Mad Ducks and Houses of Spears: Karras and Suh

 

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The story of the NFL stretches back ninety-two years, to 1920. It has existed as long as the greatest lifetime of a man. The NFL’s most celebrated chronicler, Ed Sabol, is just four years its elder—and tragically, he has already outlived his equally celebrated son.

The history of the NFL is at at turning point: when Ed Sabol passes, the last person who can understand and share its entire story will be gone. Like baseball, the history of the NFL will have to be told through generations, kept and tended and groomed and passed down from parent to child; from scribe to scribe.

Earlier this week, Fredorrarci at The Classical wrote a fascinating piece about being a foreigner trying to understand baseball. This line struck a chord with me:

My principle sporting passion, soccer, seems to be in the process of shedding its memory, believing itself to be an invincible megabeing that sprung from nothing, fully mega, around 1992.

I have often complained about this phenomenon in the NFL, where anything that happened before Jerry Rice never happened. With every franchise relocation, with every schedule realignment, with every record broken our collective sporting consciousness distances itself further from its glorious past. History becomes legend, legend becomes myth, and things which should not be forgotten fall out of memory.

This week, Alex Karras passed away.

I knew him first as Webster’s dad, a wise and gentle giant with a quick wit and a big heart. I knew him second as ‘Alex Karras, Former Detroit Lion’ in sundry TV appearances, local commercials, and the like. I knew him third as Mongo in Blazing Saddles, and nary an internet scribe mourned Karras’s passing this week without quoting his immortal line. I knew him most recently as the ringleader of the Lions' rowdy band in George Plimpton's Paper Lion.

It is this amalgam of genial wiseacre, big-hearted big guy, and former jock who was anything but dumb that most of us deep in the football Internet streets will picture when we think of The Mad Duck.

It is a gravely incomplete picture.

"For me, Alex Karras will always be a pink giant with a towel wrapped around his waist. He will always have a scowl on his face, a cigar in one paw and a cold beer in the other."

--Bill Miller, New York Times Fifth Down

Karras was a fiercely competitive player, a relentless hater and destroyer of quarterbacks. Karras, as Greg Eno reminds us, once nearly killed his own quarterback, Milt Plum. Karras threw his helmet at Plum’s head after Plum cost the Lions a crucial win over the Packers with a late interception.

Karras moonlighted as a professional wrestler. He owned a bar—and not just any bar, a seedy joint with a sports betting ring with ties to the mob. After admitting he’d placed bets on the NFL, too, Karras was suspended for a year. During his suspension, he went back to pro wrestling and kept on doing his thing. When he got unsuspended, he went right back to humiliating quarterbacks, rookies, kickers and other “milk drinkers,” both on the field and off.

Karras is not in the Hall of Fame, despite his on-field dominance and off-field, well, fame. His flouting of law and authority kept him out of Canton, though I guess nobody told the San Jose Mercury-News.

NFL Films, with Steve Sabol at the helm, produced this feature on Alex Karras as one of the top ten players not in the Hall of Fame. Not only are there several hard-to-find-online clips of Karras’s game footage, but Gayle Sayers weighs in on whether Karras belongs in Canton:

“No. Alex Karras was a dirty football player.”

Watch the footage of the legendary Lions defensive tackle. See the athleticism. See the relentlessness. See him fly to the quarterback regardless of everything else. Hear the lamentations of his opponents about his dirty play. Consider the obvious intellect and humor, and the improbably spectacular array of headline-grabbing off-field exploits.

Sound familiar?

The day after Karras passed, Ndamukong Suh made headlines after being involved in yet another car accident—and, allegedly, another incident of losing his temper. Suh, I hardly need point out, is famously considered dirty. Famously competitive. Famous for losing a grip on his temper on and off the field.

Less famously, Suh is smart. He’ll discuss his vicious pursuit of quarterbacks with charm and loquaciousness. Talk to Suh for a few minutes, as I have, and you’ll feel he’s got a lot more to give the world than quarterback sacks.

Lions fans across the globe spent a lot of words, appropriately, praising good old Alex Karras this week. With Karras’s violent, vicious, dominant play a memory from another generation, and his post-sports career as lovable TV and film personality wore his famous rough edges smooth.

Lions fans across the globe also spent a lot of words dismissing Ndamukong Suh this week. They’re sick of his antics, sick of his temper, sick of dreading whatever his next crazy, embarrassing mistake will be.

I was sick of going 0-16.

It’s hard to think of pro athletes as human beings. But they are: real, complicated, multifaceted people with neuroses and complexes and contradictions and flaws and hopes and goals and favorites and family. They can be a vicious sonuvabitch on the field, and hug their mother off it. They can scream at people in traffic and donate millions to their alma mater. They can be a brilliant, generous, funloving guys and flip out when maybe your actions have consequences you’d rather not have to deal with.

Don’t let this incident be the last straw for you with Suh, or the Lions. He, and they, are young and talented and have the next few years to fulfill their potential. If, as I’ve implied, Suh could become the next Karras, get a head start now on accepting his flaws, so you can accept his many strengths.

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Haunted By Hope: The Ghosts of Lions Past

So here’s the headline on Tom Kowalski’s latest mailbag:

Three reasons why the Detroit Lions have 'real' hope this year

Those quotes express life as a Lions fan. When has our hope been real? When have the Lions truly been building something worthwhile? When has it all been a fraud? What’s the tipping point between being sure success is right around the corner, and living in a fantasyland?

History sees only the scoreboard; many insist it’s the only real metric. In this respect Jim Schwartz’s Lions have yet to eclipse Rod Marinelli’s, or Steve Mariucci’s. In fact, of the eight non-interim Lions head coaches in my lifetime, only Marty Mornhinweg and Daryl Clark failed to notch at least one 6-win season. At this point, the 2011 Lions are no different than the 2008 Lions, or the 2005 Lions, or 1998, or 1996, or . . . All rode on waves of exceeded expectations from the year before, all were full of reasons to hope, and all took a unexpected step back—or an unimaginable plunge into the abyss.

It’s hard to forget these hopes, these expectations; it’s the unexpected flipside of my role as the Flamekeeper. My constant vigil and long perspective allows me to accept harsh disappointment, internalize it, and keep cheering. Yet, when I’ve been convinced the Lions were on a forkless Yellow Brick Road to success, and they’ve failed, it’s stuck with me. These collapsed Lions teams, these unmade dynasties-in-the-making, they haunt me like ghosts.

In the NFL, success and failure balance on the edge of a knife. I’ve pointed before at October 2, 2005 as the day Mariucci’s Lions were undone. When five years of kitting the Lions’ roster together by the 49ers’ pattern unravelled:

It was Harrington’s first signature comeback drive, an efficient 81-yard march ending with a well-placed 12-yard touchdown pass—that got taken away by review. Despite the play being ruled a touchdown on the field, and the ball being in Pollard’s hands while he was in bounds, the ref overturned the call, and the Lions’ season momentum evaporated.

Obviously, Joey Harrington was not then, never became, and likely never would have become a great NFL quarterback. But flip that one bit from “0” to “1”, and instead of the Thanksgiving Day loss to the Falcons sealing Mariucci’s fate, it’d have been the first time the Lions dipped below .500. Yes, that’s right: if that touchdown doesn’t get called back, the Lions carry a .500 or better record into Thanksgiving.

Instead, it all fell apart. With fans publicly, and teammates privately, incensed with Harrington’s subpar play, Mariucci didn’t support his quarterback. Instead, he made plain his frustration with Harrington, and propped up Jeff Garcia at every opportunity. Mariucci’s failure to groom Harrington into a winner—and by extension, failure to make Millen look good—cost Mooch his job.

In an alternate universe somewhere, the Mariucci Lions worked. Charles Rogers’ collarbone held together, Roy Williams remained a terrifying big-play threat, and Mike Williams developed into a stalwart possession receiver [Ed.—Heck, that happened in this universe]. Joey Harrington became the triggerman for an offense bristling with diverse weapons. Space was opened up in the front seven for Kevin Jones to work his magic. A solid scoring defense, and exceptional special teams units, rounded out a team you could rely to win about 59.1% of its games—just as Mariucci did in San Francisco.

I loved that team. The hometown coach, the star wideout I partied with in college, cerebral, misfit quarterback I always said I’d be were I born into a 6’-4”, 240-pound body with a rocket arm. I believed that team was on its way—just as I believe this team is, too. I had more doubts in 2008 and 2005 than I have in 2011, but I knew the Lions were on the path to success. For every nice thing an analyst has said about Jim Schwartz, I can someone citing Mariucci’s track record, or claiming they’d run through a brick wall for Marinelli after interviewing him. We can wax philosophical until we’re blue in the face, and we can cite Statistical Great Leaps Forward—but if the Lions go 5-11 this season, all of the optimism this offseason will seem just as ludicrous as me claiming Mariucci was a bad call away from taking the Lions to the promised land.

Look, I know the Lions are doing it right this time. I know Jim Schwartz was an excellent hire. I know the Lions are going to make the playoffs this year. But don’t forget, Joey Harrington once knew he could play in this league . . . I and knew he was right.

“The Young Guns of The NFL.” Drew Brees, Michael Vick, and Tom Brady, all getting second billing to Joey Ballgame—it makes us shake our head now, but it made our heads spin then. Was it madness to hope the Lions were building something great? Foolishness? To borrow a phrase, audacity? Or was it something real, something true, unjustly undone by the pernicious whims of fate and a razor-thin margin for error?

I can’t mull this over without considering the reverse: what if the Lions are successful this year, and it’s not for real? What if fortune and variance smile on the Lions, and they make a deep playoff run—followed by years of mediocrity? What if this is all the prelude to another Fontes era, where tantalizing tastes of glory are chased with bitter failure, year after year after year? How cruelly will that Lions team haunt us?

As we speak of madness and fantasy worlds, let me quote the great Albus Dumbledore who said “It is our choices that define us, Harry, far more than our abilities.” It’s our choice to make of the Lions what we will. The battle between Optimists and Pessimists has raged on Lions message boards since there’s been an Internet, and it rages still. Anyone can point to any number of reasons to hope, just as anyone can point to any number of reasons to believe it “when they see it.” I choose to hope, and so that hope is real.

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