"For me, when I had a chance to interact with him, It was awesome. He was carefree. He's very honest - you ask him a question, he doesn't take a whole long time trying to process it, figure out how he should put in it...he shoots straight. He's a funny guy. He's competitive, we played everything from ping-pong to even...I put up my imaginary 5 NBA players vs his and we'd debate which team should win...he talks football and he knows the game. He has a very deep history of the Steelers. He would talk about Rocky Bleir, and Ham...he would speak an awful lot about Swan and some of the Super Bowl teams. I know he has a rich appreciation of Steelers football.
"We talked about his draft process, his high school experience and things of that sort. He's very candid, very easy to be around. I watched him with other Pittsburgh people, at restaurants, coming on and off the field with people wanting a picture or an autograph...there's a lot of flexibility with him, and until you get a chance to tag along with someone in his spotlight you don't appreciate what he goes through day in and day out....and there are some people that were awesome and said 'hey Ben good luck' or just wanted to pat him on the back. Other people more demanding...we'd be in the middle of a training session and you would see people walk right into the drill. He's sweating and going hard. Ben would stop every time, take the marker, sign the autograph, take the photo, he would chat people up. And you know he's cooling down. His arm's cooling down and he would start the training right back up....never a complaint, never any resentment about it. He would just keep rolling. From that standpoint he really was remarkable in a lot of ways. -- George Whitfield on interacting with Ben, from his interview with 93.7 - The Fan, October 5, 2010.