Post by TheShadow on Jan 27, 2006 21:46:33 GMT -5
www.orlandosentinel.com/
NFL bad boy Matuszak lived too hard and died too soon
By Mike Bianchi
The Super Bowl, it has been said, is the ultimate symbol of American hedonism.
The parties are extravagant, the TV commercials exorbitant, the hype and hoopla exaggerated.
And, so, if the Super Bowl exemplifies our excess, then one man embodies the elephantine indulgence of America's cultural extravaganza. John Matuszak was so big and so bad that his trail of destruction and debauchery is strewn with stories 25 years later.
Even though he has been dead for nearly two decades, even though his college no longer fields a team, even though the NFL franchise that drafted him has moved to another city, they still tell tales about the massive mythological miscreant known as "The Tooz."
"He was a monster of a man," recalls Earle Bruce, his coach at the University of Tampa. "Bigger than life."
And bigger than death, too.
There's an old John Sebastian song that goes like this:
"Oh, the stories we could tell.
And if this all blows up and goes to hell.
And the scratches on the face,
Told of all the times he fell."
Bruce laughs and thinks back: "I don't know if all the stories are true."
Let's start with the one that made him famous and go from there. It's been a quarter-century now since that week at Super Bowl XV in New Orleans when Matuszak -- all 6 feet 9 and 280 pounds of him -- became a bona-fide barroom-brawling, dance-halling, tradition-galling American antihero.
By then, Matuszak was nearing the end of his career with the Oakland Raiders. He was the NFL's transcendent rebel leading the ultimate set of renegades into the Super Bowl against the robotic archetype of NFL hyper-intensity -- the Dick Vermeil-coached Philadelphia Eagles. In those days, Vermeil was the poster boy for NFL burnout -- a coach so driven, he slept on an office cot and so on edge, he once shook his fist and screamed at the Blue Angels who were flying over his practice field and distracting his players.
The Raiders, of course, were the complete opposite. Matuszak was seen out most every night at the Super Bowl roaming Bourbon Street in a drunken haze. He called it the "Tooz Cruise" and explained to reporters that he wasn't really out partying. He was out patrolling.
"I'm the enforcer," he said. "I'm out on the streets to make sure nobody else is."
Vermeil was appalled at Matuszak's lack of discipline. "If he were on the Eagles," Vermeil said disgustedly, "he'd be on a plane back to Philadelphia right now."
Raiders Coach Tom Flores scoffed at such a notion. When asked by a reporter what he was going to do to Matuszak for breaking curfew, Flores deadpanned: "Fine him $1,000 and let him sleep it off."
Flores claims now he was misquoted. "I never told John to sleep it off," he says. "He'd already slept it off and was ready to roll."
After the Raiders destroyed Philadelphia 27-10, the Tooz explained the victory philosophically. "The Eagles," he said, "got so caught up in beating the distractions that beating the distractions became the biggest distraction."
End game begins
That Super Bowl was the beginning of the Matuszak legend; it also was the beginning of the end of his life.
The adulation and advertising he received for being the NFL's marquee madman legitimized all the drinking and drugging and the fighting and philandering.
The Tooz, from Oak Creek, Wis., had serious issues dating to college, when he was kicked out of Missouri after he rearranged another student's face during a fight at a frat party. He wound up at Tampa, a program that had become a second chance for wayward players from across the country. Eight players on Matuszak's first Tampa team were older than some of the coaches.
Recalls Dan Lea, an old friend and college teammate of Matuszak's: "When I first got to Tampa, I remember walking into the locker room and there were 27- and 28-year-old players sitting around smoking cigarettes."
The perfect place for the Tooz.
One of the first memories Lea has of Matuszak is walking through the athletic dormitory and seeing this huge man lifting the dorm supervisor up by the neck. It seems the Tooz didn't take kindly to being told that no girls were allowed in the dorm.
Another time, when the Tooz was in dire need of spending money, his teammates heard a commotion in the dorm hallway. When they opened their doors, they saw the Tooz toting one of those vending-machine ponies you see children riding in front of K-Mart. Tooz lugged the fake horse into his room, cracked it open, took the quarters, then threw the whole contraption into the river behind the dorm.
"It was a sad day when the flared nostrils of the great thoroughbred pony went under water for the last time," Lea says and laughs.
There are many other stories, worse ones. Like when Matuszak met up with then-St. Petersburg Times columnist Buddy Martin for a photo shoot at the 1973 College All-Star Game in Chicago. Martin needed a ride back to his hotel after the shoot and asked Tooz for a lift. When Martin got into the rental car, Matuszak took a .357 Magnum out of his boot.
"You never know when you might need this," Tooz said as he placed the gun into the glove compartment.
Then there was the altercation with another student at a pickup basketball game during Tooz's senior season. It was only one punch, but Matuszak hit the guy so hard and shattered his cheekbone so badly that plastic surgery was required to rebuild his face.
Bruce, a no-nonsense coach who learned under Woody Hayes at Ohio State, inherited Matuszak when be became coach at Tampa. He tried to reel in his star, but even he was scared to cross the Tooz.
"I remember once when he broke curfew, I stayed up and waited for him," Bruce recalls. "John had quite a temper, so I hid a 2-by-4 behind a nearby Coke machine just in case he attacked me and I needed to crack him over the head."
A real monster
Matuszak's unstable personality and unquenchable thirst for his drink of choice -- triple Crown Royals -- didn't stop NFL scouts from drooling. Personality flaws tend to be overlooked when you're a 6-9, 280-pound defensive end with a 52-inch chest, a 34-inch waist and a 40-yard dash time of 4.75 seconds.
The Houston Oilers made Matuszak the No. 1 overall pick in the 1973 NFL draft. He quickly proved to be a monumental flop and jumped to the short-lived World Football League. After the WFL's demise, he landed with the Kansas City Chiefs and nearly died when he passed out in a bar one night after mixing sleeping pills with alcohol. He was traded to the Washington Redskins, who quickly cut him. Finally, he ended up at that halfway house for demented degenerates -- the Raiders.
In Oakland, Matuszak found acceptance. He had come to a place where his many abuses and addictions were romanticized. In Oakland, everybody winked and laughed when the Tooz talked about his own version of the "breakfast of champions" -- vodka and Valium. They guffawed when he grabbed a sports writer in the locker room and clean-and-jerked the poor dude over his head. Matuszak bragged about his escapades on the cover of his autobiography: "It's all here. The booze. The parties. The broads. The out-of-control substances. The brawls. Don't miss your chance to go 'Cruisin' with the Tooz!'"
This was a different era -- before drug-testing, before the Internet, before SportsCenter. Back then, the Tooz was portrayed in the media as a free spirit; now, he'd be a common thug. He had four drunken-driving convictions, two gun charges, domestic disputes, marijuana possessions.
Once he was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol and charged with having two concealed weapons -- a machete and a revolver.
"If he were around today," says ESPN analyst and former Matuszak teammate Joe Theismann, "he'd be fined so much, he'd be paying the NFL to play."
In the end, Matuszak did pay -- with his life. A year after he became a national celebrity at the Super Bowl, he retired to go into movies. But not even Hollywood could put a happy ending on such a sad life.
Matuszak got hooked on cocaine and painkillers and bounced in and out of drug detox and alcohol rehab. His longtime fiancee canceled their wedding and left him.
"It was tragic," Flores says. "John didn't live long enough to outgrow his craziness."
In 1989, Matuszak died of massive heart failure brought on by an overdose of Darvocet, a prescription painkiller. Traces of cocaine also were found in his bloodstream.
He was 38 when the Tooz Cruise drifted silently into port.
Weird, huh? This raging, rampaging wild-eyed bad boy became a Super Bowl legend by staying out until the wee hours. But he died alone in his bed at 8 p.m.
At long last, Big John finally made curfew.