Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  I finally tracked him down in Miami during the week of the Jets-Colts Super Bowl. He was down there to help with a fund-raising campaign for the NFL Alumni Committee, to try to get a pension installed for former players who were broke and needed help — the same battle as now, almost 40 years later. I made an appointment to meet him in his hotel. He was gone when I arrived. I re-scheduled it for the next day. Again, gone. I was getting desperate. We were onto Saturday, with the game the next day. I made an appointment to meet him at 8 a.m. I showed up at 6:30. When I came to his room, he was putting on a green sweater, getting ready to take off for a golf tournament. I told him who I was and why I was there.

  “I’ve talked to a lot of guys who said they were going to do stories on me,” he said, “but somehow I never get to see those stories. They say they’ll send them, but they never do.”

  I didn’t know what to do. If I missed him that day, well, gameday was out, then everybody scattered, and the chapter would be due. He was almost out the door. The only thing I could think of was to sound off in a pure stream of consciousness.

  I told him I was in Kezar the day Norm Standlee tackled him near the 49er bench and he crawled all the way across the field and out of bounds to save a timeout.

  “Pulled a muscle in my leg on that play,” Motley muttered.

  I told him I was sitting in the end zone for the ’47 championship game against the Yankees, when he ran 51 yards for a TD, right at me, with Harmon Rowe riding his back for the last 10 and punching him in the face. I told him I was in Yankee Stadium the day he knocked Tom Casey out of football. Casey had been a 175-pound defensive back for the Yankees, the only man I ever saw stop Motley, head on, when he had a full head of steam. He woke up in Bronx Veterans Hospital. He never played any more football.

  Motley smiled. “I see him every now and then,” he said. “He’s Dr. Thomas Casey now and he lives in Shaker Heights, right outside of Cleveland. We kid each other about that play. He’ll say, ‘You S.O.B., you ended my career.’ And I’ll tell him, ‘I couldn’t help it if you got in front of me.’”

  He looked at me hard. “Young man,” he said, “you’ve got quite a memory.” And then, and the memory stays very fresh in my mind, he slowly peeled off that green sweater and lit a cigarette.

  “Now what is it that you want to know?”

  The interview went well, and I got what I needed. I sent him an inscribed copy of the book, but, unfortunately, there’s only so much you can tell somebody, and how could I tell him that he was an early idol of mine, shortly after the death of Al Blozis, the record grenade thrower, that I had seen that incredibly tough looking picture of him in Pro Football Illustrated 1947 edition, with his lower lip sucked in and what looked like a scar running down one side of his face and I had saved it for more than 20 years? The advent of the face mask created one interesting phenomena in football. It changed the aspect of players’ faces. It took away the real tough guy look of the early stars. I mean, do you ever see anybody nowadays with a face like Bronko Nagurski’s? What you see is a collection of baby-faced, weight lifting 300-pounders. Could I tell Motley that what I saw of him on the field was even tougher than that picture of him? Nah, not done, not cool. Better move along.

  One of the saddest things you can say about a player, something that combines admiration with melancholy, is that he “plays too tough for his body.” Usually the statement defines a runner, and it is marked by fearsome collisions. Larry Brown, the old Redskins’ runner, was a perfect example of the species. So was Paul Hofer … anyone remember him? An early Bill Walsh tailback on the 49ers, real kamikaze runner. Neither of them made it past 29. But Earl Campbell did. He lasted all the way to his 30th birthday and he was as ferocious as any of them — and bigger. He punished tacklers; they punished him. Today he can barely walk. But man, when he smacked in there with that amazing takeoff speed of his and his 240 pounds, bodies flew.

  One of his most famous plays came against the Raiders, when Jack Tatum was the most feared hitter in football. It was a goal line play, Campbell exploded into the line, Tatum took a run at him and met him full force, Campbell stiffened, made it into the end zone, held onto the ball and collapsed. Six points.

  “Toughest play I’ve ever seen by a back,” the Raiders’ strong safety, George Atkinson, said. “Man scored a touchdown when he was unconscious.”

  We have flipped over to the defensive side of the ball and we’re entering the world of specialization. This is what drove the editors crazy, my battery of designated skills. I wish to apologize, for those and for the various ties I’ve awarded, but there really are different positions within one label.

  Reggie White moved around all over the line during his career, but he always came home to the power side, left defensive end, because he could play the run, could stand up to a tight end with double-team intentions, could penetrate and throw a large shadow over the quarterback’s primary field of vision, the “front side,” it’s called.

  Once I watched Eagles game film with him in his home in the Philadelphia suburbs and he pointed out the minefield he had to dance through on practically every play. It was like watching a matador trying to take on three or four bulls. They set him up, turned him, dove at his knees, hung out and waited for blindside hits, and I realized that this wasn’t just a big guy getting by with a variety of moves, speed rush, bull rush, his patented “hump move,” etc. It was a case of agility translating into survival. One particularly vicious-looking play against the Giants, when his back was half turned and one of the tackles drew a bead on the back of his knee and White just turned his body at the last minute to avoid the death blow, got me to instinctively cry out, “Watch out!” He got a laugh out of that.

  “Is this normal?” I asked him.

  “Not against every team,” he said. “With some others, though … every game, every play.”

  The argument against Deacon Jones and Richie Jackson is that they had the head slap to help them on their way to the quarterback. My argument is that even without that move they would have found a way to get in because they were such great competitors, such great athletic specimens. Neither argument is right or wrong; it’s just the admiration I share about the days when I was watching these two great players.

  I think Deacon made more crawling sacks than any player who ever lived. When he was knocked off his feet, the argument was just starting.

  “The main thing is to keep going,” he said. “If I get blocked, I’ll claw my way in, even if I have to crawl.”

  He was a run player, too, of course … they all were in those days when the ground attack was big, not just a change of pace. Not many disputed the claim that he was the greatest defensive end of his era.

  But Jackson occupies a special place in my memory because 1) no one ever heard of him, since he was an outlander from one of the AFL’s backwater franchises, and 2) he has never reached any serious level of Hall of Fame consideration, despite my lobbying for him every year in the preliminary balloting, mainly because knee injuries took the heart out of what could have been a glorious career. Two stories stay with me. The first one was told to me by Stan Jones, who was the Broncos’ defensive line coach in 1967. The team had gotten Jackson, a nondescript linebacker and tight end for the Raiders, in a five-player trade.

  “I was sitting on the porch of our dorm after dinner,” Jones said. “He pulled up in this old jalopy he’d driven nonstop from Oakland, 24 hours over the mountains. I looked at him and told him, ‘You seem a little big for a linebacker. I think we’ll try you at defensive end.’

  “He was 26 years old. He’d been in the minor leagues for a while. He just stared at me and said, ‘Mister, I’m gonna play somewhere. I’ve driven as far as I’m gonna drive. Here’s where I make my stand.’”

  And he did. He became Tombstone, one of the most respected DEs in the game.

  “He was our enforcer,” said Lyle Alzado, who’d bee
n on the same defensive line. “If a guy was Hollywooding you, you know, trying to show you up, they’d move Richie over to him, and he’d straighten the guy out. The Packers had this 6-8 tackle, Bill Hayhoe. I faced him when I was a rookie, and he was grabbing me, jerking me around, making fun of me. I was having a terrible time. Richie said, ‘Lyle, is he Hollywooding you?’ and I said yeah.

  “He moved over for one play. That’s all it took. He knocked him to his knees and split his helmet wide open. Remember that famous picture of Y.A. Tittle on his knees, with blood dripping down his nose. That was Hayhoe. They had to help him off the field.”

  Howie Long will not get many votes for the all-time team because it’s generally picked by sack totals, and his were not impressive. Oh, he’d line up on the power side and jam up the run and then move inside and face the meat grinder when he was called upon. He’d do all the nasty things, and if they awarded sack statistics in a fair manner, by sacks caused, not inherited, his totals would be out of sight because he flushed a million quarterbacks into other peoples’ arms. He just never was a great tackler himself. He used to register a certain amount of bitterness when he’d read about some defensive end who was being plugged in as a wide or open side pass rusher.

  “Just once in my life I’d like to see what that’s like, spending a whole season rushing from the open side,” he said. “What’s the record for sacks in a season?”

  One more DE and then I’ll let it go. This concerns a freak player who could rush the passer and do very little else that endeared him to his teammates. Mark Gastineau of the Jets, hated by his fellow linemen because he would not run his inside stunts, taking it inside where the big boys lived. “I’m doing my thing,” he’d tell them. But man, what a pass rusher.

  First of all, he had speed in the 4.5s to go with his weight, which was in the 290s. I’ve watched him in practice during half-line drills put on a relaxed kind of rush, with a dreamy look on his face, and come in untouched. I mean clean. Over and over again, and I’ll swear that it looked as if he were just walking fast. The problem was that offensive linemen simply could not judge his speed or his change of pace. A freak.

  Defensive tackle is a confusing position these days. You’ve got nose men playing a zero-technique, two-gap defense, and three-technique tackles, playing a one-gap, plus all manner of varieties. You’ve got base players such as Atlanta’s 350-pound Grady Jackson who might be on the field for only the first play of a series, and “reduced ends,” such as the Steelers’ Aaron Smith, who would line up as a tackle, on the last one. It makes it confusing when you’re trying to pick an All-Pro team because first you have to locate your guy on the field, after you’ve made sure he was there in the first place. If you want, you could get real technical and pick a battery of players, one for each technique, or you could get lucky when someone makes it easy for you by excelling in all of them.

  Such a player was Pat Williams, who started his NFL life as a sleek, mobile, 270-pound Buffalo Bill and gradually grew to a sturdy Minnesota Viking in the 320-330-pound range. In 2005 he had one of the greatest seasons I’ve ever seen a DT have. He could play the nose, and I saw him leave a trail of destroyed centers around the league, including Chicago’s All-Pro Olin Kreutz. He could move outside the guard in the three-technique and penetrate quicker than he could be blocked. He wasn’t like one of those typical, situation fat guys who gets yanked after his base, first or second-down play, and spends the fourth quarter on the bench, sucking oxygen. He turned it on for all four periods.

  I named him my Defensive Player of the Year. I thought he was the most impressive power tackle I’d seen since the heyday of Merlin Olsen, and do you want to know what kind of postseason awards he reaped? None. Sackers get the glory. He had one. Of course, after he had established his credentials he got a steady diet of double-teams, but that was OK. He still collapsed the pocket and forced the QB onto other peoples’ sack statistics.

  I’ve picked sacking tackles on my All-Pro team, but only if their run grades measured up. That’s why I never was as high as other people were on Alan Page, who has more sacks than any tackle in history. Against the run he was a liability. Pure rushers who, like ex-Viking John Randle, said they’d “pick up the run on the go,” were persona non grata. He never made the Sports Illustrated All-Pro list.

  “All you’re doing,” said Mike Giddings, a high-powered personnel consultant for 13 NFL teams, “is neglecting the most dominant interior rusher in the game. And that’s what the game is, whether you like it or not: pass rush and pass protection.”

  My reasoning, which I tried to explain to him, was the following, and I had seen this so many times: First play the enemy runs is a trap at Randle. He’s so far out of position he takes himself and the guy next to him out of the play. Plus eight for the opponent. Second play is a draw aimed at you know who. He’s upfield and moving fast, when the back goes by without stopping to wave. Plus five. Third play is a pass, and Randle, showing a remarkable spin and burst move, sacks the QB for a six-yard loss and pounds his chest to deafening roars (if it’s a home game). He has his sack and he can retire for the afternoon, and a season of those kind of games would give him 16 sacks, a huge number for a DT. All-Pro, of course, but to me he is seven yards in the hole … 13 allowed, six accounted for.

  Now look at my trio, please — Olsen, Lilly and Greene. No excess weight hanging over the belt, skilled in all phases of the game, never off the field. Am I being simplistic? A lost soul crying for a less technical age? I don’t care. These are my guys. Lilly’s game represented near-perfect technique. A grabber and thrower. “Hands that were so quick that you just couldn’t beat him to the punch,” Dolphins guard Bob Kuechenberg said. A roughneck only when aroused or held to the point of madness. Tom Landry used to send weekly game films to the league office with special notations marked, “Holding fouls against Bob Lilly.”

  Greene’s style was at variance with his name, Mean Joe. He could get nasty out there, but his game was based on quickness. So fast off the ball was Greene, so quick to penetrate, that the Steelers created a new alignment in his honor, “the cocked nose tackle” set up, in which Greene attacked the center-guard gap from an angle, or a tilted position. The bully boy on that defensive line, in fact the most feared player on the whole Steel Curtain Defense, was No. 63, Fats Holmes, the only player on that unit, oddly enough, who was never chosen for a Pro Bowl.

  “After the game, just look at the condition of the guy who had to play against Fats,” Chuck Noll said. “That’ll tell you what kind of a player he was.”

  Playing against Greene, the major fear was embarrassment, the whiff, the total miss, which happened more often than offensive linemen would like to recall.

  Olsen was the quintessential bull rush tackle. Oh, you’ve got bull rushers now, but he did it play after play without letup, collapsing the pocket, piling up the run, breaking down the inside of the line while his teammate, Deacon Jones, mopped up outside. He was also one of the cleanest defensive linemen in the game. He hated nonstop holders, and especially cheap shot artists. The name of Cardinals guard Conrad Dobler would get him furious, even by casual reference. Once I told him that my newspaper, the New York Post, was doing a Dobler feature. And Merlin, who played all those gentle giants on TV once his playing career was over, showed some real fury.

  “If you’re the one to write it,” he growled, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

  Another time he admitted that Dobler’s filthy tactics had forced him to do the only thing he ever regretted in 15 years of football.

  “I arranged it with Jack Youngblood, the end playing next to me,” Olsen said, “that I’d set Dobler up and Jack would crash down from his blind side and cave in his ribs. Except that we weren’t very good at it. Dobler smelled it coming. He sensed it and turned at the last minute, and Jack wound up hitting me, and Dobler just laughed at us.”

  “We should have practiced it a little more b
efore we used it,” Youngblood said.

  The year was 1968. I had just covered the Penn State-Miami game in State College, and I was in the Nittany Lions’ trainer’s room talking to Mike Reid, the junior defensive tackle. Miami DE Ted Hendricks would win an award for top collegiate defensive lineman that year, next year would be Reid’s turn, and we were discussing how a player as freaky looking as Hendricks could be so good. I mean, he was 6-7, 215, and his technique was to kind of lean over things and pluck ball carriers out of space with his inordinately long arms. Even his nickname was freaky, “The Mad Stork,” not exactly designed to put fear into people, unless they were parents with too many kids, worried about more coming.

  “He’s, well, the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind going down into the pit with,” Reid said, “but I don’t think you’d ever get a clean block on him either.”

  It proved to be a remarkably accurate forecast of what Hendricks’ life as an NFL linebacker became. He didn’t leave a trail of shattered bodies or a memory of ferocious hits, but he just played everything so well. He was seldom out of position, he could move backward and knock down passes with those long arms, or rush forward and smack them back at the quarterback. Everything was done from a plane of high intelligence … he had been a Rhodes Scholar finalist in college.

  My lasting memory? Somebody, sorry but I can’t remember who, ran a reverse at him. Now this just wasn’t done, but it was tried, and Hendricks sniffed it out immediately, and when the ball carrier had finished moving parallel to the line of scrimmage and was ready to turn upfield, there was Hendricks, just standing there. All momentum had been lost. They faced each other. Hendricks shrugged and held out his hands, palms up, like, “OK, now what happens?” A huge roar went up from the Raider crowd, which always cherished such moments. The runner dropped to a knee. Second and 16.