Post by TheShadow on Dec 24, 2005 21:29:29 GMT -5
espn.go.com
By Pat Toomay
Special to Page 2
Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of Pat Toomay's two-part look at former
Raiders coach John Madden. In Part 1, Toomay explained what it was like to
play for Madden as the Raiders defended during their first Super Bowl title
in the 1977 season.
The exhibition game in which Darryl Stingley was paralyzed was played
in Oakland. It was one of those sloppy exhibitions played early in the
preseason, when everyone's legs are dead and everyone's minds are numb.
It was one of those games in which everything is out of sync, out of
kilter, a comedy of missed passes, overthrown balls, dropped punts, fumbled
snaps, unnecessary penalties. That's the way it is when too many nervous
rookies vie with too many aging vets for too few open positions on their
respective teams. That's the way it is when new systems have been
implemented and nobody's sure how to execute them.
This confusion and uncertainty, a near lethargy, also afflicted the
organizations. The Patriots were in the second week of a West Coast road
trip. The previous week they had played in Los Angeles, and then practiced
near San Francisco. Normal people, with responsibilities in their
communities, would find a reason to go home. So it was with the New England
team physician, perhaps, for he departed after the L.A. game, leaving the
club without an orthopedist for the game in Oakland.
Because of his absence, game day found both teams under the medical
supervision of our two physicians: Dr. Robert Rosenfeld, a Beverly Hills
orthopedist, and Dr. Donald Fink, a local internist.
Dr. Rosenfeld was a gruff, insensitive man, whose typical response to
a player's injury was, "You're OK, it's just a bruise." (In 1987, Dr.
Rosenfeld's operating privileges were suspended at Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center in Los Angeles, where he practiced, because of a high complication
rate and an unusually large number of malpractice cases.)
Doc Fink wasn't much better. Though affable and in possession of a
medical license, he was lugging around players' medical records in the trunk
of his car. The plaque on Doc Fink's office door read: "Investments." His
physicals sometimes consisted of a single question: "How do you feel?" If
the answer was, "Good," that was all he needed to hear.
This was the backdrop, then, of that fateful game. The ancient Greeks
would see hubris here, on an epic scale. They would warn us. In fact, there
was a sense of warning on the sidelines. Only a play or two before Stingley
went down, John Madden, who was growing more and more upset because all
night long the Patriots had been probing the Raiders middle with passes,
turned to the guy beside him and said, "They'd better stop doing that or
somebody's going to get hurt!"
It happened in the second quarter -- a hurried pass launched over the
middle for Stingley, who was slanting into the secondary. It was high and
too far in front of him. Leaving his feet, Stingley was prone in the air,
arms outstretched, as the ball sailed past him. In my memory, there he
hangs.
For his part, Jack Tatum seemed fooled. Having started back to his
right, he pulled up as the ball was released. The receiver, he realized, was
coming from the opposite direction. Jack turned, but managed only three or
four strides before the action was upon him. He crouched over, sort of
leaning into Stingley as the Patriots receiver drifted toward him. They
collided. Stingley, in an awkward position, fell to the turf. There was no
explosive hit. No flying helmet. Yet Stingley was down. He wasn't moving. He
wasn't getting up.
Trainers from both teams rushed out on the field. They tended to
Darryl for a long time. Then an ambulance was summoned. Darryl was carefully
loaded up and carted off. The game resumed, but under a sickening pall.
After the game, Madden went directly to the hospital. It was Madden's
first instinct to go to Stingley. At the hospital, Stingley had been found
to have fractured vertebrae in his neck and was being fitted with a halo
brace to stabilize the injury. Our physicians, thankfully, had risen to the
occasion. Having overseen a safe transport, they had summoned the
appropriate specialists. Experts were now at hand.
But even at the hospital something was dissonant, out of sync.
Expecting to find himself among concerned New England officials, Madden
found himself alone. No one from the Patriots was there. Not the owner. Not
the coach. No one.
Grabbing a phone, Madden called the Oakland airport. Immediately, he
was patched through to the New England charter, taxiing out to take off. A
more than animated discussion followed. The plane returned to the gate. The
business manager was put off.
In the hospital, Stingley was conscious, as doctors worked to fit the
halo. Having donned surgeon's garb, Madden appeared beside him, leaning
close. "Everything's going to be all right," he whispered. If only it had
been true.
Meanwhile, a second disaster was averted. On the New England charter,
now airborne and headed east, players were struggling to understand
Stingley's injury when an engine started gushing fuel. Immediately, the
flight was diverted to San Francisco. A dozen fire trucks lined the runway
as the plane touched down.
In the days and weeks that followed, Madden visited Stingley, if not
daily, then as often as he could. During one visit, Madden discovered a
malfunction in Stingley's ventilator. In summoning a nurse to fix the
problem, Madden might have saved Stingley's life.
Football is about assault and survival, as much as it is about
anything. Collisions are where each play starts and ends. Grace exists on
the field to elude savagery. Men are meant to smash into each other, the
harder the better. But they are supposed to get back up, if not instantly,
then in seconds, or minutes. After an injury, they come back. It might be
months later, or even a year later. But they come back.
When this fails to happen, as it did in the case of Darryl Stingley,
our frailty shows through the masquerade of pads and numbers and facemasks
and helmets, the fake armor of invincibility. In such a moment, we don't
like what we see. An explanation outside the norms of the game is needed,
and so scapegoats are sought. Disturbing feelings are pushed aside. Only the
rarest among us grasp the depth of our frailty and still love the game. Is
John Madden such a man? I think so. And if I'm right, it all revolves around
something that opened him up a long time ago. Something that made him
acutely aware of his own vulnerability.
It took me a long time to find out what it was. After that horrible
night in Oakland, I scoured books, read newspapers and magazines, looking
for the transformative event I suspected was buried in his past. I found
only tantalizing clues.
One was an incident that occurred during his first year as head coach
at Hanthingy Junior College. Like most coaches, Madden thought players should
be serious before games; he couldn't accept it when some players turned on
music or told jokes. Before one game Madden yelled at his worst offender:
"Hey, football is serious!" Off went the music. The jokes stopped. Everyone
got serious as Madden wanted them to be.
Before the next game, however, the player who'd been scolded stepped
into Madden's office. He explained there were all different kinds of
personalities on the team, that while everybody wanted to win in the same
way, there were different ways of preparing to win. "Some guys take a nap,
some go to the bathroom, some throw up, some, like me, tell jokes. We're not
all the same."
Madden thought about it and realized the player was right. From that
point on, he accommodated all the various styles of preparation. "I learned
from my mistakes, from decisions that went wrong," Madden said. "But looking
back, I think I learned more from people."
When I read this, I had no doubt that it was true, but I was also
convinced that the ease with which he made that adjustment, the facile
nature of the shift, had deeper roots. I began to wonder about his fear of
flying.
Duane Benson, when I roomed with him during the '77 preseason, told me
that Madden was a white-knuckle flyer, but I didn't witness the phenomenon
for myself until '78, when I arrived at the airport late for a road game
after Stingley was hurt. There, I found our coach with a towel draped around
his neck, sweating profusely, as he paced the floor outside the tunnel that
led down to the plane. Startled by Madden's panic-stricken look, I paused to
see if there was anything I could do to help.
"I can't get on 'til the last second," Madden murmured. Embarrassed,
he wheeled away.
Before heading down the ramp, I stood there for a moment, taking it
in. Madden's fear was deeper and darker than anything I'd imagined. Seeing
it made me think about my own fear.
When I was 10, my family lived in West Covina, Calif., a bedroom
community nestled against the Covina Hills 30 miles east of Los Angeles.
This was 1958. I attended Vine Street School and played baseball for the
7-Up team in the West Covina Little League. My best friend on the team,
Larry Young, lived in a big house up in the hills; while spending time with
him there, we would sometimes toss rocks into the pool of the house behind
his, which belonged to a Southern California football coach named John
McKay.
My father's two brothers lived in Ontario and Claremont respectively,
two towns adjacent to each other 17 miles further west. On weekends, we
would drive to Ontario for family get-togethers. On these trips, we would
follow I-10 over Kellogg Hill, passing the new Forest Lawn cemetery, with
its gaudy imitation Italian statues, and the Cal Poly campus, which was set
against the west side of the hill with its name spelled out in white rocks
on the slope of an embankment. During the time we lived in West Covina,
these landmarks became an integral part of my childhood life, as I roamed
the hills, played Little League baseball and caddied at a local golf course.
Late in 1958, the Air Force moved my family to upstate New York, and
that's where we were living when news came that a charter plane carrying the
Cal Poly football team had crashed while taking off from the Toledo airport
after the team had lost a football game 50-6 to Bowling Green. At the time,
my 12-year-old brain assumed the plane was carrying the team from the Pomona
Cal Poly campus near our home in West Covina. My father's intense reaction
to the accident only served to reinforce this impression, because I could
think of no other reason why he would be so consumed by it.
And he was consumed by it. Twenty-two of the 48 people on board had
been killed. Yet 26 had survived. How? Why had some perished and not others?
The C46 had exploded and flipped in dense fog at an altitude of 100
feet. Engine problems were suspected. A few minutes before takeoff,
quarterback Ted Tollner had switched seats with receiver Curtis Hill, who
had asked to sit near the front of the plane instead of over the left wing.
Everybody from Tollner's spot back lived while everyone in front of Tollner
died, including Hill. Why? Why Hill and not Tollner or the others?
In photographs of the wreckage, the back half of the plane appeared
undamaged. That's where the survivors were sitting and, for my father, that
became key. When I began flying in high school for recruiting trips, he'd
pound it into me. Sit in back of the plane. That's the safest part. Always
sit in back of the plane.
After Stingley got hurt, I found myself drawn to this same kind of
whirling rumination. I was on the field when the play happened. Recovering
from a John Hannah bang-block, I launched myself at quarterback Steve
Grogan, hitting him just as he threw. My pressure might have caused the
errant pass that put Stingley prone and made him vulnerable to the hit. A
sack would have prevented his injury.
The vortex of guilt that descended was unrelenting. Had I been lined u
p over tackle Leon Gray instead of Hawg Hannah, I might have gotten to
Grogan. But we were playing our new 3-4 defense. I'd slid inside so a
linebacker could blitz. If only we hadn't changed.
This past August, the Cal Poly football team returned to Toledo to
play a game for the first time since the tragedy 41 years before. While
reading an article about the visit, I realized I'd made a mistake. When I
was 12, I'd assumed the Cal Poly flight was from the Pomona campus near my
home. But it wasn't. The flight was carrying the team from Cal Poly San Luis
Obispo, John Madden's alma mater.
A 1959 graduate, Madden had returned to campus in 1960 to do graduate
work, after wrecking his knee in Eagles training camp. I vaguely knew this,
but what I didn't know, and what wasn't mentioned in the Toledo article, was
that Madden was supposed to be on that flight. I found this out when I dug
up a column written by Washington Post reporter Ken Denlinger on the
occasion of Madden's retirement. "As assured as Madden seemed publicly,"
Denlinger wrote, "there were signs of inner turmoil. Because a quirk of fate
kept him off the plane that crashed and killed several Cal Poly San Luis
Obispo players in 1960, Madden has avoided flying whenever possible."
That was the extent of the reporting. Wanting to know more, I phoned
Denlinger and asked if he remembered what had happened. He didn't, but he
referred me to another reporter who did; Betty Cuniberti, who had covered
the Raiders for the San Francisco Chronicle during the '76 Super Bowl season
and who had subsequently worked with Denlinger at the Post, told me that her
memory was sketchy, but she seemed to recall that Madden was involved with
the football team when he returned to school. She said that he might have
been sent on some other assignment -- he was kept at home to coach the
junior-varsity team -- that had kept him out of harm's way.
That was all I needed to hear. As we know now, proximity to such a
disaster can create what psychologists call an ensouled perspective.
Madden's patience, caring and understanding, his tolerance and absolute
refusal to judge, were no mere pretense, as cynics held, but rather a
response to devastating loss. Madden's intimate knowledge of his own frailty
enabled him to respond to frailty in others.
This was what made him the perfect coach for Al Davis and his quirky
Raiders. This was what enabled him to respond to Darryl Stingley in the way
he did. This is what has fueled his unexpected and spectacularly successful
broadcasting career.
On a certain level, Madden communicates the simple thrill of being in
one's body. The earthy entanglements of line play. The grunting and banging.
The rollicking in the muck and crap. Though football is a violent game,
Madden grasps its essence. He reveres it. But then he always did -- the
memory of, and longing for, the joy of playing.
Former NFL defensive end Pat Toomay played in the league for 10 years
(1970-79) with the Cowboys, Bills, Bucs and Raiders. He is the author of two
books, The Crunch and the novel On Any Given Sunday.