Now the strike is over. Veterans and rookies are together in the first 11-on-11 practice. Jaynes, who has been the QB in camp, gets first shot under center, which is Rudnay. Hank Stram, the coach, is up in the tower, running the show. Before practice Rudnay had taken a pair of scissors and cut the crotch out of his football pants. When he got down to snap the ball, everything was hanging out. Jaynes began his call, “Brown right, red 34, ready …” he reached down … “Hut-hut … whoooo!” And the ball went flying out of his hands.
“What the hell’s going on down there?” Stram yelled.
“He won’t take the snap, coach,” Rudnay said.
“Well, get another quarterback in there.”
And that was the beginning of the end for David Jaynes.
So there I was out in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and since I came from a strong labor family, Rudnay and I hit it off just fine. The interview started light and frothy, hey, you remember when? … but then it got serious, real serious, and we were into the hypocrisy of the NFL, not from a corporate standpoint but from the players themselves. Rudnay sponsored a group of terminally ill children whom he would bring to each home game. “My special people,” he called them. He would gather with them outside the locker room and introduce them to his teammates, coming out. This has a fine ring to it, but pretty soon he noticed that after a few weeks of this, he and his group were being avoided. It was, “Oh, hi, how are ya,” and they’d keep walking. His bitterness was deep. And almost as a companion piece, so was his feeling about, ssshhh, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He, well, he ripped them.
Now no one, repeat no one, ever had the guts to take on this organization, which equates football with the virtues of Christian life. Tom Keating, the old Raider defensive tackle who spent the ’74 season with the Chiefs, told me that in one game against the Chargers, Coy Bacon, the right defensive end, collected two sacks and a lot of pressures off tackle Charlie Getty, the leader of the Chiefs’ branch of the FCA.
“His locker was next to mine, and all the writers were over there after the game, asking what happened,” Keating said. “I leaned over to listen, I wanted to hear, too. Charlie said, ‘Well, I guess God didn’t intend for me to block Coy Bacon today.’ I mean, how would you like it if you were the quarterback, and you went into a game knowing that God didn’t intend your left tackle to block his man?”
I mentioned this story to Rudnay. We were sitting in a restaurant near his home in Lee’s Summit, where there were still active Jesse James fan clubs. He stared down at his plate and then launched into his tirade. “Typical,” he said. “Emotional cripples, that’s what the FCA breeds. Guys who can’t handle it themselves, so they lay it all off on God.”
His wife, Polly, was looking very nervous. I’d been writing everything down. “Are you sure you want to see this in a national magazine?” She said. He thought it over for a moment.
“Yeah. I guess I might as well be controversial in my old age,” he said and continued his diatribe.
When it came time to write my story, I looked at the quotes again. I was very fond of Rudnay, both as a player and a person. I also felt that he had absolutely no idea what his life would be like if those sentiments ever saw the light of day. It was a hell of a flashy angle, but I took my pen and drew a line through all the FCA quotes. I just couldn’t do it.
Sometimes you don’t even realize it, but you run into a player you never really knew that well but trusts you well enough to raise the curtain, if only for brief moment. I sat with Lawrence Taylor one night when he just decided to sweep away the cliché quotes and break down the game from a purely analytical level. LT, who loved the joy of competition, who would regularly star in the contest the Giants players would hold before practice, setting a garbage can 50 yards away and seeing who could throw the most footballs into it. It was almost an impossible task, but when LT would let fly, they’d be banging off the can, with more of them dropping in than anyone else could manage, even the quarterbacks.
In the 1980s Jim Anderson, the L.A. Rams’ trainer, adopted a mongrel dog from a local shelter. It became the club’s mascot. They named it Ofer, standing for 0-for-6. It had been given seven days to live before it would be killed. Anderson got it on the seventh day. It had gone 0-for-6. Ofer’s great joy was to guard an open locker, as a cocker goalie would, while various players tried to kick a tennis ball past him. It was practically impossible. He had lightning reflexes. He wouldn’t swallow any fakes. When the Giants practiced in L.A. for the ’87 Super Bowl against the Broncos, they used the Rams’ training facilities. Everyone immediately took up the Ofer challenge. One day LT was unusually bubbly and animated for the opening of the press interview sessions. Someone asked him how come.
“I beat Ofer two out of 10 this morning,” he said.
But on this night half a decade or so later, we sat at a table, late at night, in his ill-fated restaurant, one of the many business ventures that failed, and he tried to explain what really went on out there. Maybe he was just tired of making headlines with those standard macho quotes … how he hit ’em so hard he could see the … you can fill in the rest yourself. Maybe he just wanted to take it to a different level, what actually went on out there.
“Look, there just comes a moment in a game,” he said, “when you know that’s it. If you make the play, the game’s over. It’s very hard to explain. It’s just something you feel. Maybe you’re up by 10 points and you know if you score once more, just once, on anything, they’ll quit. You can see it. You can feel it, maybe before even they know it. It could be when you’re on defense, and you can see how desperate they are, and you make the stop, you get the sack and — ahhhh — the air just goes out of them. And the game’s over. It’s not a macho thing, it’s not me against you or any of that crap and it’s deeper. But you just know it.”
I’ve felt that way sometimes, covering a game. And sometimes I was wrong. But then again, I wasn’t down in the pit. LT was, and I appreciated the way he tried to get me to understand it.
I’ve been asked what was the greatest play I’ve ever seen. Steve Young’s broken field 49-yard gallop that left Viking tacklers all over the field in 1988 comes to mind, but emotionally, I can’t get away from a play I saw Taylor make in 1983, his third year in the league, in a game against the Super Bowl Redskins. In the context of the game, it was almost meaningless; the Giants were down by 10 points at the time, and on the chart, it went down as a 15-yard run by Joe Theismann. Taylor, rushing from the right wing, gripped 300-pound All-Pro left tackle Joe Jacoby by the shoulder pads and threw him, flushing Theismann out of the pocket, and the quarterback was off and running, with LT in pursuit. George Starke, the right tackle, peeled back to pick up Taylor, who knocked him to the ground without breaking stride. Fifteen yards down field, Taylor caught up to Theismann and brought him down. He had disposed of 560 pounds worth of offensive linemen and run down a 4.6 quarterback. Nowhere was the play ever mentioned. A superhuman defensive play.
I close my eyes and see Taylor, bent over in pain, by his locker after he had recorded three sacks against the Saints and forced two fumbles, single-handedly turning the game for the Giants, playing under the extreme agony of a torn pectoral muscle in his chest. Bill Parcells knelt in front of Taylor and leaned over, and they touched foreheads.
“I didn’t think you’d make it,” he said.
“I didn’t either,” Taylor said.
The NFL become my personal province and naturally the source for my richest store of memories. Pete Rozelle spoiled me for the commissioners who followed. I could talk to him as I would to a fan. I felt that I could ask him anything. He never ducked a question, and I also never heard him say to me, “This is off the record.” He just trusted my good sense. I remember when the USFL sued the NFL in 1986 and won a settlement of $3. I rode back to the league office with Rozelle.
“I’m really proud of the way our owners handled themselves in
court,” he said. I asked him about the young owner who had enthusiastically endorsed the Porter report, a loony plan by a Harvard professor advising the NFL in the use of dirty tricks. It became a major arguing point for the USFL in court. Rozelle made a face when I mentioned the owner’s name.
“A freakin airhead,” he said.
“Let me get it right … a dickhead, was that the quote?” I asked him, faking some heavy note-taking. “An airhead, same as you,” he said smiling.
I could always get a rise out of him one way. I’d say “Fifty-five to seven,” and he’d go off. I was a sophomore at Stanford in 1950; he was the 24-year-old PR man for the University of San Francisco. A year later the great Dons team with Ollie Matson and Gino Marchetti and Burl Toler would go unbeaten — one of the great teams in history — but in ’50 they were juniors and we beat them, 55-7. Ed Brown, the quarterback who would later play for the Bears, was hurt that day, and a guy named Lefty Gene Sweeters, who couldn’t throw the ball in the ocean, threw twice as many interceptions as completions.
“Jesus Christ, out quarterback was out, and Sweeters wasn’t even supposed to play that day,” and he’d be off and running. Every time. I could get him every time.
The league always came down hard on gambling or the hint of it, and point spreads and the like. But Rozelle grew up where people liked to make an occasional wagers, and you know how some stuff dies hard. Once I asked him what he thought of a 49er-Viking game coming up. Just by instinct, without really worrying about the implications, he said, “Geez, you’ve got to like the Niners getting seven. I mean, they can run the ball.”
When I did his obit for Sports Illustrated, I wrote about that incident, and one of the prissy editors killed the part about the betting line, which, of course, destroyed the whole point of the story.
Even before Rozelle announced his retirement, he didn’t seem right, but I never wrote it and didn’t even want to know for sure what a lot of us suspected.
“What’s wrong with him?” I finally asked Browns owner Art Modell at one of the league meetings.
“No one’s saying, but it’s got to be some kind of a minor stroke,” Modell said. “What we’re seeing just isn’t like him, is it?” No, it wasn’t. It was a sad final memory.
Maybe it’s because the sporting arena is such a vivid, explosive place, but it’s very hard to accept the death of its dynamic performers. I just can’t picture Walter Payton dead. I keep remembering the time I sat with him in the lobby of the Bears’ dorm at their training camp in Lake Forest, Ill. He had brought his motorcycle in there and placed it next to a wall, and as I talked to him he just couldn’t sit still. He’d sit, jump up, bounce a few times on the balls of his feet, jump on the seat of his cycle, bounce up and down, hop off, go back to the seat, bounce again, as he made a point, his words coming as fast as his movements, a dizzying capsule of energy itself. It was getting dark outside, and seen in the dim light of the lobby, Payton actually seemed to glow; it was as if an aura was emanating from him. Fascinating, a little scary, unforgettable … how could he have died so young?
I wrote a book with Lyle Alzado. After I got to know him, he didn’t hold back, talking about the fear and insecurity that gripped him throughout his whole career. He was the only player who ever told me he was using anabolic steroids while he was an active player. Six seasons after I did the book, he played in the ’84 Super Bowl for the Raiders against the Redskins. The Raiders won big. He’d been a consistent force, exerting pressure on Theismann. The locker facilities in Tampa Stadium were cramped. Maneuvering was tough, as it normally is in a post-Super Bowl locker room, and I was struggling to get my quotes, inching through the mass of bodies. All of a sudden, someone was gripping my arm. It was Alzado. His eyes looked wild.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said.
“Jesus, Lyle,” I said. “Now? Right now?”
“Yeah, now. Let’s go in back.”
I didn’t know that had happened, a major felony, someone busted for drugs, what? We went into a back area, behind the trainers’ rooms and the washing machines and the piles of dirty uniforms, into almost pitch darkness.
“What? What is it?” I asked him. He stared at me for a moment.
“How’d I play?” He said. Phew, what a relief.
“Great, you played great, Lyle.”
“Really, you’re not shittin’ me?”
“Really.”
“Thanks,” he said.
I know it’s wrong, but I think of O.J. Simpson the same way I think of players who have died. Once I was on a talk show toward the end of his career and I was asked who were the nicest of the superstars, in any sport, to be around. It didn’t take a lot of thought to answer it. The first guy who came to mind was Pele, the great soccer player, one of the most decent, humble people I’ve ever met. The second one was O.J. Simpson.
The answer didn’t draw much of a reaction at the time. If you would have asked any of the beat guys covering the Bills, or even the 49ers during his two years there, they’d have told you the same thing. A few years ago, I was on another show and I was asked the same question. Before I answered it, I had to ask myself: How much courage do you have? Pele, over and out, would have been the easy answer, the coward’s way out. I had gotten in trouble on a lot of these kinds of shows, popping some top of the head observation out quickly without time for reflection, and what always happens is that these talk show people cut you off in a hurry without giving you time to fully develop your answer.
They’re like prosecuting attorneys. I could hear the guys now: “Are you totally aware of what he did, of the civil suit he lost in the death of Nicole Brown? Have you been asleep all this time? How could you be so blind and think only of your own relationship?” And so forth and so on. I could avoid all this. Better avoid it.
“Pele, the soccer player,” I said, “and O.J. Simpson.” And, of course, the storm came.
I just let the blows fall. I could have mentioned all the little kindnesses he showed during a 13-year professional relationship that began in his junior year at USC, all the little things he didn’t have to do but did anyway, the times he’d call me late at night, just to clarify a story, to make sure I had things right, the kindness he’d shown to my teenage son. I could have mentioned the piece I did on him in his last year in football, with the Niners, when he and Al Cowlings — that’s right — the same guy who drove the white car in that notorious TV episode, spent their day off driving me around their old neighborhood on Portero Hill acting as tour guides, almost … “This is where Joey T. backed his Camero into the grocery store window, this is where we used to play football on the street.” And then the evening I spent with O.J. and Nicole in their penthouse apartment, looking down on the twinkling lights of the city, the softness of it, gripping her hand as he told me about his child who had drowned in a swimming pool, the tears, the silences, the reflective moments. My God, this is a nice couple, I thought. I hope they find some joy in their lives.
And then gone, smashed, shattered in a horrible explosion of deadly violence and infidelity. Yeah, I could have mentioned all the nice stuff, and then the talk show guy would really have laced into me, lumping me with one of those idiots who says, “Well, Saddam Hussein was always nice to me when I dealt with him.” No, better keeping it buttoned up.
I saw O.J. on TV during the trial and afterward, and it wasn’t the same person. I guess it could have been the drugs that did it to him, perhaps a heavier dose over a longer period than people imagined. His voice had thickened and coarsened, and there was violence in it that he’d never shown in the old days … I’d never even heard of him being involved in anything ugly or violent on the field. And he looked different, thicker, darker, as silly as that might sound. It was a different person, a kind of monster, and that’s why I thought of him as a member of the roster of the dead. The old O.J. Simpson was dead.
When I was in high
school, my bible was Paul Gallico’s Farewell to Sport, and the title for this chapter duplicates his opener … out of respect. He touched on such a wide spectrum, but I have narrowed my focus to the sports I knew best. He saw the rise of big-time sports and its superheroes during his tour of duty, which lasted from 1923 to 1936. But my gosh, he lasted only 13 years until he wrote his signoff, his Farewell to Sport, which became my bible as a teenager. My question was what was his rush? He left to become a fiction writer, and for a while, I read everything he wrote, but aside from one magnificent and famous story, The Snow Goose, nothing from what I thought was a rather superficial output ever came near the depth and profundity of his sports writing.
He wrote about leaving the arena as a gradual closing of the door. Well, I’m not leaving it, not yet anyway. I’ll say goodbye when the time comes, but right now I’ll take what’s there, even if it isn’t the way it used to be. Reminds me of the old saying about New Orleans: “It ain’t what it used to be and never was.” OK, forgive me, an old man’s memories. Maybe it’s more of never-was, but to me they’re still alive. All of them.
2. Centrique To Freaque
I am looking in the mirror. I don’t like what is looking back at me. I see 74 years of strange living. What I see is old, yes, but not old old, if you know what I mean.
Dr. Z Page 4
