The Class of Football Read online

  The Class of Football

  Words of Hard-Earned Wisdom from Legends of the Gridiron

  Edited by

  Adam Schefter

  To my Hall-of-Fame family, Sharri, Devon, and

  Dylan—there should be bronze busts of you

  for putting up with me. I love you.

  We thank thee for this great sport of football, not only for the pleasure we derive as spectators, but also for the invaluable training that young men across America in high schools, colleges, and the professional rank derive as they participate. There are lessons in sportsmanship, fair play, and teamwork.

  We ask that it may always be so and that the many who lead and coach, these who are to be enshrined here today, the stars of yesterday, as well as those who are the stars of today, might be aware of the tremendous influence they exert on American youth. May that influence always be in the right direction. Help them to be aware that to whom much is given much shall be required.

  We pray also for those many young men who’ve exchanged the football uniform for that of a solider, and who now serve this nation in the armed forces around the world. We ask thy protection upon them and pray for the day when they can be returned to this land.

  —REVEREND HAROLD HENNIGER, PASTOR OF THE CANTON BAPTIST TEMPLE, 1966 INDUCTION CEREMONIES

  Check out exclusive audio and video clips

  of these speeches and more at

  www.classoffootball.com

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Roger Goodell

  Introduction

  1. Childhood

  2. Family

  3. History

  4. Memories

  5. Passion

  6. Teamwork

  7. Causes

  8. Mentors

  9. Lombardi

  10. Perseverance

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editor

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  THINK BACK TO GRADE SCHOOL, TO HIGH SCHOOL, TO your favorite teacher. Mine was football.

  The tackle football games we used to have at Macomb Street playground, right up the block from where we lived in Washington, D.C., taught me a great deal. My brothers, my friends, whoever was around, we’d take off our jackets, our sweatshirts, whatever layers of clothes we could. Those layers would form the outlines of the sidelines and end zones, an instant football field. Everyone played. Everyone tried. Everyone battled. We’d play every day, as long as we could. Right then, I started to get a taste of what was unique about football. There was nothing like the physical challenges, the collective goals, and the multiple sacrifices of it in teaching us what it took to be successful.

  Lessons came in other ways, too. One time, when I was eight years old, in the second grade at John Eaton Elementary School in Washington, our class was told that two Redskins, Brig Owens and Mike Bass, were coming in to talk to our class. You remember Mike Bass. He was the Redskins safety that intercepted Dolphins kicker Garo Yepremian’s failed field goal with two minutes left in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl VII and returned it forty-nine yards for a touch-down. It’s still replayed, even now. Mr. Owens and Mr. Bass came to our school and delivered a message I still remember today. It was all about what it took to be successful. In their case, it was all about hard work, determination, sacrifice. What was true then is still true now.

  As powerful as that moment was, the turning point of my childhood came in high school, in the fall of 1976, after another football practice. At the time, I was a tight end. We were running laps and the moment was so memorable, I can still tell you the exact spot I was standing on the track when the thought hit me. Right then, I realized other players might be better and faster, but none would work any harder. I could outrun them simply by outworking them. Right then I learned if you worked harder, you could achieve. So I just kept going.

  I kept going whenever any goal was important. Right after college, I kicked off my NFL letter-writing campaign, mailing about forty letters to NFL teams, NFL Properties, and the NFL Management Council, and one I still have to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle.

  July 2, 1981

  Dear Mr. Rozelle:

  I am writing to you in reference to any job openings you may have in your offices.

  Having just finished my undergraduate education at Washington and Jefferson College this past May, I am presently looking for a position in the management of professional sports. Being an avid football fan, I have always desired a career in the NFL. Consequently, as a great admirer of you, it would be both an honor and a pleasure to work for you in any position that may be available.

  Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

  Respectfully,

  Roger S. Goodell

  I received a big pile of rejection letters, including many from the NFL owners that eventually hired me as their commissioner. But Commissioner Rozelle did have one of his top aides, Don Weiss, interview me. And after our interview, I sent him handwritten letters almost every week, not taking no for an answer, until finally he realized that this kid must really want this job. In 1982, Weiss offered me a three-month internship—probably just to get me to stop writing him. His offer allowed me to combine my undergraduate degree from Washington and Jefferson with the masters I went on to earn from Rozelle and Tagliabue. Those men—my mentors—shaped my knowledge and beliefs about the NFL.

  Some of them: Change before you’re forced to change. Address issues directly. Look around corners. Challenge assumptions. Don’t assume you know the answers; be a good listener. Never be satisfied with results. Find a better solution. Always look for a better way. Hire a great team with strong skills. Set the bar high and raise it continually. Make people accountable. Have integrity. I always tell our team here at the NFL, “It’s not just results, it’s how you achieve those results that counts. There can be no compromise between results and integrity.”

  Football has taught me that teamwork is critical. We see NFL teams prove it each season. We see Hall-of-Fame players accentuate it during their enshrinement speeches each summer. Just listen to what they say. Listen closely. Read the passages in this book. Notice how Hall of Famers don’t reflect on their talents; they reflect on their coaches, their teammates, their family and friends. They do not make it about what they accomplished individually; they make it about what they accomplished collectively. They recognize everything and, more important, everyone it took to make them successful. It is vital that the players of today connect themselves to the league’s rich history. The players of today need to recognize the contributions of the many that came before them.

  The priority of teamwork is one of the concepts that makes football so unique. Of course there are many. People ask me all the time, as much as any other question I get, “What makes football special?” Plenty. It’s all in the pages of this book, all the lessons there are to be learned. It’s the camaraderie and the contact, the competition and the passion, the strategy and the energy, the elements and the emotion. It’s so much. There’s nothing better than walking into Lambeau Field on a snowy day in January, with close to seventy-three thousand screaming fans, and two teams battling the way they would if they were on any playground in the country.

  But maybe my favorite part of football is that every game, like every day, brings a different challenge. Every game, like every day, brings a different opponent. Games, like days, have unexpected changes and challenges. Every time there is a chance to rise up and win. I learned this back at Macomb Street playground in Washington and in the commissioner’s office at 280 Park Avenue in New York.

  Football keeps inspiri
ng me. Football keeps teaching me.

  —Roger Goodell

  INTRODUCTION

  ANNUALLY AND INEVITABLY, NO PLACE COMBINES TOUGH guys and teardrops quite like Canton.

  As the most famous figures in football history stand at a podium in Fawcett Stadium, in the shadows of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, at the entrance to immortality, their lives and accomplishments flash before them. These men pause to reflect on a day that links past achievement with present glory.

  Some inductees stay strong. They manage to make it through their speech seemingly unaffected. Like they did throughout their football careers, they hold up and don’t break down. This is what Hall of Famers do.

  But many do not. They succumb to the moment, just as they were warned they would by the men who have been in the same position in previous years. This also is what Hall of Famers do. They cry for what it means to come from random playgrounds to football’s most hallowed ground. They cry for the obstacles they have overcome, the odds they have beaten, the challenges they have conquered. They cry for all the people—parents, siblings, coaches, teammates—who stood by them, supported them, and lifted them. And they cry for all those who did not live to see this momentous occasion.

  On one August night, in one window of time, with thousands of fans sitting in front of them and living Hall of Famers seated behind them, their lives come full circle, and they are hit with the realization that they have made a team from which they never can be cut. The power of the moment arouses heartfelt and profound thoughts.

  Gone are the clichés that they may have fed to sportswriters over the seasons; the words are boxed up and packed away. In their place come real words, pulled from deep within each Hall of Famer, philosophies that helped propel these men to the type of greatness to which we all aspire.

  Each man gets his turn, one final performance in a football stadium. Only this time, the helmet is off, and the player appears as himself—not in a number or at a position, but as a man, a son, a husband, a father, a friend, a person whom fans rarely got to see during his great career. Now people hang on his words instead of his play. Childhoods are recalled, parents are praised, history is retraced, mentors are thanked, lessons are taught, guidance is given, hope is granted, and faith is restored.

  Every one of these speeches comes in midsummer, on the same stage, at the same podium, in the same high school stadium, in the same northeastern Ohio city, twenty-four miles south of Akron and sixty miles south of Cleveland. For years, the enshrinement ceremonies were performed on the steps of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But the ceremony, like the sport itself, blossomed in ways our football forefathers could not imagine. Speeches have evolved into events. The ceremony now has moved to a stadium. It now is broadcast on two networks, NFL Network and ESPN. Canton is the warm and welcoming host to it all.

  But Canton prides itself on more than just football. Our twenty-fifth president, William McKinley, lived there and is interred there. The musician Marilyn Manson came from Canton, as did the R&B group the O’Jays and R&B singer Macy Gray. New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson grew up in Canton and was killed in a plane crash there as well. And three Hall-of-Fame football players—Dan Dierdorf, Marion Motley, and Alan Page—all hail from Canton, where they were taught the Hall-of-Fame principles they later espoused in their induction speeches.

  Canton’s most notable contributions come from the men whose bronze busts reside there. Yet, as memorable as their words were on the day of induction, they were forgotten, not unlike the careers of some of the Hall of Fame’s first inductees. But now their words, as well as their legacies, can be recalled.

  Their words have been dug up, delved into, sifted through, edited down, and brought together on these pages. It is a book filled with wit and wisdom, football and faith, that has been in the making almost fifty years, since 1963, the year the Pro Football Hall of Fame opened.

  When former Washington Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs—Class of 1996—was told in December 2007, hours before his team battled the Chicago Bears, that the most memorable words of every Hall of Famer were being gathered for publication, he was stunned.

  “I didn’t even know they existed,” Gibbs said as he stood outside his team’s locker room in FedEx Field.

  Then his tone went from surprise to excited. “How do I get to see them?” he asked.

  Simple, coach. Just turn the page.

  —Adam Schefter, February 2009

  CHAPTER 1

  CHILDHOOD

  ONLY THE CHOSEN GET TO WEAR THE FAMILIAR GOLD jackets presented to each Pro Football Hall-of-Fame inductee. But anyone can grow up playing, watching, or following football.

  Every child remembers the touch football games he used to play in the street or the tackle ones at the neighborhood school. Every child had a favorite player whom he used to imitate in those games, be it Joe Namath throwing another laser, Earl Campbell bowling over a defender, or Lynn Swann making an acrobatic catch. Every child remembers the famous football plays from his youth—“The Catch” or the “The Drive.”

  As a child, almost all dreams are attainable. Yet the one that outdistances most everyone is advancing to Canton, Ohio, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

  Only the fortunate make it. Only the very best do.

  Mike Singletary

  Chicago Bears Linebacker

  Class of 1998

  An All-Pro selection nine times, Singletary also played in ten Pro Bowls.

  Presented by His Wife, Kim Singletary

  It’s only fitting that we honor the character of this football player. For that truly belongs in a Hall of Fame. The countless hours of film he watched is legendary. It was imperative to him to be able to anticipate any play before it happened. But few knew that he took it upon himself to learn the responsibility of each member of that defense on each play. And in his later years, he stayed after practice to develop his backup linebacker and fine-tune his skills. I asked Mike once if he didn’t get nervous about helping the player and putting himself out of a job. And he assured me that it would only make himself and the team better.

  But the quality that I most admire is his ability to listen. Whether it’s a meeting with a coach, a player in need, his Sunday telephone conversations with his mom, or even on a porch swing with my grandfather, he is never too busy to give you his undivided attention.

  When you walk through the halls of this building, you get a sense of the history of those who loved this game and helped form the foundation of what it is today. It’s only fitting that a young boy from Houston, Texas, who dreamed of an opportunity to have the privilege to play this game that he loved, be enshrined today with those who have dedicated themselves to being not only great football players but great human beings. Men like George Halas, Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry, and Roger Staubach all helped Mike form some of his intensity and work ethic.

  This is an age when professional athletes sometimes run away from their responsibility as role models. Well, this is one man who not only embraces that responsibility but finds greater joy in training men and women to be their own children’s role model.

  Mike Singletary

  This story began a long way back—Houston, Texas—when I was twelve years old because there were a lot of things happening at that particular time in my family. We were going through a lot. We were trying to go to the next level. And I am the last of ten kids and when you have ten kids, sometimes it’s a little bit of a struggle to make it work.

  That year when I was twelve, Mom and Dad went through a divorce. When I was five years old, my brother, Dale, passed away and my second brother would pass away when I was twelve. That was a tough year. I had no confidence, had no self-esteem. I was just a young ghetto boy in Houston, Texas, trying to figure out who he was and where he was going to go from there.

  And I want to tell you today, my mom sat me down one day when I was moping around and feeling sorry for myself, close to giving up. I had begun listening to everybody else in the neighborhood w
ho said, “No one gets out of here. No one has ever made it out of here and you won’t, either. Besides, you don’t have the ability, you don’t have the skill, you don’t have anything.”

  My mom sat me down that day and she let me know something that I always knew, but man, I needed to hear it. Mom said, “Son, I want you to know something. I want you to know that there is greatness in you, there’s something special about you. I prayed for you before you were born and every day since. It’s in there! You’ve got to go find it yourself. I’m going to do everything I can as a mother to get it out of there but you’ve got to find it.”

  She put her hands on my forearm and she asked me if I could become the man around the house. I said, “Mom, I can do that.” That day I went to my room and I wrote down my goals. And at twelve years old, it went something like this: find a way to get a scholarship to go to college, become an All-American in college, get my degree, go to the NFL, and buy my mom a house and take care of her for the rest of my life.

  When I think back on that time, I think how important it is that we need to let people know, let our kids know, let our spouses know, how important they are to us. Don’t keep it a secret. Because that day, my life began.

  Chuck Bednarik

  Philadelphia Eagles Center/Linebacker

  Class of 1967

  Bednarik was selected to eight Pro Bowls. He missed three games in fourteen years, and was named the NFL’s all-time center in 1969.

  When you’re a kid just coming up, I guess you look forward to being a high school football player. And then you go to your next stepping stone, you want to become a college All-American. And when you achieve that, you want to go into the pro ranks. And then, of course, the pinnacle or highlight of your entire career comes on this particular day—entering the Hall of Fame.