Kurt Warner knows what you're thinking: C'mon, stock boy, do it again. Let's go, mister grocery clerk, throw that ball around like you did last season and let's see if it turns into Wonder Bread. Show us that the patron saint of Aisle 6 wasn't just a flash-in-the-pancake-mix.

Enough with the supermarket references, already. What everyone needs to understand is that Warner has had a lot of jobs, and that his latest one, St. Louis Rams quarterback, is not another temp position. Working in the convenience store was, and now it's time to bag the stock boy thing once and for all. "It was a stint, okay?" he says.

He has a point. Warner has done the Disney commercial, and the milk ad, and the cereal box. He has a contract for $46 million from the Rams, the largest in team history. He has a book out, All Things Possible. He has a new home with a security gate to keep the gawkers at bay. He is over the shell shock of sudden fame, and he is no longer an untried novelty, or a charming hard-luck story. Sure, his run through Arena Football and NFL Europe helped him perfect the art of the timing pass that he continues to zip past NFL defenders. But spare him yet another retelling of how he rose above his humble origins. He's too busy establishing himself as a premier NFL quarterback, a guy who is going to stick around and maybe even follow up last season's 4,353-yard, 41-touchdown performance with something as good or better. "Everybody wanted the story, and they wanted the same story, and they wanted it over and over," he says. "That got wearing, because it was like, you know, I don't stock shelves anymore. Let's move on."

Sometimes it seems like Warner's life is stuck on a replay loop. His initiation into the repetitious demands of life in the spotlight came as time ran out in last season's Super Bowl. Warner had played the hero by throwing the go-ahead 73-yard scoring pass to Isaac Bruce, and watched tensely from the sideline when Mike Jones stopped Tennessee's Kevin Dyson short of the goal line. As Warner joyously ran onto the field with the rest of his teammates, a camera crew immediately apprehended him.

Warner was prepared; he knew his lines. "I'm going to Disney World!" he shouted, then started to jog away, figuring that was a wrap. He could get on with the fairy-tale ending. Not so fast. You could practically hear the screech of the video machine. The director tapped him. "We've got to do it again," he said. Warner frowned. What did they mean, again? He thought the Disney commercials were supposed to be spontaneous. "I'm going to Disney World!" he shouted, again.

"One more time," the director said.

They did another take, and then another, and then another. Finally, Warner snapped, "Can't you find something to use in that?" He still hadn't made it to midfield, where his teammates were mobbing one another. He hadn't talked to the media and said, "First things first" before thanking Jesus. He hadn't even hugged his wife. He was stuck in front of a camera, doing a retake. Retake? There are no retakes in football.

Oh yes, there are.

That was just a taste of what was to come. After the Super Bowl, Warner became public property. He did award banquets, speaking engagements, autograph signings. "I did so much that I can't remember any of them," he says. "It seemed like every weekend I was going off and doing something." He went to Los Angeles to film a Chunky Soup commercial, and took his wife, Brenda, and their three kids. They stayed at the W Hotel and marveled over the high-tech design. Even the light fixtures amazed them. But then it got messy: He was taken to task in the press for crossing the picket line of the striking Screen Actors Guild, an organization he'd barely heard of. Nothing, it seemed, was easy.

At home, when he tried to buy a gallon of milk in the grocery store, it took 30 minutes for him to get out, thanks to the autograph seekers. He signed something for every one of them. He and Brenda would take the kids to dinner, and their table would be surrounded by the owner, the manager and the headwaiter. If they wanted to go to a movie, they'd call ahead and ask the manager to sneak them in after the lights went down. Everywhere they went, the lines formed. "The guy went from a nobody in the community to someone who can't go to the mall without being hounded," says teammate Ryan Tucker. Brenda and the kids would wait, impatiently, while he signed.

Warner went home to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to see his mother -- and she had an entire roomful of stuff for him to sign for friends and family. It's one thing to say no to a perfect stranger, but how do you tell your mother no? Took him over an hour to sign all of them. Finally, Brenda put her foot down. "I won't have it," she said. "I just won't have it." New rules, Brenda declared. When they were with the kids, or visiting their families, no autographs.

Warner couldn't even take his wife out for a romantic evening without thinking carefully about how to avoid crowds. They used to go country dancing, but there was no way he could get on a dance floor unmolested. And now Brenda started getting recognized too. She got pregnant, and it wasn't so wonderful to be recognized, especially when she was in "the puky stage," as she puts it. "Some days, maybe I just don't want to be Mrs. Warner."

Then the drive-bys started. Everyone in St. Louis knew where he lived because a rock outside had the family name painted on it. Cars would cruise by and slow down while the drivers hung out the window. Stuff started piling up on the doorstep. The Warners would get home and find balls and pennants and odds and ends stacked up, with notes saying, "Can you sign this and get it back to me?"

Their lives seemed irrevocably distorted and stretched out of shape. When things got to be too much, Brenda told Kurt, "The difference between a burden and a blessing is your perspective." Warner, determined to keep a good attitude, decided he was uniquely suited to handle the attention without getting a big head, because he was no neophyte. He was a 28-year-old with three kids who had once been so poor that he lived on ramen noodles.

He couldn't help shaking his head in wonder at the supreme irony of success: Now that he could afford whatever he wanted, people wanted to give him everything for free. Restaurant managers wanted to pick up the check, sponsors wanted to give him free cars. "Can't figure it out," Warner says. When Brenda went to the store to buy steaks, the cashier stared at her knowingly, as if to say, "Of course she's buying steak." Brenda couldn't help remembering when she was on food stamps. Back then, she'd buy red meat for Kurt, and the cashier would frown at her, as if to say, "What's she doing buying steak?"

But when the time came to renegotiate with the Rams, Warner's modesty receded. He wanted his new big-time stature acknowledged in the form of a long-term contract. Even though he was the Super Bowl-winning QB, he didn't necessarily feel secure. After all, he had only one credible season on his résumé, and was paid the second-year minimum throughout that Super Bowl season. "I felt fortunate for it," he says. But now he wanted tangible evidence that he was the Rams' quarterback of the present and future, that he wouldn't have to move his family again and start over in another town, that he wouldn't be supplanted by high-priced backup Trent Green as soon as something went wrong. He wanted to know he wasn't a temp.

It wasn't about money. In fact, the subject of money made him kind of sheepish. When his agent, Mark Bartelstein, launched talks with the Rams, "I really was indifferent about it," Warner says. "I know it's hard to believe, but the thing I was really looking for was the size of the commitment. Being in the situation I was in last year, and after a lot of things that I went through, I just wanted to know that I was going to be the guy."

Warner was so determined to extract a commitment from the Rams that he made a somewhat unorthodox and risky gesture: He decided to go to camp for the minimum. Instead of holding out, he signed a one-year tender offer of $358,000 and showed up just so he could practice with the team. He also told Bartelstein he would take less money in exchange for longevity.

Warner's decision to go to camp gave him the chance to show the Rams two things: that he was loyal to the team, and that the ability he had displayed for 19 games last season was not a mirage. "I don't think there was a question I would show up for camp," he says. "Even though it might have been in the back of their minds -- Is he going to hold out? -- this is what I love to do. I felt so fortunate to be making the minimum last year, so to think that I was going to hold out instead of doing what I love to do -- and what I had waited five months to do ever since the Super Bowl -- just to make more money, was crazy."

Still, it was a tense period for Warner, not because he didn't play well in camp, which he did, but because of the exhaustive negotiations. He talked to Bartelstein three times a day. Finally, he said, "Just get it done." Bartelstein was taken aback. Most clients badgered him for more money, not less. "The total wasn't important to him," Bartelstein says. "Once the money got to a certain level, he didn't care. He just wanted to know they believed in him. With some guys, it's 'What's the next guy making?' But he wanted it over." Bartelstein and the Rams settled on $46.35 million over seven years, with an $11.5 million signing bonus.

The contract puts Warner right where he believes he belongs, in the upper echelon of quarterbacks. It will pay him more than Jacksonville's Mark Brunell and puts him on a par with Brett Favre, Drew Bledsoe, Peyton Manning and Tim Couch. When the contract was announced, prime protector Orlando Pace said, "He's the big man now, the big-money guy." But his teammates soon realized that while Warner's life had changed, he hadn't. He doesn't even wear his Super Bowl ring. Ask him where it is, and he says with a shrug, "It's in the house somewhere." As for the enormous contract, Warner was not just indifferent, he also felt faintly guilty about it. He did exactly two things with his signing bonus: He wrote a gigantic check to his church -- "more than 10%," he says -- and he bought a new house on five secluded acres with a security system, a gate and a surveillance camera, with the notion of protecting his family's privacy once and for all. "Kurt's whole attitude toward the money is, he's not worthy of it, so he has to give it all away," says Brenda. "I said, 'Honey, maybe we should deposit it first.' "

There was one other change in Warner's status that he did not like -- at all. Now that he was the big-money guy, he had to stand on the sidelines protected from contact throughout the preseason, while Trent Green directed the Rams through the exhibition schedule. Preseason tortured him. He would climb into his uniform and jitter up and down the sidelines, warming up like he was going to play, until his teammates started cracking up all around him. "Kurt, what are you doing out here?" defensive tackle D'Marco Farr would ask, his shoulders shaking with laughter. Warner couldn't take the idleness, the sensation of being a reserve again. "I want to play," Warner would whine, like a little boy. "Put a smile on your face," Farr would remind him. "Now that you're all that, you've got to understand the situation."

On the rare occasions when Warner did get in, he showed enough to suggest that he was no Cinderella. He was exactly the same quarterback who directed the Rams on the winning drive with 2:05 left in the Super Bowl. A fluke? He certainly didn't look the part. He had touch and control, and, if anything, he was reading better and getting rid of the ball more quickly. Says new coach Mike Martz, "I think that Kurt has a coach's view of the game at this point, which allows us to move on from where we were last year, instead of going back and starting over."

The Rams didn't talk about it too much, because in preseason it would've sounded like so much hyperbole, and there was no sense in making Warner any more of a marked man. But among themselves, the Rams whispered that there was no reason they couldn't hang up big numbers again, and go for a repeat. "Can't is a bad word to use with Kurt," Tucker says. "He's already shown it's not in his vocabulary."

The Broncos might know, especially after the season opener. It was hard to overstate the importance of the game in solidifying once and for all the Rams' belief in Warner, and the rest of the league's respect. "The game was huge," says Bartelstein. "In a strange way, it was like final validation. Last year, all the stars lined up perfectly for him. But then he comes up in the first game of the season -- on Monday Night Football -- and throws for almost 500 yards. Anyone who watched it said, 'This guy is one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL.' No one is questioning anymore whether this can go on." Warner threw for three touchdowns and led a scoring drive in the last 2:58 to give the Rams a 41-36 victory. "I watched him on TV, and that [bleep] was ridiculous," says Panthers defensive end Chuck Smith, who chased Warner around for the Falcons last season. "The poise and the way he throws passes and completes everything. Everything, man. That was ridiculous."

He did it again the following week against Seattle: With less than two minutes to go, Warner took the Rams 61 yards in eight plays. On third-and-17 from the 50, he hit Torry Holt on a spectacular 41-yard strike to set up the winning field goal with 23 seconds left. "You need a guy who, when he gets in the pocket and there are bodies falling at his feet, delivers," says Tucker. "He adjusts and delivers time after time. Things like that are contagious."

Along the way, Warner is proving to be one of the most dangerous quarterbacks alive. Against the Seahawks, he completed 16 straight passes, and finished with 35 completions in 47 attempts for 386 yards. By the time his Rams survived another of his costly interceptions to beat the 49ers 41-24 in Week 3, Warner had thrown for more yards in the first three games of a season (1,221) than any quarterback in NFL history. The beat goes on. What's more, he isn't taking the beating other quarterbacks are because he gets rid of the ball so quickly. "I feel like I'm light-years ahead of where I was at the beginning of last season," Warner says. "Things have come much easier for me, much quicker, and to me that's the key to having a better year. It lets me take the educated chances that I have to to make me one of the best quarterbacks in the league."

At least one of his opponents believes he's well on his way. "You've got all these great receivers, a great running back, a great line," says Smith, "and then you throw in Kurt, the field general that brings it all together. If he does what he did last year over time, who knows how high he could go?"

But the cynical view is that Warner can't possibly keep doing this, that to live up to last year's performance is an impossible task. For one thing, it remains to be seen how the matter-of-fact Martz can keep the Rams riding the momentum forged by last year's head man, the ever-emotional Dick Vermeil. They must also cope with the fact that every team will play at a fever pitch against them.

Then there is the constant specter of Trent Green hanging over Warner's highly paid shoulder. Green is a legitimate NFL starter who was playing well before he suffered a knee injury in the 1999 preseason. Says Brenda, "We know that day will come when Kurt doesn't have a good game, and Trent will be there in the background."

For now, though, Warner is on a 22-game roll that may be the best in NFL history. By all rights, he should have put the stock boy rep to rest. Then again, it's an awfully good tale that only gets better in the retelling. "You get tired of those labels," Brenda says, "but it's a real part of his story, and it's unique, and that's why people have hung on to it."

So cling to the grocery store fable for now if you need to. But if you're looking for the stock boy, he's in the QB section.

On the top shelf, of course.

This article appears in the October 2, 2000 issue of ESPN The Magazine.