“As far as I'm concerned, we're not done yet,” Gonzalez said. “We have to stay humble, stay hungry and go out there and get ready because we've got a tough game next week out there in Denver.”

Tight ends have been lots of things through the years. They have been savage (Mike Ditka) and unstoppable (John Mackey) and heroic (Kellen Winslow) and acrobatic (Ozzie Newsome) and just plain huge (Ben Coates).

They have been muddied and bloodied and studied and thudied. But tight ends have never been glamorous. Leave it to the Kansas City Chiefs to have the first glamorous tight end in the history of professional football. "I don't think I'm glamorous," Tony Gonzalez said. "But hey, I'm not going to argue about it."

III

Tony Gonzalez had a real quandary on his hands this off-season. See, he had always signed his autographs: "Be the best. Tony Gonzalez." He wanted to toss a little inspiration in there, you know, for kids. "Be the best." Nice, right? But then Gonzalez started worrying about it. Not everyone can be the best. Was he setting up kids for failure?

It really bothered him. You have to understand, Gonzalez craves perfection. He never leaves the practice field without doing a little something extra. He will play catch for 15 minutes. He will take 100 extra passes from the football-pitching machine. Sometimes, he will just lie in the sun and pick the brain of quarterback Warren Moon.

"The guy knows everything," Gonzalez said.

He hungers to get better. You would be surprised how rare that is. Gonzalez is already the best tight end in pro football, but it's more than that. He's at a place where he can reinvent the tight-end position, the way Lawrence Taylor reinvented linebacker, the way Ronnie Lott reinvented strong safety.

Exaggeration? Hardly. A year ago, in an offense that ran the ball more than any other team in the NFL, Gonzalez caught 11 touchdown passes. Kellen Winslow never did that. Ozzie Newsome never did that. John Mackey, Jackie Smith, Keith Jackson, Ben Coates, Shannon Sharpe, none of these guys did that.

Gonzalez is different. He's 6 feet 4, runs fast, jumps high, has this remarkable control of his body. He's a basketball player playing football, meaning he blocks out defensive backs, leaps over linebackers, drives past safeties, all of it making him pretty much unstoppable, especially around the goal line.

"We haven't even begun to see what Tony Gonzalez can do," Chiefs coach Gunther Cunningham said. "The guy is a superstar."

Of course, it doesn't hurt that he has movie-star looks, which led him to play himself in "Arli$$," do a photo shoot for a few magazines and help out Oliver Stone with "Any Given Sunday."

And it also doesn't hurt that he's just a supremely nice guy who likes talking to people, who, among other things, goes to hospitals and nursing homes and hands out little Tony Gonzalez "Shadow Buddies."

It's that niceness that brings us back to the autograph problem.

"I thought about it," he said. "And I decided that the best thing to do was start signing, `Be your best.' Anyone can be their best."

He smiles.

"That's better, isn't it?" he asked.

III

The Chiefs want to move Gonzalez all over the field. He's their offensive star, no question. Gonzalez disagrees -- "I hope they will double-cover me, because our receivers will eat them up" -- but there's no doubt that he's the first man quarterback Elvis Grbac looks for.

"Sure he is," Grbac said. "Because I know that even if he's covered, if I can get the ball close, he's going to catch it. It's unbelievable what I've seen him do this training camp. He's catching anything near him. It's hard to believe, but he's better than he was last year."

There's no doubt that the Chiefs are building around Gonzalez. Sure, there will be the relentless running game, pounding, pounding, pounding, and Derrick Alexander will run his crossing patterns, and Kevin Lockett will try to, once and for all, prove he can play big-time football, and there's the rookie, Sylvester Morris, big and fast, ready to go long.

But the key is Gonzalez. It's hard to find an NFL team that has built around a tight end. Then, it's hard to find a tight end as versatile as Gonzalez. The Chiefs plan to use him all over the place. He might be split out wide like a receiver. He might be put in the backfield like a running back. He might be used on reverses. He might throw a pass.

"In a way, it's unfair to call Tony a tight end," Cunningham said. "He's stretching the limits of what a tight end is supposed to do.

"I'll give you an example. We put him out wide like a receiver. Now, you're a defensive coordinator. What do you do? Put a linebacker on him? He'll run right by him. Put a cornerback on him? He's too strong. Put a safety on him? He'll jump over him. See what I'm saying?

"And the best part of Tony is that I can tell him, `Tony, you are going to have a great season,' and it doesn't go to his head. He's the most level-headed player I know. Expectations don't faze him. Nothing fazes him."

It wasn't always that way.

III

Gonzalez will never forget that feeling. It hit him in just his second year. He had never started an NFL game, but when he went into the Bo's 'N Mine, a River Falls, Wis., training-camp hangout, Tim Grunhard grabbed him and hugged him.

"You're one of the best in the league," Grunhard said. "It's up to you. The team's counting on you. You've got to be the man. It's time to put up."

Suddenly, Gonzalez felt all this pressure coursing through him. The man? Me? Understand, Gonzalez was no sports fan. He was a beach kid in Southern California. His parents did not know football. The extent of football advice they offered was when his mom, Judy, would say, "When you catch the ball, run like heck." She still says that.

Every step surprised him. He was an All-American tight end and linebacker at Huntington Beach High. He was Orange County Athlete of the Year along with some guy named Tiger Woods. What did it mean? He didn't really know. He wanted to play basketball and football, so he went to Cal, which is not often the place where All-American tight ends and linebackers go.

There, he played on a Sweet 16 basketball team with Jason Kidd. He was an All-American tight end. Then, one day in his junior year, reporters started asking him if he would turn pro early.

His response was classic Gonzalez: "Can I do that?"

"Nobody in my family really could give me advice because nobody had gone through any of this," he said. "I just didn't know anything. I wasn't thinking about going to the NFL and becoming a star. What did I know about the NFL? All these great tight ends that people talk about, Kellen Winslow, Keith Jackson, whoever. I didn't imitate them. I didn't even know who they were."

So, when Grunhard said what everyone was thinking -- that Gonzalez needed to step up and be a star -- Gonzalez panicked. That 1998 season was a fiasco. He dropped passes left and right. He didn't score a touchdown the first 14 games. He felt like he was letting the team down. And the worse he got, the worse he felt. He would mark down in a notebook every single dropped pass and spend his nights stewing.

"I was working as hard as ever," he said. "Actually, I was working harder. But I wasn't having any fun. I was listening too much to other people. See, it just goes back to what I was saying. I was trying to be the best. I wasn't trying to be my best."

All that changed last year. Gonzalez came into camp determined to enjoy the season. He had the greatest season a Chiefs tight end has ever had. He caught 76 passes. He had a 73-yard catch in Oakland. He scored two touchdowns in back-to-back weeks. He was the first Chiefs receiver to go for double-digit touchdowns in more than a decade. He went to the Pro Bowl.

Now, the expectations amuse him. When Cunningham says, "Tony has an opportunity to be one of those special players who go down in football history," well, it doesn't burden Gonzalez at all.

"I really don't listen to what people say or what people write," he said. "I just think you can get caught up in all that. It doesn't really matter. I just want to go out there, play well, have fun. Be my best. That's everything."

III

One day after practice at River Falls, Gonzalez rested in the grass and talked to Moon for, well, it must have been an hour. They just chatted away, about football and life and expectations. Gonzalez says Moon is not a big brother to him or anything like that. They are friends.

"I'm not asking for advice," Gonzalez said. "We're just talking, you know?"

As they walked off the field, Moon asked Gonzalez about a certain play. It was one where Gonzalez went over the middle and was double-covered by a safety and a linebacker. The ball headed his way, and Gonzalez somehow bumped the safety out of the way, leaped, then tore the ball out of the linebacker's hands.

"How did you do that?" Moon asked.

Gonzalez smiled and shrugged.

"Never saw a tight end do anything quite like that," Moon said, shaking his head. "You've got a future in this game."