by Rich Cohen
When I met Emery, he was in the same office in Northbrook where he answers the phone, “This is Emery.” We sat in the conference room and talked about marriage, divorce, family, Ditka, Super Bowl, and high school. The son of a garbage collector, Emery has sent two kids to college and lives a quiet life on the North Shore. It’s a long way from third and two with a season on the line, but it’s the American dream.
Standing up and jingling his keys, he said, “Let’s go.”
I’d asked him to show me houses. Partly because I had seen Emery block and catch and now wanted to see him sell, partly because, now and then, something in me says, “It’s time to go home.” We looked in Evanston and Wilmette, talking football as we drove. When we arrived at a house, he’d shut off his car, say, “Here it is,” then lead me up the cobblestone as the robins sang. Little of the athlete remains in Emery. He was shaped like a lifeguard, but the lines have blurred. If he walks into the next world like this, they’ll never recognize him.
* * *
Doug Plank played his last game for the Bears in 1982: missed tackle, head-to-head, lightning flash. He played part of another season in the USFL but the old zipperoo was gone. When he should’ve been accelerating, he was bracing for impact. A body wants to learn from its disasters. He’d been working all along, taking whatever jobs he could find in the off-season. “I sold Culligan water softeners,” he told me. “I rehabilitated houses. I was a realtor. That was life as a professional athlete. My salary my first year was $18,000.”
He went back to Columbus, Ohio, after he retired and bought into a Burger King. He was not a celebrity owner, standing out front meeting and greeting—he worked in back, standing over the grill. In 1985, when the Bears made their run, he was too busy to feel like he’d missed out. “Here’s what I recommend for former athletes,” he told me. “If you want to get past it and stop feeling bad, run a restaurant. We opened at six a.m. and closed at two a.m. Bury yourself in work. You’ll never have time to feel sorry for yourself.”
“What’s the hardest part of making that transition?” I asked.
“What transition?”
“From Soldier Field to Burger King?”
He laughed, then said, “Well, when I made a great Whopper, nobody was clapping as I wrapped it up and put it down the chute. And you know, you really do miss getting that adoration on a consistent basis. We’re driven toward it. As kids, we all want to get a pat on the back. That’s what you miss: the adult version of a pat on the back. We just don’t get it. That’s why I’m cheesy. I make a big deal of little things. Doing things the right way, giving guys accolades for that. It’s important. In Burger King we used to call it taking a walk. Taking a walk means you get out of your office and walk around the restaurant. You walk outside and look for trash. Is the dining room clean? Are your employees dressed properly? Are they smiling? Are the lights on? We all need to take a walk more often. Just look around and say, ‘Is everything right? Is everything the way it should be? Are we giving ourselves the best chance to have success?’ And if we are, then what’s wrong with going up to that person that has that area cleaned up, and is focused, with a smile on their face, and saying, ‘Hey, I want you to know I appreciate it.’ If there’s one thing I learned as an owner, it’s that the players, people that work for you, they’re the ones that are going to make you successful.”
Plank bought another Burger King, then another. By 1992, he owned several franchises. The national corporation asked him to take over its operations in the Southwest, which meant a move to Arizona. He later sold his restaurants back to the corporation but stayed in Scottsdale, where the climate is kinder to men with titanium shoulders.
Plank’s life changed again about twenty years ago. “I’m driving to a Burger King I own down in Tempe and on the radio I hear that Buddy Ryan has just been announced as the general manager and head coach of the [Arizona] Cardinals,” Plank told me. “And I’m thinking, gosh, they need me for lunch if they’re making combo meals. But Buddy was the guy that named the defense after me. I figured I owed him a visit. So I went down and congratulated him. Then we’re talking. And you can imagine all the media types. It was after a press conference. And someone says, ‘Who’s this guy, Buddy?’ And Buddy goes, ‘This is Doug Plank, number 46. The 46 defense.’ Within five minutes somebody from the Cardinals walked up and said, ‘Hey Doug, would you like to do our pre- and postgame radio show?’”
Plank works as a broadcaster and is now head coach of the Orlando Predators of the Arena Football League. He’s coached at Ohio State and for the New York Jets, where he worked for Buddy’s son, Rex. “Looking back, I’d much rather have a defense named after me than have gone to the Super Bowl,” he said. “I say that with all honesty. Two years ago, while I was working with the Jets in the weight room, the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, walked through, introducing himself to players and coaches. He comes over to me and I put down the dumbbells and say, ‘It’s a pleasure meeting you, Commissioner. I’m Doug Plank.’ And once again, it’s one of those Joe Paterno moments: he’s just looking at me, shaking my hand, remembering. Doug Plank. The 46 defense. And he says, ‘You were a great player.’ What’s that worth? Wouldn’t somebody pay a lot of money to have the NFL commissioner say that?”
* * *
Willie Gault played through 1993, finishing with the Raiders, then dedicated himself to his real dream: Hollywood. If you want to reach Willie, it’s via his agent. If you want to see Willie, it’s via his head shot. He looks like a romantic in his publicity photos, suave with an open shirt and a white-toothed smile, his chest accented by a necklace of coral shells. His television and film credits, scattered across the twenty years, include Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper (Clifford), Baywatch (Willa’s dad), Night Vision (FBI Agent Coleman), Holy Man (NordicTrack Guy), Millennium Man (Lieutenant Dunn), The Pretender (Willie the Sweeper, nineteen episodes), Grounded for Life (Hugh), The West Wing (Agent, four episodes), Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (Black Man in Airport). Of all the Bears at the White House, only Gault looked like he could still get up and down the field. When Willie was a Bear, Ditka designed a play to take advantage of his speed. It was called Big Ben. Willie took off. Mac waited three beats, then threw the football as far as he possibly could.
* * *
Mike Richardson was known as L.A. As fans, we assumed it stood for Los Angeles, as Richardson grew up in Compton, but it actually stood for Lazy Ass. Almost everything he did well came naturally. He was fast, hard-hitting, and had great hands—but if he had to work for it, it wasn’t going to happen. Richardson spent seven years in the NFL, finishing in San Francisco in 1989. At twenty-eight, he was done with everything that came easy. He moved back to L.A., where he bounced from job to job, losing touch with teammates along the way. He was the blip that suddenly vanishes from the radar screen. His drug habit began to swallow his life, and he aged quickly. He got in trouble with the police. He was arrested. In the course of sixteen years, he was convicted twenty-one times. Five of the convictions were for felonies.
Following a routine traffic stop in 2006, the police found twenty-eight grams of rock cocaine and ten grams of amphetamine in his car. He was sentenced to one year in prison. Did that, got out, violated his parole and was sent back for thirteen more years. He was given a second shot at parole after just three. Ditka and Dent sent letters to the judge, begging for leniency. “I will help in any way necessary to try and find a way to help him through this tough time,” Ditka wrote. “I believe his life is worth trying to save.” “I know that Mike is troubled, but is a good man to his soul,” wrote Dent. “I would deeply beg the court to give Mike one last chance.”
“You reached heights in your career, in your life,” Judge Kelly told Richardson before he was released. “You attained goals that few people in the world can ever attain. You were a Super Bowl champion. You tasted greatness. You have it inside of you … But the drugs are going to crush it all. And it has already crushed a substantial portion of your life.�
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* * *
Steve McMichael, the defensive tackle known variously as Ming the Merciless and Mongo, never stopped being Steve McMichael. Soon after his last football game, he was on the road with the World Wrestling Federation. He took part in WrestleMania, fought Bam Bam Bigelow and Kama Mustafa, aka Papa Shango, aka the Godfather. Later, when McMichael moved to World Championship Wrestling, he worked as hero and heel, commentator, instigator, dispute settler, tag teamer, big talker, clown killer. He fought Ric Flair and Bill Goldberg and was involved in every plot and subplot of that impossible-to-follow netherworld. “It was fun for a couple of years,” he said. “But the road … I’d be home two days out of the month just to get clean clothes. You start to smell like a carny in the midway.” The hardest thing, he said, was “learning how to whip my own ass.”
McMichael has remained a fixture on the Chicago sports scene, an aging giant with a bowl haircut, singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field. He coaches the Chicago Slaughter of the indoor football league. He recently ran for mayor of Romeoville, a southwest suburb of Chicago. And lost. He was married, then divorced, then married again. His second wife is named Misty. He has a child. “I’ll be sixty-five when she’s fifteen,” he said. “That’s when I’m going to start letting her date. You know what I’m going to tell the little boys? I’m going to tell them, ‘I’m so old now I ain’t got no problem going to jail. Killing your little ass just helps support my free jailhouse nursing care. That way, I’m not a burden on my family.’”
* * *
Shaun Gayle was a special teams standout and a second-string defensive back on the ’85 Bears. He recovered the ball Giants punter Sean Landeta whiffed on in the playoffs and ran it for a touchdown. He later replaced Fencik at safety. He spent a dozen years in the league and made the Pro Bowl in 1991. He was handsome—too handsome. A little is helpful; very presents problems. He became a television broadcaster and worked as a commentator on Sky Sports in the United Kingdom. You’d be flipping through the channels on a trip to London and there was Shaun Gayle explaining some intricacy of American football.
He lived in Deerfield, in one of those big houses on one of those flat streets that just go round and round. On October 4, 2007, an intruder broke into his house and shot and killed his girlfriend, Rhoni Reuter—she was seven months pregnant. In March 2009, the police arrested Marni Yang, described as Gayle’s business associate. When the case went to trial in 2011, Gayle admitted he’d slept with Yang the night before the murder. Asked how often they had sex, Gayle said, “It was, on average, roughly two to three times in the course of a year.” Yang was sentenced to life in prison.
* * *
Gary Fencik was attending Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business while the ’85 Bears were making their run. It gave him a stunning résumé: Barrington High School, Yale University (BA), Kellogg School of Business (MBA), Chicago Bears (twelve years, two Pro Bowls, one Super Bowl, career interception leader). In negotiations for his last contract, he inserted a clause that guaranteed him the right to purchase four season tickets if the team ever built a new stadium. The seats had to be between the 40-yard lines. Those tickets, which Fencik got after the renovation of Soldier Field, are probably worth more than Doug Plank made in his entire career.
These days, Fencik sounds less like a football player than a banker, which he is: “As soon as I retired, I joined the firm I’m still with,” he told me. “We manage pension assets with a focus on private equity. We have a venture capital group and our primary strategy is a fund of funds. We’ll take ten, twenty million and put it into various ventures around the world.”
Of course, the football thing—it never goes way. A few years back, Fencik served as head coach of his daughter’s flag football team. What do you think happened? He went insane. Drills, meetings, options; reverses, tricks, flea flickers, the flying wedge—an arrow of adolescent girls blazing up the field. In the end, he had thirty plays, too many to remember, so he had them printed on armbands, which the quarterback could check as she took a knee in the huddle—just like the kind worn by the pros. When the team won it all, Fencik had a mini–Super Bowl trophy made for each player.
* * *
Buddy Ryan turned the Philadelphia Eagles into a power but never could win the big game. He was zero and three in the playoffs. Perhaps he was too defensive minded, overly attuned to just one side of the ball. After going ten and six in 1990, he was fired. He took the defensive coordinator position with Houston but was fired again, this time after he punched his own team’s offensive coordinator on the sideline. When he arrived in Arizona in 1994, he told the press, “You’ve got a winner in town!” He lost half his games in 1994, more in 1995, and was fired before the ’96 season. He suddenly seemed very old. His method—beat ’em down, build ’em up—was of an earlier era. You grab a kid by the face mask or call him fat Jap today, he’ll call his lawyer. Buddy Ryan didn’t change; the country did. He retired to a farm in Kentucky, where he trains horses. He has one named 46 Blitz, and another named FiredForWinning.
* * *
The decision came from the Bears front office: 1987 would be Walter Payton’s last season. At thirty-three, he was no longer a broken field runner who could weave through traffic. On his best plays, he was good for three or four yards up the middle. “He [didn’t] embarrass himself, but he had lost the stuff, no question,” Ditka said. Payton played his last game in the playoffs against the Redskins. The Bears were down 21–17 with time running out. They had the ball on their own 36. “Fourth down and a season to go,” said the announcer. McMahon was in the shotgun, Payton and Suhey behind. Mac licked his fingers, took the snap, got away from the rush, faked the bomb, then tossed a soft screen to Payton, who had nothing but open field ahead. Years before, Walter described this as his dream situation: give me the ball with everything on the line and ten to go. He went upfield, turned from a tackler, and raced toward the sideline, trying to beat his man around the end, but he no longer had the speed. He was driven out-of-bounds a yard short of the first down.
A second later, the game was over. A second after that, the stadium was empty. Darkness washed over the grounds. Only Payton remained, in his equipment, his chin strap buckled, waiting to be sent into a game that would never be played. He had his feet out, head down. “I’ll always remember Walter, when we got beat by Washington, that last game, sitting on the bench till the stadium was just about empty,” McMichael wrote. “He sat on the end of the bench like he was trying to suck it all in and remember where he was right then in his life. Just sitting with his head down, reflecting, like [Rodin’s] statue of the Thinker.”
“They paid me for football,” Payton said, “but I would have played for nothing.” Payton was never going to be satisfied showing apartments, or making combo meals. He was an adrenaline junkie. He might’ve been too old for football, but he was still a young man, and, when he left the game, he lost everything that made life fun. “It’s like being a Vietnam vet,” he said. “You go in and it’s such a different world, and all of a sudden you come home and you’re expected to just be normal and you’re not normal.” He spent years searching for ways to get the blood moving. He had affairs. He fired weapons. He raced for Paul Newman’s stock car team. He toyed with a return to the game. With the failure of each attempt, his mood blackened—he treated himself with drugs. It’s the typical experience of an NFL star trying to adjust to the blandness of civilian life.
As I read Jeff Pearlman’s book Sweetness, I jotted down some of the symptoms said to characterize Payton at loose ends:
Took a lot of pills
Avoided old friends
Missed appointments
Gained weight
Was a lunatic for Brach’s candy
Stopped working out
Cheated on his wife
Accidentally shot an employee
Made speculative investments, lost money
Worked as assistant coach
for a high school basketball team
Lent his Super Bowl ring to a kid who lost it in a couch
“Walter Payton often found himself suffocated by darkness,” wrote Pearlman. “Oh, he wouldn’t let on as such. He smiled and laughed and told jokes and pinched rear ends and tried his absolute best to come across as the life of the party. Inside, however, happiness eluded Payton in the same manner he had once eluded opposing linebackers.”
“I was definitely lost those first few years,” Payton wrote. “I went through withdrawal when it was game time. It was the biological clock kicking in.”
“It sounds like just about every other guy who ever had to adjust to normal life after the NFL,” Kurt Becker told me.
As Pearlman wrote, Walter was a nut for Brach’s. A piece of candy was like a plug of tobacco. His pockets were filled with wrappers. He sucked on them from morning till night, which is why he was annoyed, then alarmed, when he came upon one bum piece of candy, then another, then another. Then the stomachaches started, mild at first, then like knives. He tired easily, had to lie down in the afternoon. Smells began to bother him. Then everything lost its taste. The whites of his eyes turned yellow. He went to a doctor, who sent him to the Mayo Clinic. In December 1998, he was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare liver disease. The bile ducts stop working, the poisons build up, you start to die.
No one can say what had caused the disease. I wondered if it could have been all those years of punishment. He had not missed a start in thirteen seasons and now, still young, he was being erased from life. The doctors gave him a year, maybe two—he was put on the list for a liver transplant. He told few people about his illness, but it was hard to keep the secret. Payton’s son Jarrett, a star high school running back, held a press conference to announce what college he would attend. A camera lingered on Walter, standing behind his son. He had lost fifty pounds in a few months. A reporter named Mark Giangreco blanched. “The man there who looks like Gandhi is the former Walter Payton,” he said. “I think I could take him on.”