Displacing Bodies
MY PLAYING CAREER was drawing to a close.
I hadn’t entertained any notion I’d go into coaching. My career had been great until 1970. In 1969 Tiger Johnson left for the Bengals. His replacement, Ernie Zwahlen, started changing things in what was a very efficient line. He’d make us duck walk before games. It was embarrassing. He thought I was resisting him. He was right.
The 49ers wouldn’t renegotiate my contract in 1969. They wouldn’t even talk to me. They traded me to Chicago in midseason. It was an ugly thing. I was taking somebody’s place. I was kind of nervous.
The first day when I went into to that locker room I was disoriented. This guy comes bounding over and says, “After practice I want you to come with us. We’re gonna go eat across the street.”
It was Brian Piccolo. He was a very magnetic, outgoing guy. I bonded with him really fast.
After I had been in Chicago for a while, I heard something that reinforced the value in what Tiger had taught. The greatest compliment I ever received as a player—greater even than the Pro Bowl or being All-Pro and all those honors—was when Jimmy Cadile, a guard for the Bears, told me, “I thought you were pretty good. I didn’t know you were that good.”
But those days were near a sad ending.
We’d just recovered a fumble against the Vikings. It was my turn to go in. So I get in the huddle. I clap and bark out, “All right, let’s go.”
Dead silence.
So I say, “What the heck? The damned goal line is right there. Let’s go.”
Well, Piccolo runs in. He’s excited. So now it feels like he’s my pal. And then he scores. It was a play called 45 Trap. I trapped Jim Marshall, throwing the block that opened the hole.
It was one of Brian Piccolo’s last touchdowns.
We go in the locker room afterward. He’s coughing. He’s pounding on his chest. He says, “I don’t feel so good. It must be the cancer of my heart.” He was actually joking when he said it. I thought it was the flu, or something.
Well, he did have cancer. It was a rare form that actually develops in the fetus. They found the tumor in the mediastinum.
I had access to lawyers for the players’ union in Chicago. They knew a Bears physician. There had been tests. One of the lawyers whispered to me on the phone. “You can’t tell anybody, but Brian Piccolo has inoperable cancer. They’re sending him to Sloan Kettering tomorrow.” A doctor friend of mine whom I’d asked about it confirmed it was terminal. It was devastating.
In the movie “Brian’s Song” there’s a scene where all the players come into his hospital room. I engineered the gathering the scene is based on. We had just won a game against Pittsburgh. I was playing against Joe Greene. He was a rookie, so he didn’t know much. It was fun. It wouldn’t have been later.
After the game, I got Cadile and some of the offensive linemen. I said, “Let’s go get some pizza and beer and we’ll go up and see that little jerk.”
We get some pizza and beer and go up to his room. I said, “Get your ass out of bed. I’ve been working all day.” So I was lying on his bed and he was sitting in a chair. I told his daughters that story about twenty years later, a very sad memory. It was very sad to have lost him.
Brian made me feel welcome in an uncomfortable situation. We would’ve been great friends.
In the last game of the season my knee blew up. My right foot was planted and I was turning, when someone hit me on the left shoulder. And my knee went. It was a freak injury, really. I still remember rolling over and saying, “Oh, damn.” The play was still going. I got up and hopped off the field. I didn’t want to take a timeout.
I came back in 1970. The way they treated injuries in those days was just awful. We called the team doctor, Theodore Fox, “Needles” because he was always sticking a needle in you.
They operated and applied a cast. But the difference then was in those days, with a ligament injury, it was over. You didn’t play anymore. They couldn’t repair them. They didn’t have sports medicine as we know it now.
But I went to camp. They drained it at least once a week. Then they put cortisone in it. They did that for that whole season. It just kept deteriorating. And Fox would show me a piece of paper that said absolutely no running. Then I’d go to practice, and the line coach would say, “I want you in there.”
We didn’t have enough sense to stand up to that. My joint was so sloppy. Fox didn’t fix it right, and it wore out in six months, largely because of the cortisone and how they tried to reconstruct it.
I went to camp in 1971. I couldn’t do anything. They cut me. I was done.
Excerpted with permission from View from the O-Line: Football According to NFL Offensive Linemen and an Uncommon Coach by Howard Mudd and Richard Lister (Sports Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).
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