It all started with a podium-pounding, venom-spewing, Ditka-snorting news conference in Miami.
It was Feb. 2, 2007, three days before Peyton Manning won his only Super Bowl title and the first day the public was made acutely aware of the plight of former football players.
Former Green Bay Packers offensive lineman Jerry Kramer and his colleague, Jennifer Smith, were leading a newly formed group called Gridiron Greats, the first charity organization to help former NFL players who were physically or mentally impaired, homeless, disabled, denied aid and receiving pathetically small pension payments.
Kramer and Smith brought along a former coach, Hall of Fame player and NFL analyst Mike Ditka, who became the star of a news conference that had two missions: One, raise awareness of the poor quality of life so many of yesterday’s football heroes were enduring and, two, to raise funds.
Ditka became more impassioned the more he talked. As he got madder, his face got redder.
“That’s Mike. He’s like that at dinner,” Kramer said Friday from Milwaukee. “The more we put Ditka out front, the more he made comments and the more he believed in the project.”
When four NFL players (Patrick Willis, Jason Worilds, Chris Borland and Jake Locker) with plenty of football left in them shockingly retired recently, my mind went back to that 2007 news conference in Miami.
Borland, a terrific tackling linebacker, retired after his rookie season with the San Francisco 49ers because, after extensive self-research, he determined concussions and their long-term effects aren’t worth money, fame and even the joy of playing the game.
The linebacker Borland replaced last season was Patrick Willis, who might have cost himself a bronze bust in Canton’s Hall of Fame by retiring at age 30 because of chronic feet and toe pain.
“Honestly, I pay attention to guys when they’re finished playing, walking around like they’ve got no hips and they can’t play with their kids,” Willis said at his farewell news conference. “They can barely walk. People see that and they feel sorry. But they don’t realize it’s because he played a few extra years.”
The perils of playing football had been largely ignored until Ditka, Kramer and several stars from the 1960s and 1970s stepped forward in Miami and started educating people on the enormous price paid for playing a violent game.
At the same Miami presser, Joe DeLamielleure, the former “Electric Company” guard for the Buffalo Bills and O.J. Simpson, bluntly blamed former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and players union boss Gene Upshaw for doing nothing to help former players.
It got so entertainingly contentious, Upshaw later threatened to break DeLamielleure’s neck. But there would be a greater good.
Kramer’s group counted coverage from 155 newspapers (including The Denver Post) and dozens of radio and TV stations. The league and union have long stopped treating needy former players like pests and swatting them away. Both the league and the union have set up programs that have funneled millions toward former players.
And current players, even the young ones, better understand they are not indestructible.
The league has made the game safer by outlawing hits to the head, leading with the helmet and almost all hits to the quarterback.
“Quarterbacks are part of the mafia now: They’re untouchable,” Kramer said. “The game has changed but there’s always going to be a certain element of violence in the game because when you want a power position, you put your weight forward. You don’t have any power standing straight up. You have power when you lean into something or bend into it to make contact. That brings the head down. That’s the nature of the game so there is always going to be a certain amount of violence there.”
Soon after that news conference in Miami, Ditka took control of the Gridiron Greats and still runs it. Smith helps head up PAST (Pain Alternate Solutions and Treatments), a retired athletes medical resource group based in Clifton, N.J. Kramer, 79, lives in Boise, Idaho, and has a busier speaking schedule than he’s had in years.
Their work will never be done. But never will such work ever be as effective as their introductory news conference eight years ago in Miami.
“We had a fallback plan there that morning,” Kramer said. “Ditka says, ‘Jerry, if this doesn’t work let’s get all the guys who are disabled or have dementia or have physical problems, and get them in their wheelchairs and their crutches and we’ll march them around the stadium at next year’s Super Bowl.’
“We didn’t have to do that thank god. It was a wonderful kickoff for us. It worked.”
Mike Klis: mklis @denverpost.com or
