woodbuck27
05-29-2007, 02:55 PM
http://www.hofmag.com/content/view/489/30/
Calling Gale Sayers
by Kevin Cook
HOFMAG.com Exclusive
Do we choose our heroes, or do they choose us?
Usually you cheer for the quarterback on your hometown team or the biggest star in your favorite sport. If you're a boy, the process starts when you're eight or nine, just old enough to notice that your Dad, as stupendous as he is, can't dunk. So you pick other heroes and put their pictures on your bedroom wall. And you never forget them.
In 1965 a Chicago Bears rookie zipped into the sports pages. The Kansas Comet, they called him.
Gale Sayers came out of the University of Kansas with sprinter speed and the cornering quickness of a slot car. In his first preseason game he took a punt 77 yards for a touchdown, scored again on a 93-yard kickoff return and tossed a halfback option pass for another TD. In the regular-season opener he scored both Bears touchdowns. A week later he shrugged off a hit by the Rams' mammoth Rosey Grier and streaked 80 yards for a touchdown.
"I hit him so hard I thought I'd busted him in two," said Grier. "I figured he fumbled. Then I look up and there he is, going in for the score."
I was eight years old. An avid reader of the Indianapolis Star sports pages, I needed a football hero to fill the void after my beloved Cincinnati Reds finished their season, and Gale Sayers seemed perfect. Even his name sounded quick as the wind. I idolized the Sayers of grainy news photos – a skinny black-helmeted figure seen from a distance, outrunning everyone. In his second pro game, the Kansas Comet scored four touchdowns.
The Bears' third game of 1965 was on TV. That was a treat. In the days before ESPN and Monday Night Football, you could go all season without seeing your favorite team. My dad and I made popcorn and sat in front of our black-and-white TV. I yelled and pointed ("That's Gale!") when Sayers jogged to the sideline and pulled off his helmet. That's when I got a surprise I never forgot.
For author Kevin Cook, Gale Sayers was a matter of black and right. Gale Sayers was a Negro.
The word sounds bizarre now. You can be a black man or a white man, but either way you're a man. "Negro" was different – a noun that defined him as something alien to my lily-white life in Indiana. In the mid-sixties, a time of race riots, civil-rights marches, Black Panthers and Ku Klux Klan rallies, I didn't know a single black person. There were no black people in my school, my church or my neighborhood. How could I have a Negro hero?
I remember the moment – watching Sayers slip between tacklers on that grainy RCA TV screen, wondering if I could love someone so unexpectedly different, someone who might even dislike me for the color of my skin.
On the other hand, he was so great!
So I taped his picture to the wall over my bed. I bought a scrapbook and filled it with newspaper clippings. SAYERS SCORES SIX TDs IN BEARS WIN. Chicago coach George Halas, who'd helped found the NFL 46 years before, called that "the greatest performance I have ever seen on a football field."
SAYERS NFL ROOKIE OF THE YEAR. He scored 22 touchdowns that season, still a rookie record. The next year he led the league in rushing. By then I had a velvet painting of him in my room – Sayers in his black Bears jersey with the big white 40 on it, hurdling a tackler.
In 1968 a clean but violent tackle by the 49ers' Kermit Alexander demolished Sayers' right knee. I cried as Gale was carried off the field. He rehabbed and won another rushing title, but never regained the lightning of his early career, and retired at age 29 after blowing out his other knee.
In 1977 he became the youngest man ever inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.
By then Sayers had been played by Billy Dee Williams in Brian's Song, the famed TV tearjerker. I had moved out of boyhood into college and left that velvet painting in my parents' basement.
Now, eons later, my kids are choosing their own heroes. Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods, Ronaldinho, Shaq, Steve Nash – it's a colorful, color-blind list. It's also a reminder of something valuable about sports. Pro sports are a meritocracy: They prove that melanin doesn't matter, and they provide heroes of all sizes, shapes and colors. Can you say as much for politics or banking?
Sayers is 63 years old now – and still running.
Only now it's a computer services company that bears his name with offices in Chicago, Boston and Florida. "I never had a football hero," he told me when we spoke for the first time, using this column as an entrée. "But I met Jim Brown once and he said, 'Gale, pro football's hard. They hit harder, and the worst pro defense is better than anything you've seen.' He was right, too."
Still the Kansas Comet ran for 4,956 yards in his brief, meteoric career. His average kickoff return of 30.56 yards is still an NFL record.
"People say kick returning's risky, but I wanted the ball. And I had great peripheral vision. You won't hit me from the side – I'll see you," Sayers said. "The only guy I think ran similar to me was Barry Sanders. Good vision, speed and change of direction – he could move."
And what about race?
"I got called the 'N' word a few times. It makes you aware of your role. If you're a minority, you have more responsibility to project good character and values. That's one way sports can bring people together. I don't know how much good it did, but maybe there were some people out there noticing."
There were.
Comment woodbuck27:
I loved to watch this Bear play football.
Calling Gale Sayers
by Kevin Cook
HOFMAG.com Exclusive
Do we choose our heroes, or do they choose us?
Usually you cheer for the quarterback on your hometown team or the biggest star in your favorite sport. If you're a boy, the process starts when you're eight or nine, just old enough to notice that your Dad, as stupendous as he is, can't dunk. So you pick other heroes and put their pictures on your bedroom wall. And you never forget them.
In 1965 a Chicago Bears rookie zipped into the sports pages. The Kansas Comet, they called him.
Gale Sayers came out of the University of Kansas with sprinter speed and the cornering quickness of a slot car. In his first preseason game he took a punt 77 yards for a touchdown, scored again on a 93-yard kickoff return and tossed a halfback option pass for another TD. In the regular-season opener he scored both Bears touchdowns. A week later he shrugged off a hit by the Rams' mammoth Rosey Grier and streaked 80 yards for a touchdown.
"I hit him so hard I thought I'd busted him in two," said Grier. "I figured he fumbled. Then I look up and there he is, going in for the score."
I was eight years old. An avid reader of the Indianapolis Star sports pages, I needed a football hero to fill the void after my beloved Cincinnati Reds finished their season, and Gale Sayers seemed perfect. Even his name sounded quick as the wind. I idolized the Sayers of grainy news photos – a skinny black-helmeted figure seen from a distance, outrunning everyone. In his second pro game, the Kansas Comet scored four touchdowns.
The Bears' third game of 1965 was on TV. That was a treat. In the days before ESPN and Monday Night Football, you could go all season without seeing your favorite team. My dad and I made popcorn and sat in front of our black-and-white TV. I yelled and pointed ("That's Gale!") when Sayers jogged to the sideline and pulled off his helmet. That's when I got a surprise I never forgot.
For author Kevin Cook, Gale Sayers was a matter of black and right. Gale Sayers was a Negro.
The word sounds bizarre now. You can be a black man or a white man, but either way you're a man. "Negro" was different – a noun that defined him as something alien to my lily-white life in Indiana. In the mid-sixties, a time of race riots, civil-rights marches, Black Panthers and Ku Klux Klan rallies, I didn't know a single black person. There were no black people in my school, my church or my neighborhood. How could I have a Negro hero?
I remember the moment – watching Sayers slip between tacklers on that grainy RCA TV screen, wondering if I could love someone so unexpectedly different, someone who might even dislike me for the color of my skin.
On the other hand, he was so great!
So I taped his picture to the wall over my bed. I bought a scrapbook and filled it with newspaper clippings. SAYERS SCORES SIX TDs IN BEARS WIN. Chicago coach George Halas, who'd helped found the NFL 46 years before, called that "the greatest performance I have ever seen on a football field."
SAYERS NFL ROOKIE OF THE YEAR. He scored 22 touchdowns that season, still a rookie record. The next year he led the league in rushing. By then I had a velvet painting of him in my room – Sayers in his black Bears jersey with the big white 40 on it, hurdling a tackler.
In 1968 a clean but violent tackle by the 49ers' Kermit Alexander demolished Sayers' right knee. I cried as Gale was carried off the field. He rehabbed and won another rushing title, but never regained the lightning of his early career, and retired at age 29 after blowing out his other knee.
In 1977 he became the youngest man ever inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.
By then Sayers had been played by Billy Dee Williams in Brian's Song, the famed TV tearjerker. I had moved out of boyhood into college and left that velvet painting in my parents' basement.
Now, eons later, my kids are choosing their own heroes. Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods, Ronaldinho, Shaq, Steve Nash – it's a colorful, color-blind list. It's also a reminder of something valuable about sports. Pro sports are a meritocracy: They prove that melanin doesn't matter, and they provide heroes of all sizes, shapes and colors. Can you say as much for politics or banking?
Sayers is 63 years old now – and still running.
Only now it's a computer services company that bears his name with offices in Chicago, Boston and Florida. "I never had a football hero," he told me when we spoke for the first time, using this column as an entrée. "But I met Jim Brown once and he said, 'Gale, pro football's hard. They hit harder, and the worst pro defense is better than anything you've seen.' He was right, too."
Still the Kansas Comet ran for 4,956 yards in his brief, meteoric career. His average kickoff return of 30.56 yards is still an NFL record.
"People say kick returning's risky, but I wanted the ball. And I had great peripheral vision. You won't hit me from the side – I'll see you," Sayers said. "The only guy I think ran similar to me was Barry Sanders. Good vision, speed and change of direction – he could move."
And what about race?
"I got called the 'N' word a few times. It makes you aware of your role. If you're a minority, you have more responsibility to project good character and values. That's one way sports can bring people together. I don't know how much good it did, but maybe there were some people out there noticing."
There were.
Comment woodbuck27:
I loved to watch this Bear play football.