Willie Anderson has lived a lifetime in the last 30 days. Ever since his girl gave him her kidney. So when the call came the other day to reminisce about the 1996 NFL Draft, 30 years blurred like surgery.

"Thirty years?" says Anderson, who wants you to know all is well. "I didn't think about it until I heard it the other day. But it has to be. Because I'll be 51 this year."

Brock Gutierrez knows the math.

"I remember one night at minicamp, and Ken Blackman and Rod Jones and I were going to go get a beer," Gutierrez says of his fellow rookie offensive linemen. "And Willie couldn't go because he wasn't old enough."

But at a tender 20, Anderson was more than old enough to become one of the greatest Bengals in history. A Ring of Honor right tackle. For the sixth straight year, a finalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But even more than that, more than the draft's 10^th pick, he's still the glue of that class of '96. Always in the middle of the text chain.

"Justin Smith told me he had (the transplant), and I called him right away," Gutierrez says. "I was with him for seven years. A hell of a guy."

Thirty years later, and the Bengals are picking No. 10 again.

"Hey," Anderson says, "make sure you talk to those other guys. Brock. Marco."

"Willie has that voice. Picture a mouthpiece in there with a chinstrap ," says Marco Battaglia, the Rutgers tight end who put New Brunswick on the NFL map long before the McCourtys when the Bengals picked him in the second round that year.

"You knew he was going to call the right thing and do the right thing."

Thirty years later, and Battaglia is still a shining Knight among the Scarlet. Instead of raising zones, he's raising money as Rutgers' senior advisor to the foundation president.

"I still talk to those guys," says Battaglia in between meetings. "Ken Blackman is a nut job, but we love him. J-Rock is a great dude. Living in Africa. Tommy Tumulty is still one of my best friends. He'd come up for Christmas before the girls got older. We were a tight-knit group."

Blackman, the mauling guard, was the third-round pick out of Illinois. Jevon Langford, said to be the great-grandson of boxing icon Sam Langford, was the workout freak from Oklahoma State. A fourth-round defensive end. Tumulty, a Pittsburgh linebacker taken in the sixth round, was a tackling machine. Injuries haunted them all. All, it seems, except for Anderson.

The class was also caught in the throes of transition, and it wasn't easy. The Bengals were moving into a new era and a new stadium. The NFL was caught in the same awkward vortex. Old school in thought while flexing 21^st-century muscles. The '96 draft was one of the first to go modern multi-media crazy. Inviting players to New York City?

"I got invited, but I didn't go," Anderson says. "You could only get three or four tickets, and I wanted everybody to be a part of it. Family. Friends. We had a big barbecue at my mom's house."

The cameras still converged on Dial Street in the Whistler neighborhood of Pritchard, Ala. You've got to remember. Anderson had been one of the most covered athletes in the long, glorious history of Mobile sports. His career at Auburn had made him even bigger than his 6-6, 350 pounds that dominated the local football fields and basketball courts.

The same thing was going on up north in the big city. The Battaglias were hosting 40 family and friends in Queens. Anthony Fucilli and his Madison Square Garden cameras were there, too. "My mom cooked. My dad cooked," Battaglia says.

This was big. Battaglia was poised to be the first Rutgers player to go in the first round since, well, forever. It didn't happen, and Battaglia found himself cussing the cameras and telling them to put them down as the second round began.

"I was demoralized," Battaglia says. "I needed a moment. I went up into my room. Then somebody said Coach Shula was on the phone. I'm thinking I'm going to the Dolphins. No, they said, not Don Shula, Dave Shula from the Bengals. I didn't even know there was another Shula coaching."

Down south, there was also confusion. The draft may have been trying to go big-time, but there were still kinks to be worked out. Prepping for the barbecue, Anderson was mowing the lawn when he got called to the phone by Tampa Bay coach Tony Dungy.

"Do you want to be a Buc?" Dungy asked.

Auburn had just played in the Outback Bowl, and Anderson recalls how, "We had tons of fun in Tampa." He got done cutting grass and settled in to hear from the Bucs.

But the call never came. Anderson figured Dungy would have to trade ahead of the Bengals at No. 10 because everyone had him going to Cincinnati. But the Raiders kept their pick from Houston at No. 9 and took Ohio State tight end Ricky Dudley.

"I must have been the only correct mock draft pick that year. The Bengals had been saying it for months," Anderson says. "If he's there at ten, we're going to take him."

Still, there was pandemonium on Dial Street when it shot across ESPN. The house stood on bricks and when everyone jumped, the living room floor tilted.

"One of the reporters wrote about it," Anderson says. " 'Oh, the guy came from the dirt roads of Alabama.' My mom was so embarrassed. I told her, 'Don't worry about it, Momma. In a couple of months, you'll be in a new house.'"

Indeed, her son would twice become the richest offensive lineman in NFL history during a career that was all about busting ceilings for him and Mary Anderson's family.

"The thing about Willie," Guttierrez says, "is that he not only had the talent, but he had the drive, and he had the smarts. People ask me all the time. That's what it takes to be a Hall-of-Famer. If you've just got the talent and nothing else, you just play for six, seven years, and get paid."

Guttierez is that bookend of that '96 draft, at the other end of the cameras and Canton. This was way before Central Michigan's J.J. Watts and Eric Fishers of the 2010s. In fact, safety Robert Jackson of the '80s Bengals was probably the last Chippewa to make it in the league before Bengals offensive line coach Paul Alexander called Guttierez and told him they were going to sign him after the draft.

"I had no idea," says Gutierrez, heading into his 16^th season as the Central Michigan radio analyst. "I was already playing in the Arena League, trying to make some money to buy a car and other stuff before I started working. I had already played a preseason game."

The 6-3, 304-pound Guttierez proved to be a bright, resourceful, and durable center. By the time he played nine years for three teams and 116 games, only Anderson ended up playing more in the NFL in the Bengals' Class of '96.

But first Guttierez had to convince the Arizona Wranglers head coach. Danny White, the old Cowboys punter and quarterback, wasn't buying it as he looked to keep his center. You're never going to make the (Bengals) team, White told Gutierrez.

"Be that as it may be, Coach," Guttierez recalls the conversation of a lifetime, "I'm going to try. I'll always wonder if I would have."

While floors slanted and cameras whirred for others, Guttierez signed a Bengals contract via something called a fax and waited for the Wranglers to fly him home. Nope. Only if we cut you, the general manager said, and we're not cutting you.

So Gutierrez sat in the stands with a few beers to watch the next preseason game and saw his replacement break his leg when he got rolled up. When the GM figured out that Gutierrez was going to stay in the stands until they cut him, he called the Bengals' Jim Lippincott and the front office exec sent Guttierez a plane ticket.

"I wasn't the biggest guy or the most athletic guy," says Guttierez, forever the trivia answer as the center in Corey Dillon's 278-yard game. "But I stayed healthy and never missed practice. I'm not sure I could make it today with the way they do training camp. There's not as much attrition."

The 30-year thread of the '96 class is Anderson getting his guys together on text. Just like in the locker room.

"There were a lot of distractions," Battaglia says. "But Willie never bought into that. He was never distracted."

Battaglia never has to look far to remember the cameras of '96. MSG's Anthony Fucilli is now Rutgers' sideline reporter, and Battaglia continues to be amazed at how far it has all come. And, yes, he wonders about the impact on his young athletes. There always seems to be microphones and staffers and media in the hallways and never just players and coaches.

"It's a rock concert on steroids and it just never ends," Battaglia says.

The '90s seems to be a safe harbor.

"I tell people all the time," Battaglia says of his life in the NFL. "It's like being in a schoolyard in the New York City public school system. Everybody goes to the yard. Not everybody comes from the same background, putting everybody together. And you have great friendships that last forever, and you have great enemies that last a short time."

Willie Anderson hears him.

After ten days or so in the hospital, he's back up to walking a mile per day in a park near his Atlanta home. He's paused his offensive line academy with plans to return to coaching soon. There are the twice-weekly visits to check the labs. He's down to 301 pounds, the lightest he's been since he was one of the most recruited high school players in the country.

"That's a good thing. I'm trying to get to 290," Anderson says. "I'm training. I'm working out. The kidney was just holding so much fluid. But now it's working properly."

His lady, who gave him her kidney, plans to run Atlanta's Peachtree 10-kilometer on the Fourth of July. He says he'll be out there at a water spot, a few days before he turns 51.

The class of '96, from Whistler to Queens to the old Arizona Wranglers, is waiting for the text.

"We had a fun class," Willie Anderson says. "We all learned together."