What a Different Time

Imagine an American football player; an offensive lineman, let's say. He guards the quarterback against the oncoming rush and blitzes of the defense. A professional, he's able to make a living and get decent time off during the year, but maybe he's also discontent. Maybe he has bad feelings about the violence in his sport, about the glorification of that violence in an ever-increasingly violent world. Imagine a war of choice occurring, a war on the other side of the planet that sends young boys off to inflict damage and have damage inflicted upon them, and that this war has effected this player's thoughts on his professional sport.

A six year veteran, this player could be coming from today's world. What would that player do? Right now, I imagine he'd be hoping the labor strife gets worked out in time (go players!), but he'd probably swallow the pill and collect as much money as possible.

He probably wouldn't write a letter to the owner of his team saying:

Someday you are going to have to decide what is most important to you, the profit you make and the property you own or the establishment of a democratic egalitarian society. In such a society football as a professional sports activity will no longer take place and I hope that when the barricades are drawn you will be on the right side.

Rick Sortun, a six year veteran with the St. Louis Cardinals (now Arizona Cardinals), wrote that in a letter to Stormy Bidwell, the Cardinal owner in 1970. As you might imagine, most of Rick's story has been erased from the internet, and unless you happen to read an obscure interview from Dave Zirin's blog site with Dave Meggyesy, you might never know his story.

Rick left pro football and joined a socialist movement, working toward a socialist revolution in America. He played football from sixth grade until he left for political reasons even though he "hated playing football. I stuck it out...because it was the only way I knew to make $30,000 a year and still have six months off."

He was the leader of the progressives on the Cardinals, and helped mentor the aforementioned Dave Meggyesy, who left pro football in a slightly more spectacular fashion, with a tell-all book, but for many of the same reasons. Sortun and Meggyesy organized a petition for their Missouri congressman to vote against escalating the conflict in Vietnam, and got most of their Cardinal teammates to sign it.

A third player labeled a "pro dropout" at the time was Chip Oliver. He was a growing star who discovered LSD (I imagine), and left the game to move in permanently to the San Francisco commune he'd been living at and rediscover himself. Chip got fed-up with, among other things, his teammates asking him to hook them up with the hippie chicks he was living with. It was a far less political reason that Rick and Dave, but he still left.

All three were happy to rid themselves of the game. They are the three main reasons that pro teams began to do extensive background checks into their draft choices; they don't want to be blindsided by choices that undermine their investments.

In today's age you have Ricky Williams, a running back chosen first overall in the draft nearly a decade ago. Ricky, after failing a few successive marijuana tests, announced that he was quitting football and moving to India to work with a famous Yogi. He left for a year, maybe two, but returned, and is a starter with the Miami Dolphins.

Integrity and politics making athletically gifted young men behave against the flow. How refreshing.