Whenever anyone asks my opinion on the greatest football player of all time, my answer is always the same and almost always surprising.
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This all comes to mind because Butkus has been in town recently promoting his autobiography, Butkus: Flesh and Blood. It’s his second book, but the first, Stop Action, which dates from his playing days, was a sort of week-in-the-life along the lines of Vince Lombardi’s Run to Daylight. Flesh and Blood is a surprisingly fluid read; in fact, when he writes about almost flunking out of freshman rhetoric at the University of Illinois and hails a certain Miss Watt for improving his prose, one would be tempted to nominate this Miss Watt for a Nobel in literature if journalist Pat Smith weren’t given such prominent credit as cowriter. In short, the writing appears to be mostly Smith’s, and as the book advances through Butkus’s playing days it seems to rely less and less on his memories and more and more on newspaper clippings. His family life is given short shrift, and it comes as something of a surprise when his wife, Helen, gives birth to their third child more than halfway through the book after nary a mention of the first two. But Flesh and Blood is worthwhile for Butkus’s version of his rough-and-tumble childhood on the south side; for the inside story of his battles with George Halas and “Needles”–team physician Theodore Fox; and, most of all, for the theories behind his intensity, his concentration on the tiniest details of his opponents–their looks, their body language–and his conscious use of intimidation on the field.
What’s surprising about Flesh and Blood is Butkus’s apparently sincere discomfort with his current status as a legend. After his playing days, he writes, “the stories of my exploits on the field began to grow and take on a life of their own. Friends of mine would ask about things that occurred during my playing days, things that seemed absolutely preposterous….
Oddly enough, in Flesh and Blood Butkus recalls a similar fake-punt play run by Doug Buffone a few seasons earlier but not his own run against the Lions, though it was the only rushing attempt of his career. I know that it was his only rush and that it went for 28 yards from consulting the new Total Football, the long-overdue attempt to collect all NFL statistics into a single volume.
