By Mark Curnutte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Shaun Alexander stopped answering his cell phone Tuesday.

He was getting non-stop calls from area codes 513, 859 and 606.

"Everybody is trying to get me to give pep-rally speeches," Alexander said just days before returning home to Cincinnati for the first time as an NFL player. "At the same time, it's very exciting to play in front of people back home again."

Alexander, the former Boone County High School star from Florence, will play Sunday for the first time against the team he rooted for as a child and still considers his second favorite, the Bengals.

Alexander still feels close to the Bengals, and local football fans have not forgotten him.

Almost 400 people have purchased a package deal - a fund-raiser for his foundation - to attend a homecoming event Sunday in Newport and go to the game wearing No. 37 Seahawks shirts.

At Boone County, where he rushed for 3,166 yards and 54 touchdowns as a senior, Alexander trained with Dave Guidugli, father of UC quarterback Gino Guidugli and trainer of some former Bengals players.

"I was always around the Bengals enough to really feel that those were my guys and that's kind of how I've always felt, even to this day," Alexander said.

There was talk of the Bengals drafting Alexander when he came out of Alabama in 2000. The Bengals took wide receiver Peter Warrick. They already had Corey Dillon.

"Would I have been happy to go to the Bengals if they had traded Corey to get me? Of course," Alexander said. "That would have been exciting, but they did what they had to do. And you can't blame them when you had Corey."

Rumors surfaced again before the draft this year that the Bengals would send Dillon to his hometown of Seattle, and Alexander would return to Cincinnati.

But the Seahawks held onto Alexander, who fits well in coach Mike Holmgren's West Coast offense.

"He's our workhorse, we need him to play well for us to be successful," Holmgren said.

The Seahawks are 9-2 when Alexander rushes for 100 yards.

With 497 rushing yards this season and three 100-yard games, Alexander now has 3,303 career yards with 37 rushing touchdowns. He also has five receiving touchdowns and another 959 yards.

"He's a good-sized guy that has tremendous speed and the ability to cut and flash," Bengals coach Marvin Lewis said of the 229-pound Alexander.

But football is only part of Alexander's story and explains just part of his popularity. He's widely regarded as one of the NFL's top citizens off the field, and the Shaun Alexander Family Foundation is one of the most active player charities in the league. Examples of the work are raising more than $40,000 to build playgrounds for impoverished children and paying utility bills for low income families.

Alexander also puts his Christian faith into action as a speaker at youth rallies. He often comes back to Northern Kentucky and has appeared at several churches.

"That area is as much of an importance to me as the Seattle area is and the cities in Alabama that I've already helped," Alexander said of Northern Kentucky, home for his parents, brother and 30 first cousins.

Alexander and his wife, Valerie, are at home in the Seattle area. And his ability to balance family and football was evident on Sept. 21 - the day his daughter, Heaven Nashay, was born 23 minutes before kickoff of the Seahawks-Rams game.

Holmgren supported Alexander's decision to be present for the birth.

"We were both just not thinking it was going to be on game day," Alexander said.

He sat with his wife for 30 minutes after the birth, then was driven to Seahawks Stadium. He arrived at the start of the second quarter and was in the game with nine minutes remaining in the half.

He had 58 rushing yards, and the Seahawks beat the Rams on two fourth-quarter touchdowns.

"I wanted to take care of my responsibilities as a husband first and take care of my wife," he said, "and then I wanted to take care of the next thing - and that's my team."

E-mail mcurnutte@enquirer.com