A Front-Row Seat with the Sportswriters Who Sat There
Sit down with host Todd Jones and other sportswriters who knew the greatest athletes and coaches, and experienced first-hand some of the biggest sports moments in the past 50 years. They’ll share stories behind the stories -- some they’ve only told to each other.
Rick Telander: Going Beyond the Surface
Rick Telander is curious by nature, and his drive to learn more through reporting and relationships has served readers well for five decades. He’s always dives deep on stories, and he takes us with him on this episode. Rick puts us in an NFL training camp, where getting cut as a player caused his writing career to bloom. We go with him to the heaven-like basketball playgrounds of New York City in the 1970s for his first book. We ride with Rick into the Wild West of college football in the ‘80s. He takes us behind the scenes with characters on the ferocious ’85 Bears. Hear about the childlike wonder and blazing inner-drive of the great Walter Payton. Rick also explains the mischievous and competitiveness of another Chicago icon – some guy named Michael Jordan, who could read any room like no one else. And Rick takes us from the heights of fame with Jordan to the tough west side of Chicago, where he chronicled how prep basketball players at Orr Academy must overcome much more than opponents.
Rick has been an award-winning senior sports-columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times since 1995. He wrote about 300 stories and nearly three dozen cover stories for Sports Illustrated as a senior writer for that magazine from 1974-1998. Rick was a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, made regular appearances on that cable network’s show, Sports Reporters, and hosted a radio show on ESPN radio. Rick was also a panelist on The Sportswriters on TV, Sports Channel America cable, from 1985-2000. And he hosted a radio show on WSCR-AM in Chicago.
The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association voted Rick Illinois Sportswriter of the Year eight times. He has won nine Peter Lisagor awards for sports journalism. In 2014, Telander was awarded the Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism by the Union League Club of Chicago. That same year, he was awarded the Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism by the Union League Club of Chicago. In 2018, he received the Sigma Delta Chi Award and Bronze Medallion for distinguished service from the Society of Professional Journalists, in Wash., D.C. Rick’s work has been featured in The Best American Sportswriting Anthology eight times and in over two dozen other anthologies. He was the guest editor for The 2016 Best American Sports Writing anthology. Rick is the author of eight books, one of which, Heaven Is A Playground, was named one of the Ten Best Sports Books of All Time by Playboy Magazine, and one of the 100 Best Sports Books by Sports Illustrated. That book was made into a movie released in 1991.
Rick is a native of Peoria, Illinois and played football (defensive back) for Northwestern, where he graduated in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature. He was named All-Big Ten as a senior and was a two-time All-Big Ten Academic honoree. The Kansas City Chiefs selected him in the eighth round of the ’71 NFL draft but cut him during training camp. He wrote a book about that experience in 2004, Like a Rose, which was made into a short film by NFL Films in 2013. In 2017, Telander announced that after his death, his brain will be donated to Boston’s Concussion Legacy Foundation for research about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Follow him on Twitter: @ricktelander
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Todd
Welcome everyone to our Pressbox Access Tavern. We're pleased to be joined by Rick Telender today, and Rick's been one of my favorite writers over the years. So I'm really thrilled about him joining us. He's a senior sports columnist for the Chicago Sun Times since 1995, and he's he spent many, many years at Sports Illustrated as a senior writer from 74 to 98. And he also has written for ESPN on different platforms. He's been on TV radio. You name it. Rick has done it. Rick, thanks a lot for joining us.
Todd
I really appreciate it.
Rick
It's my pleasure, Todd.
Todd
Well, there's no cigar smoke here. I got to tell you, it's not like your days from the Sports riders on TV.
Rick
That's okay. I breathed enough as a young man to make up for anything.
Todd
Now, I was curious, how are your lungs after all those years of sitting next to Gleason?
Rick
Well, they're good. Bill Gleason and Ben Bentley had to smoke cigars almost like I compared to a little kid of a pacifier, and you could not make them not smoke. And that was just the deal. And one time I came in there, some guy smoked Billowing in this room that actually was very detrimental to the lights and the cameras and all that in the studio. And those guys didn't care. It was too bad. Clean it. Whatever the particulate matter there clean it up. So one time I came in and actually I went out and got a very cheap gas mask, a yellow thing that went over my ears and all that stuff.
Rick
Yeah, I wore it and I breathed, okay, you couldn't hear me. So I had to take that off. I got a little miniature fan to blow the smoke towards them. None of it worked. I just sucked it up.
Todd
Well, I got to tell you, I watched that show religiously back in my days as a sports rider, and it was one of my favorite shows, but I think I have secondhand smoke problems just from watching it on television. Well, we've never shared a cigar. We did on my 40th birthday at the 2006 British Open in St. Andrews. You and I and Marla Ride now are celebrated in a pub in St. Andrews. And I remember that 40th.
Rick
I remember that one time it was so smoky in there they could still smoke. And I thought it was low ceiling and everything. But, boy, how about that being in St. Andrews? Is that not awesome place?
Todd
Oh, my gosh. In fact, you just walk right off the 18th green and there's a pub.
Rick
Amazing.
Todd
Yes, there was.
Rick
There are all kinds of things. And as soon as the golfers were done, they opened up the whole course like a park. And it just walked all over because it's like cement the fairways anyhow. It's just a links course right there. That huge beach, gigantic beach. And when we were there, that was very interesting. You used to seeing just horrendous weather, winds and rain coming sideways. We were there. It was hot, it was wonderful. It was sunny and it's magnificent.
Todd
I was almost disappointed in the fact that we didn't get that crazy Scottish weather that you associate with the British Open. I do remember, like you said, they opened the course up at night and people are walking around like it's a regular park. And I remember seeing a dog taking a crap on the 18th fairway the night before the final round. And I'm like, wow, okay.
Rick
That was really something you could hit a drive if you had a good role. It seems to me like they would just go out of sight and just continue. I do see this thing rolling past somebody's drive. You don't even know where it came from because it was essentially a runway. A lot of those things. But if you got in trouble in the deep, whatever they call that stuff the gorse or the.
Todd
Bushes, right?
Rick
Yeah. Whatever, man. It was like, You'd never find your ball.
Todd
I could never find my ball anyway, no matter where I'm playing. So, Rick, what a career. I mean, 50 years, basically, when you think about all the different places you've been and things that you've covered, we're going to talk a lot of football and basketball. But I wanted to start with football because one thing I used to hear from people when they were pissed at me was, hey, you didn't actually play. You know what, though, Rick Talender, you actually played football. You played College football in Northwestern.
Todd
How are you as a player? I know you got drafted right by the NFL.
Rick
Yeah, I got drafted by the Chiefs. As I like to say, they gave me a cup of coffee and didn't even fill it. And then Hang stranded and basically said, It's time for you to get on with your career. Yeah.
Todd
Hang said it was time for you to matriculate your way into some other field.
Rick
And Hanks FAM was not only the coach, he's also the general manager. So anyway, they said, Well, listen, somebody said, this is a good strategy. Tell them that if they don't give you more money, you're going to go to law school. And he said, Rick, you want the Northwestern. That sounds logical. Like maybe you're some smart dude or something. So anyway, I did float that with Hank Strand, and he said, oh, okay. And he gave me $500 more in my bonus, but he took it off of my salary.
Rick
I didn't care. So I got $3,000. As a bonus. It was $2,500. I worked him up to $3,000, a lot of money back in 1971, more than I ever made. I took that check from the chief really nicely printed and put it on this mirror in the front room of the house. This collapsed three storey house where a bunch of us guys are living. I just left it there because I knew nobody could cash it. I
Todd
Well, you know what's interesting, though, is that it's very interesting that that training camp experience getting cut as an eight round draft pick with the Chiefs actually led to your writing career directly.
Rick
Yeah, I did one thing that I tell young writers, aspiring writers. If you're going to write nonfiction, it's hard just to get right into fiction. But what's unique about your life? And believe me, everybody's life is unique. You need to figure out what that is. I wanted to write for Sports Illustrator. That was my dream job. I never told anybody, never really told anybody I wanted to be a writer. But I wanted to make a living. I didn't want to just be a guy in an attic somewhere, starving and with consumption blanket wrapped around them, a little candle for heat typing.
Todd
Wait, you mean kind of like me right now?
Rick
I did have my moment. That was similar to that. But I want to write for Sports Illustrated. And I read the magazine forever. Sports Illustrated was really a big deal back then. I mean, that was it.
Todd
It was like the sports Bible.
Rick
It was literature, only four color weekly sports magazine in the world. And it's great expense that they spent putting that thing out. So anyway, that was my dream. And if I was going to do that, I had read different sections of the magazine. And if I were going to offer anything, I knew I couldn't write to them and say, hey, I want to cover the World Series for you. What do you think? But maybe I could write about my own experience, which nobody else had. Have you had anybody else who was in an NFL training camp who got cut have to get on with his life, whatever how pitiful his whole life is.
Rick
Have anybody write a first person story about that? And the editor, Pat Ryan, said, I didn't say that in so many words. Told her what I thought maybe I could do. And she said, yeah, you know what? It's interesting. So do it on speculation. We'll pay you $1,000 if we run it.
Todd
That's almost as much as Hank was paying you.
Rick
Oh, God, man, I'm so rich. I can live on $1,000 for about six months. Anyway, I wrote it took me a long time. I agonized and got it in, and they actually ran it. And that was the start of it. So that playing football was the one thing that I had, that kind of separated me. And I think I've been able to utilize that throughout my career. What did I do? Different. What have I seen? Different. I'm sure you have Todd, too, in your column, writing and reporting.
Rick
We all have that people just have to look and say, what is it that I have that nobody else has find your distinct voice.
Todd
And what do you know at the time you knew what it was like to be cut. And you wrote the story Football like a Rose and that story for sports. So it became your first book, from Red Ink to Roses.
Todd
You wrote that first article and that first book by hand by hand.
Rick
Absolutely. I wrote Heaven as a Plague Now, which was my very first book, 600 pages of yellow legal pad and pencil in longhand. And then I had found somebody to type it for me because I couldn't type.
Todd
I couldn't type. You wanted to be a writer, but you couldn't type exactly.
Rick
You're like Abe Lincoln by the Fire.
Todd
Just writing on a legal bad.
Rick
I just get a piece of charcoal and do it on a wall or cave. I mean, I still can't really type. It is irrelevant if you're using a laptop, whether you can type or not, you can pick, Hunt and Peck. There's still some guys I've seen the press box just rare, rare who use actually one finger, not one finger on each hand, but one finger type. And pretty much as fast as anybody because you just erase delete right over. So, yeah, it was a real issue not being able to type there at the beginning.
Todd
Well, in the 70s, right. You could just do things a little differently as long as you got it done.
Rick
I did actually write a couple of stories for sports illustrators. I printed them. I was at games or whatever, but I couldn't type. I literally would take me forever because you had to hit that key and the hammer had to hit. And if you made a mistake, you're supposed to go back and wipe out a little piece of paper that had white on it. It was a miserable experience. So I actually would print them out as leisurely as I could. And then there was a guy named Lance Love that he was a kid, and he was from Western Union, and he'd come and grab the thing.
Rick
And somehow, I don't know, they put in one of those rollers or whatever and away would go. And it worked. So somebody in New York would then type up this chicken scratching that I know it was critical. I got to do it. It was really sad.
Todd
Pony Express, that thing in New York, right. I think my kids say to me, dad, are you using a stone tablet and a chisel? What is that?
Todd
Well, you played football, you wrote by hand, and you actually learned to type. And you started writing full time at Sports Illustrated in 74 and stayed there for 24 years. And you also, Besides playing football, went on to write a lot of football. I think in the 80s, you were like the College football rider at sports illustrator. And that was quite a time for College football when you think about it. Oklahoma Lou Holtz and the Irish, Notre Dame are rolling the U Miami Hurricanes. What was it like in the mid 80s, late 80s, covering College football?
Rick
Well, I think I can say without any hyperbole that it was crazy. It was the Wild West in the entire country. It was nuts, the stuff that was going out of Oklahoma, that's when there would be guns in the dormitory, there was a gang rape, the Charles Thompson, the quarterback for Oklahoma, a guy that I like. I ended up visiting Texas penitentiary.
Todd
Yeah, he ended up on a cover. Sports Illustrated handcuffed.
Rick
Yeah. In an Orange jumpsuit. There's a starting quarterback. He's a drug dealer. I mean, big time, big time drug dealer. It was really wild. What was going on everywhere. And it was completely out of hand. It was almost like College football was waiting for some kind of regulation for somebody to come and say, My God, there's SMU paying players. The Pony Express paid Jerry Ball, and it was nuts. And then the governor of Texas, after they kind of stopped that deal, he said, Well, these fellows have been counting on that money so much like in these envelopes that it's kind of wrong to not keep paying them.
Rick
So they did. And then SME, you got the death penalty. It was wild. And at that time, Todd, there was really nobody else who was covering the whole country in College football, flying from Washington State to Miami to Oklahoma to Texas to Ohio State to work that many schools out east. But the whole Southwest Conference, Southern Cal, on and on and all the Big Ten pieces and putting it all together. Like, what is the big picture? So it's almost surreal. There might have been, I don't know who else was doing it in the whole country.
Rick
People were focused on their conference or their team and their city, wherever they were playing. But I was going here, there and everywhere, and I would talk to coaches. They didn't know anything that I knew. I mean, they were like, really that's going on out there or down here? Yeah.
Todd
You think about how we weren't connected back then?
Rick
No Internet, no cell phones. You wanted to find out something. Usa Today hadn't even started in the 70s, and it didn't come out until the 80s. But there was no way to find out back to get them. You had to call the PR guy. You had to go to the place wherever the athletic Department at that particular school to actually find out what was going on. It was stimulating. It was crazy. I still don't think I've recovered.
Todd
Well, tell us a story about just showing up at Oklahoma. What was it like you show up in Oklahoma? Barry, switchers coach. Welcome, Rick. Welcome to our football program. What's that like?
Rick
Well, the PR guys, you'd have to deal with it with PR guys. I like them all, but they're always trying to steer you away from the scandals. Whatever the scandals might be in eligibility, pay all coaches having affairs with other coaches, wives, stuff like that. And then actual crime serious crime. University of Colorado in on that stuff, too. Hey, Mary, how are you doing? Go to his office and shoot the breeze with him. He had an autobiography. It's called Bootleggers Boy. Not like I Coach Man or I'm a football bootleggers boy.
Todd
His dad, which I think is very honest.
Rick
Right.
Todd
Here'S what I am.
Rick
He did not make that up. His dad told me his dad would sometimes call a pistol, just fire holes to the roof of their, like shack in Arkansas. Wherever was up on cement blocks. And then his mother shot his dad and his girlfriend came to pick him up and take him to the hospital. I think I got this right. And then she crashed the car and killed them both. And you think, okay, this is this guy's upbringing. And here he is now he's got his quarterback. Charles Thompson.
Rick
I said, Where'd you find a talent like him because they're riding the wishbone. He said, well, I found him. He was break dancing on a big piece of cardboard at a car dealership in Lawton. This is new. This is new, Rick.
Todd
You played College football in the late sixtys early 70s at Northwestern. How did you think playing College football informed you as a writer covering College football?
Rick
Well, everybody can watch the game. And I'm not one of these people feel you have to. If you want to ride out war, you had to be a soldier. You want to ride about politics, you had to be a politician. I think observation can give you a lot. But also, I do believe that being inside, locking to being there, knowing what a coach's word means to you, knowing the relationship you have with your teammates, seeing how you depended on each other, that at certain times, you felt this almost like Rapture.
Rick
The whole was greater than the parts. All of you working together.And when that happens, it's actually transcended. I mean, you feel this love and this other guy. It's just incredible. And then also the racial things that I saw in the team, it's hard for me to believe that my freshman class, all the scholarship players, 25 or so, all white, every one of which is white.
Rick
I thought, what is going on? There are black guys before me and certainly a lot after, but none in my class. And I'm thinking, you got to be kidding me. The entire class, where are the black guys? Because I knew they were out there and played against them in high school. And I've seen coaches do things to players, my buddies, my teammates demean them in ways that I still have gotten over because the power that a coach has over you is 100%. It is total. If you don't play, let's put you in. And it's always somebody that's almost as good as you or better.
Todd
You mentioned race. I always thought, looking back through the prism of time in that era in the mid to late 80s, you had the whole Notre Dame versus Miami thing going on, and I always felt that was racially tinged in many respects.
Rick
Absolutely.
Todd
You're on the front lines of that. Do you agree?
Rick
Oh, absolutely. I mean, they had those T shirts, Catholics versus convicts. I actually wrote about that. No, the name had all the Catholics allegedly. And Miami had convicts. Both sides had troubled people. And I had trouble with the law. I actually went to Miami. Jimmy Johnson was a coach, and I went around and started asking guys, Miami had far more Catholics on a starting team than Notre Dame did. I think Steve Walsh was, of course, the offensive line was from all over, but I think they're all Catholics.
Rick
Tony Rice, I believe it's a quarterback for Nurturing Baptist, right? Yes, it was. Yeah. Everything. Listen, the whole world is racial in America. Everything is about race. We're dealing with it today. I thought we'd solve a lot of things in the 60s with all the tumult, but we didn't. We just kicked them down the road. And I saw things happening in football that were very unusual. And I knew I had to change. Yeah.
Todd
And you end up writing a great book about that. In 1989, you came out with your book, the 100 Yard Lie, The Miss and Corruption of College Football, because again, you had the experience of your own playing career. But then you're covering this Wild West era of College football. What led to that book? And when you look back on it, I know you've updated it even recently. Where does that book stand? And all the things you have done in your writing career for you?
Rick
Well, that's kind of my testimony to what I had seen that I thought was unique. Again, my position, having played football, having gone to played in the Big Ten, played in some big games, played in huge stadiums, traveled and all that stuff played the Coliseum in La, played in the Ohio State. There the 100,000, whatever people wanting to kill you. I understood all that. Seeing it all and then just putting it all together. What is wrong here? And somebody once said to me, Actually, an editor sports, because I just seen too much.
Rick
He said, Rick, you know what? You should never see how the sausage is made. And that's kind of an edict that I believe is absolutely true. But once you do see how the sausages made, what you do see behind the curtain, you see the wizard of Oz behind that curtain with the levers, you see the hypocrisy, you see the fraud, you see the racism, you see the imperialism, you see the money making, the greed. You see all those things. You'll see, if it's politics, you'll see, if it has to do with business, anything you look at too closely.
Rick
This is what you're going to find, because we're humans and we're flawed and faulty and frail. So when I wrote that book, the 100 Yard Live, the first time I put everything in there that I could think of that I had seen that I just thought was wrong. Coaches abusing players, guys who shouldn't be in school, players not getting even remotely anything resembled in education, being used up, injured and just discarded like waste. And then I saw the coaches starting to exploit all this. I saw the coaches themselves in weird ways, being corrupted in ways they didn't want. I felt a lot of them really just wanted to coach football.
Rick
Then they started to see the money that was there, the ancillary aspect to it. Cheating became I saw the whole fraud of amateurism.
Todd
Well, before we leave football, I wanted to steer over to professional football, which has its own issues. But in some ways, it is a business, right? It tells you right up front that these are paid mercenaries. And so in the 80s, you're a Chicago guy. And in football, you immediately think, well, 85 Chicago Bears. And you were around that team and those characters, man, what a cast of characters, right.
Rick
Oh, my God. Again, the big fault from there, the lever is there was no Internet, there's no cell phones, nobody's taking pictures of what these guys are doing off the field. I lived next door to the Bears training camp next door to Howard Hawk, literally the fence. That was my backyard. And the backyard was only about maybe 20ft. And then there were bushes on the other side of this fence. Chain Lake fence. And that was the Bears practice field. It was also the Lake Forest College Division Three Foresters gamefield.
Rick
So they would tear it up, and then the Bears would practice on it. It was ridiculous. 100 yard field, that's all it was.
Todd
You got the best football team on the planet.
Rick
Exactly.
Todd
Practicing on this field. It's 100 yard field.
Rick
That's all torn up grass. And when they would play, when the foresters would play, like, Ripon or Lawrence or somebody in, say, late October, it would be a rainstorm, and they would tear the living hell out of that field. It's just mud. Then it would freeze. It was horrible. It was just horrible. Nobody's there. I could look out my window and I could see Mike Ditko. I could see Jim McMahon, Walter Payton and these other guys would come to the fence right next to my house because there are all these bushes and they didn't want to go all the way the 120 yards through the ends of indoors to house hall if they had to take a leak.
Rick
So I'd be on my little deck there and I'd look at, hey, get out of here. I'd scare these guys after death, like I was going to call the cops.
Todd
I meant they're watering your grass.
Rick
It didn't come through anyway. It was funny. So I finally ended up cutting a hole in the fence. I could walk right there. I'd be on the field in 3 seconds. It's literally right there. So Jim Harbour was then a quarterback later in the 90s. And we talked one time. He actually had suggested ask me if maybe I'd want to sell my house to him because he could be right there on the field. He could do it fast. He could get inside the meeting room, like 20 seconds, cut through that fence.
Rick
Eventually the College put a new fence in, boarded up everything that I had done. You mentioned Ditko, so he's got this team with all these characters, McMahon and all these guys, Hampton and all these guys. Mcmicha McMichael just legendary, like, folk tales about these guys. You wrote a couple of books with Dick. What made Dick are the right coach for that team, especially in the magical year of 85.
Rick
That's a very good question. I think that his inner fire, which is just there. It's like bubbling. It's like a cauldron. You want to be careful? It doesn't blow up around you. I think that that was just the right moment for the great talent that they had. He was perfect for one year. And they should have repeated that. They could never get a quarterback. Mcmahon could never stay healthy. They brought in one quarterback after the other from Doug Fluty on and on and on, so I could never get that straight.
Rick
But that one moment, the ferocity that he had that everybody knew about it, from him being a player. He was not your typical head coach. He was not a X's nose, then endless amounts of time in devising schemes. He did do that. But he took the offense and the defense was a whole separate team. Michael Hampton. Don't forget the fridge. Was there Mike Singleterry, Otis Wilson. I mean, these guys were incredible. Les Frasier in the back. They had their own coach. They had Buddy Ryan. And so it was like two entirely separate teams.
Rick
And I'm sure you recall after they won the Super Bowl, just annihilated the Patriots, they hoisted both Buddy Ryan and Ditcho under their shoulders when they came off the field. I don't think that's ever been done before. Defensive coordinator and the head coach.
Todd
You played defense in College. What made that 46 defense or Ryan so special? Besides the obvious talent?
Rick
Yeah, well, yeah, certainly needed the talent. But it was an aggressiveness that nobody had prepared for it. It's just basically saying we're going to put almost ten guys on the line. We'll have Gary fence safe to be back a little race, and we're going to take the receivers. We're going to do everything. You've got. These old five step drops past the ball. Look down here. You're not going to make it to five steps. Forget the seven step drop. You may roll out. We may have a blitz on from the corner.
Rick
You're going to get annihilated, and nobody has figured out how to work against it. You can look at some of the defenses, and they're literally all on the line. Every guy is within two yards of one. Yeah, it was crazy. And it was vulnerable to a lot of things that nobody could take advantage of. They didn't have time. They demolished quarterbacks. In fact, they didn't want to knock Tony Easton out of the game of the Super Bowl. They wanted to keep him in prop him up.
Rick
Yeah, unfortunately, they did knock him out and Jim Jordan came in. But this is when you could hit the quarterbacks with their helmet head first. Oh, my God. They did stuff to quarterbacks. It was just vicious. And then they bark like animal like dogs.
Todd
During the game.
Rick
Yeah, right on. Right after something like that that I'll stand up and bark. Yes. It was something that within a couple of years, I guess with spread offenses going to parts of the run and shoot, doing things quick passing, other ways to utilize running backs, they figured out other ways to work against it. But Buddy Ryan left after that year, became the head coach of the Eagles, and that kind of destroyed it. Right. But that year was absolutely transcendent. And the characters. Don't forget the fridge. Was that William Perry.
Rick
There were 320 pound guys in the League back then.
Todd
Yeah, not an entire League, much less. I mean, now it's like common, right?
Rick
But now I usually have eight to twelve guys or £300 or more. But in that area, a lot of guys are listed at 299. That cracks me up. Who weighs £299 anyway?
Todd
Biscuits shy.
Rick
The fridge. Yes. Oh, God, they would tease him. But this guy saw the Buddy Ryan wasn't using him. This guy probably at times weighed up to £340. But he said, I saw this. They're running little ten yard sprints. I saw this dirt flying from behind his cleats. He said, I can use this guy. So he carried the ball, he caught a touchdown pass. They put him in the backfield because Dick always carried a garage against 40 Niners for putting God was made some offensive lineman in the backfield when they yeah.
Todd
I can see that.
Rick
Yeah. I remember that guy McIntyre. That's who he was. And he was a great big 280. Something like that wasn't 300. And Walsh put it in the backyard.
Todd
I don't like that.
Rick
So anyway, use the fridge. The characters were such good players too. Don't forget, Jim Kovac just got put into the hall of Fame. It's great. And there's so many guys on defense. Richard Dens didn't even mention Richard Dens. You had no prayer. The quarterback you could see they were scared when they played against the sporty. Six. Yeah.
Todd
I think the ferocity is what stands out in my mind. And you don't always have that in football. You have to love the game. But some guys just really lost a hit.
Rick
Yes, they do.
Todd
You had that as a collection of Bears on that decent.
Rick
Yeah, it was a collection. Also, don't forget of first rounders. They really collected a lot of talent. And then you had that middle linebacker position going from Dick Butcher and then the single Terry, because Brian Rule after that was just a rare position in and of itself. And they had Mike singletier. He was held by a brimstone, like a preacher. I remember talking to him one time, Mike, you hit guys so hard. He broke, like, over a dozen helmets when he was at, when he was playing at Baylor.
Rick
So sometimes he break it. His head was stuck right in his shoulders. He had no neck. Basically, you look at it. It was like, right there, perfect for football, like a missile. And I said, when you hit somebody so hard, what's it like? He said he was almost like a preacher. He said, you feel this, contact this force, and he feels it, and it's good for you. And it's good for him. This explosion. Damn, man. Okay. This is something out of body.
Todd
And then they had one of the all time great players ever on offense in Walter Payton, not just a great player, but a great guy. The NFL. Mandy, your awards named after him. When you think about Payton, what comes to mind from your time around him?
Rick
I think of a guy who was childlike, not childish, but childlike had this happiness to him, but also this drive that was insight, kind of like ditching. I think Walter was probably ADHD. He had to be moving, drumming all the time. He's always moving. He's standing there and nothing was happening. Come up and pinch your leg. Everybody knows it's from behind it's so hard they can leave, like a huge black and blue mud. He thought that was funny, but he would do stuff like that. It's always like a love tap the wall.
Rick
He was lighting firecrackers. He would call Ditka and disguise that voicemail, disguise his voice like he was a Mexican female.
Todd
He could do all these different voices.
Rick
Oh, God, yeah. This is Juanita. Anyway, he would do stuff like that. And then inside of him, the beating he took was just incredible. Just incredible. I've always wondered if that liver ailment, liver cancer or whatever they call it biodux cancer had anything to do with the beating he took as a player. There were times I saw him on the sideline, and he would come back wildly from the play, and they would literally take a smelling salt, cracking that ammonia and just, like, breathe it. Anybody try that one so your head will jerk back.
Rick
It's beyond belief. And he would just need that thing to come to again. And then he go back in on the next place. His desire was probably so off the charts that it transcended his very body. He should not have been doing what he was actually doing.
Todd
Wonder where that came from. That desire.
Rick
Part of it came first of all, it's a mate. We don't understand the human psyche. I certainly don't understand that. But his older brother, Eddie, had set a lot of records. He was very good players, smaller than Walter, but really good at Jackson State and in high school, as best. I can tell there's a bit of a bully. There's a real competition between the two of them. I'm real serious. You can get them. I mean, Eddie loves Waller, but there was this thing like, I just want to kick his ass, too.
Rick
And I think Waller felt that towards Eddie, maybe going a little too far, but the transference of that could have been part of it, brothers. It's just the two of them. It's interesting. You can psychoanalyze it all you wanted to, but something inside of him, being from the Deep South, this guy goes to Jackson State. Are you kidding me? Not LSU, not Old Miss, not Miami, not Arkansas, not any of these places. Because racism was absolute in the south and more hidden, but absolute up north, too.
Rick
And I think Walter underneath, like, a lot of black guys who were able to cover it. Maybe like, even a lot of black Blues men from the south. You get underneath you tap it. There's this rage, the rage against society, rage against unfairness rage about being treated wrongly. This guy should have been the Heisman Trophy winner at some big school. He was that good in College. He was unbelievable. But he's a little dinky, traditional black College. All these guys. Hell, when I went to the Keith and I got drafted there, they had all kinds of guys from Rambling from Morgan State, Williamir from Morgan State.
Todd
He's never even heard of it. Think about it. That's how the great steel teams in the 70s was built. Is they recruited or not crooked? They drafted guys out of the black colleges.
Rick
They could have played in the Big Ten. They could have played anywhere. Bucky Cannon. I mean, are you kidding me? Six, 8275 or six, maybe six, six. And this guy can't play in a Big Ten team. So you go to some little dinky school. I mean, it was really, I think something that drove Walter more than anybody has ever really talked about. It can never prove.
Todd
Well, he certainly channeled it in a productive way as a football player and was known as a great person. Hence the NFL award named Man after him. And he's certainly one of the most beloved sports figures in Chicago. And obviously, during your time as a sports writer in Chicago, there's another guy who's also become so well known that he's an international figure and that's this guy named Jordan, I believe.
Rick
Michael. Yes. Mike. Number 23, Air Jordan himself. Mike.
I just saw an article today. Who's the greatest basketball player of all time? He was in USA Today. And they said, Is it Kareem LeBron or Michael? The answer was yes. Exactly. Right. And it's really good, right. That's one of the reasons I left sports Illustrator probably could be the main reason that he was not going to talk to Sports Illustrated anymore. This is.
Todd
And you left in 95.
Rick
Yes, I did. And I love sports. I love the Editors. There the writers, the freedom, the intellect, everything about it.
Todd
But Jordan wasn't going to talk to him because of the baseball coverage store exactly went to the minor League baseball, right?
Rick
Exactly. The one that said baggage. Michael, Michael Jordan and the White Sox embarrassed baseball.
Todd
So Michael Jordan playing baseball led to you going to the Chicago sometimes pretty much if anybody cares.
Rick
Yes, it did, because I was not going to spend. The guy just been named would soon be named the greatest athlete of the 20th century. I was not going to spend my career not being able to write about this guy. And I knew him. I've seen it. Bold practices. I'd written about him. I did a cover story on it for Sports Illustrator back. And I want to say it was after his rookie year and then a secondary injured his foot. Then the next year came back with a fire that was beyond the leaf.
Rick
So anyway, I knew him. We got along. I really liked him. A fascinating guy.
Todd
What did you like about him?
Rick
I loved his personality, the way he could look out of the room and read it. He used to tell me I was really a bad kid when I was a kid. I think I must be Mr. President. I believe this close to maybe going the other way, being a real bad kid. And it being a bad adult. If he hadn't been to basketball or something else because he had this mischievousness, he was mischievous. He was also like Walter in that regard. But he also had what was it?
Rick
He saw things a little different. He was not going to play the game that gave him the courage to create on the floor. It gave him this passion to not only win, but to destroy the opponent. And I remember one time I asked him, I said, you have to win. What is it? You have to win all the time. Is it just winning? That's the thing he said. No, it isn't, really. I can't stand the thought of another man making his name off of me. That was it?
Rick
He just didn't want to lose. Winning was kind of irrelevant. You're not going to beat me. So however you want to look at that kind of equation, that's how it was.
Todd
Do you have a favorite anecdote about Jordan from your time around him? Something that really speaks to who he was not just as a basketball player, but what he was about?
Rick
Well, two things, really. One was him playing with the flu game. He was sick. You could see this guy never had the flu. We've all had food poison. It's usually about a six hour, maybe twelve hour window where you'd rather die. I mean, you can't do it in your head, hurt your eyes hurt. Your skin hurts. It's just horrible to see him play through that versus down. You got a new town. And then the other thing was just we're dedicating the James Jordan boys and girls named after his father, who's been murdered.
Rick
Right. And it was a new, brand new building. And Jordan was there with Juanita and Mayor Daly was there. There are a lot of dignitaries, a lot of swells there in the press all around. And we're going around different rooms, and they go into the art room, and there's a teacher there this young woman, and she's so nervous just beyond belief. And she has to talk to her, like, what's going to happen in here. And she's kind of, well, we'll do clay and stuff and finger painting, and she just kind of couldn't go on.
Rick
And Michael steps forward and says, what you're saying is, the room will never be this clean again. And everybody laughed. She laughed. And it was just the whole tension diminished. And anybody could have done what he said, what he did. He's the one that read it.
Todd
That's interesting, because that's, like, very empathetic. And I always think of him as more like an assassin. And yet here he is, reading the room and seeing what she needed in that moment.
Rick
Yeah. Somebody could be that sarcastic. And that means that somebody like Jerry Krause, who he never forgave Krause meant that he had that intuitive empathy where he'd go against the empathy that he knows what he could say to you to be nice. I'm just saying the opposite because I'm a bad dude, but he understood it. And that to me always. I just like, wow, that's incredible. That's like somebody who's putting their arm around somebody when they're feeling down, somebody's vastly or superior. Yeah.
Todd
Do you think it made him a better basketball player and how I think it made him.
Rick
Yeah. I think that was something that he had over other places. He had always joked about Scotty Pippin being from Hamburg, Arkansas. He's just a country bumpkin. And he was, like, the youngest of 13 or something like that. But Jordan would tease him. Drug was into teasing because he knew how to get it. He knew what your vulnerability was because that ability to read. You read your weakness on the floor, whatever it might be. Maybe you don't, like, go to your right. Maybe you can't handle my crossover.
Rick
Maybe. I know you can jump and everything, but you can't teach you a thing about my following, my fade away jumper. And I really think that was part of his personality, which fascinates me his personality. First of all, this guy was a splendid, unique athlete. He had hands. He's so big. Love to shake hands with him. I shake hands with Dr. J, too. It's like it's hilarious. Your fingers come halfway up your wrist. Really long arms, really long legs, not a particularly long torso. He was just magnificent broad shoulders.
Rick
And then he was like a Panther. The way he can move his agility. I think that he understood all that. I have something nobody else has. Nobody. And here we go. You guys are going to eat it. Every one of you. If you ever, ever try to make your name off me with a couple of guards, did they might have had a good game in a series? Like I remember DJ Armstrong was playing on the other team for the Hornets or whatever. He celebrated after they beat the Bulls.
Rick
Right. And DJ was a tough player. I remember missing the front, too, because it knocked out. Kept playing. But he celebrated. And Jordan's, like, going through that computer, you will die. I just demolish the next game. And on. He never forgot stuff like that. Just like with Jerry Krause. Never forgave him, for not playing him. When he felt that his foot had healed and he could have kept playing, they would take him out after a certain amount of minutes and drove Jordan crazy.
Todd
And he never forgot the Sports Illustrated cover when he played baseball, right?
Rick
Yeah.
Todd
It's like he never file away these grievances and take them out.
Rick
To this day. That was 27 years ago. He has not spoken to sports baseball. And I just thought, you guys, I've talked to Editors there about it when I started the coverage. Do you know what you're doing here? I mean, is he really embarrassing baseball? I thought it was an incredibly Noble move. The guy was not a bad baseball player. He added, like, two0, six or something. He had a few home runs, 206.
Todd
He'd be playing today in the majors?
Rick
Absolutely. Even Jerry Reinstall says we've given him more time. I think this guy could have made the majors. I remember one time he was down to Birmingham. Or maybe it was actually the stock something. I was watching the game and he's on first and somebody hit the ball as a four slight second. And he's trying to fake the second base, not with a move. The second base doesn't move. You're not going to get it to fall off his feet. He figured out to do between basketball and baseball, but to say that he embarrassed baseball because he tried it during the strike when the entire major leagues were full of scrubs and they called off the World Series.
Rick
It wasn't him. Baseball.
Todd
Not a good headline, not a good editorial choice.
Rick
There not for the guy that never forgets. No. For 27 years, he's been under cover.
Todd
Well, we're never going to forget Jordan. He's the basketball player, perhaps of all time. You can argue all you want, but he's certainly the guy who defined his generation, his era. And it's funny, Rick, you were a football player, as we've mentioned. But really, basketball has been kind of a defining theme throughout your whole journalism career. Going back to as you mentioned, your first book, Heaven is a Playground, the great book about your time up in New York and the playgrounds of the early 70s. Summer 73.
Todd
You write the article for Sports illustrate. And then next year you go back to Brooklyn. What is it about basketball that always drew you as a writer?
Rick
Well, I thought about that a lot. I love the game. I just love the way it works. Five guys, these five or the beauty of it is three on 32121 on one. Or just shoot by yourself. Shoot three toes, two jumpers. I've seen games of 21. I never lived out in Florida and go to the local gym and they'd be like, 25 guys. That's where you shoot. You don't get to rebound, take your ball back. You can shoot. It'd be mayhem like a mob. And playing this game of 21, you can do so many things with the game.
Rick
When James Nation had invented it in 1891, Springfield, Massachusetts, it was immediately popular immediately. Everybody liked it. Women liked it. Kids liked it. It's a global game where every person on the court has the opportunity to do everything that is pass, dribble, shoot, defend whatever else. Hot dogs hog the ball. Everything. But just because you're like in baseball, you're a pitcher. Nobody else is going to pitch. You're coming back. It's just you basketball, just seeing the way it works. I liked it. I loved the ball.
Rick
When I was a kid, I listened to Bradley basketball games back home in Fury, and I dribbled my ball through the house and my mom would stop it. If you can't do that, go outside. He's dead. Winter. I'd go outside and dribble the ball. Come back in, listen to the radio. That is a nice Orange void ball. It gets so cold.
Todd
The void ball. I try to dribble the void ball in February.
Rick
So I did it'd be frozen. So I took it and put it in the sink in a bath of warm water. We had a gravel driveway, didn't even have cement. Get all the dirt gravel off it, warm it up. The Orange. Warm my hands up, which is frozen. Go back out and keep dribbling and stuff. So I like that. And I like the fact that there's so much history tied in with basketball, particularly race is absolutely embodied by basketball from the Globetrotters to the City game, which is what I was following up.
Rick
So God love him. Wrote part of his book. The City Game was about New York Street basketball. We didn't really investigate it, but I said, Man, I want to see this. I want to see the cradle of it.
Todd
So how did you do that, Rick? You go up to Brooklyn in 74, the summer. How did you report that book?
Rick
What did you do? I had no idea what I was doing. First of all, there's no blueprint. I didn't know how to write a book. I didn't know what you did. I knew how long the book was. It wasn't like you should go online and say, hey, get all this stuff. Youtube video. I said, this is what you do, kid. Do this and do that. So I just had notebooks. I had those composition books, those cardboard ones. You all had blue or green scattered looking covers, and they had maybe 120 pages in it.
Rick
And I drew a line down it. And I would write down one column the next. Just my observation. What do you see? I'm walking up no Strength Avenue towards the park. Foster park. There's all these kids on bicycles zipping through the two wheelies. There's a broken glass in the gutters, there's old men passing around a bottle of wine in a sack. And then all of a sudden, this basketball court opens up this asphalt court, three of them. And it's like this Cactus. If I can use that word, it's music, yelling and screaming and pass the ball and all the noise of the clang off the rim and stuff.
Rick
And it's like I just walked into odds.
Todd
And there's something about the playground, too. I mean, obviously it drew you in the early 70s up in New York. You went back a couple of times for Sports Illustrated. And then the other thing that I wanted to ask you quickly about was in 2017 for the Sunshine. You saw a way that basketball fit into a certain community at Aura Academy in Chicago. And tell me about why you end up going to our Academy in 2017 to write about a basketball team that's really in the heart of all this poverty and violence in Chicago.
Rick
Yeah. Or is on the west side of Chicago Avenue. It's 4000 west. I want to say so. Anyway, you can look straight up Chicago Avenue to the Lake and look right at the Hancock Building. You're looking at it. But it might as well be another country. I had already written a story or a series about a park on the South Side that Derek Rose frequented in Englewood, which is again a violence just plagued area. It's called Murray Park, sometimes known as Murder Park. Derek made it out of there.
Rick
Somehow I wanted to see how I wanted to see the workings of that part. So then time went by, and there was so much killing, so much horror that how does any kid transcend this? How does he come out of this and play something as functional as a game of basketball and somehow make it literally? I mean, physically make it to school sometimes. So I talked to our prep writer, Michael O'Brien. Sometimes I said he would be a good coach. I don't want to go to the south side.
Rick
I don't want to do Semian or whatever. I want to go out west, be Marshall or somewhere else. And he said, you know what? His coach, he thought he named it you and gave reasons why I might not like them. This is coaching Lou Adams. Lou is a fiery guy. He's out of our Academy. And what they like about him is, he'll never lie to you. Okay, that's my guy. I called Lucid. Of all things. It always has to be your mental lucid. Come on up.
Rick
So I'm vetted with Lou Adam. He's a guy from Tunica, Mississippi. He had an outhouse. You talk about somebody from the Deep South didn't have plumbing, all that stuff. And here he is. He's a coach. He had stories. I didn't know it at the time, but he had been shot years earlier. He wasn't in a gang. He knows all of anybody's past. He was there at Ore. And he said, yeah, you can follow us. And I did. And unbeknownst to me, this team was going to win the state Championship.
Rick
I mean, I had no idea. None. Zero. I just a team. This is where I wanted to be. In the heart of the violence and the shootings and the gangs and all this. How does somebody transcend what's around them? And they win the state Championship? Yeah.
Todd
Our Academy goes on and wins the two a Illinois state Championship. And it's like you talked about Oz. It's like you're right there and this whole story unfolds of the success of this team. But really, what did it mean to the community? I think that's what it's all about.
Rick
I think it meant a huge amount. I hope people were dragged along with it for success. I hope the players work. I hate to tell you, but one of the guys I really like, it was a good guy who was going to junior College and was going to a four year College this year. I think he's going to be a junior. He got arrested for murder and the story he shot and killed somebody. But it was defense. Maybe he went a little too far afterwards, but it's just a horrible, sad story.
Rick
He got sucked in. He was trying to make it out. He truly was. And the full story, I hope, comes out. I hope they take mercy on him. I called Lou Adams, and he said, yeah, man, I'll keep you posted, but I hope the others can make it because the odds of me. I said my series, if I were a young man on the West Side, knowing what I know about myself in high school as a teenager, the kind of kid I was, I wouldn't have made it.
Rick
And I know that I feel that if you need something or somebody to help you out of this mess, who that person is. I don't know, Matt. It's almost an intractable problem, but, God, my heart goes out to every one of those kids on the team.
Todd
Well, it's an amazing series, and I really recommend people to go back and take a look at that. Ricky, go into this community. And like you mentioned the word C, you're looking to see something beyond just what's the obvious, right? What else is going on? And I think about my time in sports and people would joke, oh, you're in the toy Department, and it's kind of a put down thing. But really, your career has proven that to be a fallacy, because you've done all the reporting, you've built, the relationships, you've found the facts, and then you had the insight to bring some light into something so we could see it as readers.
Todd
And that's why I always had a lot of respect for what you did. You saw more than what was.
Rick
Thank you, Todd. You were in it, too. And you know what, people. It's easy to call the toy Department. I think you might call it the political writers or in the toy Department. Think of what we covered in sports, the great racial awakening in America. What else, when they talk about the Globetrotters and the integration of the NBA, Jackie Robinson, where did that happen? That was sports. Mohammed Ali, sports talk about contracts. You talk about fairness, you talk about exploitation, you talk about transcending things to be better human beings, the good part of sports, all those things.
Rick
We're right there in front of us. The game is obvious. I mean, the games there, and sometimes the games are enough to talk about. But the ancillary stuff. That's what always fascinated me. The people, the social movements that are going on. Look at Colin Kaepernick, that's football that started the whole Black Lives Matter thing. So I've always been happy to be in sports, never felt constrained by it at all the parameters out there, how far you want to take the steaks and put them out there?
Rick
That's what you take. Well.
Todd
And if you have people like Lou Adams or even Michael Jordan, for that matter, if they'll let you in. If they'll give you the access to take you into their world, then you can help others see it, too. And it's been quite an adventure, right?
Rick
Yeah, it is. I think part of being a writer. If you want to do Generalism and what we do what you did, I think you have to learn how to deal with people, to understand and to make them like you. If you will. Nobody wants a jerk hanging around with them. Just be somebody that they don't mind having around. Even if you don't say anything, you're just there. You watch them. They let you observe. And what happens happens all around. You ask the right questions.
Todd
Be curious, right?
Rick
Be curious. Yeah. That's it. Then be curious.
Todd
Curiosity can take you a long way. Well, it took you here to press box access, and we really appreciate it because you got plenty of other things you could be doing. But to spend some time and talk about your career and the people and places you've been, it's been a real treat, Rick. I really thank you for your time.
Rick
Well, thank you. Enjoy it great talking to you. Thank you.
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