Dr. Z Read online

  Contents

  Foreword by Peter King

  Introduction by Linda Bailey Zimmerman

  Editor’s Note

  1. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

  2. Centrique To Freaque

  3. Boxing Ernest Hemingway

  4. Journalism

  5. Super Bowl Memories

  6. Diary of a Madman

  7. All-Time Teams

  8. Urgent Dispatch from Comrade Kalugin

  9. Olympics

  10. Quarterbacks

  11. Wine

  12. Collecting

  13. Authority

  14. National Anthem

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Gallery

  Foreword by Peter King

  My first encounter with Paul Zimmerman (I don’t think he was in the “Dr. Z” realm then) happened in my first week as a pro football writer. This was in May 1984, after the NFL draft, when I was writing for the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Bengals had three picks in the first round of the draft. Pretty good haul, everyone thought. The Bengals had turned the first pick in the draft that year into a linebacker (Ricky Hunley), a defensive end (Pete Koch) and a guard (Brian Blados). We can now look at that haul and say: meh. But as a rookie beat man looking for guidance and a strong opinion about the performance of the Bengals in the draft, I called around the league for press-friendly GMs and zeroed in on one other person: Sports Illustrated football maven Paul Zimmerman, whom I’d read for years, going back to when the magazine got rolled up and stuffed in my dorm mailbox at Ohio University.

  I have no idea what Zimmerman told me when I reached him on the phone, but I do remember thinking he gave me a lot of time. Like 45 minutes. For some schmoe he’d never met, Zimmerman opened up his draft trove for me and just kept going and going. I was impressed. The guy who’d written brilliantly on the real Chuck Noll and the tortured genius of Al Davis and who explained the game better than anyone alive in The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football had that much time for a know-nothing rookie in Cincinnati.

  That’s sort of the foreword to this foreword. The reason why I’m bullish on this book, and on a man who has been silenced since a series of three strokes hit him in 2008, finally getting his words out is because Paul has so much to say. Sometimes I’ve liked it. Sometimes I’ve hated it. But Paul Zimmerman is the most genuine person I’ve met in 60 years of life. That’s Paul. One of the truly unfortunate parts of his affliction — he can hear and see and feel and taste, but he can’t speak or read — is that he always was the life of the party, he always could talk about any subject in any walk of life and he could read anything from a tabloid to Moby Dick, happily.

  But it is our great fortune that you get to read words about his life that he crafted in the last years before he was rendered speechless. When I read the manuscript a couple of years ago, I said to his wife, Linda, “We’ve got to get this published. We just have to.” Fortunately, Triumph Books loved it the way we did, and so here you are, the book Paul so desperately wanted to get in your hands.

  I worked with Paul at Sports Illustrated from 1989 to 2008 and I’ve got stories about him. Plenty. As I sat down and tried to figure what would give you the best sense of him, I had a very strange thought. Mock drafts. Every spring the magazine would have Paul do its mock NFL draft for the issue just before the real NFL draft. Near the turn of the century, I was doing a mock draft too … for the magazine’s website, SI.com. A mock draft, if you don’t know, is an exercise in futility. You try to predict, pick by pick, each one of the selections in the first round. It’s the impossible dream. The smartest NFL beat men might get a quarter of the picks correct after weeks of talking to the scouts and GMs and coaches about their plans for the first round.

  (Linda Bailey Zimmerman)

  This was a fairly fruitless exercise to me; I tried to be good, but I understood that a mistake on the second pick could have the kind of domino effect that would make the next 10 picks wrong. Just too many X factors that could mess you up. To Paul, it was a referendum on whether you knew your stuff. He would start working on it the week after the Super Bowl, and I’d always wonder why; most GMs wouldn’t have seen all the players yet, so how could they know? But every little nugget helped. Paul would work the phones, then buttonhole the decision-makers at the league meetings in March, then work the phones through April. Sometimes it paid off hugely. In one of the great mock performances in NFL history, he got eight of the first nine picks in 2000 correct and hit on Ron Dayne (New York Giants) and Chris Hovan (Minnesota Vikings) later in the round. A-plus.

  But in other years, we’d talk on the Sunday before the draft, the day his mock was always due, and I’d pass along a piece of information or two (such as: “Paul, Green Bay’s not taking Koren Robinson; guarantee it”), and he’d lapse into an angry string of this-guy-with-the-Packers-screwed-me-and-now-what-am-I-gonna-dos and feverishly go about adjusting his draft, getting back on the phone. What Paul wrote mattered so much. He was so principled about it.

  With that in mind, I will leave you with the five lessons I learned from Paul Zimmerman:

  1. Never go to the star with the mob around him in the locker room. Everybody’s going to have that stuff. Go get your own stuff, apart from the crowd.

  2. Always seek out the smart offensive linemen. “They know everything,” he once told me, “and nobody talks to them much because they don’t touch the ball. And they love to talk.”

  3. Make the extra phone call and do the extra interview. Read his stuff. Paul lived for details. You’re not doing your job if you file a story and think: I should have talked to the tackle who made the important block on that play. This wasn’t work for him. It was as simple as knowing when you’d completed the job and, if you had 27 interviews to do for one story and two for the next one, so be it. He just knew.

  4. Don’t be a slave to quotes. Too often, stories read like quote-transition-quote-quote, etc. Tell a story. You’re the writer. Write. His best stuff, far and away, is when he tells a tale about a play or a game or a person, written in his intelligently acerbic way.

  5. Compete. He’d be shocked to hear me say this because I doubt he ever said a word to me about it over the years. But every time he covered a game, he was going to write a better story than The New York Times guy. Every time he talked to Joe Montana, he was going to get better stuff than the ESPN people. Every time he did the mock draft, he was going to beat the good writers in Dallas and Green Bay. He was driven to do that. It was not something he ever had to say to me; I could see it in him. And I think of it to this day.

  Quite a mentor he was. In so many of us who do this work today, he’s a part.

  — Peter King

  Introduction by Linda Bailey Zimmerman

  I met Paul in March of 1995 when he came to Phoenix to cover the NFL meetings at the Arizona Biltmore. He was working out in the athletic center and cornered an employee, asking: “Who is that?”

  Paul and I spent the next two years dating long distance. He was in New Jersey, and I was in Phoenix. We’d meet in California, Sedona, Jersey. He was the most intriguing person I had ever met. Crazy … brilliant … wild … like two cats thrown into a pillowcase to fight it out.

  When we were apart, he’d write detailed accounts of his days. His letters always smelled of cigars and were always addressed to “The Flaming Redhead.”

  In ’97 we met in San Francisco for dinner at Masa’s and an overnight stay in the city before heading up to our favorite getaway in Mendocino. I knew I was getting weary of the back-and-forth across the country and I wanted to know where we were headed.

  The dreaded talk.

  “So Paul … what do you s
ee happening with us?”

  “Hmmm … ah … umm … well, I could see you moving to New Jersey and getting an apartment.”

  “And how much time do you see me staying in that apartment?”

  “Well, you could go and water your plants.”

  That’s it. I jumped up and headed upstairs to pack. I was heading back to Phoenix. There was no need to head up the coast. This guy was clearly bonkers.

  He followed me up the stairs and then sat on the bed.

  “Would you marry me?”

  “Well, I’m sure as hell not moving to New Jersey to water plants.”

  From that moment on he was totally onboard … totally committed. He made all the arrangements for our wedding and reception. Paul was so involved that he wanted me to take part in every aspect of his life and career. I went to meetings, games, interviews. It was a fabulous ride … with an amazing partner.

  I remember the interview with Johnny Unitas. Paul was invited to Johnny’s home outside of Baltimore. We were greeted by Johnny and his English bulldog, a big, laboring hulk of slobbering love. Johnny spent a few hours with us. He had me on the floor demonstrating plays. I kept thinking, Don’t ask me any football questions. God, I don’t want him to know that I know next to nothing about what he’s talking about. So I kept asking him questions. I remember when Johnny shook my hand, thinking that his handshake was a little weak. Later in the conversation he showed us how he had to wrap his hand around a golf club to get a better grip because there was just too much football damage. (This interview, by the way, led to the Sports Illustrated article, which is included in the chapter on quarterbacks.)

  Paul and I were together 24 hours a day. He’d work downstairs in his library, and I’d be upstairs working in my studio. If he hadn’t talked to me in an hour, or he wanted “another word for … ,” he’d call me. I found it very endearing. He was such a bull and so obstinate to the rest of the world but so thoughtful toward me. He never gave me the bluster. Truth be told … I think my red hair scared him.

  Paul decided to take a sabbatical at the end of the 2006 football season. He wanted some time to begin writing his memoirs. There were so many aspects of Paul’s life that many of his football fans knew little about — wine tasting, book and coin collecting, travel. He wrote and he didn’t start with any outlined plan or order to his recollections. He just followed his memories, and memories have a way of coming out in an odd order. He figured that over time all of his life would be covered. He didn’t realize that his time was limited. No one does.

  On November 22nd, 2008, everything came to a halt.

  A series of massive strokes will do that.

  His light was snuffed … his brilliance locked away inside of him.

  Paul cannot read, write or speak. He has no alphabet so he can’t type out words on a computer as Steven Hawking does. Not only is Paul physically disabled and in a wheelchair, but his world is also closed off.

  He suffers from profound aphasia and apraxia. It is even difficult for him to point to his nose. He can clearly understand where his nose is located, but the signal from his brain to his hand to point to his nose becomes scrambled.

  The toughest part of all of this? The brilliance is still there. He is still as sharp as a whip. He gets the joke before the rest of us do. He still suffers no fools.

  Every single aspect of his life has changed. We can’t even watch foreign films because Paul can’t read the captions. I’ve tried reading them out loud, but that didn’t work. His urge to collect is still strong, but now he’s collecting cans of soda and rolls of paper towels instead of miniatures and rare books.

  The best way for someone to communicate with Paul is to ask him questions that he can answer yes and no to. Even then he really has to concentrate, and sometimes concentrating so hard can lead to the wrong answer. We spend our days in an endless and confusing dance of pantomime.

  There are no words to describe the heartbreak and anguish.

  I went into action. Everything had to be adapted. I had to become Paul’s voice … Paul’s advocate. In a sense I became Paul. I found that I became more aggressive. I had to be the bull.

  It has taken years to find a balance.

  Just when we thought that life had thrown us enough challenges, we faced another. The home that Paul had loved for over 50 years betrayed him. It became impossible to get Paul from one chairlift to another, impossible to get him in and out of the shower, impossible to keep him safe.

  Paul ended up hospitalized — for the eighth time since his stroke — leaving him too weak to return home. He had to go back into Kessler Rehabilitation Center for three weeks. He has spent so much time at Kessler in both inpatient and outpatient facilities that he was featured in their annual calendar.

  As his stint in Kessler neared an end, it became evident that Paul needed a safer environment than his beloved home could offer. My sister and I went to a dozen nursing facilities, asking dozens of questions … and often leaving in tears.

  I figured that after eight years I was cried out. I was wrong.

  How many times can a heart break?

  We now spend our days together at an assisted living/nursing facility … and our nights separately. Life has its own cruel plan. But as Paul always said: “They’re not going to break me.”

  No, damn it … love will find a way.

  — Linda Bailey Zimmerman

  Editor’s Note

  Paul Zimmerman began writing his memoir in 2006 before suffering a series of debilitating strokes in 2008. Dr. Z: The Lost Memoirs of an Irreverent Football Writer is this unfinished manuscript in its entirety. When relevant, supplementary material from Paul’s SI.com and Sports Illustrated work has been added.

  1. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

  I have covered sports for 48 years and have been primarily a football writer for many of them, I have an entire room full of charts and old programs and a lifetime full of memories. I close my eyes, and a panorama comes sweeping across my brain. I am what is known as a footballhead.

  A few years ago, I had a dream. So vivid was that dream that I couldn’t shake it for days, and at odd times, I would catch myself committing parts of it to paper, and they took the form of football plays. Yes, that’s right. I dreamed about the X’s and O’s except that they didn’t line up into patterns that would be recognizable by today’s players. They were lined up in the single-wing formation.

  The what? You know, the single-wing; the run and pass tailback lined up deep, behind the center in an abbreviated shotgun; the fullback set a step or two in front of him on either side; the wingback on the flank and the blocking back up near the line, cruising like an H-Back or second tight end of today, searching for the murderous blocking angles. What was different, though, was that I had lined up the current Michael Vick of the Atlanta Falcons in that formation that hadn’t been regularly used in the league since 1951, and only by one team in those days, the Steelers.

  Vick was my pass and run tailback star in that dream, 254-pound T.J. Duckett was my fullback, also known as the spinning fullback in the old days, because he’d often do a half turn and hand the ball off or fake a handoff; little Warrick Dunn would be my wingback. I could just see him slicing through the weak side on a short reverse, behind the blocking of 250-pound Brian Kozlowski, my blocking back. And wouldn’t Koz have fun, leveling all those pigeons from the blind side?

  I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. The single-wing still was used by some successful college teams when I was in school. It was a thing of beauty when mighty Michigan ran it with Charlie Ortmann and Wally Teninga and Killer Kempthorn, formful and flashy when used by UCLA and at times USC — with a dazzling tailback named Frank Gifford — and downright nasty when you had to line up against it. Nope, no fun at all if you were a tackle, which I was, and you were playing in front of the imbalanced strong side. It felt like half a dozen different
people were either double-teaming or trapping you. Playing against the short side meant lining up over the weakside end … what a racket! It was like stealing. But that was another thing about facing the single-wing. The unfairness of it made you want to cry.

  After a few days, that strange dream became a reality in my poor, tormented brain. I’ve seen quite a few guys who would have been brilliant as run-pass stars, working out of a deep tailback set — Randall Cunningham, the two Youngs, Vince and Steve, and, of course, Vick. I remember once asking Vince Lombardi what would happen if a team all of a sudden surprised everyone by coming out in a single-wing.

  “It would embarrass the hell out of us,” he said.

  I put the same question to Bill Walsh.

  “Oh my goodness,” he said, “I’ve never thought of that. You could double-team right down the line, you could trap at almost every hole. My God, it would just chew up those three and four-man lines.”

  Then I took my looniness one step further. I called Dan Reeves, the Falcons coach, and laid out my entire single-wing scenario for him: Vick as the run and pass tailback, Duckett as the spinning fullback, etc. There was a pause.

  “What’s a spinning fullback?” he said.

  I knew that at that point, it was time to get a grip on things. I had gone over the line. I’d shed my writer’s garb and injected myself into the role of strategist, playmaker, God knows what. It had happened before but never to this extent. Usually it just consisted of material that appeared in print, observations that I’d made from the perspective of a former player, things that just were natural to me. My experience certainly had not been all-encompassing — the usual high school run, 3,000-mile trip to Stanford, thrust into the meat-grinder as a 16-year-old child and grimly hanging on for three seasons, never fully understanding the thrashing world of major college football that raged around me, a non-entity but still the possessor of knowledge that only can be gained by hours on the practice field. Then a transfer and the long trip back to Columbia, where I should have been in the first place.