that proved to be a turning point in his career, Rypien bolted the WSU team during his sophomore season, unhappy with his role in football and considering a switch to baseball at another school. Walden huddled with Rypien in Spokane and convinced him that his athletic future was brightest as a quarterback.

Having already had his identity crisis, Rypien was able to weather the two seasons the Redskins had him stashed on the injured reserve list before he ever got a regular-season snap.

"All along, it was a process that has maybe gone slower than I expected,quot; Rypien said upon leading the Redskins to victory in the 1992 Super Bowl, quot;but the way things transpired is something I can cherish forever and ever and never forget.q&uot;

One of five children of Bob and Terry Rypien, Mark Robert Rypien was born October 2, 1962, in Calgary into a family with a definite athletic bent. Younger brothers Tim and David were both fine baseball players -- Tim playing in the Toronto Blue Jays chain, David on the Canadian Olympic team. And Bob Rypien, a hockey player as a young man, was a particular inspiration -- especially after he died from a heart attack at age 52, with Mark's professional football career barely under way.

"He plays for my dad," Tim Rypien said of his older brother.

His success as a high school athlete came straight out of a storybook. He was a PARADE magazine All-America as a quarterback who led Shadle to three straight Greater Spokane League championships. He was the point guard on the Shadle basketball team that upset Mercer Island with a last-second shot for the state championship. And he was a pitcher on Shadle's baseball team, which reached the Kingdome playoffs when he was a junior.

"Mark was the only kid I ever had who I worried about screwing up," said Jim Brown, who coached Shadle's quarterbacks and the baseball team. "I was always nervous because this guy was going somewhere some day."

If his Cougar career was not as dazzling, he did become the All-Pacific-10 Conference quarterback his junior year and engineered a stunning upset of rival Washington in his final college game. And his pro career had the same kinds of ups and downs. He earned his first Super Bowl ring as a spectator, then grew fitfully into coach Joe Gibbs' system until he put it all together that Super Bowl season.

That year, he passed for an NFC-leading 3,564 yards and 28 touchdowns, including a 6-touchdown, 442-yard effort against Atlanta. In the 37-24 Super Bowl victory over Buffalo, he completed 18 of 33 passes for 292 yards and 2 touchdowns -- all in virtually three quarters, since the Redskins were so far in front they hardly passed in the final period.

This after Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke had called him quot;a bloody idiotquot; during a preseason contract holdout, and after his ability to compete at a championship level had been questioned.

"I always let the critics say what they want," Rypien said. "I don't hold grudges. Sometimes some of the things people say, media and such, might hurt inside, but you know in a lot of ways it's true. At least now they can't say I didn't win the big game. Because if there's any bigger game than this one, tell me about it and I'd like to play in it.

"This is a game that makes heroes."

But it took a tragedy to turn Rypien into a real hero.

It took just two years after the Super Bowl triumph for Rypien's romance with the Redskins to end, the vagaries of NFL salary structure and player movement turning him loose as a free agent in 1994. He fell into the routine of a journeyman backup -- a year in Cleveland, another in St. Louis, a year in Philadelphia and then back to St. Louis in 1997. In 1998, he signed with the Atlanta Falcons and prepared to go to camp.

But in 1997, his 2-year-old son, Andrew, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. As Andrew's condition worsened, the family -- wife Annette and daughters Ambre and Angie -- drew ever closer around him, until Mark decided to put his football career on hold. For the 1998 season, he walked away from a $1.8 million contract and returned to the family home in Post Falls -- reading books to Andrew, dressing up as Winnie the Pooh's pal Tigger and trying to shower a lifetime of attention on a little boy whose days were growing unspeakably short.

"It's all about making Andrew happy," Rypien said.

On August 22, 1998, 3-year-old Andrew Rypien died in his sleep, lying in bed between his parents. The outpouring of sympathy, locally and nationally, was immense.

"We've got a lot of great memories of Andrew, a lot of lasting things that will be with us forever," Rypien said. "That doesn't mean we don't hurt."

As the 1999 season approached, Rypien discussed returning to professional football, but admitted he was leaning toward retirement, unwilling to give up the time he'd been devoting to his family. He did return to the celebrity golf scene, and at one tournament in Lake Tahoe found himself the first-round leader.

Still a natural, after all these years.

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