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You Call THAT a Personal Foul? Sissy!

For the second time in three years, a Sports Illustrated poll of NFL players named Patriots' safety Rodney Harrison as the league's "dirtiest" player. What a weenie age we live in. Calling Harrison "dirty" is nothing but grade inflation and a distortion of the word's true meaning.

To paraphrase a famous quote, I know dirty players. I grew up watching dirty NFL players. At least one dirty NFL player was a friend of mine. And Rodney Harrison, sir, is no dirty player. If he's the worst pro football has to offer, the league is operating under standards of sportsmanship better suited for a cricket Test Match.

Harrison is an extraordinarily aggressive and hard-hitting defender. Ergo, he's often on the nanosecond's edge between legal and illegal hits. The penalties Harrison draws when he falls off the edge aren't a feature of his game-they're inescapable bugs, mistakes that are a natural byproduct of the way he plays. Harrison admits his personal budget his a line-item for NFL fines, and there's no denying some of his penalties and collisions are, at the least, creative. But they seem to stem from the flow of a game and the inherent violence of the sport.

Ripping off Hines Ward's facemask was a flagrant foul. Was it dirty, or a natural outgrowth of a day's worth of collisions between two very tough hombres?

To me, anyway, the word "dirty" means a player who breaks the rules in the deliberate attempt to inflict bodily harm on the opposition, or cheating as one's ONLY means of competing. In Harrison's time with the Pats, I've seen him deliver more than a few late hits, but I can't recall any which appeared to be an idea he had before the play began.

Dirty means Conrad Dobler, poking fingers in his man's eyes and spitting in his face for a capper. If I'd voted in the SI poll, my ballot would've gone to the Denver offensive line. The Broncos highly effective cut blocking scheme depends on play designed to create the threat of injury. Hitting guys real hard while drawing fouls as the cost of doing business isn't the same thing at all.

Not to date myself, but yours truly has been watching pro football way longer than the players SI polled have been alive. That's a mixed blessing, but it does mean I came of age with the game in the early and mid-'60s, a/k/a the Golden Age of Dirty Football. What Harrison does today would've qualified him for the Lady Byng back when LBJ was in the White House.

The Pro Bowl defensive back of my youth was the Eagles' Tom Brookshier. Brookie was neither particularly big, strong, nor fast. Nevertheless, receivers found it most difficult to get separation from him. This was no surprise. Brookshier usually had both hands inside their shoulder pads.

Any football fan wishing a delightful and terrifying half-hour should spend the time chatting with Deacon Jones. Jones was one of the top three defensive linemen in history, and there's nothing he likes better than recounting the various moves he laid on enemy blockers. These stratagems, most of which were perfectly legal at the time, woudn't just get Jones penalized today. He be en route to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes.

Were players more sociopathic back then? Naah. They were, however, less scrutinized. Instant replay was in its infancy. Games were telecast by maybe three cameras, and none were focused on the mayhem in the pit. There was even one fewer official on the field until 1965.

There were fewer rules for those zebras to enforce, as well. The face mask was in common use by the mid-50s. Grabbing the fack mask did not become a penalty until 1962! If players could get away with more legal assault, it stands to reason their ILLEGAL hits were correspondingly more atrocious.

Since the NFL hates its own history, and operates on the principle that today's game is always the most and best ever in every respect, younger fans might not believe modern players are relative models of on-field decorum. I refer them to the following reference materials. Steve Sabol of NFL Films has a clip show devoted to outtakes from the organization's early days in the '60s, and a good part of the episode covers dirty plays. Nothing major-running a guy into the water table 15 yards out of bounds, knocking down a player from behind as he stood by a pile over a fumble on a play already whistled dead, that kind of thing. The kicker? We see the fouls, but we don't see any flags thrown. Nobody's seen more pro ball than Sabol. If he says the game was dirtier back then, he's got more credibility than any other source I could site.

Except for this one, perhaps. The Golden Age of Dirty Football was also the time when Esquire was the greatest magazine in American history. In September of 1965, it ran an issue devoted to the NFL, AFL, and the violence therein. The cover of the mag was a shot of a lone player (guard Darrell Dess of the Giants) kneeling in prayer. The title "God help this man, he's about to pro ball."

The part of the issue I remember most was a segment listing the top five NFL players in terms of pain, five who'd endured the most, and five who'd inflicted the most. List B was highlighted by Hall of Fame fullback John Henry Johnson, and the blurb by his photo contained the following anecdote.

Once during a game Johnson was driven out of bounds by one opponent, then hit by another well after the play should've been dead. So John Henry got up and whacked the miscreant upside the head WITH THE DOWN MARKER!

There's dirty football, folks. Harrison's just not in that league. He couldn't be, no more than a NASCAR driver could race in the protective gear of 1965. Players are much bigger and faster than they were 40 years ago, and if there weren't more rules more strictly enforced, fatalities would be a commonplace occurance on NFL Sundays.

If we're going to enforce the rules of the English language with similiar strictness, however, Sports Illustrated's poll draws a 15-yard walkoff for false marketing. It called Harrison the dirtiest player in the NFL when it meant to call him the most violent. That's not an insult, it's a tribute. It's why Harrison will himself make the Hall of Fame one day.

I hope during his induction weekend in Canton, Harrison, J.H. Johnson, and Jones get together and compare notes.

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:16 AM