Jerry Rice still runs "The Hill."
He wouldn't mind having, oh, a million or so youngsters accompanying him on his grueling workouts.
The greatest receiver in football history, Rice is helping the NFL and Xbox 360 fight childhood obesity through a program that hopes to encourage 1 million youngsters to become more active.
The "60 Million Minutes Challenge" asks kids of all ages to pledge to be active for 60 minutes every day. It's part of the NFL's PLAY 60 program, a new initiative launched Monday.
"To reverse the trend of childhood obesity, we need to continue to educate kids and parents about the importance of 60 minutes of daily activity," Rice said. "That's what's great about Kinect for Xbox 360. It gets kids off the couch and gets their whole body in the game.
"Being a healthy kid can lead to being a healthy adult."
The folks at the NFL and Microsoft Corp., which makes the video system central to this initiative, are offering incentives such as gift cards for merchandise and personalized autographs on Facebook to youngsters who join up.
Because the entire body is the controller through Kinect for Xbox 360, the amount of exercise a player gets easily dwarfs the more conventional approaches for video games in which the fingers and the wrists get the biggest workouts.
