Category Archives: football

Football. And football.

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Pondering big football doings on the horizon…

First, an aside: A long-ago Dallas Cowboys star running back, Duane Thomas, when informed that having starred in the Super Bowl must have been “like going to the moon,” marveled in response, “You been to the moon, man?” Thomas’ reply to assertions that the Super Bowl was the “ultimate game” was similarly restrained. “If it’s the ultimate game,” he said, “how come they’re playing it again next year?”

So, with all due respect to the upcoming Super Bowl, America’s most-watched television event and cultural benchmark, the topic here is the football competition paramount in the eyes of most Earthlings: Soccer’s quadrennial World Cup tournament. And, interestingly, how that event’s return in 2026 to these shores is an example of retrofitting international expectations—physically as well as enthusiastically—into American mores.

Word has just come down that the World Cup championship final will be played on July 19, 2026 at the home stadium of American football’s two New York teams, the Giants and the Jets, in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal, and more evidence that football—sorry, soccer—continues to be melded into the U.S. entertainment fabric.

We are well past the time when most of us in The Colonies reflected the great sportswriter Frank Deford’s perception that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-tall.” The 2026 World Cup essentially is guaranteed to set records for attendance and profit, in part because the tournament will be expanded to 48 participating teams, up from 32 in the last seven iterations. For the first time, three nations—the United States, Canada and Mexico—will share hosting duties, with the U.S. getting 78 of the tournament’s 104 matches.

And this time, 32 years since the U.S. staged the 1994 World Cup, the 11 U.S. stadiums in use will feel far less like mongrel soccer facilities, now better equipped to convert their gridirons to pitches to meet global requirements with widened playing surfaces and grass floors.

American football fields, Yank officials had to be reminded back in ’94, are 120 yards long and 53.3 yards wide, while soccer matches are played out on a 115- by- 75-yard layout. On grass; not artificial turf. Back then, before MetLife Stadium replaced Giants Stadium as New York metro’s primary football theatre, officials proposed what sounded like growing hair on a bald man’s head.

The idea was to construct a grass playing field on an elevated platform suspended by a scaffolding almost 12 feet above the permanent floor and extending six or seven rows into the Giants Stadium stands.

By the time World Cup sites officially were awarded then, the goofy platform idea had been ditched and great pallets of sod were trucked in from a North Carolina farm and placed over the fake turf. Likewise, grass was brought from a farm in California to temporarily cover the artificial stuff in the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. (There was a lot of slipping and sliding on that grass inside the roofed Silverdome during the opening game there.)

These days, stadiums routinely cover their plastic grass with the real stuff to hold major soccer events. A Rhode Island outfit—Kingston Turf Farms—advertises having installed sod over the artificial surface for years at MetLife Stadium: “We bring in a crew to truck the specialty sod in, transport the sod to the field and install the sod over specialized turf protection layer…to transform an artificial playing surface to a natural grass surface in a 24-hour period,” Kingston Turf Farms broadcasts on its website.

And to make their field wider to meet soccer standards, MetLife officials plan to remove 1,740 seats, estimating a decrease in capacity from the 83,367 attendees at an October Giants-Jets Game to 74,895.

Of the other 2026 World Cup stadiums in the United States, those in Arlington, Tex.; Atlanta, Foxborough, Mass.; Houston, Inglewood, Calif.; Seattle and Vancouver also will cover their artificial turf with grass. (“Natural grass,” as the often-used redundancy has it.) And several stadiums are expected to figure out some way to widen their playing surfaces.

When international soccer officials granted the United States its first World Cup in 1994, it came with the stipulation that this country would establish an elite professional soccer league and, beginning in 1996, Major League Soccer materialized. And one consequence of that creation was the new league’s rejection of hybrid football/soccer venues. By 1999, the first “soccer-specific” stadium—with a wider field of grass—was opened in Columbus, Ohio and, of the 26 MLS teams now based in the United States, 22 of them compete in such arenas.

Such stadiums, by the way, were the brainchild of Lamar Hunt, an original founding investor in MLS. And a real football guy, however you define “football.” Hunt was a principal founder of the American Football League and of the charter member Dallas Texans. Who became the Kansas City Chiefs, beneficiaries of the 1966 AFL/NFL merger avidly pursued by Hunt.

The same Chiefs, of course, now attempting to win a big game that Lamar Hunt was first to call the “Super Bowl.”

Leaves of grass (not the poetry)

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Grass is back. No, no; not that. Not cannabis, Mary Jane, weed, pot, dope. This is not an update on the 1960s counterculture, Woodstock or the hippie revolution. (Although amended laws in fact have recently given marijuana a new life.) Rather, this is a consideration of how football playing surfaces, after almost a half century of experimentation with synthetic flooring, have reversed field a bit. Or, in some cases, stuck with what the late sports commentator Bud Collins referred to as “God’s own greensward.”

This comes to mind with the annual razzmatazz that surrounds the Super Bowl, which has now been played 57 times with the same fellow overseeing the landscaping at each host stadium. That person is George Toma, now 94 years old, a superstar groundskeeper who has ably dealt with his corner of earth being trod upon by behemoth athletes and all manner of elaborate halftime productions.

In some ways, the just-completed 2023 championship game illustrated the imperfection of what often is referred to, redundantly, as “natural grass.” (Grass is grass; it’s natural.) Sports Illustrated huffed that the game was “completely marred by horrible field conditions”—with players at times unsteady on the Bermuda-grass lawn in Arizona’s Glendale stadium.

It should be noted that exactly half of the NFL’s 32 teams employ grass on their fields, including both of this year’s Super Bowl participants, so neither the Kansas City Chiefs nor Philadelphia Eagles should have had an edge in the big game. Furthermore, several of the losing Eagles refused to moan about the surface flaws, reminding that the Chiefs had to navigate the same ground.

But given modern technology and science, there has come to be an overwhelming expectation of flawlessness in major sporting events—in playing conditions, refereeing, athletic performance—which can get a little silly at times. Lost is the idea that the beauty of competition can be enhanced by what coaches call “things beyond our control.” Why not see how fabulously paid jocks can handle some rain, snow, wind, dirt?

Since we’re on the topic, then: Artificial playing surfaces originated with AstroTurf in 1965 after Houston’s baseball team, housed in the world’s first multi-purpose domed stadium, found that grass didn’t grow well indoors. It was assumed, correctly to some extent, that artificial turf would require less maintenance and be less susceptible to unpredictable weather, and both pro and college teams rushed to join the fake grass movement.

Early reviews were glowing. Dan Jenkins, covering the University of Tennessee’s 1968 season-opener in Knoxville, declared in his Sports Illustrated game story, “The question of whether a good football game can be played on your living room carpet has been answered pretty much to everyone’s satisfaction down on a rim of the Smokies in the Old South. The University of Tennessee has won the sport’s interior decorating award with its new synthetic turf….”

Jenkins wrote that, at the conclusion of a 17-17 tie with Georgia, “everything sagged mercifully except the gleaming nylon playing field….still as rich green and spotless as it had been three hours earlier. And this was after a truckload of Tennessee cheerleaders had driven on it, after a Tennessee walking horse had pranced around it, after a Georgia bulldog had gnawed at it and after a Georgia coach had flicked ashes on it.”

Alas, artificial turf did not grow back.

Return with me to the 1976 Super Bowl at Miami’s since-demolished Orange Bowl Stadium, which was an early convert to fake grass using something called Poly-Turf. In its seventh season, the Poly-Turf had come to resemble a 100-yard banana peel, with rips and bumps. Toma—the God of Sod, the Sodfather, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Man who is on record as preferring grass—was working the 10th of his 57 Super Bowls in ‘76, putting in 12-hour days alongside his crew in the week leading up to the game.

“We crawl every seam on our hands and knees,” Toma said then, “and anywhere that even a fingernail would go under, we glue, using a contact glue, which will hold for a couple of weeks. It’s like the glue you might use on Formica table tops at home.

“Then we take a tractor over it to press it down good. We sewed up a couple of rips. The way the surface has matted unevenly, we can’t do much about that. There will be some slick spots….Where there’s a few bumps, like you might get in your rug in your house, we’ve taken scissors and shaved off the top.”

After that game, the Orange Bowl returned to grass and stayed with the real stuff until it closed in 2008. Hard Rock Stadium, which replaced the Orange Bowl as Miami’s big-time football stadium in 1987, always has featured grass. Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, cite of that 1968 artificial turf debut chronicled by Dan Jenkins, has been back to grass since 1994.

This year’s Super Bowl runner-up Eagles, by the way, were the first NFL team to use artificial turf in their home stadium—in 1969 when they played at Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania campus. From 1971 to 2002, their place of business was Philadelphia’s multipurpose Veteran’s Stadium, so infamous for the gaps and uneven patches in its synthetic floor that it because known as the “Field of Seams.” Since 2003, the Eagles have been settled in Lincoln Financial Field, which is equipped with grass. So maybe there isn’t a better mousetrap after all.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Play on?

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Since Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest early in his team’s Jan. 2 game in Cincinnati, there has been a steady stream of thoughtful essays considering the appropriate response to that unsettling incident.

Are we—fans, reporters, the game’s marketers and promoters—all “complicit in the NFL’s violence” by contributing to the sport’s massive popularity?—New York Times.

Is football “designed to be deadly”?—Salon.

Is it “the ethos of football…to play on” no matter the players’ risk?—The New Yorker.

“Should a civilized culture really be sanctioning” football’s “most inescapable reality show”?—The Atlantic.

All reasonable questions, and there will be no good answers here, though I have dealt with a handful of incidents in a half-century of working as a sports journalist that could have triggered similar contemplations.

I happened to be covering a 2010 college game in which a player was paralyzed by a kickoff collision. I was asked to interview the father, brother and associates of Darryl Stingley one year after Stingley famously was left a paraplegic during a 1978 NFL exhibition game. I have reported on the increasingly common evidence of the degenerative brain disease CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, found in deceased former players, and have spoken to forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu who, in a 2002 autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, first recognized CTE in a football player.

What made the Hamlin episode different, and instantly more terrifying, was that it appeared after a typical play-ending tackle, didn’t result from one of those crippling head blows, yet brought medical personnel racing onto the field to administer CPR. Everything—fellow players, officials, spectators—stood eerily still even after Hamlin was carted away in an ambulance 10 minutes later. Almost as hour passed before the game was postponed, with Hamlin said to be in critical condition at a local hospital.

So, about those earlier questions: New York Magazine’s Will Leitch found “progress” in the league’s decision to stop play, citing the opposite decision minutes after Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions, the only NFL player to die on the field, collapsed with a heart attack during a 1971 game.

Such standard procedure to play on applied in ’78, when a vicious blow from Oakland’s Jack Tatum levelled New England star receiver Stingley, putting him in a wheelchair for life (he died on 2007), but didn’t stop the game. And, in 2010 at the New Jersey Meadowlands, as soon as Rutgers University lineman Eric LeGrand was carried off the field on a stretcher—he attempted to give a thumbs-up but had no feeling below the neck—action against Army resumed.

And somehow these sobering moments didn’t put a dint in attraction to the sport—for fans, officials, teammates and the gravely injured players themselves. In Rutgers’ victorious but glum locker room after that 2010 Army game, LeGrand’s teammates acknowledged, in the words of linebacker Antonio Lowery, how it was “hard going back out there after [seeing LeGrand motionless on the field]. Everybody had watered eyes. It’s hard. Violent game.”

Yet he added, “It’s what I do. I love it to death. [Such an injury] is one of those things you have to deal with.”

In my 1979 interview with Stingley’s father and brother, both of whom were former football players at a lower level, there was happy reminiscing recalled from a recent Father’s Day gathering. No regrets, his brother Wayne recalled, only that “Darryl said, ‘Hey, I gave it my all and it took something from me.’ That’s what he said. ‘I gave it my all and it took something from me.’”

Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard player who is a behavioral neuroscientist and founding CEO of the nonprofit Concussion Legacy Foundation that studies CTE, cautioned in a New York Times essay that as alarming as Hamlin’s injury was, it was “focusing attention on a single, dramatic outlier rather than the chronic medical conditions that pose by far the greatest danger to players.”

Nowinski cited chronic heart disease and the long-term effects of traumatic brain injuries for robbing “countless players of their health, their happiness and even their lives but do not receive the same medical or cultural attention because they happen away from the cameras.” He ticked off the names and ages of nine former players who died of heart disease between 26 and 46 years old since 2015.

Of course, the good news is that Hamlin, who is only 24, is in the midst of a remarkable recovery and there even has been speculation whether he might ever play football again. But here’s another question with no answer: Should he?

Not instant replay

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A proposal to revive the USFL feels more like opening a time capsule than hitting on a promising idea. Pro football in the Spring? That was then, and it didn’t work so well.

The contemporary culture of the 1980s—the proliferation of cable television, a subsequent need for more programming, a bet on football’s endless attraction to gamblers, the urge to test sports’ saturation point—might have made the USFL idea worth a try in that distant past. Now? It’s possible to argue that as we emerge, blinking, from the coronavirus pestilence, we are finding there is too much sports to watch these days, and that there is a natural cycle of when people do not tune into certain athletic endeavors, a point reinforced by the pandemic’s skewing of scheduling routines.

With hockey and basketball playoffs last year delayed into August, baseball’s season opening put off until July and the Masters golf tournament moved to November, TV ratings were down across sports. That, in spite of the fact that TV most often was the only way to watch sports, since spectators were socially distanced right out of stadiums and arenas.

But here we are, looking at a blueprint that is four decades old.

Older, really. As far back as the 1970s Dave Dixon, an influential New Orleans businessman who helped create the Saints, the Louisiana Superdome and an early men’s pro tennis tour, tried to convince NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle that a supplemental Spring operation was a winning proposition.

Rozelle wasn’t buying. But by the ‘80s, Dixon made himself a key actor in bringing forth the USFL, convinced that the added variable of cable TV “changes the industry.” He partnered with ESPN, then a couple of years old, and cited consultants who hammered on the fact that, while the October/November/December quarter (traditional football season) indeed produced the best ratings, next in line was the April/May/June window.

The television promise was perceived to be so strong that Upton Bell, another of the original USFL founders, went so far as dismissing the need to sell tickets. He’d give them away, he said, and “guarantee a studio game.”

And now Brian Woods, working on the USFL’s reincarnation next Spring, appears to have bought into those 40-year-old presumptions. He is hyping a deal with Fox Sports for “giving fans everywhere the best football viewing product possible during what is typically a period devoid of professional football.”

OK. Here’s what happened in the Spring of 1983:

For its debut, the USFL placed 11 of its 12 franchises in NFL facilities and stirred significant attention, especially by signing a handful of Big Name college players. The most prominent of those was University of Georgia running back Herschel Walker, who had just won the Heisman Trophy in his junior season.

Several of us sports news hounds were in Orlando, Fla., when Walker was delivered to the training camp of the New Jersey Generals via private jet, helicopter and limo—all provided by team owner J. Walter Duncan, an Oklahoma oil tycoon—a week before the league’s first games.

That royal treatment was rewarded, to some extent, by Walker winning the league’s first rushing title. But the Generals, playing in the USFL’s primary market, won only six of 18 games and the leaguewide attendance average steadily declined to fewer than 25,000—a studio game!—by season’s end. The build-up to the first championship game that July in Denver—derided by some as the “Super-fluous Bowl,” “The Bowl to End All Bowls” and “Bowling for Dollars”—was overshadowed by the arrival at his NFL training camp, a few miles from Denver, by the NFL Broncos’ star rookie quarterback John Elway.

USFL officials, meanwhile, called the White House in an attempt to get President Ronald Reagan to telephone the winning lockerroom after the championship game—the Michigan Panthers defeated the Philadelphia Stars. But that fell on deaf ears of the man who fashioned himself “The Gipper” after the Notre Dame gridiron legend.

And things began to really unravel when Duncan, who had been talked into owning the Generals by Dixon, quickly sold the team to an attention-hog real estate developer named Donald Trump. Two seasons later, during which the USFL lost more than $120 million, Trump sealed the league’s demise by insisting it move its season to the Fall and go head-to-head with the NFL.

By then, the NFL had run the USFL out of stadiums in Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and Pete Rozelle made it clear that the NFL “never had discussions with the USFL about merging or taking in any of their teams.” (Which is what Trump had been angling for.)

“You really think,” an NFL official said, “that NFL would stand still for Donald Trump?”

Some things don’t seem worth a do-over.

 

New (NFL) math

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Though hardly a watershed moment in NFL history, the recent revision of rules related to uniform numbers nevertheless has stirred discussions of athletes’ traditional (almost spiritual) attachment to their numbers as well as the league’s long-perceived stodginess.

Nothing new there. In the 1970s, during my days covering the New York Giants, there was a wide receiver named Danny Buggs, drafted out of West Virginia, who requested jersey No. 8 when he showed up at rookie camp. Sorry, he was told; wrong number. Requirements at the time—just now changed—were that Buggs, as a wide receiver, had to pick something from 80 to 89.

Buggs was given 86 and later 88, but remained uncomfortable with both. “8 means a lot to me,” he said. “I wore it in college….It’s psychological or something. I don’t know. I feel lighter in 8.”

Bobby Hammond, a running back who was briefly Buggs’ teammate, also requested 8, which he had worn at Morgan State. He too was informed of that impossibility because, starting in 1972, NFL running backs had been restricted to digits from 20 to 49. Hammond was assigned 46, though he stubbornly wore 8 in practice.

A half-century later, we have a recount. For the upcoming 2021 season, NFL wide receivers and running backs will be allowed any number from 1 to 49 and 80 to 89.

With this new numbers racket, articles naturally have surfaced taking the league to task for its past sin of being too buttoned-up—The No Fun League—over all these years. Why, before this, couldn’t players wear any number they wanted?

The answer was that codifying numbers by position benefited officiating crews to instantly differentiate, for instance, interior linemen from eligible receivers (which the new system essentially continues). The NFL also believed it was “simpler for fans” to be able to associate numbers with players’ roles. So in 1972, the league decreed: 1-19 for quarterbacks and kickers; 20-49 for running backs and defensive backs; 50-59 for centers and linebackers; 60-79 for defensive linemen and interior offensive linemen (except centers); 80-89 for wide receivers and tight ends; 90-99 for exhibition game use only (when teams’ rosters are larger).

No exceptions! Except…The Giants had signed a celebrated linebacker out of Michigan State for the 1973 season named Brad Van Pelt, and Van Pelt had included a stipulation in his contract—shortly before the numbers rule passed—that he wear No. 10.

Which he did for 11 seasons. Until he was traded to the Raiders—who then were based in Los Angeles—and took advantage of a 1984 tweak in the numbers’ rule (allowing 90s for linebackers) by wearing No. 91.

Football observers even older than myself know that long, long ago, on a planet far, far away, no number was out of bounds on the gridiron. Red Grange, a superstar halfback of the 1920s and 30s (before that position was known as “running back”), wore 77. The University of Michigan back Tom Harmon, who twice led the nation in scoring in the 1940s and played briefly for the Rams, was widely referred to as “Old 98,” his unique uniform number.

These days, smaller numbers—and, specifically, single digits—are all the fashion, as a glance at any college roster demonstrates. What hasn’t changed is that players get attached to their numbers, often as early as high school, and acknowledge that they “feel like an 85” or “feel like a 7….” and prefer to take the number with them as long as they are playing.

Now, basically, they can, though there is a financial catch. Any NFL veteran wanting to switch numbers for the 2021 season will have to buy out the existing allotment of his personalized jerseys that are on the market featuring his old number. Still, this is a matter of identity, and the NFL Network analyst Andrew Hawkins, who had worn 2 as a college wide receiver and 0 in the Canadian League, expects, for instance, to see single-digit wide receiver numbers proliferate. Because, he said, “You look good, you feel good, you play good.”

And maybe, as Danny Buggs said long ago, you feel lighter.

Anybody have a problem with that?

“Good luck trying to block the right people now!” lamented old pro Tom Brady in a tweet. What if his linemen won’t know who to knock down if their opponents are wearing smaller jersey numbers? “DUMB,” Brady railed. “Why not let the Linemen wear whatever they want, too? Why have numbers? Just have colored jerseys…Why not wear the same number?…DUMB.”

It has been reported that Brady’s former coach, New England’s Bill Belichick, likewise is against the new number allowances. That guy across the line dressed in No. 3 might be either a cornerback or a linebacker—maybe a kicker—and then what?

In the end, the sum of all this doesn’t seem to amount to much.

Go figure.

Rhymes with sad

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The familiar smiting of foreheads continues with New York football fans. Ahead by 11 points with fewer than seven minutes to play last week, the Giants managed to lose to Philadelphia, 22-21.

Cue Mark Twain—“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”—and I’ll tell you about covering a striking preview to current gridiron developments in 1976 as Newsday’s Giants beat writer.

In ’76, the Giants had at last won a game—in their 10th try—at home against Washington, whereupon they immediately lost the next week. By one point. This year, their first victory—much earlier; sixth game—also came in the Jersey Meadowlands, also against Washington, also followed by this latest failure, also by a single point.

Furthermore, in each of the long overdue, skin-of-the-teeth first-of-the-season successes—in 1976 and 2020—the Giants barely had escaped yet another defeat in the final minute vs. Washington.

In ’76, with the Giants ahead by 3, Washington set up for a final offensive play at the Giants’ seven-yard line with 41 seconds remaining. An option pass, the potential winning score, was tipped by a rookie Giants linebacker named Harry Carson (who went on to a 13-year NFL career and a place in the Hall of Fame) and was intercepted in the end zone.

In 2020, ahead by 1 with 36 seconds left, the Giants were faced with a Washington two-point conversion attempt after the apparent tying touchdown. That went awry under defensive pressure from Giants defenders and, combined with Washington coach Ron Rivera’s risky decision not to play for the PAT and overtime, saved the Giants’ bacon.

Followed by the next week’s close-but-no-cigar let-down. Now as then. An echo from 44 years earlier.

The famous George Santayana quote—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—may not apply so much as novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s rejoinder: “I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana. We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”

Not that re-runs are exact. In ’76, there was no sports talk radio for anguished boosters to let off steam. No social media, either. Of course, here in 2020, with fans homebound by the coronavirus, there isn’t instant in-stadium Monday-morning quarterbacking via the old raspberry. And one other minor, extraneous difference: The Washington Football Team no longer has an offensive nickname, as in 1976.

So the Giants are 1-6, a smidge ahead of their ’76 record of 0-7, then on their way to 3-11. Another non-playoff season apparently is assured, which would make four in a row and eight in the last nine years. While, by the way, their co-tenants at MetLife Stadium, the New York Jets, who were 1-6 at this point in ’76, also headed for a 3-11 record, now are 0-7. Sort of neighboring mirror images.

“History is a poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water,” Canadian poet/novelist Anne Michaels wrote. “It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, or precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history; an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.”

Whoa. In 1976, after a seventh consecutive loss, the Giants fired head coach Bill Arnsparger, a brick of potential that appears about to hit winless Jets coach Adam Gase in the back of the head. And in ’76, the Jets had a first-year head coach, Lou Holtz, who resigned in hopelessness after the team’s next-to-last game. That idea wouldn’t be resurrected by this year’s first-year Giants coach, Joe Judge, would it? More rhyming history?

Re-name that team

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For a new name, I suggest “Washington Pigskins.” That would check all the boxes: 1) History, by retaining a reference to the ‘Skins moniker that has been part of the NFL team’s identity since 1933. 2) The sport in question, since footballs, though never made from a pig’s skin, nevertheless have been stuck with the description for more than a century. 3) Washington fans’ particular fondness for members of the massive offensive line, known as the Hogs, that produced three Super Bowl titles in the 1980s and ‘90s. 4) and most important, it’s a handle that wouldn’t insult anyone.

Sports nicknames range from the geographically (Colorado Rockies) or historically (Philadelphia 76ers) appropriate to simple alliteration (Baylor Bears) and wieldiness (Minnesota Wild). They aren’t of great import and occasionally are downright wacky. A minor-league hockey team in Georgia was the Macon Whoopies. There was a high school in Illinois called the Polo Marcos. The UC Santa Cruz teams are known as the Banana Slugs.

But there is this obtuse old habit of pro, college and high school teams calling themselves Indians, Braves, Chiefs and so on—and employing wild-eyed, bloodthirsty-looking caricatures, feather-wearing fans and “war” chants as part of their act. At least since the early 1970s, indigenous peoples have been raising public objections. Please stop, Native American leaders said: “We’re people, not mascots.”

Some teams did stop, decades ago. Dartmouth College ditched “Indians” for “Big Green.” Stanford University replaced “Indians” with “Cardinal.” St. John’s University transitioned from “Redmen” to “Red Storm.” Just to cite a few. Yet the highest-profile of the offenders, the professional football team in the nation’s capital, has persistently used—and repeatedly defended—a racial slur as its brand for 87 years. The Washington Redskins.

Retired Washington Post reporter Leonard Shapiro this week recalled confronting then-team owner Jack Kent Cook in 1992 with Webster’s unabridged dictionary’s derogatory definition of the nickname. That was when activists attempted (but failed) to remove trademark rights to the name.

“I don’t care what Webster’s says,” Shapiro quoted Cook. “I use the Oxford Dictionary, and my dear boy, it says no such thing.”

In the same lordly fashion of Cook and George Preston Marshall—the avowed racist who founded the team, burdened it with the “Redskins” name and was the last NFL owner to integrate his roster—current owner Daniel Snyder has continued to belligerently resist demands to show a little respect.

In 2013, during yet another round of protests by Native American groups and an increasingly mainstream awareness of the disparaging term, Snyder swore “never” to change it. At the time, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray refused to utter the nickname, referring only to “our Washington team.” Sports Illustrated football maven Peter King and my former Newsday colleague Tom Rock did the same. A D.C. high school announced that it was barring all Washington team paraphernalia on its campus.

(On that occasion, the satirical “news” site, The Onion, acknowledged Snyder’s willfully tone-deaf stubbornness by recommending he change the name to “the D.C. Redskins.” Another snarky source proposed that, if he was so intent of keeping “Redskins,” Snyder could at least show a touch of sensitivity by tweaking the logo to a redskin potato.)

True to form, Snyder—backed by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell at the time—cited polls claiming that Native Americans weren’t put off by the name, and took refuge in the weak excuse that he was preserving the team’s sacred tradition and heritage.

That struck Duke University cultural anthropologist Orin Starn, who was teaching a Native American studies program, as a “spurious argument. You don’t want to keep the tradition of separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites or the tradition of keeping black players out of professional sports [as Marshall had].”

Except, of course: “Rich men don’t like to be told what to do,” Starn said.

So here’s what appears to be different now amid the nationwide demonstrations over minority human rights and social justice following George Floyd’s murder by a Minnesota policeman. The corporate giants FedEx and Nike, speaking Snyder’s language—big money—have sensed a different answer blowing in the wind and have let Snyder know it.

Snyder suddenly is saying the team is open to a “thorough review” of the nickname, and already alternatives are being offered on social media: The Washington Redtails—a nod to the nickname for the crimson-tailed planes flown by World War II’s Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first Black military aviators in World War II. The Washington Americans. Generals. Presidents. Lincolns. Memorials. Veterans. Jeffersons. Roosevelts. Monuments.

Snyder could take his pick. Or, he could keep his willfully degrading team name. And retain his personal appellation: the Washington Pigheaded.

 

 

Play now, heal (and pay) later.

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In many ways, Nick Buoniconti was a parable of the football culture. He punched above his weight—a low draft choice, theoretically too small to be a pro linebacker, but whose doggedness and toughness landed him in the Hall of Fame. He played hurt, a point of highest praise in his sport, and won two Super Bowl rings. Yet he spent the last four years of his life, before his death at 78 this week, “paying the price,” in his own words—suffering from dementia he believed resulted from more than 500,000 hits to the head during his 14-year professional career.

Yet, to the end, and even having endured the trauma of his son’s paralysis, the result of a college football injury in 1985, Buoniconti insisted that he “always loved” football. “I still do.”

During my six years of covering the NFL, the longest conversation I ever had with Buoniconti was during Super Bowl Week in 1974, when he made clear his realization—and acceptance—of the “athlete’s dilemma,” what author John Weston Parry described in his 2017 book as “sacrificing health for wealth and fame.”

It was five days before the Big Game in Houston, during a post-workout media opportunity on the Dolphins’ practice field as Buoniconti’s Miami Dolphins were preparing to face the Minnesota Vikings. Almost off-handedly, Buoniconti described the pain from three floating chips in his right elbow and how his coach, Don Shula, had just nixed surgery to fix the problem.

“It’s my elbow,” Buoniconti said. “But what can I say? Shula decided that if I had the operation before the Super Bowl, there may have been complications and I wouldn’t be ready to play this week. I’ve learned that it’s a player’s obligation to play.”

His wasn’t the only example that day of football’s split-screen image, a requirement of yeoman strength in juxtaposition to physical disarray. Among Buoniconti’s teammates, safety Jake Scott had five metal screws holding together a broken hand (but joked that the team’s biggest fear was “a lightning storm.”) Guard Bob Kuechenberg had a pin in his right shoulder, cornerback Tim Foley had a pin in his left shoulder and tight end Jim Mandich had a pin in his left hand.

None of them missed the game (won by the Dolphins for a second consecutive Super Bowl title).

Buoniconti had injured his elbow three weeks earlier and aggravated it in the conference title game the following weekend. Because he was having “trouble moving my fingers and there was radiating pain down my arm,” he said, Dolphins’ physician Herbert Virgin agreed to operate immediately.

Except: “Well, after the [conference championship] game that night,” Buoniconti said, “I dropped into King Arthur’s Place [a Miami bar/restaurant] and saw Shula there and he offered to buy me a beer. I said I couldn’t, that I had to be going. Shula asked, ‘Where?’ I said, ‘I’m going over to the hospital to get the bone chips taken out of my elbow.’ Shula said, ‘What?!’”

Shula summoned Virgin, two other physicians and Buoniconti for a consultation that, according to Buoniconti, went like this: “There were five people there and one man, Shula, decided I shouldn’t have the operation. You know, we decided. But we really didn’t. Shula will probably give me hell for saying this stuff.”

Likely, Buoniconti—a two-time all-pro—was protected from discipline over that loose-lips moment for the same reason Shula blocked his medical care: Shula needed Buoniconti in the Super Bowl.

My phone call to Virgin later that day brought the doctor’s refusal to discuss the situation. “I am under strictest orders from the coach not to discuss this unless [Shula] gives permission,” he said. Shula denied any interference. “Did Virgin say he couldn’t discuss this?” Shula said. “Well, anything that’s of a confidential nature within our team, we prefer to keep it that way.”

Virgin later called back to say he in fact had permission to explain that “it’s no big deal. Nick can’t injure himself further. If it bothers him during the game, we’ll just give him some Darvon, and that’s only glorified aspirin.” (Darvon was banned by the FDA in 2010 because of heart risks.)

There are endless examples similar to Shula’s stiff-arm response to prioritizing health over football, and Buoniconti acknowledged as much that day.

“We all know this stuff about having arthritis 20 years from now,” he said then. “But, heck, I understand that football players don’t live past 50, anyway, because of their injuries and because they tend to be overweight as soon as they finish competing. But I’m not thinking of 20 years from now. I’m thinking of Sunday.”

He was 33 at the time and he lived past 50. By 28 years. But there was a football price.

 

The Gagliardi Doctrine: Football sanity

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John Gagliardi began his letter—neatly produced by playing the Olivetti or the Underwood, one of those manual pre-laptop writing machines—“See. I can type.”

I had interviewed him a couple of weeks earlier at St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., where Gagliardi was in the 34th of his eventual 60 seasons coaching the school’s football team. He already was wildly successful at collecting championships in the NCAA’s non-scholarship Division III, but that wasn’t the news. The real story was how Gagliardi had an approach to his sport that was so foreign as to be a football non sequitur.

That was 1987, and it simply did not follow then—any more than there might seem a logical progression now—that Gagliardi’s rejection of tackling in practice, of playbooks and agility drills, of calisthenics and war terminology, of clipboards and whistles and blocking dummies, could set such an enviable example of gridiron might.

Anyway, Gagliardi was recalling back then how his coaching career began as a 16-year-old high school junior. And how, “meanwhile, there was a junior college in town”—Trinidad, Col.—“and I was also playing basketball in high school and the coach at the junior college asked me if I’d like to play for him after the high school season was over.

“He told me,” Gagliardi said, “to go to night school and take typing” to be eligible for the college team. “I wound up lettering four years in junior college in basketball—two years while I was still in high school. I got to be a hell of a typist.”

When Gagliardi died this week at 91, six years after retirement, he took with him a humanity and a wonderfully sly sense of humor. More than his 489-138-11 coaching record—by far the most accomplished mark in college football history—was his outrageously sane approach.

A football team that didn’t practice tackling? “That came to me,” he said, “as a young guy who was getting killed in practice” during his high school playing days at Trinidad Catholic.

No calisthenics? No drills? No laps? “When I was in high school,” he said, “we had a coach I learned a lot from. All negative. He was a fanatic on calisthenics and drills. Torturous stuff. And laps, laps, laps. We were worn out before we started. My memory of it was that Hell must be like this. Those damn duck walks. I hated them. Years later, everybody was told how bad those duck walks are for your knees. Anyway, then we’d scrimmage. We’d kill each other in practice. I came within a hair of not hanging in there.”

What saved his playing career, and launched his coaching vocation, was when that negative coach was called to military service during Gagliardi’s junior year. The school principal intended to disband the football team but Gaglilardi, the team captain, saved the day by volunteering to coach.

“We just wanted to play,” he said. “First thing I did was throw out all the calisthenics. See, I had noticed all the kids who would go play intramurals never did all the drills and that stuff, and I never saw any ambulances going over to their fields. The ambulances always were coming over to us.”

And another thing: “Our coach used to say, ‘Hit somebody! Kill somebody!’ But I noticed that I was the guy getting killed,” Gagliardi said. “The only tragic flaw in his system was that, when we lined up, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I was the tailback—you know, the old single-wing, Notre Dame Box and all that—and I noticed that when I’d call a play, there would be panic in the linemen’s eyes. ‘Who do I block?’ I thought the first thing we ought to do is figure out who to block.”

When Trinidad Catholic proceeded to win the state championship that year, Gagliardi had found his calling—and the conviction that a football coach need not stand on ceremony. At St. John’s, he did without staff meetings, grading of game film, the existence of a training table. No player was considered too small. No player ever was cut from the team, with in excess of 150 on the roster some years and as many as 120 sometimes used in the same game.

His players employed The Beautiful Day Drill, in which they would lie on their backs, gazing up at the foliage and Minnesota sky, observing to one another, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” The team had an informal Canadian Award, no more than a verbal prize, given to players who made it through the chilly Midwestern autumns practicing only in shorts. There was an inordinate amount of fun.

To those incoming freshmen, intent on proving they were worthy footballers, who asked Gagliardi, “Who do I hit or kill?” Gagliardi’s answer was, “That’s not the way to make a tackle. First, you’ve got to line up in the right spot. You’ve got to go to the right spot. You’ve got to figure out where the ball is. You’ve got to not get blocked. You’ve got to pressure the ball.

“You do all that, eventually you’ll make the tackle. Besides, if you’re in the hospital, you won’t make the tackle. And I hate visiting hospitals. If we tackle in practice, who do we hurt? Our own quarterback and running back. They’re human. They’ve got knees and mothers.”

In 2010, when the National Football League at last acknowledged the risk of brain damage inherent in the sport, I called Gagliardi, who often noted that “we haven’t made a tackle on the practice field since 1958.” Might such a system save the pros from further head trauma and long-range health and legal issues?

Gagliardi, who once declined to take an assistant coaching position with Bud Grant’s Minnesota Vikings, insisted that NFL coaches “certainly don’t need my advice. I’m not looking for converts. Certain things—religion, politics—you’ll never change.

“But I think we led the world in fewest injuries. It isn’t rocket science to me. I’ll never forget the first time we won the national championship and, at a clinic afterwards, a fellow says to me, ‘Don’t you think, if you’d have hit more in practice, you’d have done better?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We played 12 games and won them all. I don’t know how we could’ve won 13.’”

My type of coach.

Touchdown Elvis

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I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died. Day that he died.

—“Elvis Presley Blues,” sung by Jimmy Buffett

 

Approximately nobody missed the news flash on Aug. 16, 1977, that Elvis had died. Think of this week’s response to Aretha Franklin’s death, but with a heavier blow because Elvis was only 42, almost half Franklin’s age. So on that day, exactly 41 years earlier, the main topic of conversation in the New York Giants’ lockerroom at their Pleasantville, N.Y., summer training camp wasn’t the least bit unusual.

It’s just that it was slightly more personal than might have been expected. A thousand miles from Graceland, the connection went beyond the fact that Elvis had claimed football to be his second most passionate interest, after music. Specifically, he had been a very public fan of the short-lived World Football League franchise in his Memphis hometown. And no fewer than 11 members of the 1977 Giants—eight players and three coaches, including head coach John McVay—were refugees from the recently defunct Memphis Southmen.

If I had been a more alert journalist, I would have offered the bosses at Newsday an instant sidebar on the Giants’ thoughts about their close encounters with the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Instead, I filed a not-so-earthshattering piece on how the Giants coaches were switching fourth-year pro Ray Rhodes from wide receiver to defensive back. (“Yeh, I’m a cornerback,” Rhodes said, “but I’m giving no interviews. I got nothing to say.”)

Certainly Rhodes, who wound up playing four more years and coaching another 30 in the NFL, was all shook up that day. But the real story was Elvis and, by extension, the former Memphis players who shared some thoughts about the man.

They were aware that Elvis had been in the building, Memphis’ Liberty Bowl, with 30,121 other spectators for the Southmen’s debut on July 10, 1974. It was reported that Elvis sat with country singer Charlie Rich, and that when Rich returned to his seat after singing the national anthem, Elvis observed, “That’s a tough song to sing, ain’t it?”

Memphis was a good team, winning 17 of 21 games in 1974 and had a 7-4 record the next year when the league folded mid-season. Which led to the migration North, from Memphis to the Giants, by running backs Larry Csonka and Willie Spencer, receivers Ed Marshall and Gary Shirk, center Ralph Hill, linebacker Frank Marion, guard Ron Mikolajczyk and defensive back Larry Mallory—along with McVay and his assistants Jay Fry and Bob Gibson.

Pro football never returned to Memphis despite an effort by Elvis’ foundation in the early 1990s, long after his death, for a franchise to be named the Hound Dogs. What was left behind was “an Elvis-owned and –used WFL football” given to him by Southmen owner John Bassett and offered at auction at Graceland during the annual Elvis Week in 2017.

According to a letter of authenticity from Elvis’ bodyguard Sonny West, who died months before that auction, “Elvis used this football on the grounds of Graceland in the ’70s….

“Elvis and some of us guys went to some of the [Southmen] home games as a guest of the owner and sat in his box. Elvis and John became friends quickly. John got the ball and gave it to Elvis. I’m sure it was a game ball at one time but had passed the newness of that stage and became a practice ball for the team. Elvis and I passed the ball a few times in the backyard of Graceland.”

Likely, then, the future Giants Csonka, Marshall, Shirk, Spencer and the others had handled that ball at some point in practice. The Elvis ball. I wish I’d asked a few more questions in 1977 about such small degrees of separation.

But, now, full circle, thinking about the day that Aretha Franklin—born in Memphis, by the way—died. Among the countless tributes of respect for her influence and eclectic musical gifts was a recollection of her rendition of the Star Spangled Banner before a 2016 Thanksgiving Day game between the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings. Passionate, four-and-a-half minutes long, with gospel phrasing and ad-libs—“It is the land of the free,” she threw in—it surely would have moved Elvis to marvel, “That’s a tough song to sing that way, ain’t it?”