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Dodd | Thursday, August 21, 2008 |
 Gene Upshaw, Hall of Fame offensive lineman and executive director of the NFLPA, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 63.
Upshaw played for the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders from 1967 through 1981. He was a seven-time Pro Bowl selection and an 11-time All-Pro, playing on two Super Bowl-winning teams with the Raiders. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1987, but has been better known for the past 25 years as the executive director of the NFL Players Association.
From his involvement with the NFLPA as a player through his tenure as executive director, Upshaw took part in negotiations of the 1977, 1982 and 1993 Collective Bargaining Agreements between the NFL and NFLPA, and extensions of the CBA in 1998, 2002 and 2006.
Upshaw was born on Aug. 15, 1945, in Robstown, Texas, and played collegiately at Texas A&M. He was a first-round draft pick of the Oakland Raiders in 1967 and became the starting left guard as a rookie. He quickly became part of one of the NFL’s most dominant offensive lines, lining up between fellow Hall of Famers Art Shell at tackle and Jim Otto at center. Upshaw became the first player who was exclusively a guard to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
It is no exaggeration to say that Upshaw had as much of an impact on the shape and success of the modern NFL as any owner or group of owners. His influence on the game and his advocacy for and on behalf of players (past and present) was a major factor in making football such a popular sport. R.I.P.
UPDATE (James Joyner): Truly a sad and unexpected loss. Driving in this morning, I heard the news on Sirius NFL Radio. They were stunned that Upshaw hadn’t told anyone but, as it turns out, he only learned of his illness this past weekend.
I started watching the NFL on a serious basis with the 1979 season, during which I also collected the Topps player cards. Here’s the front and back of Upshaw’s card from that year (via Milo’s Cards):
 
I should note, too, that when I tuned into the middle of the Sirius discussion about how the upcoming labor talks would go without Upshaw, I presumed he had been fired. In recent months, there was a movement within the union seeking to replace Upshaw because he was perceived as too cozy with ownership. They’ll soon find out, to their chagrin, how good they had it.
Rick Gosselin notes that we throw around the phrase “future Hall of Famer” way too easily when talking about NFL greats.
 I’m hearing “first-ballot Hall of Famer” plenty these days with the retirements of Brett Favre, Jonathan Ogden, Michael Strahan and Warren Sapp. I’m hearing “future Hall of Famer” with the retirements of Steve McNair and Bryant Young. The Class of 2013 could be pumped up even further if Junior Seau decides he’s through.
The assumption is that the latest is always the greatest, so let’s rush all these guys into Canton.
 In Favre’s case, I’ll buy it. He retired as the game’s all-time leading passer with more completions, yards and touchdowns than any other quarterback in NFL history. Five years from now when he becomes eligible for Canton, Favre figures to still be atop all the passing lists.
Those are the true first-ballot guys: Favre, Jerry Rice, Emmitt Smith – players who pushed the bar so high it would take years for anyone to catch them statistically.
All other “first-ballot” candidates are matters of opinion, which makes them all subject to debate.
Strahan retired after 15 seasons with 141½ sacks. First ballot? Ask Chris Doleman his definition of a first-ballot Hall of Fame pass rusher. His statistics are better than Strahan’s across the board, but he can’t even get into the room for discussion by the Hall of Fame selection committee. Here’s a comparison:
| Player |
Seasons |
Games |
Sacks |
FF |
FR |
Int |
| Doleman |
15 |
232 |
150½ |
43 |
23 |
8 |
| Strahan |
15 |
216 |
141½ |
23 |
14 |
4 |
| (FF-Forced fumbles; FR-Fumble recoveries, INT-Interceptions) |
The natural argument would be that Strahan played the strong side, where a player generally has to fight through more traffic to get to the quarterback than a weakside pass rusher like Doleman. But that argument hasn’t helped Kevin Greene. He finished his career with 160 sacks in 228 career games at his strongside linebacker spot and also can’t get into the room for discussion. Both Doleman and Greene enter their fifth year of eligibility in 2009. Both Doleman and Greene deserve discussion before Strahan. Derrick Thomas, Richard Dent and Charles Haley also belong in the queue ahead of Strahan.
Warren Sapp was an all-decade tackle for the 1990s. So was Bryant Young. But so was Cortez Kennedy. Young went to five Pro Bowls, Sapp eight and Kennedy eight. Sapp was the NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1999. So was Kennedy in 1992. Yet Kennedy has never been a finalist in his four years of eligibility.
McNair took a team to the Super Bowl and was an NFL MVP. Ken Anderson also took a team to the Super Bowl and was an NFL MVP. Anderson went to twice as many Pro Bowls (four) than McNair (two). He also threw for more yards (32,838) and more touchdowns (197) than McNair (31,304 and 174). Anderson has been a finalist twice and been rejected twice.
Jonathan Ogden went to 11 Pro Bowls. So did guard Randall McDaniel, who was bounced in his first trip to the finals last February.
Junior Seau went to 12 Pro Bowls in his 18 NFL seasons. Les Richter played nine NFL seasons (1954-62) as a linebacker and went to eight Pro Bowls. He was once traded for 11 players. Yet he’s never been discussed by the Hall of Fame selection committee. Maxie Baughan went to nine Pro Bowls in the 1960s. He also has never been discussed.
The latest doesn’t always translate into the greatest. Labeling any player a “future Hall of Famer” or “first-ballot Hall of Famer” is a disservice to those who have already earned their way into Canton with those designations.
He’s right, of course. Some truly great players are not in the Hall and some of today’s perennial Pro Bowlers will surely fall short.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame is by far the most exclusive of those representing the major sports. There are some truly mediocre players in Cooperstown. Basketball’s hall is, frankly, a joke, seeking to include everyone regardless of what level of competition they played at, lumping NBA greats in with women’s hoopstars and international stars. Golf’s hall is simply matter of “qualifying” by winning the requisite number of tournaments and, again, it includes those who excel on the women’s tour.
Canton has gone, in my view, to the opposite extreme. A football team has 22 starters, not counting special teams, compared to nine in baseball and five in basketball. Yet, they let in a maximum of six modern era players each year. Baseball lets in anyone getting votes from 75 percent of the writers, allowing large classes if several greats retire in short order. Class sizes vary from year-to-year but typically three make it and as many as seven have in a single year. Again, in a sport with far fewer players.
He played 15 years and had a less than unspectacular two seasons as an NFL head coach. RIP.
GREEN BAY, Wis. – Jim Ringo, a Hall of Fame center who played 15 seasons for the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles, died Monday morning after a short illness. He was two days shy of his 76th birthday.
Former Packers teammate Willie Davis said Ringo, who lived in Chesapeake, Va., had been battling Alzheimer’s.
“One minute, you’re reliving an experience,” said Davis, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame with Ringo in 1981. “And the next minute, he’d be asking, ‘Who’s this?’”
The Packers drafted Ringo out of Syracuse in the seventh round in 1953, and he became one of the league’s best centers despite being undersized at just over 200 pounds.
“But what tenacity he had as a center in the NFL,” Davis said. “Probably, no one was better.”
But Ringo turned his relatively small size into an advantage, leading the way on the power sweep that made the Packers’ offense so effective.
“As Vince Lombardi once observed, Jim epitomized the toughness and determination needed to not only play the center position but to become one of the game’s most dominant offensive linemen of his era,” said Steve Perry, president/executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “On behalf of all of us at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, I extend my heartfelt condolences to Jim’s family.”
Ringo played for Green Bay through 1963, but a contract dispute led Ringo and Lombardi to part ways. According to Packers folklore, Ringo had the audacity to bring an agent with him to negotiate a new contract — and Lombardi traded him to Philadelphia on the spot.
“The story goes that Jim came in with a representative to visit with coach Lombardi about his contract,” Packers historian Lee Remmel said. “Vince excused himself, came back, and said ‘You now are a member of the Philadelphia Eagles.’”
As far as Davis is concerned, the story is true.
“Jim was probably not out of place,” Davis said. “But at that point, Lombardi was not prepared to have an intermediary.”
Agents, of course, now are an accepted part of the today’s game, something Davis said Lombardi would have struggled with.
“I don’t think he’d be a very happy camper,” Davis said.
It wasn’t the first time Ringo didn’t see eye to eye with a Packers coach. In fact, his Hall of Fame career almost was over before it started.
Remmel said that as a rookie in 1953, Ringo decided training camp was too tough and simply walked out one day. Then-coach Gene Ronzani sent one of the team’s scouts all the way to the East Coast to pick him up.
“It’s fortunate that he did, because he went on to become a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame,” Remmel said.
Ringo played for the Eagles from 1964-67. He was voted to 10 Pro Bowls and was chosen for the NFL’s All-Decade Team of the 1960s. He started in a then-record 182 consecutive games from 1954-67.
Ringo later went in to coaching. He replaced Buffalo Bills coach Lou Saban part of the way through the 1976 season, and the Bills lost their last nine games. He returned the following year, and the Bills went 3-11. Ringo was fired after the season and replaced by Chuck Knox.
Ringo’s death comes just a month after the death of former Packers receiver and broadcaster Max McGee, making for a tough couple of weeks in what has otherwise been a joyful season on the field the Packers.
“It does,” Davis said. “While each one kind of has its place, you can’t be oblivious to the McGee and Ringo kind of disasters. As far as I’m concerned, one of the best things that that could happen is for the Packers to go on and get into the Super Bowl.”
Ringo’s wife Judy said her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1996, and the couple moved to Chesapeake about 10 years ago. He lived at home for much of that time until moving to a treatment unit in nearby Virginia Beach, she said, and he had recently developed penumonia.
Several Dallas Cowboys, most notably owner Jerry Jones and former coach Jimmy Johnson, are on the long list of candidates for the 2008 class at the Hall of Fame.
 Cowboys owner-general manager Jerry Jones and former head coach Jimmy Johnson are among 124 modern-era players, coaches and contributors who comprise the preliminary nominees list for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2008.
The preliminary list will be trimmed to 25 semifinalists next month, and 15 modern-era finalists eventually will be selected by mail ballot along with previously announced senior nominees Marshall Goldberg and Emmitt Thomas.
Other notable Cowboys nominees include former vice president of personnel development Gil Brandt; defensive ends Charles Haley, Jim Jeffcoat and Ed “Too Tall” Jones; tight end Jay Novacek; wide receiver Drew Pearson; running back Herschel Walker; and quarterback Danny White.
Johnson was Jones’ first head-coaching hire upon taking ownership in 1989. The two enjoyed consecutive Super Bowl titles from 1992-93 before Johnson’s departure following the ‘93 season.
To be considered for election, players and coaches must be retired at least five years. Contributors such as Jones may still be active in the NFL.
One could make a strong case for all of these players except perhaps Jeffcoat and White. Both were excellent players but neither was a truly dominant, great player.
Charles Haley and Drew Pearson should certainly be in the Hall already. Pearson was a more dominant wide receiver than either Lynn Swann or John Stallworth; unfortunately for him, they got the national spotlight of four Super Bowl wins. He’s also in the same boat as Art Monk, great players from a different era whose stats no longer seem impressive. Haley was a dominant player on five Super Bowl champions. ‘Nuff said.
Gil Brandt was the GM of the Cowboys during the entire Landry era, building an expansion team — from the days when they didn’t even get draft picks their first year — into a perennial championship contender. He certainly deserves to be in Canton.
Two years ago, I’d have said Johnson didn’t coach long enough to make it. Then John Madden, who was a head coach only ten years and who won only one Super Bowl, got voted in. If that’s the standard, Johnson, who coached two Super Bowl champions and built the core of the team that wo a third under Barry Switzer, should qualify.
As for Jones, he’s a lock for Canton. He’s transformed the League’s business model and made it much more profitable. It’s a matter of when, not if. My guess is “when” is several years from now.
Rick Gosselin, himself a member of the sportswriter’s wing, believes the numbers for the Pro Football Hall of Fame just don’t add up.
Bruce Matthews became the 10th guard inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame from the game’s modern era (since 1960). I didn’t have a problem with his enshrinement.
His longevity (19 seasons), productivity (14 Pro Bowls) and versatility (five different positions) mount a powerful case for Matthews. But what I’m having a problem with is the sheer numbers.
Two of the 10 guards now in Canton – one-fifth of all the enshrined guards of the modern era – played on a Houston Oilers team that went 85-90 during the 11 years Matthews and Mike Munchak lined up together. The Oilers won only three playoff games in those 11 years.
Yet the enshrinements of Matthews and Munchak stamp them as the greatest guard tandem in the history of pro football. I don’t have an issue with either Matthews or Munchak having a bust in Canton, but I do have an issue with both of them having busts in Canton.
I feel the same way about the two Pittsburgh wide receivers, John Stallworth and Lynn Swann, in the Hall of Fame. Pick one and enshrine him in Canton. It doesn’t matter which one. Pick one – but just one. Not two.
Can anyone tell me definitively that Stallworth and Swann were better at their craft than Drew Pearson? He played during the same era and played well enough to earn all-decade honors for the 1970s. Swann also was on that all-decade team. Stallworth was not.
Yet Swann was enshrined in 2001 and Stallworth in 2002 – but 27 years after his retirement, Pearson remains a Canton afterthought. He has never even been discussed as a Hall of Fame candidate by the full selection committee.
Can anyone tell me definitively that both Matthews and Munchak were better than Russ Grimm? Or Jerry Kramer? Bob Kuechenberg? John Niland? Ed Budde? Gale Gillingham? Dick Stanfel? There are some talented guards still on the outside looking in.
Washington’s Hogs, who supplied the beef for three Super Bowl championships, don’t have a single blocker enshrined at any position.
Right now, a lot of numbers just aren’t adding up in Canton.
Good points, all. The problem, really, is that there are 45 members on an NFL roster and 32 teams. That means there are a lot of truly great players out there. Some of them will necessarily be left off.
While I don’t agree, I understand why some of the great Dallas Cowboys aren’t in the Hall and too many of the Steelers from that era are. After all, they faced off in the Super Bowl twice and the Steelers won both times. Still, that doesn’t explain the lack of representation from the Hogs or Kuchenberg’s omission, given their championship pedigree.
Dandy Don Meredith has been enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a broadcaster. Some think he should already be in for his career as a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys.
Don Meredith finally made the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Meredith was recognized for his 15-year broadcast career, winning the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award. He was honored at a dinner Friday night. “I really appreciate that,” Meredith said. “It’s a nice thing to be honored in any way, so I can certainly say thank you, thank you very much. That’s what Elvis would say.”
Meredith’s best friend, Hall of Famer Frank Gifford, argues that Meredith might be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a player if he hadn’t played for an expansion team. A trade for future draft picks was worked with the Chicago Bears so Meredith could be signed by the expansion Cowboys. He began his career as a backup to Eddie LeBaron.
“The expectations in Dallas are much higher than they are in other places, so as soon as you get somebody like Meredith, who was a high school hero in Texas and an SMU hero, so much more is expected of him,” said Gil Brandt, the Cowboys’ former player personnel director. “So whatever he did, it was going to be, ‘Well, why didn’t he do more?’ “He played with broken ribs. He played when other guys would not play. The guy was a special guy.”
Meredith played in 104 games in nine seasons, passing for 17,199 yards and 135 touchdowns. He earned Pro Bowl honors in 1966, ‘67 and ‘68, and was named the Maxwell Club’s NFL Player of the Year in ‘66 after throwing for 2,805 yards and 24 touchdowns while running for 242 yards and five touchdowns.
He led the Cowboys to the NFL Championship Game in 1966, when they lost to the eventual Super Bowl I champion Green Bay Packers 34-27. The following year, the Cowboys lost to the Packers in the Ice Bowl, 21-17, which decided the NFL title and a trip to Super Bowl II. “I did think we had the best team that year,” Meredith said of the Ice Bowl loss to the Packers. “… Under better [weather] circumstances, I think we would have a better outcome. Our whole offense [was] based on speed and running and passing.”
Meredith’s legacy might have been different, too, if not for Bart Starr’s quarterback sneak, which still ranks as one of the NFL’s most memorable plays. “They make [Meredith] the governor of Texas if the Cowboys win that game,” Gifford said.
Meredith, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M., and has a second home in Palm Springs, Calif., disappeared from public view after retiring from broadcasting in 1984. He has rarely granted interviews or been seen, even by his teammates, since.
I was born in November of 1965, so don’t recall Meredith’s days as a Cowboy, although I have seen replays of a couple of those championship games. He was among the stars of his era; whether he deserves to be in Canton without a championship, though, I don’t know.
I can vouch for the fact that he added a lot of color to those Monday Night Football broadcasts, though. And it’s arguable that MNF helped make the NFL what it is today: by far the most popular spectator sport in America. Howard Cosell was more instrumental to that than Meredith but it was definitely a team effort.
Former Dallas Cowboy Michael Irvin was inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame yesterday, two years later than it should have happened.
Mickey Spagnola describes the day:
 Leave it to Michael Irvin. And the Pro Football Hall of Fame did. Michael Irvin stepped to the podium last, the sixth of six great athletes entering into the Hall of Fame here Saturday night at an emotionally-drained Fawcett Stadium, where tears flowed freely all night long.
[...]
Then Cowboys owner Jerry Jones took the stage, charged with presenting Irvin, the man who gave him so much joy and put him through so much pain during his 12 years with the Dallas Cowboys, right to the bitter end when Irvin went down in Philadelphia and never got up, carried off on a stretcher the fourth game of the 1999 season forever more.
“I don’t know that we’ll see again a professional football player with a combination of his strength and his skills as an athlete on the field and his unbelievable people skills,” Jones said. “Smart, resourceful, communication, charm, the kind of charisma and tremendous will with the strength to get the respect of the team. He had his faults. But in a unique way, that only Michael Irvin could pull off.
“His fallibility by the people who follow him, by the people who were looking at him, his fallibility gave them strength because they knew, too, how fallible they were and that they wanted to see somebody that could go down and come up stronger and try to get better when they got on their feet. That’s what Michael Irvin brought to the Dallas Cowboys.”
How ironic then, that at the end of his career, Irvin went down one last time, his head piled into the Veterans Stadium turf and carried off the field on a stretcher, never to step on the football field again as a player.
Well, as he had his entire life, one which began as one of Walter and Stella’s 17 children in a home with a barren refrigerator and a cereal bowl without milk, Michael Irvin rose one more time Saturday night, giving a speech from his heart, without a single note, baring his ever-lovin’ soul before God and everybody.
The lady down the road from me was wiping her eyes. Grown men in front of me were looking down, not wanting to appear weak. The sheriff’s deputy in the holding zone was shaking his head afterward, as if he had never heard the likes. Stella Irvin cried, cried so hard she was biting the towel in her hands to muffle her emotions. Gene Jones cried, as did her husband, Jerry Jones, who made it through his presentation, but not Michael’s.
We cried. You cried. Michael cried, not ashamed to wipe away his tears.
“You could hear a pin drop,” Jones said of the atmosphere on stage with the other Hall of Famers and the former inductees. “You saw some of the ways he can motivate people, relate to people.”
The entire world saw what Irvin was capable of in the locker room and in the huddle. You saw why former Cowboys head coach Dave Campo, an assistant with Irvin at the University of Miami, asked and received special dispensation from Jacksonville head coach Jack Del Rio to miss Saturday’s practice so he could attend Saturday’s ceremony and why he would say beforehand, “I loved Mike. He was always my guy.”
You saw why the Cowboys’ list of who’s who was so long on the floor of Fawcett Stadium: Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Troy Novacek, Nate Newton, Erik Williams, Jim Jeffcoat, Russell Maryland, Deion Sanders, Daryl Johnston, James Washington, Hubbard Alexander, Ron Stone, and no telling who else was there.
Why you might have heard and read all our stories, but you saw first hand why Irvin indeed was the heart and soul of those Cowboys teams winning three Super Bowls in four years, the flamboyant receiver confirming every single tale with how he related to the every-day man on this night.
Someone afterward asked Irvin if his speech, his brutal honesty was cathartic, as if he was doing penance for all the social and legal transgressions he went through when he was on the top of the world playing for the Dallas Cowboys.
Irvin stared at the inquisitor, knowing he had told everyone the day before he was planning to speak from his “heart.” He kept secret the part about from his soul. “It was real,” Irvin said, summing up what NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told Deion Sanders afterward, saying, “That was the best speech I’ve heard in a long time.”
Me, forever. You?
“I just felt I needed to share with all that had messed up their lives what I had done,” Irvin said. “It haunts me. People think I got away with something now that I’m up here.”
So he was trying the best he could to make something good out of some things bad, but he couldn’t without going down to his knees.
Irvin realizes his life has been as transparent as his career. People saw his greatness on the field, but also saw him in the courtroom that summer of 1996, finally pleading no-contest to a felony drug possession charge, receiving a five-year probation sentence, 100’s of hours of community service and a target on his head for others to implicate him for this and that, Irvin not taking care to keep himself out of harm’s way where people could try to take him down.
He’s not proud of that part of his life, how at times he thought he was invisible after midnight although a married man with eventually a family of four. And indeed it haunts him now that he knows his sons, Michael, 10, and Elijah, 8, can now go online and read about that other Michael, evidently to him, the ultimate embarrassment.
So when Michael spoke here Saturday night, he was selfless. He spoke very little of his accomplishments, while reaching out to put an arm around everyone else – from Hickerson, to the people of Dallas, to the Cowboys fans, to the Jones family, to his teammates, to his mother, father, brothers and sisters, and Aunt Fanny, too.
Why, Irvin put his arm around the people of New Orleans, where he witnessed firsthand the return of a city on “Monday night, Sept. 26, 2006, New Orleans, Louisiana, site of the Superdome. I watched our people who had suffered so grievously through Hurricane Katrina fill a stadium hours before the game and stay hours after the game. I witnessed those fans as they looked for each other, hugged one another, and just be thankful to be in that stadium.
“You see the game flexed its greatest muscle that day: The ability to heal. I experienced a football game that contributed to the healing of a city. So don’t tell me it’s just a game.”
No it’s life, and Irvin, in his inimitable way, came clean, knowing he had to somehow reduce himself to the common man, to all of us who have fallen or will fall, trying to tell them they, too, can get up.
So he began rising once again, referencing the threshing floor, a biblical reference for a healing place:
“The threshing floor is where you take your greatest fear and you pray for help from your great God. I want to share something with you today. I have two sons. Michael, he’s 10, and Elijah, he’s 8. Michael and Elijah, could you guys stand up for me. (They did.) That’s my heart right there. That’s my heart. When I am on that threshing floor, I pray. I say, ‘God, I have my struggles and I made some bad decisions, but whatever you do, whatever you do, don’t let me mess this up.’
“I say, ‘Please, help me raise them for some young lady so that they can be a better husband than I. Help me raise them for their kids so that they could be a better father than I. And I tell you guys to always do the right thing so you can be a better role model than dad.
“I sat right here where you are last year and I watched the Class of 2006: Troy Aikman, Warren Moon, Harry Carson, Rayfield Wright, John Madden, and the late great Reggie White represented by his wife Sara White. And I said, ‘Wow, that’s what a Hall of Famer is.’
“Certainly I am not that. I doubted I would ever have the chance to stand before you today. So when I returned home, I spoke with Michael and Elijah. I said, ‘That’s how you do it, son. You do it like they did it.’ Michael asked, he said, ‘Dad, do you ever think we will be there?’ And I didn’t know how to answer that. And it returned me to that threshing floor. This time I was voiceless, but my heart cried out. God, why must I go through so many peaks and valleys? I wanted to stand in front of my boys and say, ‘Do it like your dad, like any proud dad would want to.’
“Why must I go through so much?
“At that moment a voice came over me and said, ‘Look up, get up, and don’t ever give up. You tell everyone or anyone that has ever doubted, thought they did not measure up or wanted to quit, you tell them to look up, get up and don’t ever give up.’”
Look up.
Get up.
Don’t ever give up.
Michael Irvin never quit on the field. That’s why he was here Saturday night.
Maybe now he won’t quit on himself,
The staff at USA Today is killing time before training camp by putting together a list of the best NFL players during the paper’s existence.
TOP 25 OF THE USA TODAY ERA (1982-2007)
To commemorate USA TODAY’s 25th anniversary, a panel of USA TODAY’s NFL reporters and editors has produced an anthology of the 25 best NFL players of the past 25 years. Working down from No. 25, we are unveiling one player each weekday until training camp season arrives:
They’re up to #18 so far:
This will spark some interesting debates, as the one Tim McMahon has going on with Dallas fans over which other Cowboys players should join Aikman (I’d say Tony Dorsett, Larry Allen, and Emmitt Smith for sure; probably Randy White and Michael Irvin, too).
Nobody currently on the list is objectionable, although Tomlinson would presumably be higher on the list were he further into his career. One could argue whether Troy Aikman was really a better QB than Terry Bradshaw, for example.
That’s what these lists are for, though.
Bill Simmons has an interesting piece in ESPN The Magazine this week asking, “Does greatness have a shelf life?”
He grew up a Celtics fan watching John Havlicek but realized during a recent television replay that he’d forgotten just how good Hondo was. He thinks this is a common phenomenon.
One of my favorite books is Wait Till Next Year, in which a sports columnist (Mike Lupica) and a Hollywood screenwriter (William Goldman) trade chapters about a particularly crazy year in New York sports. Writing as a fan, Goldman submits an impassioned defense of Wilt Chamberlain’s legacy, called “To the Death,” which is one of my favorite pieces. He argues that great athletes fade from memory not because they’re surpassed by better ones but because either we forget about them or our memories are tainted by things that have nothing to do with their career (like Bill Russell’s being a lousy announcer, or OJ’s being an, um, lousy ex-husband). Goldman writes, “the greatest struggle an athlete undergoes is the battle for our memories. It’s gradual. It begins before you’re aware that it’s begun, and it ends with a terrible fall from grace. It really is a battle to the death.”
This piece was published in 1988, when Bird and Magic were at the height of their powers and Jordan was nearing the same tipping point LeBron reached in Detroit. Already saddened that we’d be poking holes in them some day, Goldman predicted, “Bird and Magic’s time is coming. It’s easy being fans of theirs now. Just wait. Give it a decade.” Then he wrote an entire mock paragraph of fans picking apart their games in the year 2000, complaining that Magic couldn’t guard anyone and Bird was too slow. He ended with this mock quote: “Sure (Bird) was good, and so was Magic — but they couldn’t play today.” I remember reading that piece in college and thinking, Come on, that’s ludicrous. Nobody will ever forget Bird and Magic! Those guys saved the NBA!
Well, you know what? It’s 2007, and no one gives a crap about Bird and Magic anymore. Goldman was right. The phenomenon was in full swing after 48 Special — again, a magnificent event, but one that paled in comparison with a 20-year-old Magic jumping center in Philly, slapping up a 42/15/7, playing five positions and leading the Lakers to the 1980 title. Imagine if something like that happened today? There would be pieces of Skip Bayless’ head scattered across the entire city of Bristol.
So why do we pump up the present at the expense of the past? Goldman believed that every era is “so arrogant (and) so dismissive,” and again he was right, although that arrogance/dismissiveness isn’t entirely intentional. We’d like to believe that our current stars are better than the guys we once watched.
Why? Because the single best thing about sports is the unknown. It’s much more fun to think about what could happen than about what already has. We don’t want LeBron to be as good as MJ; we need him to be better than MJ. We already did the MJ thing. Who wants to rent the same movie twice? We want LeBron to take us to a place we’ve never been. It’s the same reason we convince ourselves that Shaq is better than Wilt and Steve Nash is better than Bob Cousy. We don’t know these things for sure. We just want them to be true.
There’s a much simpler reason that we’re incapable of fully appreciating the past. As the Havlicek broadcast proved to me, it’s easy to forget anything if you stop thinking about it long enough, even something as ingrained as “My favorite basketball team employed one of the best 20 players ever when I was a little kid.” Once upon a time, the Boston Garden fans cheered Hondo for 510 seconds. And I was there, in the building.
But that’s the funny thing about noise: Eventually, it stops.
I think that’s right. Aside from Jim Brown, who has a legendary status because he retired at his peak, it’s hard to think of a great athlete from the distant past who we consider the best of the best.
Most of us now think of Babe Ruth as a fat guy who couldn’t play with today’s athletes.
The list of great quarterbacks seldom includes anyone who played before Joe Montana. Terry Bradshaw? Roger Staubach? Who were they? And goodness knows we seldom hear mention of anyone who excelled before there were Super Bowls.
Who’s the greatest basketball player ever? Michael Jordan seems to be the consensus pick. Still, there’s hardly anyone from the distant past even in the discussion other than maybe Wilt Chamberlain.
Sports glory is fleeting.
I have always wondered what it would be like to get behind the wheel of these monster machines. And now my favorite player of all time, John Elway, will be one of a dozen celebrities taking part in Gillette’s “Fast Cars & Superstars” reality show sponsored by Cars.com, which begins airing June 7 on ABC.
“Speed’s kind of a scary thing,” Elway said after his ride in the Cars.com racecar. “I’d never gone that fast before, so it was … very interesting.”
There’s clearly a difference, the former Denver Broncos star notes, between riding along in a race car and being in the pocket as the defense closes in.
“In football, you really don’t realize the impact of it,” he said. “I’m sure that [NASCAR driver] Kurt [Busch has] been around in that car enough that you become numb to kind of what’s outside of it. For me, I was a lot more aware of what was going on than I’m sure Kurt is, because he’s been doing it for so long.”
Cars.com was able to get in a few questions between Elway’s training and the competition.
The Interview
What was the very first car you drove?
“I had a ‘61 Buick LeSabre.”
Big engine?
“Big engine; it was my grandmother’s car and it had snow tires in Southern California.” [Laughs]
What do you drive now?
“I have a (Mercedes-Benz) S55 AMG.”
What do you use for carting the kids around?
“I use the S55, but I’ve got a [Toyota] Land Cruiser for getting through the snow. I still live in Colorado, so needless to say I’ve got a lot of use out of the Land Cruiser this year.”
Do you ever lose your competitive nature?
“No, that is one thing that you never lose. When you retire, it’s what you miss. When they called me to do this, it took me about one second to say yes, because you get a chance to compete. So, you never lose that, no matter how old you are.”
Have you always been a race fan, or is it something that you’ve picked up recently?
“No. Over the last five years, or somewhere in there, I started following it a little bit. I’m always intrigued — it’s the same thing in football; it’s always the little details that make the difference between winning and losing. And then you start looking at NASCAR, and it’s the same type of game. Such a small difference.”
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