by Rich Cohen
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Pro football looked different after the war, and it would have a different focus. It had been the team, the scrum. It would become the individual. Lombardi denied it, but he was among the biggest individuals of all. As was MacArthur. As was Patton. That’s the meaning of celebrity general. I’m in front. Follow me.
Of course, Lombardi meant for himself to be the individual, the general in charge of the division, but once that genie was out of the bottle …
If you want to understand what happened to the NFL, don’t look at Jim Brown or Tom Brady. Look at Homer Jones, a Giants receiver who, attempting to distinguish himself in the 1960s, became the first man to “spike” the ball. In the past, a player handed the ball to the referee after scoring, or he might toss it into the stands. Jones heaved the ball into the turf instead, driving it into the end zone like a coup stick. You go from there to Billy White Shoes Johnson’s touchdown dance, to the Ickey Woods shuffle, to Terrell Owens’s Sharpie.
As the modern game emerged, here was the big question: Who will represent the league? The coach or the quarterback? Who will determine its style? Lombardi, with his coach pants and short sleeves and wire frames and buzz cut? Or Joe Namath, with his white shoes and fur coat and Lincoln Continental and Fu Manchu mustache, which, in 1968, he shaved on live TV for $10,000? (Namath was on Richard Nixon’s enemies list, apparently on general principle.) According to David Maraniss, the author of When Pride Still Mattered, Lombardi’s last words, spoken in a delirium on his deathbed, were: “Joe Namath! You’re not bigger than football! Remember that!”
But Joe Namath was bigger than football—or, more dangerous, Joe Namath and those who rode the tails of his fur coat would become football. It had been the muck and the mire of a team in the pile, but it would be the quarterback. As Louis B. Mayer knew, every picture needs a star. In this inhumanly violent game, where players are armored and often indistinguishable, the quarterback is the standout, the figure onto whom we project our fantasies. More than just another player, he’s an archetype, like the cowboy or gangster. He stands for certain national characteristics. He represents us. His career is our life compressed to a handful of seasons. If you pick one to follow and he prospers, you will ultimately see a man when he’s young and green, and when he’s so old only knowledge and desire remain.
You can have a quarterback as a Catholic has a patron saint, a figure to focus on amid the chaos. Sid Luckman was the first to lead a modern offense. Johnny Unitas was the first to become a pop star—this had everything to do with television. Joe Namath was the first to become a trendsetter and revolutionary, a flash of color in a black-and-white world, “a real ring-ding-a-ding finger-snapper,” Sports Illustrated reported in 1965, “a girl ogler, a swingin’ cat with dark good looks who sleeps till noon.” But my favorite was Jim McMahon, who served as a kind of avatar. His struggles seemed to replicate and amplify my own, what I faced and how I wanted to react. The way he responded in crucial moments, how he seemed to get even better after he’d been hurt, the way, in the midst of the crowd, he always seemed in some fundamental sense to be all alone—it was everything I wanted to be.
How does the quarterback represent us?
The quarterback is man in pain. Via his suffering, we witness our own suffering at a safe remove. We eat chips and drink beer as he’s lacerated, stepped on, stomped, taunted, concussed. It’s the sort of physical torment that certain Christian sects fixate on, a Jesus-on-the-road-to-Calvary spectacle that is liberating because it shows you’re not alone. The Passion of the Quarterback. When I asked McMahon what sort of injuries he had in the course of his fifteen-year career, he gripped his shoulder and said, “Well, I destroyed my shoulder. You maybe know about that; it was bad. Then there was the Charles Martin thing”—the dirtiest play I’ve ever seen. “I wrecked my hands and knees, my head, lots of dings and concussions, go into a room now, can’t remember why I’m there, like, Who are you and why are we talking? Haha, just kidding—or am I? In ’91, I broke five ribs off my sternum in New York and bruised my heart. I could’ve punctured it, but it just bruised. That was an unusual injury: How many other guys have broken all those ribs off the sternum? Some guys get a cracked rib here or there, but to break them off your sternum? And then to hurt your kidney the way I hurt mine…?”
The kidney was a defining injury for McMahon. It happened in 1984, when the Bears hosted the Los Angeles Raiders, the reigning Super Bowl champs. The Raiders were considered the meanest team in the NFL, so for the Bears this was a nasty version of King of the Hill. Some consider it the most violent game ever played. Los Angeles lost two quarterbacks that afternoon. Their third-stringer, thirty-eight-year-old punter Ray Guy, refused to go in. There was a fifteen-minute delay while the first-stringer, Marc Wilson, was medicated, taped up, and sent back out.
In the third quarter, Mac, seeing no open receivers, tucked the ball under his arm and took off. “As I was running, I got jerked from behind,” he said, “and when I got jerked, my kidney was exposed and that’s when the guy hit me. And his helmet, it just sliced it in half.”
Sliced what in half?
“My kidney.”
Mac took two more snaps: it’s what the offensive lineman loved about him—he played the game like Doug Plank, a human missile living in the right fucking now.
“There was clearly something wrong with him,” Kurt Becker said. “He was barking out plays but we couldn’t hear him. His voice was gone and he was white like a ghost but would not leave. We had to basically carry him off the field.”
“I went down to the locker room—this was in the middle of the game—and I found Jim there, standing at the toilet, in his pads, pissing blood,” McMahon’s agent, Steve Zucker, told me. “He was really hurt. He was streaming blood, dark red blood.”
“I was in the ICU at the hospital for ten, eleven days,” said McMahon, “fighting with the doctors, who wanted to take it out—it wouldn’t stop bleeding. But if I had just one kidney, they’d never let me play again. So I refused, and after about three days, it closed up.”
I asked if he still suffered any effects from that injury, thirty years later. “If I drink hard liquor, it hurts like hell,” he said. “I can drink beer all day, but there’s something about hard liquor. I’ll wake up the next day and it kills. It still functions, but it kills.”
When the quarterback is injured, we get to see how he deals with pain. In this, he is an example for the common fan. How he reacts shows us how we should and should not behave. We’re all going to get hurt and die. The only freedom is the freedom to choose how we respond. Nature gets the first move and the last, but if you concentrate, you can work in a few moves of your own between. Some quarterbacks stay and play through the pain, while others cry as they are carried away on an electric cart. A few years ago, when Bears quarterback Jay Cutler injured his knee and took himself out of a playoff game, fans, the media, even a few former players denounced him. What sort of message does it send the team and the city? In this game, if you can walk, you play.
There is nothing more thrilling in sports than a wounded player who overcomes the pain to win; it’s the closest the game comes to a religious moment. This is why fans reacted so fiercely to Cutler; he seemed to be robbing them of a shot at transcendence. When I asked Rob Ryan, a producer at NFL Films, why football became more popular than baseball, he said, “It’s a word we’re not allowed to use because of the concussions, but it’s violence. Fans love to see the player wounded and even more to see that player get off the turf and stay in the game and strike back. Ben Roethlisberger limping across the end zone, Jack Youngblood playing on a broken leg in the playoffs, Emmitt Smith going on with his busted ribs and bruised lungs to carry the ball thirty times for almost two hundred yards in a big game against the Giants. He’s dying, but he’s playing. People can connect with that. It’s how they want to be.”
Season after season, the injuries build up and the interest is compounded—how does a player deal with it? To
my mind, there are two ways, hence two basic kinds of quarterbacks. There are those who turn to religion. The randomness of the career-ending disaster seems to demand professions of faith. God can give even a torn ACL meaning: it’s how He wants it, all part of the plan. That’s why football seems so much more religious than other sports. God is in the pregame prayer and the postgame invocation, with the priest on one knee and in the circle of big men at midfield. He’s there with Tebow Tebowing and with every wide receiver who points to the sky when he gets into the end zone. (“I had my own feelings about praying before a game,” Bernie Parrish wrote in They Call It a Game. “If God would just stay out of it, I would win by myself. As Phil Harris used to sing in the thirties and forties, ‘Lord don’t help me, but please don’t help that bear.’”) Every time a player stays down too long, athletes on both sidelines take off their helmets and whisper in the heavenly ear, because it’s a violent world and the worst can happen and there but for the grace of God go I.
The other type of quarterback is hard-bitten, Bogartian. He seeks a worldly solace, which partly explains the long relationship between professional football and every variety of painkiller and stimulant. Novocaine, Xylocaine, Vicodin, amphetamine. Halas took whiskey from a flask—because, years later, he could still feel the place where Jim Thorpe took him out at the end of that glorious run. Johnny Blood, who started his career with the Duluth Eskimos, was the first player to use the pep pills known as greenies. “Doctors say that drugs like Dexedrine or Benzedrine do not have an effect on one’s performance,” wrote Parrish. “Perhaps not, but after that day [when we took them before] practice, we were convinced they were great. I never played another game in my college or professional career without taking Dexedrine or Benzedrine. The last season of my career with Cleveland I was taking ten or fifteen 5-milligram tablets of Dexedrine.”
“When I first got in the league there’d be bowls of different-colored pills in the locker room,” McMahon told me. “Take two of these, take two of those. You’d figure out which ones you liked, which ones you didn’t. They definitely get you ready to go. Then you didn’t sleep for two days. I took what they called ‘Up Times.’ It was like drinking a pot of coffee. I’d take a couple of those and a couple of painkillers to even it out. I didn’t want to feel anything until the game was over.”
“The intimacy of our doping ritual had begun with codeine and Demerol,” Peter Gent wrote in North Dallas Forty. “At first, the pills were used just to bear the pain of shredded and smashed muscles and ligaments. Then later we combined them with alcohol to shorten the long, anxious return trips to Dallas. We would sit, strapped in our seats, packed in ice or wrapped in elastic, in lengthy discussion of the sounds and feelings of excruciating injuries … I was high on something all the time—codeine, booze, grass, speed, fear; in fact, I doubt that during a season I was ever in a normal state of mind, if there is such a thing as normal.”
For quarterbacks, the drugs are often the only way to stay on the field. I believe I once saw a photo of McMahon, taken from above, surrounded by coaches and players shielding him as a doctor plunged a hypodermic into his fist. “When I broke my hand, they’d shoot it five or six times around the bone and they always hit a nerve,” McMahon told me. “I’d go numb, couldn’t feel the ball. Nothing to the elbow. It first happened in ’84. I came off the field ’cause I’d landed on my back and busted my hand. I couldn’t feel it. I went to reach for some water and I couldn’t hold the cup. It just fell out. My hand was already about that big. I said, ‘Doc, look.’ He said, ‘It’s just a bruise.’ Everything was just a bruise. I cut my kidney in half, and it was just a bruise. That night it was killing me. I go to the hospital on my own, get it X-rayed. They said, ‘You’ve broken a bone.’ They casted it. I go to work the next morning and they’re all freaking out. The trainer said, ‘What are you doing with a cast?’ I said, ‘My hand’s broke.’ ‘Well, you can’t let the press see that.’ ‘Well fuck, they’re going to figure it out sooner or later. I can’t throw a spiral ’cause I can’t feel the ball.’ But they didn’t want anybody to ever know you were hurt.”
It was a rap on McMahon: great competitor but can’t throw a spiral.
“You know why?” he asked me. “’Cause I was being shot up. When you can’t feel the ball, you have no idea where it’s going. It wasn’t my fault. It was Novocaine or Xylocaine … one of the ’caine brothers.”
* * *
How else does the quarterback represent us?
He replicates our predicament in the world, known as the human condition. Life is a game and we’re in it but also removed, which is exactly the position of the QB. He leads the team but is separate, a freak, part player, part coach, potential hero, possible goat, but never really one of the boys. A football field is about duplication. There are multiples of every sort of player in most alignments: four linemen, two running backs, three linebackers. But there’s only one quarterback. He carries the weight of the endeavor on his back. He’s critical and he’s alone. As such, he understands the mercenary truth of the world better than the rest: there’s no sentimentality; regardless of the past, the minute he falters, he’s gone. It’s the same for everyone, of course. Each success only brings you closer to inevitable failure. There is no team, as there is no nation; it’s only you, in your helmet, in your head. “When an athlete, no matter what color jersey he wears, finally realizes that opponents and teammates alike are his adversaries, and he must deal and dispense with them all, he is on his way to understanding the spirit that underlies the business of competitive sport,” writes Peter Gent. “There is no team, no loyalty, no camaraderie; there is only him, alone.”
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How else does the quarterback represent us?
He shows us how to deal with old age and death, for the pro athlete must get old when he is young, must lose all he has trained for and dreamed about for years and then lose everything else. In other words, the quarterback dies twice. I could never hear too many last-season, end-of-career stories: How did you finish? How did you walk away? It’s a model you apply to your own life. Do you go out like John Elway, whose last game was a Super Bowl? Or do you stick around till they make you leave, like Johnny Unitas, who was broken when he played his last game in San Diego? Or Brett Favre, who went from team to team in those final seasons, selling his services like a hired gun?
Here’s a question I’ve long asked myself: What, if anything, redeems the game? What justifies the physical pain and mental anguish and bad endings and dings and morning fog and ultimate failure suffered in the course of every career?
It’s the joy of the sport, of course, the way you feel when everything works, when every defender is fooled and every tackle is broken and even the boners are good for ten yards. It’s the thrill of fear and the pride you take in overcoming that fear. It’s finding a way to win even though you’re past your prime, the knees gone, the arm gone. For a fan, nothing beats the satisfaction of watching an ancient mariner of a QB find a way to get it done.
I remember seeing a Redskins game with my father when I was small. It must have been 1977 or 1978. The starter had been knocked out, forcing the coach to bring in Billy Kilmer, who, at that moment, was as old as anyone who’d ever lived. He was out of condition, pear-shaped, slow. My father told me that Kilmer had missed the entire ’63 season after falling asleep at the wheel of his ’57 Chevy and driving into San Francisco Bay—it was part of a colorful past, the storied career of the man who’d been around forever. He had played his first NFL game in 1961, when Chuck Bednarik was still going both ways for the Philadelphia Eagles. Bednarik had played his first game in 1948, when Luckman was still out there. And Luckman played with Nagurski, who played with Grange, who played with Halas, who played with Thorpe. In other words, via this one player, you could trace a path back to the dawn of football. And meanwhile, there was Kilmer, marching down the field. His passes were knuckleballs, but they kept finding their target. “Look at that son of a bitch,” my father
said. “Can’t run, can’t throw, but he still finds a way!”
7
MIKE DISCO
Mike Ditka, the first modern tight end, making a catch in Wrigley Field on November 24, 1963
The pieces of the 1985 Bears began to come together in 1939, when Mike Ditka was born in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. His parents had emigrated from the Ukraine, where the family name was Dyczko, which each uncle Americanized in his own way, Disco being the least fortunate variation. It’s hard to imagine Mike Disco becoming anything but a dancing machine; Ditka was more appropriate for a son of Aliquippa, the tough west Pennsylvania factory town where he spent his formative years. His father was a welder in a steel mill, “a burner” on a train that ran through the factory that employed just about everyone in town. The old man would come home with blisters on his hands, wounds of a working life. He’d been a marine and was a strict disciplinarian. “What he said, he said, that was it,” Ditka wrote. “He didn’t spare the rod.” Ditka’s autobiography is filled with phrases like “worst beating of my life.” “If I didn’t [do what he said],” wrote Ditka, “he gave me a hard time. By a hard time, I mean he simply whipped my ass.” Such poundings usually came in response to some bit of mischief. A neighbor once described young Mike Ditka as “a high-intensity boy.” On one occasion, experimenting with cigarettes, he burned down a stand of trees behind the family house. When Ditka’s father came home, he wondered what had happened “to the forest.”