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.”