Hi John,
If you have a pager like
, you can do almost anything you want about how you want to display it. For instance, you can hide it until loading is completed: $('#grid_pager').hide(), and if you want to add your own text you can do something like this: $('#grid_pager_right').text('foo'). If you use FireBug plugin, you can get the DOM information on any section of the page.
I hope this helps,
Boson