The Hit Men

Sporting News, The, Nov 1, 1999 by Phil Barber

Dick Butkus. Chuck Bednarik. Mike Singletary. The list of football's 100 greatest players is laced with names of guys who blazed a trail of broken helmets and bruised ribs. It's all in a day's work for the league's hardest hitters, then and now.

The subject is snot-loosening, marrow-jiggling contact, and it has made Sam Huff talkative.

Huff, a Hall of Fame linebacker for the Giants and Redskins who ranks 76th on THE SPORTING NEWS' list of the Top 100 football players of all time, remembers a game in 1969, a humid September affair in pre-Superdome New Orleans. Bill Kilmer, an agile scrambler, was quarterbacking the Saints, and Huff got after him on a blitz. He chased Kilmer from one sideline to the other.

"Well, I'd never run that far and not hit something," Huff says. "We wound up in front of the Saints' bench. He said he was out of bounds. But it wasn't by much. I hit him, and he flipped in the air. The last I saw Billy, he was headed for one of those tables-you know, with Gatorade and a telephone and everything."

"I was five yards out of bounds!" Kilmer retorts. "He hit me into the table, and Gatorade slopped all over Al Hirt's trumpet. Sam was that kind of player. He'd hit guys out of bounds. But it wasn't so much the blow from him. I hit the corner of the table, and I had this big braise on my hip for six weeks."

Which is nothing compared to getting smashed between two Packers defensive linemen in the 1972 playoffs. That sandwich left Kilmer with a permanent souvenir, a noticeable lump in his neck that doctors describe as harmless fatty tissue.

If Kilmer was mistreated by NFL defenders, he was neither the first nor the last.

Chargers fullback Keith Lincoln almost single-handedly destroyed the Boston Patriots in the 1963 AFL championship game. Lincoln was off to another fast start in the 1964 game, against Buffalo, when quarterback Tobin Rote sent him across the middle on a delayed pass pattern, in front of Bills linebacker Mike Stratton.

"Mike must have been 20 yards downfield," Lincoln recalls. "My side's all cleared out; hell, it's going to be a great play. So Tobin looks at me, then he looks deep at (Lance) Alworth again. The first time he looked at me, I'm sure Stratton said, `Oops, I've got Lincoln.' So now he's coming full speed. The rush is on, and Tobin throws me the ball, and it's almost like a snowball down a chimney. That thing had some loft to it. The ball and Stratton got there at the same time. I broke at least two ribs. The good thing was, I didn't fumble."

The bad thing was, Lincoln went to the sideline and San Diego stalled without him, losing, 20-7.

Then there was a Monday night game between Denver and Kansas City in September 1990. Chiefs running back Christian Okoye, the NFL's defending rushing champion, took a handoff and found room up the middle. Steve Atwater, a second-year safety for the Broncos, made a beeline for the 253-pound running back.

"I remember the hole opened up," Atwater says. "He was running full speed. I got a decent break, and there was just a collision. Fortunately, I got the best of him on that one."

"Nobody knew anything about him then," Okoye reflects. "He caught me by surprise and knocked me sideways. My feet went off the ground. It was a credit to him."

Huff, Stratton and Atwater are among the breed of football player exceptional not for speed or size, or an ability to throw or catch, but for steady, unmitigated ferocity. In short, they are hitters.

To be sure, such players come in many hues--the snarling fury of Dick Butkus, the lurking malevolence of Jack Tatum, the fearless gamesmanship of Mike Singletary. Some of the league's most memorable enforcers are also among its greatest players Others--Blaine Bishop, Bill Romanowski, Rodney Harrison--are miles away from the Top 100 list. But they, too, are part of a brotherhood whose secret handshake is a forearm to the rib cage.

"When I was a kid, I wanted to hit like Dick Butkus," recalls Ronnie Lott, the sensational defensive back who ranks 23rd on TSN's list, 14 spots behind Butkus (No. 9). "I remember he did a commercial for, like, Prestone, and he said, `My job is to plug holes.' And I said, `Yeah. I want to plug holes, too.'"

Lott, like Butkus before him, has become part of the NFL's lore. While the two-minute highlights on the evening news consist primarily of graceful touchdowns, it is destructive, head-on contact that continues to define this sport. It is Hardy Brown's "thumper" and Bill Bergey's "shoulder punch." It is Chuck Bednarik (No. 54) knocking out Frank Gifford in 1960, and Tatum separating Sammie White from his helmet (though not quite his head) in Super Bowl 11, and Karl Mecklenburg making a silver-and-black tortilla of Marcus Allen in the mid-1980s.

"I've always said that I was personally responsible for elevating Karl Mecklenburg's career," Allen (No. 72), a former running back and current CBS features reporter, says with a laugh. "Jim Plunkett threw me a pass one time that hung awhile. To be honest, I think I could have fair-caught the thing. When Mecklenburg hit me, I think the whole stadium got up and waited for my last rites. But I didn't feel a thing. Frankly, I was miffed at Jim. I laid there a few seconds to give him a scare."