Category Archives: Biography

Baseball, Biography, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

Rodriguez is not giving back any of the money

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The money made him do it.
Money is the second oldest motive in the world, after all. Willie Sutton famously said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. The Menendez brothers. The Lindberg baby kidnapping. Bonnie and Clyde. Wall Street.

All about money.

We understand. People do awful things for money. Heroic things. Careless things.

Except, of course, Alex Rodriquez already had the money. More money than any baseball player ever. More money than Madonna, just to make a nice, neat circle.
Rodriguez already had the talent, too. That’s why he got the money. More talent than, well, certainly Madonna, and anyone else in baseball, including Mr. Clear and Mr. Cream himself, Barry Bonds.

How awful it would have been if A-Rod had been judged to be worth only, oh, $20 million, or even $15 million. What a shame. What a sham.

A man has to protect his over-inflated worth, or what’s a CEO bonus for?

Rodriguez is not giving back any of the money. Not for the years 2001 or 2002 or 2003, nor is he returning the MVP award he won in Texas. He is not refuting his distinction as the youngest player to ever do just about everything.

Sorry, Ernie Banks, you kind old gentleman. A-Rod is still the sluggingest shortstop of all time.

Rodriguez is not saying, please, don’t count any of the 156 homers hit during that time, nor please ignore any of the phony deeds that got him to the Yankees, to New York, where even Rodriquez’ money is more than anyone needs for doing nothing very vital.

Are you worth that much money, Alex? I will be as soon as I take this shot.

What’s in the shot? Dunno. This is a loosey-goosey time. Everyone’s doing it.
The President of the United States finds the news depressing. He said so at a press conference that somehow, after the economy and war and terrorism had been dealt with, just naturally got around to Rodriquez, A-Fraud as is his new alias.

And the President is especially depressed about the message sent to the kids out there.
Don’t do this, kids. Don’t do it if you want to make $27 million a year, hang out with celebrities, challenge the greatest records in the greatest game, be considered the best there ever was.

Deny everything until you can’t and when you no longer can, be ready to say you are sorry, really sorry. Sorry for being foolish, sorry for being naïve, sorry for being part of a loosey-goosey time in baseball, sorry for…well, you know. All of it.

Don’t accuse the reporter who got the story of stalking you because that just seems petty, but do make sure to confess to a friendly baseball eminence, someone who will treat you with deference and never make you say out loud the actual word, “steroids.”

You may come away leaving the impression that you had done nothing more serious than put cinnamon on your sunflower seeds.

There are many good lessons here for kids. No reason to be depressed about that.

Spread the blame around. Give a share to Tom Hicks, the Texas owner who paid him all that money, and to Seattle, too, I suppose, for not being a grand enough stage for a 25-year-old with great hand-eye-coordination. And his agent Scott Boras for concocting the contract in the first place.
Blame everyone before Rodriguez.

If there was “enormous pressure” to perform on a last place team, why should Rodriquez feel any less pressure playing for just as much money in the House that Ruth Built? Maybe, as his postseason failures grow, what Yankee fans resent is that he does not think enough of them to do what he did for Texas.

In the five years since Rodriquez confesses he did what others did, what he felt necessary to justify the wealth he accepted, he has been a terrific player, if not Derek Jeter in the New York heart. In the same way that Bonds was great before the pharmaceutical deceit that will define him forever, so does Rodriguez repel sympathy. Maybe more so.

Rodriguez was the anti-Bonds—and I suppose that title now falls to Ken Griffey, Jr.—the natural specimen of power and skill, unpolluted by either chemistry or conceit, and surely that perception made it difficult for Rodriquez to confess before now.

It’s that image thing again. In Texas he had to be better to justify the money. In New York he had to lie to protect the original lie. Lie. Lie. Lie.

The so-called Steroid Generation of Baseball is defined by lies, finger-wagging, stone-walling, Congress defying lies, and now that Rodriguez has told some of the truth he seems more forgivable than Bonds. Or Roger Clemens. Or Miguel Tejada.

Bonds may go to jail for lying. That’s the difference between lying to a grand jury and lying to Katie Couric.

Baseball, Biography, Chicago Tribune, Professional

SUTTER’S FINGERS HIS SAVING GRACE

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WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. – Except for enough hair on his face and head to stuff a small mattress, Bruce Sutter is as ordinary as any of us who makes $1.7 million a year working roughly seven or eight minutes a week.

Sutter likes hunting and fishing, ignores exercise and avoids lifting anything heavier than a 5-ounce baseball or a 12-ounce can.

“I get my exercise on the mound,” Sutter said, swabbing off the sweat he had gathered by watching his new Atlanta pitching mates try to advance imaginary baserunners on a remote field at the Braves’ spring-training complex.

When Sutter left St. Louis to gain greater wealth as the most significant free agent of the winter (“What it boiled down to was they didn’t want me anymore,” he said), Cardinals’ manager Whitey Herzog moaned, “I am now 45 games dumber.”

What makes Sutter different from the rest of us, as well as from the 100 or so members of his own fraternity of late-inning game-savers, is the way he holds the baseball.

The first two fingers of Sutter’s right hand look long enough to scratch both ears at the same time. That is a good trick at parties but not something anyone would give him $48 million to do, which the Braves have agreed is fair over the life of Sutter’s new contract–a life that will most likely last longer than his own.

Sutter’s right wrist is long enough to keep him from buying his shirts off the rack. He wraps his fingers around each side of a baseball, snaps his wrist and tickles the underside of the ball with his thumb as he releases it. His thumb ends up between his fingers, just like yours does when you pretend to steal a baby’s nose.

And that, pretty much, is how the forkball is thrown.

“I know the mechanics of the pitch,” said Johnny Sain, the Braves’ pitching coach who has been around Sutter for less than a week, “and I surely know what it does when he throws it. But why it works so well I’m kindly hoping to learn from him myself.”

Good luck. Sutter can show it and will explain it if he’s in the mood, but he is as mystified as the next guy as to what makes the forkball–or the split-fingered fastball–the deadliest pitch since the Sirens sang to Ulysses. “All I know is that it is easy for me to throw,” Sutter said. “I don’t think a lot about it, where my head is or my shoulders are. I wouldn’t make a very good pitching coach.”

Other pitchers have tried it, or so they claim, most notably the staff of the champion Detroit Tigers. But Sutter holds the patent.

“It looks like a fastball, but it’s not,” said Braves’ center-fielder Dale Murphy, who has had as much success hitting it as anybody. “It looks like an off-speed pitch, but it’s not. Usually when you swing at it, it’s not a strike.”

Sutter learned the pitch when he was in the Cubs’ farm system, in Quincy, from the late Fred Martin. Sutter was a 20-year-old prospect who had signed for $500, in contrast to the $500,000 signing bonus the Braves gave him 12 years later.

Sutter remembers Martin showing a group of young pitchers how to throw what he called an off-speed curve. Because of his long fingers and his wrist snap, Sutter realized that he could throw the ball harder than it was meant to be.

What a batter sees when Sutter’s ball comes at him is a fastball that suddenly disappears below his knees.

“When Sutter is pitching well,” said Atlanta’s Bob Horner, “the ball jumps under your bat.”

“It’s kind of like a dry spitter,” Sutter said.

And the beauty of all of this is that Sutter only has to show off when his team is ahead, and for not very long.

“I’ve never pitched for more than five innings in one game in the major leagues,” Sutter said.

Most batters see so little of him, their knowledge of how to hit his pitch relies largely on rumor.

“I have more trouble with slap hitters,” Sutter said. “But they usually bring me in to pitch to the stars in the big situation.

“I only face a hitter maybe three-four times a season, so none of them can really get familiar with the pitch. And I throw it 95 percent of the time. “I’m not an intimidator like a Rich Gossage, where if he has one slip, he could end a guy’s career. Mine is a freak pitch. It goes spiraling in like a football, but I can’t explain it any better than that. I know that when it’s working best, I can’t see it break. And if I’m in the game for more than two innings, we’ve lost.”

Sutter’s value, as with most things in baseball, must be put into numbers. He saved 45 of St. Louis’ 84 victories last season and won 5. No Atlanta relief pitcher had more than 16 saves.

Atlanta lost nine games after leading in the ninth inning; St. Louis lost only two. Had those numbers been reversed, the Braves might or might not have caught San Diego, to whom they finished second, but Ted Turner’s money is saying that they would have.

“I can’t really help a fourth- or fifth-place team,” Sutter said. “I can’t make a team a winner by myself. The team has to be good enough to give me a lead to protect. I think the Braves are that good.”

“The worst feeling you could have,” said Murphy, “was to see Sutter get up in the bullpen. You’d tense up just knowing you had to get some runs before he got into the game.

“Now it’s somebody else’s turn to sweat.”

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

FLUTIE COMES UP SHORT USFL DEBUT IS LESS THAN A BIG SUCCESS

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Dateline: BIRMINGHAM, ALA. – What might have been, for Doug Flutie, could be reduced to simple mathematics.

“What did we score in the fourth quarter, 21 points?” Flutie asked. “Over a whole game, that’s 84.”

And that would have been ample to overcome the 38 points scored by the Heismanless Birmingham Stallions here Sunday. That many points, or even half as many, may have justified Flutie as an adult quarterback for the New Jersey Generals, if not the most recent savior of the United States Football League.

Alas for Flutie, they still count the actual points scored in each quarter before adding them up, even in the USFL, and he thus will forever have to live with the indelible fact that he was a loser, 38-28, the first time he had a chance to show anyone why he is worth $7 million.

“I made no promises when I came into this league,” Flutie said. “I don’t owe anything to anybody.”

Well, that is not exactly true. He owes a small debt to whoever taught him his times tables, if no one else.

Flutie might just as easily have multiplied his first-half completions by two, which would still have been zero. In fact, he could have gone all the way until two minutes were left in the third quarter and not have projected a completion for himself, unless you count the two he threw to Birmingham.

By the end of the game, Flutie was 12 of 27 for two touchdowns and three interceptions, but until his last futile flurry, he played like a baby with his thumbs on backwards.

“I just wasn’t on the money,” Flutie said, intending no pun.

Other great athletes have had ineffective starts. Someone was mentioning that Willie Mays went 0-for-50 or something when he broke in, but of course, someone was throwing the ball at Mays, not just handing it to him.

“No one said it was going to be easy,” Flutie said.

Of course they did. Everybody said so. Anyone who saw him whip Miami with his miracle pass or applauded him for taking the Heisman without blushing thought so. Certainly Donald Trump, Flutie’s new landlord, who paid him all that money and traded veteran Brian Sipe to unclutter the backfield for him, thought so.

Watching Flutie flail away at his own myth for most of his first game was like watching a shiny new Ferrari turn into just another used car.

The first four passes he threw did not touch another human being. His fifth pass bounced off Herschel Walker, who has a Heisman of his own, and his sixth pass was swatted down by 300-pound tackle Doug Smith, who is big enough to be sliced into several Fluties and frozen.

Flutie’s seventh pass finally found a companion, though it happened to be David Dumars of the other team. No. 8 was a time zone too long and No. 9 came down in the arms of Birmingham’s Chuck Clinton.

Cynics as well as realists were trying to get up a pool in the press box on when Flutie would complete his first pass. I took August.

It wasn’t until Flutie introduced the ball to teammate Clarence Collins that the game ball had anyone’s fingerprints on it but Flutie’s and his enemies’.

Once he completed his first pass, with the score 31-7, Flutie outscored Birmingham by 21-7, but it was still another interception, by Dennis Woodberry of the Stallions with seven minutes to play, that stopped whatever chance Flutie had of working his magic.

On this day, there was nothing up his sleeve, except a rather ordinary arm, shorter than most.

“It was frustrating and irritating,” Flutie said. “I was angry at myself for not getting off to a better start. I just . . . shoot, I just wish I could have done it the whole game.”

Flutie was asked, quite properly, if he possibly had any trouble seeing over the Birmingham linemen.

“No comment,” said Flutie, who was game to talk about everything but why he has never grown bigger than your average placekicker.

He did not alibi on his lack of preparation, a mere two weeks of training with the Generals.

“If I had only one day of practice, I still would have felt I should start,” Flutie said.

And yet . . .

“What I need,” Flutie said, “is more game experience. Week after week, game after game, I will get better.”

The pressure of his debut, he said, was no bother.

“I was relaxed and I was calm,” Flutie said. “I knew what I was doing.”

And yet . . .

“I know what people will say,” Flutie said. ” ‘Flutie didn’t win his first game. When’s he going to win one?’ There will be more pressure.”

But what happened against Birmingham?

“We didn’t have the ball,” Flutie said, which was true. In all, New Jersey had the ball for only 18 minutes, just two minutes in the second quarter and three in the third. “When you make a mistake, you like to get out there and fix it. I didn’t work up a sweat until the third quarter.”

And when Flutie did, a few of the things for which he became notable began to happen.

“We’re a running team,” Flutie said, “but I feel more comfortable when things are helter-skelter. When I have to think on my feet, I react better. I don’t feel like a robot, just handing the ball off.”

That is a matter for his coach, Walt Michaels, to solve. The fourth- quarter Flutie was much preferable to the first-, second- and third-quarter Flutie, and if he is to be anything close to what the USFL imagines him to be, Flutie may have to play the game on the edge, as he did in college.

“I don’t give a damn about stats,” Flutie said. “If I was 0-for-30 and we won the game 6-0, I would be happy.”

That would make one. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Doug Flutie, New Jersey’s $7-million man. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Doug Flutie passes under pressure Sunday during his first regular-season game with the New Jersey Generals. He completed 12 of 27 for 189 yards and had 3 interceptions.

Biography, Boxing, Chicago Tribune

CHAMP’S CORNER CRAWLING WITH PALS

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Dateline: RENO – The soft side of Livingstone Bramble, the Rastafarian who took away Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini’s lightweight fist-fighting title by pounding Mancini’s face into sausage last summer, is that Bramble loves pets.

Bramble won’t go anywhere without his animal friends and insists on even bringing them with him to work.

Think of the guilt you have felt when leaving home to the sounds of Bowser whining on the other side of the door. Bramble would never be so heartless.

He has brought many of his household favorites with him from his home in New Jersey. And the hotel where he is living and training couldn’t be nicer about it, though it usually discourages anything but casino pigeons.

It is not uncommon for Bramble to sign autographs while one of his adoring little pals nuzzles his neck, and he often will park one of them in the corner of the ring while he spars for his rematch with Mancini, or maybe hang it over the top rope. Wherever it is most comfortable.

Bramble’s concern for his pets is a treasure to see, and infinitely more urgent than his concern for the health of Mr. Mancini, whom he has taken to calling “Boy-cini” and whom he promises to rehumiliate here Saturday for cable television.

Two of Bramble’s constant companions are Turtle and Dog, the first of which is a 7-foot python and the second a 5 1/2-foot boa constrictor, neither of which will eat anything that isn’t alive. Feeding time is Bramble’s favorite part of the day.

Why they are called Turtle and Dog is not quite clear, except that Bramble’s favorite pet is called Snake, and he had the name first, even though Snake is a serious pit bull terrier that once bit the head off a friendly poodle. Or so the story goes.

Bramble likes Snake so much that he has taken on the nickname of Pit Bull himself, proving that he is generous and ecumenical when sorting out all of God’s creatures, be they large, small, slithery or full of teeth.

However, one can only be grateful that it was not Bramble’s job to name all animals in the first place, otherwise we might be calling a cockroach a sparrow, a vulture a lamb, and have no idea what to call lawyers.

Part of Bramble’s warm-up ritual is to chase a chicken while Turtle and Dog watch with interest, but Bramble never catches the chicken. It is just his way of keeping each of them in shape, like doing roadwork with a friend.

There has been no talk that Bramble’s unique method of exercise will be made into a video cassette, but the possibilities are intriguing: “Now on tape. In the privacy of your own living room. Trim down, firm up and stay fit by chasing your dinner around the house”–boiled, not fried, of course.

It has been said that animal lovers tend to take on the characteristics of their pets. Bramble will not dispute this theory.

“When I fight, I shoot out my jab and then bring it back real fast,” he says. “Just like my snakes when they’re going after a rat.

“When I get somebody in trouble, I just keep pouring it on, using my killer instinct, just like my pit bulls if they were in a fight to the death.”

How, then, can anyone who is so in touch with the harmony of nature be judged harshly, even if Bramble did beat up everybody’s boy next door, which is what Mancini was to us all, although I cannot think of any kid on my block who ever killed a foreigner with his fists, as Mancini did. At least not in public.

Bramble has yet to be widely accepted as champion. His victory over Mancini was decisive and undisputed, even if it was only the second main event Bramble had ever fought.

He has fought 24 times since leaving his home in the Virgin Islands six years ago, losing once and drawing once. Bramble oftens fights with the wrong hand from the wrong stance, appearing awkward and vulnerable in the process. He gets by on tenacity as much as skill, and the same could be said of Mancini.

He has a 9-inch reach advantage on Mancini, 74 to 65, and one year of age, 24 to 23. But, mostly, Bramble has weirdness.

Mancini confessed to being shaken up by Bramble’s sense of mischief before the first fight. Bramble kept calling Mancini a murderer for the ring death of Korean Duk Koo Kim, not something Mancini was anxious to remember, and Bramble is not exactly the kind of guy Mancini was used to running into at the neighborhood pool hall.

Bramble does not wear the dreadnoughts of the Rastafarian religion, but he does wear his hair in corn rows, as well as the occasional snake around his neck.

Mancini’s people last week wanted to make sure that Bramble’s braided corn rows were not an unauthorized weapon and requested the Nevada boxing authories to check them out.

An official dutifully went to Bramble’s camp and insisted that Bramble rub his hair against the official’s cheek.

Coming away unscarred, the official proclaimed that Bramble’s hair was soft enough to be admitted to the ring, though both snakes have to be left in the room or pay their own way to ringside. Thirty seats ought to be enough.

PHOTO: Livingstone Bramble.

Basketball, Biography, Chicago Tribune, Professional

SAMPSON JUST IMMEASURABLE

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Dateline: INDIANAPOLIS

Let’s not ask the real Ralph Sampson to stand up, please.

Sampson in his underwear already is 7 feet 4 inches, an altitude with which the rest of us are unfamiliar, except on those rare occasions when someone might ask us to stand on a ladder to wash an elephant.

But the world of professional basketball would like to see just how far Sampson can stretch, for when that happens, as it did in inspired moments of Sunday’s National Basketball Association All-Star game, the sport becomes something never imagined by Dr. James Naismith or any of his heirs, who all now apparently live in Indiana and are convinced they know more about basketball than the rest of the world put together.

“Sampson is still growing,” said Los Angeles Lakers’ and West coach Pat Riley. “Growing in his basketball life, I mean. You look at him now and you just say, ‘Wow.’

“And then you think of what he can become, and you cannot imagine where he’ll be, where he’ll take basketball. He will have an impact no one else has ever had on this league.”

Or, to quote Mr. Magic Johnson of the Lakers, many of whose 15 assists went to Sampson in the West’s 140-129 disposal of its geographic opposite in the Hoosier Dome: “You bring the ball up, and you take two guys into the paint with you, and then you just flip it over your head and here comes Sampson. Woooo. Woosh. Wham.

“You can’t wait to give it to him again. You say: ‘Let’s do it. Let’s go again. Here it comes, big guy.’ You look up and there he is, so high, and you know the game is changing. Whooeee.”

“Playing like that,” allowed Sampson, “is a lot of fun.”

K.C. Jones, the East coach from Boston, mused: “You coach against a team like that and you try to do a halfway decent job on Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar). That’s a maybe. And then Magic, that’s a maybe. And George Gervin hits 10 of 10 or 20 of 20, and still you think there’s a chance.

“Then you see a guy like Sampson, a guy that tall filling the lane, bringing the ball up, getting offensive boards, playing defense, blocking shots. Sampson was kind of awesome today.”

Awesome translated into numbers is 24 points and 10 rebounds in 29 minutes of play, all of them in motion.

As long as there are so many people saying such nice things about him, or the press voting him the most valuable star of stars, Sampson will never have to speak for himself, which he has always had a tough time doing, though he tries to prove his education at Virginia wasn’t wasted.

“I just want to be able to do what there is to do,” Sampson said.

Which is? “Drive, dribble, shoot, whatever has to be done,” Sampson said. “I’d love to play point guard.”

The point is, Sampson is not supposed to be gyrating like a playground punk, juking and jamming and driving. He is supposed to be standing right under the basket, like all 7-footers before him, maybe skyhooking when the mood is right but mostly reaching over the rim while pygmies claw at his waist.

That’s the way he did it in college. That’s the way he did it in Houston last year, his first season as a pro. That’s the way he might have done it forever had not Houston drafted another 7-footer, Akeem Olajuwon, to take the interior pounding and free Sampson to be the best that he can be.

“Ralph is a better forward than center,” said Johnson.

“He is too versatile to just play in the pivot,” said Abdul-Jabbar. “It limits him.”

The votes of NBA fans put Sampson in the West’s starting lineup, but Riley’s sense of history kept him on the same floor with L.A.’s Johnson, who knows how to make ordinary giants look great, and what we saw on a snowy Sunday in Indy was just a hint of things to come.

“I would have to think in my own mind that he would be much better if he played with me,” said Johnson. “If I played with him all the time, I’d have 25 assists a game.”

Sampson with Johnson certainly impressed Riley, whose chief regret is that he has but the one.

“You can’t help marveling at the novelty of both,” said Riley. “Here is Magic, a 6-9 point guard, and there is Sampson, a 7-4 small forward.

“Nobody really knows what to do with either one, yet. They are just too unorthodox. They are stretching the perimeters of the game.”

“I really don’t know what I can do, what my limits are,” Sampson said. “All I know is I can do a lot more than I do now.

“I just want to get better and enjoy the days to come.”

So say we all.

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

SUBSTANCE LOST OUT TO NAMATH’S STYLE

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JOE NAMATH WOULD not be much on our minds these days except for two astonishing developments. First, he got married, and second, he joined pro football’s Hall of Fame, only one of which, as far as is known, required a vote.

Namath as a groom may be more intriguing than Namath as an all-time hero, since his reputation as a bachelor always exceeded his fame as a quarterback. Namath had one great moment on the football field. The number and intensity of his other accomplishments will have to wait for his memoirs.

I suppose he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame for no other reason than that magic afternoon in Super Bowl III, when he brought the American Football League from tourist to first class. But he never did anything with a football before or after that day that warrants enshrinement in Canton, Ohio, the last place anyone nicknamed Broadway would be expected to be found anyhow.

FOR THOSE WHO have forgotten the legacy of Namath, he once represented a generation, right up there with the Beatles and Muhammad Ali.

His last game, if memory serves, was a losing playoff encounter six years ago between the Los Angeles Rams, for whom he lurked in the final year of his career, and the Minnesota Vikings.

The end was not what his legend demanded. For those who believed he was everything romantic and compelling in sports, Namath should have gone down under a fierce pass rush, pinpointing one last touchdown pass to win the big game. He should have been carried off on his shield, thumbing his nose at the world in one final, glorious act of defiance.

Instead, the man who once joked about sleeping through college sat alone on the bench of a team most of us can’t remember he ever suited up for while Pat Haden, a Rhodes Scholar, swept up in front of him.

The man who once saved a league with the New York Jets was not asked to save a single game for the Rams.

IT WAS AN END not uncommon in sports. Babe Ruth ran out his string with the Boston Braves, leaving his team in a pique because it wouldn’t give him the day off. Ali fought pygmies for money, losing his last fight in front of foreigners because they were the only ones who could watch without turning their heads. Billie Jean King hung on and on, willing to lose tennis matches to children.

And like them, Namath was always bigger than the game he played. He has managed to remain with us, more or less, as a fitful actor, a celebrity bowler or some such.

It takes a Hall of Fame endorsement for us to remember what he was. Namath’s real importance and his real credentials for the Hall of Fame were his influence on his sport and on his time. What he was and what he did linger still like a locker-room odor.

He was the first to give football players an exaggerated value of their own worth, getting nearly half a million dollars as a rookie and immediately jacking up the wages of combat.

Any sports contract that does not begin on the fat side of $1 million these days is not worth mentioning.

NAMATH’S LIFESTYLE, outrageous in his day, is commonplace now. Not that booze and women were ever out of fashion with athletes, but Namath made both a status symbol for the successful jock. Booze has been replaced by more exotic mindbenders, a not surprising progression.

A more trivial example of a Namath affectation that became routine is white shoes. It is difficult to find an athlete south of Minnesota who wears basic black on his feet instead of white. And are we all too young to remember when Namath was the only one who wore them?

Namath’s long hair set a style not only in sports but also in the larger arena. Executives who would have been the first to yell, “Get a hair cut!” in 1968, became shaggier than Namath ever was, and like the original he was, Namath showed his ears again long before they showed theirs.

Namath was the first athlete who got away with being different. “Do your own thing” became a catch phrase for a generation.

BY BEATING THE establishment in the Super Bowl, and by challenging it when he quit football in dispute over ownership of a bar, he set the tone for much of the later rebelliousness of athletes everywhere.

Namath’s demand for freedom was echoed in player strikes in both football and baseball. For better or worse, the roots of almost all athletic unrest can be traced to Namath’s trend-setting belligerence.

It was no accident that Namath’s greatest glory came in the ’60s. He was the kind of hero an uncomfortable nation was looking for–arrogant, self- confident and a rebel.

And it is worth noting that, as the turbulent ’60s gave way to the complacent ’70s, Namath gave way also. Here in the causeless ’80s, he is just another Yuppie whose only rebellion is against polyester.

Now he is being honored by the establishment he once taunted, going into the Hall of Fame at the same time as no less than the high commissioner of the game himself, Pete Rozelle, which proves what we’ve always suspected: Young pioneers have a way of becoming old proprietors.

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional, Quotes

Montana the Best? No Argument Here

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WHAT A RELIEF it will be to pass through the approaching NFL-less months without having to worry about who the greatest quarterback in football is.

We now know that it is Joe Montana of San Francisco, an issue that was settled clearly in Super Bowl XIX and the only reason to remember the game at all, unless you count the human American flag that boogied during the National Anthem.

Montana is the best quarterback, and a more reluctant hero we have not had in football since last year, when Jim Plunkett mumbled his way into our hearts.

“Joe is the greatest quarterback in football today,” said his coach, Bill Walsh, and if you can’t trust a guy who always dresses in white, who can you trust?

“Joe Montana is the best that ever played,” said Dwight Clark, who used to be Montana’s roommate and still serves as Montana’s landlord between brides.

“Joe has established himself as maybe the finest quarterback to play,” said Paul Hackett, who is only Montana’s personal coach.

There we have three perfectly objective endorsements, and, of course, our own eyes.

SUPER BOWL XIX was just the latest chapter in the Joe Montana (Montagna in the original Italian) story. The beginning was back in Monongahela, Pa., in the back yard where an only child already burdened with the designation of junior after his name caught footballs thrown by a father determined to make him a great athlete.

The story moved to Notre Dame where, from seventh string, Montana became a college legend. Montana brought the Irish from behind no less than half a dozen times in his three seasons of play there, from a 20-point rescue against Air Force, to a 35-34 victory over Houston in the Cotton Bowl with no time left after Notre Dame had fallen behind 34-12.

And now to San Francisco, where in just six years Montana has won two Super Bowls and has been the outstanding player in each one.

“I don’t know how I’ve been able to do these things,” Montana said. “I just go out there and try to win.”

You don’t learn much about Montana from Montana. For a young man consistently described as fiercely competitive, he is absolutely timid in public.

In any gathering, he would be the one most likely to pass for a sarcophagus.

He speaks softly, though he always fixes the questioner with his clear blue eyes, and he always stops his answer short of anything revealing, though he did confess after this Super Bowl that the one thing that most upset him was being called a wimp by “a writer from Miami.”

OF COURSE, NO ONE in San Francisco would call him that, no matter how tempted by Montana’s hermit instincts. In fact, Montana was declared God for a Day by one group of sign painters who watched the 49er victory parade that Montana skipped.

In all candor, Montana does not look like a quarterback. What he looks like is somebody who carries your groceries to the car.

“The good Lord did not put him together like Dan Marino,” said 49er guard Randy Cross, “but he can run, pass and get out of the way of problems. Marino is the best thrower in the league. Joe Montana is the best quarterback.”

“He is not a flamboyant person,” said Walsh. “He’s like a great writer or musician. There’s something internal that you just know.

“People will play alongside him more smoothly than someone who attracts a lot of attention. He doesn’t have that bravado that certain people who are less smart have.”

What Montana has are results. Notre Dame used to cheer when Dan Devine would finally put Montana into a game, usually when it appeared lost. Devine likes to take credit for discovering Montana, but there is a story around that, during Montana’s junior year, after two Notre Dame quarterbacks had been hurt, Devine whirled angrily and yelled at his assistants, “Get me a quarterback!”

Montana was sent into the game. He brought the Irish back to beat Purdue, causing Devine to ask, “What’s that kid’s name?”

WALSH AND MONTANA are an ideal pair, kind of like a professor and his puppy. Here’s a new trick, Joe. Roll over and stand on one leg. Isn’t he cute? “He is extremely coachable,” said Walsh, “and he is very inventive.”

Walsh first saw Montana when Walsh was working out UCLA running back James Owens before the 1979 draft. Owens had brought Montana along to throw the ball to him, and Walsh was impressed enough to forget Owens and make Montana the 49ers’ second selection.

The choice was high enough to startle NFL scouts. “They questioned his consistency,” said Walsh, “but I felt that was the fault of Notre Dame. I wondered why, if he could have one great game, why not two, or three? They said his arm wasn’t strong enough, but it is as strong as Dan Fouts’. I put his arm in the 90th percentile.

“Joe has leadership, instinct, resourcefulness, maturity. We have the most detailed offense in the league. The quarterback is our limit. But with Joe, we don’t have a limit.”

End of argument.

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional, Quotes

Marino’s Success Speaks for Itself

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Dateline: SAN FRANCISCO

Two things you don’t expect to learn about Dan Marino are: one, he is painfully young; and two, he is fat.

Not that he’s a real porker, not like a pulling guard or a nose tackle, but he has a belly that belongs on a baker, or a bartender, not on the greatest quarterback to ever become a legend over a weekend, which is about how long it has taken Marino to make the world forget Dan Fouts.

Quarterbacks, especially record-setting 23-year-old quarterbacks, ought not to look better with their shirttails out. Marino has a body made for suspenders.

Bless his paunch, a mortal flaw. You cannot imagine what a relief it is to have made this discovery. For if he had one of those speedbump stomachs, he would be just too perfect to stand.

He already has hair that curls around his face with careless insolence, eyes as blue as a Florida dawn, a smile that could melt the heart of a hermit, and he can throw a football with the inspiration of a minor Roman deity, which he is rumored to be in assorted Italian neighborhoods and the offensive huddle of the Dolphins.

IF YOU STARTED out to build a quarterback, Marino would already have all the best parts, though yours would probably be able to touch his toes without sitting.

And you might give him something interesting to say, just for variety. Marino treats conversation like a spaniel treats a rose bush.

“How did you come by your fast release?” Marino is asked.

“Who can say?” he shrugs.

“What do you say to people who already call you the greatest quarterback who ever lived?” he is asked.

“Who’s to say who is the greatest?” he says.

“Are you surprised to be in the Super Bowl so soon in your career?” he is asked.

“No,” he says.

“Do you think you are a dull person?” he is asked.

“Who’s to say who is dull? Maybe I think you are dull,” he says.

AND SO IT GOES. Marino came to this Super Bowl with a world ready to anoint him for his achievements, past and future, and he has managed to treat it as if it were trying to steal his wallet.

He has been patient with almost all inquiries, but he would clearly rather be someplace else. Three minutes into any interview and he starts shuffling his feet as if his toes were on fire.

An easy conclusion to draw is that Marino is essentially a jerk, a judgment that is as premature as is any on his place in the history of paid quarterbacking.

Marino is not very smart, not in an extra-football sense. If he has ever had a thought that did not include football or fun or family, he chased it out of his head before it left a scar.

In order to get out on the town with his teammates this week, to avoid the fans who gather to gawk and tug at him, Marino has had to leave his Oakland hotel in disguise. What the disguise is has not been revealed, but rumor has it he has been undetected as a scholar.

“I don’t think about things,” Marino said. “Have I ever sat down and thought at this moment in my life if I am destined to be a champion? No, I don’t do things like that.”

A DEEP THINKER, HE ISN’T. Marino’s explanation of how he does what he does with the football is no more complicated than this: “I just turn it loose and have fun.”

One suspects if he were to ever really understand his gift, in the way that a mechanic understands an engine, the fun would be gone. For him and for us.

For now, Marino’s innocence, or his arrogance, whichever it is, produces simply marvelous results.

Marino lives by instinct, on the field as well as off it, an approach to life that has served him fairly well so far. Fame has always come to Marino on his terms, or not at all.

Marino has a specialness that visits a few humans without any basis in reason. Just as Edison was destined to be more than a tinkerer, Baryshnikov more than a dancer, Charles Manson more than a nuisance, so was Marino destined to be more than just another quarterback.

EVEN DON SHULA is not quite sure what makes Marino so special. “I’d rather just pat him on the back and say, ‘Atta boy, Dan’,” Shula has said.

And Marino is a baby still, reacting with a child’s suspicion to adults who have wronged him.

A magazine story during Marino’s junior year at Pitt quoted him as saying he could throw the ball better than anybody in college and could throw with anybody in the pros. Marino did not say it exactly that way, even if he believed it, and he has been careful since to avoid saying anything the least bit colorful.

“I’m just being myself,” he said. “I am not being purposely dull.”

No argument here. No one could be that dull on purpose.

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

He Fits the Mold Only If It’s Cracked

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SAN FRANCISCO — Russ Francis, the tight end, was asked to define his role as one of the San Francisco 49ers’ offensive weapons.

“A weapon?” he asked. “Is that what I am? Is there any government agency I should register with?”

It is possible to get a straight answer from Francis, but foolish to insist on one, much the same as going to the circus for the food.

Francis explained why he once dived from a sixth-floor balcony into a hotel swimming pool.

“If I had jumped, my femurs would have been lodged in my frontal lobes,” he said.

But from the sixth floor?

“That’s all the floors the hotel had,” he said.

FRANCIS LOOKS LIKE a garden-variety football player, big and broad. He smiles more than most footballers, but knowing only that he plays football is like trying to know what’s inside a suitcase by reading the name tag.

Football is what he does, not what he is. Francis himself isn’t quite sure what that is.

“Free spirit, I’ve been called,” he said. “Thrill seeker. A guy with a death wish. I’m just someone who does what he enjoys, things that are available for everyone to do, and not difficult.”

Like falling out of airplanes, or flying them upside down. Motorcycle racing. Wrestling. Surfing. Skiing. Playing a little golf now and again.

“What’s your handicap?” he was asked.

“Everything,” he said. “The cart. The trees. The ball.”

Francis plans to set a speed record in his small, open-cockpit biplane after the Super Bowl. He wanted to have done it by now, but the 49ers were unreasonably concerned about his getting injured.

“I told Bill (Walsh) that I’m going to be going 300 miles an hour 50 feet above the ground,” Francis said. “Injury is not a possibility.”

FRANCIS HAS ALWAYS been this way, from six years as an All-Pro pass catcher for New England to his more recent, and more obscure, three-year tenure as a blocker for the 49ers. He has always been a flake.

“Flake is an ugly word,” he said. “It implies lack of ambition, lack of direction. I take that word as a personal insult. Call me eccentric, different, independent, whatever you like. Those descriptions are probably all accurate. Flaky is not.”

True, Francis has never set his hair on fire or eaten glass in public, as Tim Rossovich, the NFL’s all-time flake, once did. Nor has he terrorized himself and companions in the fashion of Joe Don Looney, who was so cursed by his own eccentricity that when his dog bit a stranger, someone observed, “Poor Joe Don. Just when he begins to get his act together, his dog goes crazy.”

But Francis has always tended to be uncommon. At the height of his talent, fame and wealth, for example, he walked away from paid football.

“Retired,” he said. “For a year (in 1981). It was much needed and refreshing. I recommend it to every football player at some time in his career. You get an unrealistic view of things when you are in the game, and you don’t really understand what it will be like when it ends. There’s a whole other world out there.”

IT IS A WORLD that Francis has challenged with at least as much passion as he has football.

He said that as a teenager he used to visit nursing homes. He was fascinated by old people, and thought he could learn something from their experiences.

“Once I was talking to a man who was 90 years old,” Francis said. “He said the two things he thought of most were, first, that it got there so fast and, second, that there were things he never got around to doing. He had never been up in an airplane and he regretted that.

“I vowed I would never look back when I was old and say, ‘I wish I’d done that.’ If I wanted to do something, I was going to do it.”

Jumping out of airplanes was a place to start. “Skydiving,” he said. “It puts you in touch with pure, unbridled terror.”

AND PRO WRESTLING, which his father made a living at in Hawaii. Francis was a pro wrestler before he was a pro football player. “Don’t talk to me about wrestling being fake,” he said. “When the ambulance comes in the middle of the night to take your dad to the hospital because the stitches didn’t hold and people say that’s not real blood, you tend to get a little touchy.”

Francis has been seriously injured only once in all his off-field adventures, that in a motorcycle accident. His otherwise handsome face still is scarred a bit around the eyes.

“The game of football is more dangerous than anything else I do,” Francis said. “I keep running into a lot of crazy people whose express intent is to hurt me, and I’ve never been able to understand why.”

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

Walsh Doesn’t Fit the Coaching Mold

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IT IS HARD TO imagine Bill Walsh fitting in as a football coach anywhere but San Francisco. Walsh and The City are perfectly matched. Both are distinctive, attractive, literate, eccentric, arrogant and self-absorbed, yet both are fun to be around.

Wandering through Walsh’s imagination is a lot like wandering up and down San Francisco’s hills. There is a delight over every horizon, and even if you get lost, the scenery is worth the trip.

“If unique is what you seek,” said 49er guard Randy Cross, “then Bill Walsh is your man.”

We all know what the best football coaches are like. Their jaws jut, they have gaps between their teeth, their foreheads hang like awnings over their eyes and their life is at the end of the next can of game film. They have the sense of humor of a pit bull and the tolerance of a tax auditor.

WALSH LOOKS LIKE he just stepped out of a library. He talks like he has read half the books there and acts like he wrote the other half.

“The Super Bowl,” Walsh said, before he won one, “is to the American people what May Day is to Eastern Europeans, an added holiday.”

What most football coaches know of Eastern Europe they learned from their placekickers.

The older Walsh gets, the less inclined he is to dishevel the sport that has made him notable, but he once condemned the NFL support structure as “jockstrap elitists” and pro football itself as the plaything of “45- year-old football groupies.”

From the frosty tips of his silver hair to the barbs on the end of his pointed tongue, Walsh is quite decidedly not your run-of-the-cliche football coach.

AT ITS MOST basic, the upcoming Battle of Palo Alto, otherwise known as Super Bowl XIX, is a confrontation between modern and old-school coaches, Don Shula of Miami championing the traditional.

Shula came from Paul Brown, through Blanton Collier, by way of Weeb Ewbank, and was once a boy wonder head coach. He has never spoken of, or to, elitists and groupies, though he has been known to chat with the odd fan. Shula has never found any reason to abandon coaching lessons he learned early. Nothing beats hard work, organization and discipline.

“I don’t have peace of mind until I know I’ve given the game everything I can, because the whole idea is to get a winning edge,” said Shula, summarizing his vision and giving himself a title for his autobiography.

Walsh, at 53, is just two years younger than Shula, but he spent 18 years as an assistant while Shula was winning Super Bowls. Walsh’s long tenure as one of the boys may account for his more free-form approach to leadership.

“EACH OF US has a role to play,” said Walsh. “Mine does not have to be commander-in-chief. It’s kind of like being a submarine commander on a long, undersea cruise. You just can’t run around saluting all the time.”

In spite of his eccentricity, or maybe because of it, Walsh has become known commonly as a genius. He makes quarterbacks the way other coaches make excuses. His credits include Greg Cook, Ken Anderson, Dan Fouts and Joe Montana, not to mention assorted others at Stanford during his tenure there.

“I’m not sure I like the word ‘genius,’ t ” Walsh once protested. “There’s a certain figment of crackpot that goes with that, like a professor in a laboratory.”

Walsh will accept the title of artist, or even expert.

“I think I have as much expertise as anybody coaching football,” he said.

HE INSISTS HE is not consumed by ambition, but it is hard to believe him. He was irked at losing out on head jobs to Lou Holtz (Jets), George Allen (Rams) and Bill Johnson (Bengals) before he got the San Francisco job.

As if he needs to convince the world that none of this is important to him, Walsh has threatened twice to stop coaching the 49ers. Each time he has changed his mind.

Walsh cannot quite conceal his pride in having accomplished what he has, doing it his way, even as he insists, “I am not interested in having my won- lost record on my tombstone.”

Style matters less than results, and Shula has gotten better results than anybody. No other coach has ever been to six Super Bowls, but if Walsh should happen to win this Super Bowl, he will have won two in six years as a head coach, or just as many as Shula has in 22.

FOR ALL HIS varnished exterior, Walsh is not that much different from Shula underneath. As much as he might resist the truth, Walsh is a football coach and not half bad at it.

The chief difference between Shula and Walsh is that Shula does not apologize for his life’s work, and Walsh would have you believe that he has been merely slumming.