Let the real games begin

Sporting News, The, Sept 1, 1997 by Dave Kindred

With the NFL season ready to open, it's time to say, as they do in Las Vegas, "Let's get it on." Or, as they also say in Las Vegas, "Let's get ready to RUMMMMMBLE!" Which leaves out my favorite Las Vegas quotation, no doubt spoken this summer, "Mike, I said fight the fear, not bite his ear."

How long do these interminable. irritable NFL exhibition games go on, anyway? Every fourth quarter populated by wannabes, has-been and cannon fodder lasted 9/12 weeks -- and no one will convince me they lasted a second less. The only reason each NFL team perpetrates four of these pseudo-games is to fleece the customers of a few extra bucks, which they eagerly pay for a brutality fix to end the withdrawal pains of a spring and summer during which they saw not one anterior cruciate ligament reduced to confetti.

Even the manliest of the Packers, quarterback Brett Favre, who was left for dead after running his Jeep up a telephone pole in 1990, who came back two months after that accident and one month after surgery to carry little ol' Southern Mississippi past mighty. Alabama -- even this creature of the Mississippi outback, raised alongside the alligators of Rotten Bayou, thinks the exhibition season is a waste of time for skilled professionals already in shape. And, more important, Favre says if you're going to put players at risk of injury, they ought to play games that count.

Kerry Collins woozily agrees. Why get your jaw busted, as the Panthers quarterback did, when you're in the game for a quarter because -- yes, because -- the coach doesn't want you to get hurt?

Jaguars quarterback Mark Brunell went down with a knee injury so bad the team doctors, after running him through a machine that tells them everything, said, "Surgery. Now." But Brunell said no to surgery. On crutches while talking to reporters, he further said, "God will heal it."

He did. Or else the doctors misread the machine's report.

Anyway, instead of reconstructive surgery that would have put him out for the year, Brunell needed only minor work. This time, when doctors said he'd be back in two months or less, Brunell said it'd be a month. No one asked if that was his idea or God's; they just said OK.

Meanwhile, in New York, the Jets do not speak to God. The report to a Higher Authority, the coach, Bill Parcels, sometimes known as Tuna. He has put the fear of Tuna into the Giants, Patriots and now the Jets.

When the big right guard, Matt O'Dwyer, missed an exhibition game with a sprained ankle, Parcells reached into baseball history to remind O'Dwyer of a football axiom most passionately and irrationally articulated by Vince Lombardi, a Parcells idol: "No one is ever hurt. Hurt is in the mind."

Said Parcells: "Ask O'Dwyer if he knows who Wally Pipp was." First baseman Pipp twice led the American League in home runs. Three times he hit over .300. Three times, as good in the field as he was at bat, he helped the Yankees win pennants.

But one day in May of 1925 he woke up with a headache and asked manager Miller Huggins for the day off. Huggins replaced Pipp with a young kid playing his first full season with the Yankees. The kid's name: Lou Gehrig.

Pipp never got his job back. Gehrig played the next 2,130 games, which took him some 14 years -- or about half as long as an NFL exhibition game, even one in which Iron Mike Ditka returns to Chicago as Saint Michael.

The football was only an added attraction when Ditka, again a coach, again what he was born to be brought the Saints to Soldier Field.

Here's a man who has done a thing so remarkable he's the only one to do it: He was a hero tight end on the Bears' 1963 world championship team; and 22 seasons later, he was the coach who led them to a Super Bowl victory. That makes him the only Hall of Fame player to coach a Super Bowl winner.

Though Ditka now works in New Orleans, he still owns a restaurant in Chicago. And it's clear where his heart is. "I put no emphasis on coming back here," he says after flying into Chicago's O'Hare Airport, "until you land, and then you come down and see the skyline. Then I realize I spent a major part of my life in this city. It does get a little sentimental. It's more than another stop....My life made a dramatic turn in this city."

So dramatic that some Chicagoans will argue that however big Michael Jordan is in the Windy City, he stands small alongside Ditka. A version of that argument was made by Ditka himself, who said of Jordan's Bulls,"I don't care if they win nine NBA titles. The '86 Super Bowl was the greatest thing to happen to Chicago sports."

We could argue that, but no in Iron Mike's presence. Instead, let's go to Austin, Texas, for a final report on the Cowboys, who, as you know, reported to training camp this summer under an ultimate to clean up their act.

The owner, Jerry Jones, would no longer tolerate behavior that has brought disgrace to his doorstep because, after all, he can say the Cowboys cheerleaders wear too many clothes, he can break every NFL rule he doesn't like, he can insult and ultimately fie, for no good reason other than rampant ego, the coach who won him two Super Bowls -- but his players must be rational, reasonable men.