Emery Moorehead: “He was shaped like a lifeguard, but the lines have blurred. If he walks into the next world like this, they’ll never recognize him.”
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Cohen reaches back to the origins of pro football as a brutal sport played by brutal laborers in mill towns. “Football is an angry game, played with punishing violence,” he writes. “People get destroyed on the field, lives end. It makes sense that its first star was someone who’d already lost everything, a ruined man, ill-treated, stripped to his essential qualities: speed, strength, power. Jim Thorpe is the spirit of the game. Every NFL hit still carries the fury of the disgraced Indian, prowling the field, seeking justice.”
Cohen describes the ’85 Chicago-Dallas game, head coach Mike Ditka going against his mentor, the Cowboys’ Tom Landry. “Describing the game is difficult in the way it’s difficult to describe a hurricane: the devastation was everywhere, all at once,” Cohen writes. Dallas quarterback Danny White was knocked out of the game in the second quarter. Ditka would later say about White’s replacement: “I can still see their backup, Gary Hogeboom, when he was already on his way to the turf, and [Mike] Singletary hit him so hard before he could reach the ground that I thought Mike had killed him.” White went back out to start the second half. “I wasn’t going to let them knock me out and just sit over there watching this massacre,” he told Cohen. “It was like watching your kids getting beaten up by somebody and just sitting there.”
“I used to hope the Bears would lose the coin toss so the 46 defense would come out first,” Cohen tells us. “I wanted to see the other team not just beaten but annihilated.” (Remember, he was in high school.) Now it seems there’s a new rule modification every year to make the game safer, an unending search for the fix “that can change everything yet preserve what’s important. If we fail, some worry that football will go the way of boxing. Not because people won’t watch, but because parents won’t let their children play. (I don’t know if I’ll let my sons play.) Those who love it know it has to change, as it has changed in the past . . .
Here’s the only point of any consequence I think Cohen gets wrong. Having grown up in a northern suburb, and then lit out for New York after college in New Orleans, he’s judging Harold Washington from a distance and he wrongly dismisses him. Washington, the city’s first black mayor, was transformational. Racism came to a boil with Council Wars, but afterward Chicago simply didn’t hate the way it used to. (The second Daley got that.) In a study of the golden hour of Chicago’s most violent heroes, the ebbing of civic fear and loathing is something it feels important to get right.
