Playing with Pain

Pettis Norman was 11 when he stood in the shade of the tree and watched those bad-ass boys with that weird-looking ball. It was the first football he had ever seen. One of ten children, the son of an impoverished black sharecropper, Pettis could not understand why they were fighting so hard for that piece of leather.

He had five miles yet to walk home from school, across the tracks to the rough side of Charlotte, North Carolina, but the game and the laughter and the ball now had him intrigued. Each afternoon for the next three days, he stopped at the park and stared, absorbing every move. When he finally joined in the game, he caught on quickly. Now the has beginning to understand.

The bad-ass boys stared as the barefoot newcomer streaked across their field, dodging them and the broken ground. They had never seen anyone so fast and so agile. Many years later, there would be times when Pettis Norman would sob with pain and regret that he had ever stopped at that park.

•

By the time he was ready to graduate from high school, Norman was a handsome, trim young athlete. But with his father dead, he was the sole means of support for his ailing mother and the young members of the family. He worked all his spare time in the Esso station down the street from his high school. As graduation approached, he decided to join the Air Force.

He was washing old rags in the back of the garage when the coach for Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina drove up at the front to fill his sparkling blue 1958 Bonneville with gas. One of Norman's friends worked the pump for the coach and asked him what he was doing in town.

Recruiting for the college, the coach said.

"The best football player in the state is out back," Norman's friend boasted.

"Well," said the coach, laughing, "bring him out here."

At first, neither he nor Norman took the encounter seriously, but then, a few weeks later, the coach offered Norman a football scholarship. It proved to be a smart move for both parties. Norman was small-college All-American his senior year and, in his entire college career, dropped only one pass.

He majored in physical education and excelled in science. With a few more credits, he could have had a premed degree. Pettis Burch Norman was the only child in his family delivered by a doctor, and he was named for that physician. Like his mother, he was in awe of the medical profession.

But he was also in awe when the front-office man from the Dallas Cowboys sat across the table from him in the Charlotte café, thumbing a stack of 500 one-dollar bills. It was more money than Norman had ever seen.

"That's just the bonus," the front-office man said.

Norman's mind raced and he couldn't stop himself from grinning. "Just a bonus?"

"We know your mother's sick and you've got a lot of doctor bills."

So, after graduating, Norman turned pro. Beginning in 1962, he played eight years with the Dallas Cowboys and won the city's heart. He had his share of pain, of course--a separated shoulder, broken bones, sprains, torn muscles, nagging knee problems--but he accepted them as part of the exercise. He was renowned for his ability to play with pain and he liked that reputation. He liked the praise from his teammates and the roar from the crowd. But his left hand had been smashed so badly so many times that his third finger now grew out at a weird angle from a grotesque hump that had once been his knuckle.

By 1970, it was becoming increasingly hard for him to crawl out of bed in the morning, let alone take those first few steps. The nights were as bad, often worse. But Norman was a man now, a professional football player, one of the best. Strength was all that mattered. Pain could not count.

He worked at a bank in the off season. A feeling in his gut somehow told him he was about to be traded when coach Tom Landry walked up to him at the bank one summer afternoon. Even before Landry spoke, Norman's only questions were where he was going and why.

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It was during a pre-season game of 1973, for all intents a meaningless match-up between San Diego and Los Angeles. Johnny Unitas was in the twilight of his career, throwing a few final balls for the Chargers. Norman was one of his prime receivers, yet he wondered how much longer he himself had left. He was beginning to dread the future. But on that golden afternoon in Southern California, the crowd roared and Norman felt good. He leaned into the huddle and his mind snapped into gear as Unitas called the play: "Red right, fire forty-nine, O, Y across, wing drag, X fly."

It was Norman's play and he ran to the line of scrimmage. On the last hut, the backfield split, the line faked a running play and Unitas dropped back. Norman had already streaked out between the Rams' linebacker and defensive end. He was eight yards out and turning back inside when Unitas unleashed the ball--an easy catch over his left shoulder. But at that same moment, a Rams defender broke free, read the play and headed straight for Norman, hitting him in the chest with his helmet, knocking him unconscious and grabbing his left leg. As he blacked out, Norman felt a strange, twisting sensation in his left knee. Still, he tried to dive and crawl after the ball, which now was bouncing away. The next thing he remembered, he was on the side line, the doctor and the trainer hunched over him. When he tried to stand, his leg gave way.

The San Diego physician, Dr. E. Paul Woodward, examined Norman's knee after the game and again the next day. It was badly bruised, he said, and he told him to rest it, then cleared him to play again. Woodward told Norman it was a bruise each week that he played until the end of the season. Then he told him the knee needed surgery.

"About two days after the operation," says Norman, "he came to see me in the hospital and said he had cleaned a lot of old gook out of my knee and that I was going to be better than new."

Even before Norman left San Diego for the off season, his knee swelled up like a small watermelon. The doctor drained the knee, injected it with cortisone and sent him home. A month later, he was in Chicago at a Players Association meeting. Twice in 48 hours, his knee swelled again. The first time, he hobbled down to a cab and rode across town to the Chicago team doctor's office. The doctor drained his knee and sent him back to the hotel.

That night, Norman lay half naked on his hotel bed, unable to draw a sheet over his body because the weight of it was unbearable on his knee. Awash with sweat, quivering and moaning with pain, he watched the knee swell once more. His hands shook as he dialed the airline and booked a seat on the last flight home. Slowly he dressed, checked out of the hotel and took a cab to the airport. He stumbled out of the taxi and started for his gate. Finally, the agony overwhelmed him. His knee was so large now it was bursting at his pants. He stood trembling, then started to cry.

He wished he had a gun or a knife. In the middle of a crowd in O'Hare airport, Pettis Norman desperately wanted to kill himself. It was the only time in his life that he had even considered it. Now it seemed the only solution. Fighting the tears, he slowly found his way to the plane.

The knee was infected, the doctors said. The problem could be solved with drugs and an immobilizing cast.

Norman did not report to training camp in 1974, because the Chargers had not sent him a new contract. He wasn't surprised, because he knew the games that were played at contract time. He played them himself. Finally, however, he gave in and called the Chargers' head office. An official first told him the team thought he had retired but then asked him to meet them at their second preseason game in Houston, saying he could have his checkup there.

"You need another operation on that knee," Norman recalled the doctor saying. "Something's wrong with it. The Chargers told me they would pay for the operation if you would agree to retire."

"Wait a minute, doc," Norman said. "This isn't an either-or situation. I don't know that one has anything to do with the other."

"Well, Pettis, I don't have anything to do with that. I'm just telling you what they told me."

Norman never played football again. Most of the time, it was doubtful he could have walked across a football field, let alone broken out of a line of scrimmage.

At best, he had a shred of cartilage in his left knee. His right knee had none. The bones in his legs had ground away against one another and his joints resembled chipped stones. Parts of the (continued on page 278) Playing With Pain (continued from page 160) bones were growing spurs as a hopeless self-healing mechanism. The insides of his kneecaps also were grinding away.

He sued the San Diego Chargers' doctor for malpractice but lost. Then the decision was vacated on the basis of jury misconduct. Affidavits showed that in the late Seventies, at least one juror didn't like the idea of a "nigger" football player suing a white doctor. The judge quickly ordered a new trial.

By the time Norman's story reached the courtroom the second time, the once-proud athlete was already a defeated man. Through both trials, he sat quietly beside his attorney, listening and scribbling an occasional note. But when a former Dallas Cowboys physician. Dr. John Gunn, was called as a defense witness, Norman practically fell out of his seat. His mouth dropped as he listened to Gunn answer the defense lawyer's questions. They were talking about a time 15 years before:

Q.: Did you conduct a physical examination of him [Pettis Norman in Dallas] and signed by you for the year 1963?

A.: Yes.

Q.: And what did you find in July of 1963, when you examined him?

A.: I found that he had bilateral chondromalacia.

Q.: How much disability did you find in the year 1963?

A.: Twenty-five percent.

Norman leaned over to his attorney, sputtering, but the lawyer's concentration was fixed on the Dallas doctor. Gunn went on to describe Norman's knees and what he said had been their degenerated state in 1963. He said he had examined them again in 1964 and found the left knee even worse. He said he had twice informed Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm.

In 1965, the right knee also was worse. Quoting from a warning to Schramm. Gunn read from a copy of a letter: "'This [right] knee should be watched carefully and very probably he should not run any excessive amounts other than it is absolutely necessary. He should probably be rested at least on each Tuesday of the week."'

"What?" Norman said. Disability? Rested? He wanted to shout a protest. "Why didn't someone tell me?"

According to testimony, the doctor thought as far back as 1964 that Norman's career was "in jeopardy." Asked by the athlete's attorney if the player had been given cortisone injections in his knees so he could continue to perform, the doctor first said no. Then:

Q.: The result of the cortisone injection was to take down the inflammation and permit him to play on a diseased joint, wasn't it?

A.: Yes, sir.

Earlier, the attorney had asked the doctor:

Q.: Was that [the disability discovered in 1963] communicated to Mr. Norman?

A.: I don't think so.

The Dallas doctor's testimony worked well for the San Diego doctor. It clearly showed that Norman had knee trouble long before he went to the Chargers, so San Diego's doctor could not be held responsible for his medical problems. The suit again was dismissed and Norman returned to Texas, where he bought into some hamburger stores and worried for months whether or not he should sue the Cowboys and their doctors, the people who, according to the testimony, had not told him about his knee problems in the first place.

Ultimately, Norman did decide to take the Cowboys to court for physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, disability and loss of earnings and earning capacity. The case is expected to go to trial soon, and it could change the face of football.

•

At the heart of the Pettis Norman-Dallas Cowboys lawsuit is one question that threatens to overturn a basic philosophy, a way of life in the National Football League. Play with pain. Win at all costs. Don't ask questions. Live by the Vince Lombardi philosophy: "No one is ever hurt. Hurt is in the mind." If Norman were a lone voice in a forest of mute John Wayne types, his contentions would be easy enough to dismiss. But such is not the case. Behind the macho façades are a multitude of serious questions, many of them recognized--if reluctantly--by some of the biggest, bravest names in the business.

Everyone agrees that the basic rule in football is that you just don't play if you're not prepared to play with pain. No argument. The disagreement comes when the line must be drawn between absorbing punishment and risking an aggravated injury that could lead at least to a lifetime of agony and at most to crippling effects. It is there that the role of the supposedly objective team doctors comes into focus. Are the doctors supposed to treat the players as patients and help them recuperate--or are they there to patch them up enough to struggle onto the playing field the next week? Depending on whom you ask, team doctors are the most dedicated, selfless collection of human souls since the good Samaritan, or they are the most unethical horde of butchers (continued on page 285) that owners and management can buy.

San Diego attorney Robert Baxley spoke for many when he said, "A cancer exists in the N.F.L." It was Baxley's line of questioning during depositions for another N.F.L. case in 1973 that helped reveal some aspects of the football drug-abuse scandal at that time. "Without the use of numbing drugs and loose medical treatment," he said, "professional football could not exist in its present form."

Dan Pastorini knows that story. He had often wondered why he played football when his whole body ached and it was tough just to make it to the locker room before a game. His ribs had been broken 34 times. On an X ray, his calcium deposits looked like ornaments on a Christmas tree. At one point, three ribs on his right side were mangled. Two were snapped in half. Another was drooping down inside him, connected only by a sliver of bone.

The bursa, the source of lubrication for his right elbow, was chronically burst. The last time, the doctors had drained a tenth of a quart of blood and muck from the joint. He had long ago lost the ligaments on the outside of his right ankle, and he was secretly battling a rare disease in a nerve that controlled the muscles in his right shoulder, his throwing arm. His left knee was locked in a brace and his lean body was covered with a mass of purple-and-yellow bruises.

He stretched out on the table in the locker room and the doctor inserted the first shot of novocaine into his side. Eleven more injections would follow, each one deeper, until the point of the needle reached to the wall of his lung. Minutes later, numbed and wearing a specially designed flak jacket, the then-Houston quarterback was ready for action, ready to earn his $379,000 salary. At half time, he would crawl back onto the table for 12 more injections.

In fact, at 31. Dante Pastorini is a paradigm of the play-with-pain philosophy. At 6'3" and a little more than 200 pounds, he is considered a vulnerable figure, but few players in the league have shaken off more injuries and agonies to take the field than he has. As far back as 1970, his senior year at Santa Clara University, he was known for that attitude. He played the last three games of that year with torn knee ligaments. "I was desperate," he says. "I wanted to play professionally. I wanted to show the scouts I could do it, play football." And he did, too. He was named Most Valuable Player in the East-West Shrine game and Most Valuable Offensive Player in the Senior Bowl.

But now the years of pain show in Pastorini's generally friendly, open, California-handsome face. They show most of all in his eyes. "Sometimes I wonder why the hell I do play with pain," he says, frowning with concentration. "A lot of us aren't in it just for the money. We're not glorymongers. We're not Joe Macho. It's just an inner drive, an inner satisfaction--a harmony that only you yourself know. If I died playing football, or if I died in a race car, or if I died saving the life of a friend, I'd die happy--because I was doing something I wanted to do."

But in the 1979 season, before he was traded to Oakland, Pastorini was fighting not only the pain but also many of the Houston fans. The rumors spread daily. He gets hurt too much. He's getting old. His arm's gone.

Nursing a bruised shoulder along with his other wounds, he sat in coach Bum Phillips' office. He wanted out of the game completely. "That's it," Pastorini said. "I've had it. I can't do it anymore. I quit."

Phillips would not listen. He persuaded Pastorini to keep playing and, in turn, Pastorini dedicated his game to the coach he had grown to love--a man he considered a father figure. Ten months later, when Phillips called Pastorini at his parents' home in San Jose on a rainy Friday afternoon in March to tell him he was about to be traded to Oakland, Pastorini was both elated and depressed. At least he could then say what he wanted to the dissident Houston fans: "Fuck you."

Former pro Pete Gent, the author of North Dallas Forty, believes the very thrust of football's objective has been warped. "The idea was that athletics was for the athlete. It improved the individual. It was meant to improve social relationships within the team."

Now, says Gent, it's the audience that matters. "The player is performing for the audience rather than communing with himself as an athlete and a human being. We're now saying the show must go on and that we're going to have casualties. As soon as one athlete starts to suffer, we must start considering the game again. The concern is, 'Does the audience enjoy it? If the audience doesn't enjoy it, there's no value to the game."'

The question falls back finally not only to the coaches, owners and players but also to us, the sports fans. How much do we have the right to expect from our modern-day gladiators? How much punishment and injury is enough?

Some of the answer came when Captain America, Roger Staubach, retired from Dallas earlier this year. Part of Staubach's rationale was a series of concussions he had suffered during the 1979 season. In effect, he was saying that five concussions in one season were enough for a 38-year-old man. But even Staubach himself downplayed the importance of the injuries, despite the fact that medical tests had shown he had lost reaction in his left side. Staubach made up his own mind. If he had listened to some of his coaches, doctors--and, above all, the fans--he'd still be on the field, facing a more serious injury.

An injury, maybe, such as the one Mel Renfro sustained. Renfro was a professional football player for 14 years. He was picked for the Pro Bowl ten times and named N.F.L.-N.F.C. All-Star in five seasons. From the moment he tried to struggle out of bed in the morning, Renfro forgot what it was like to live without agony. He grew to think it was normal to take sparrow steps on his way to the bathroom, stopping in doorways to brace his body against the stabbing pains. Optimistically, he always told himself it was the worst he was going to feel all day. It had to get better. Sometimes it did.

In the first game of his third season with the Dallas Cowboys, Renfro caught a pass from Don Meredith and ran 30 yards. He was past the mass of diving, clawing bodies and was two strides from a touchdown when one last New York Giant defender dived at him from behind. Renfro says he will always remember the sound that he heard from his right ankle.

The team doctor diagnosed the injury as a sprain. Five weeks later, he sent Renfro back into the game. The next season. Renfro was returning a kickoff when he was tackled and heard the same sharp popping sound from his bad ankle. It would be another year before he was told what really was wrong, that surgery was needed to remove a mass of chipped bones.

The next time, it was his left knee. Bruised, the doctors said.

As the years passed, Renfro started slowing down. "You're getting old," a doctor said.

It was after he helped win the 1977 Super Bowl that Mel Renfro retired, 36 years old and barely able to walk up a flight of steps. It's now more than two years since he quit. Some of the aches and pains have gone. He has no regrets that he played football; he just wishes someone had told him what was really wrong with him, so he could have made his own decision. He wishes that because he has just been told that for the past five years, the cartilage in his left knee has been grinding into sawdust--ever since it was "bruised."

•

Predictably, a high-ranking N.F.L. official defends the manner in which team doctors treat players. But despite the deluge of self-righteous answers and explanations, it becomes increasingly apparent that all is by no means well in pro football. There is no standard for medical care or treatment throughout the league and studies of injuries incurred are rare. Yet statistics show that by the end of the 1979 season, more than 17 percent of all professional football players were on "injured reserve."

The latest N.F.L. study of injuries was made in 1974 by the Stanford Research Institute. It showed that more than 13 percent of almost 1200 injuries ended players' seasons; more than a third caused them to miss two or more games. Twenty percent of all injuries were to knees, almost 50 percent to legs. And no similar study has been done since.

But statistics are one picture, human lives another. The most tragic victim of professional football in recent years is New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley, paralyzed from the neck down after he was tackled in a game against the Oakland Raiders. It was, most agreed, an awful accident. Then along came Jack Tatum, the Raiders' safety who had made the tackle.

In his now notorious book, They Call Me Assassin, Tatum paints a shocking image of the game. Saying that he wants to think his own tackles bordered on "felonious assault," he recounts a point-scoring system that he and another artist of the game played. The winner was the one who could come up with the most "knockouts" or "limp-offs." Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, says the question of blame in the Stingley incident is academic. He sees both Stingley and Tatum as victims of the system and the game.

Since publication of his book, Tatum has had time to reflect, and now he tends to agree with Murray. One morning last February, while sipping orange juice and dragging on a borrowed cigarette, Tatum narrowed his threatening eyes and said that football players are "exploited from the beginning."

"It starts," he said, "in college." There the pressure to play while injured is worse on the younger players. "They could make a decision not to play [in particular games], but there's so much pressure on them, they won't do it. It's pressure for your job, mainly. A young guy gets the chance to play, to start. Then he gets hurt. If someone comes along when he hasn't really established that position, the new guy may play better and the kid's on the bench again. The pressure comes from everywhere--the coaches, the owners, your teammates, the fans. But most of all, it comes from upstairs--the owners and management.

"You learn to cope with it in your head. I've seen a lot of guys who couldn't walk on Thursday go out and play on Sunday."

Speaking of the Pettis Norman case, Tatum said, "It's been happening for quite a while. A lot of team doctors are more worried about getting a guy out to play than about his welfare. I think that all comes down to the owners again. A lot of times, a guy will think he can't play, but the doctor says he can. Then, if he doesn't, he's out."

Why would a doctor forget his Hip-pocratic oath and ignore the welfare of an athlete? Tatum says the answer is partly money. "And the doctor is often caught in the middle. The owner wants the player to play. And the player wants to play."

Tatum says players should "not even be allowed to suit up" if there is a question about their condition. "It's too easy to be asked to go out--and it's too hard not to go."

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Dr. W. Norman Scott is a respected orthopedic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. He is the team physician for the New York Knicks, assists in treating the New York Jets and is a consultant to the Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma. Like Tatum, he believes that "part of the sickness" is that the athletes themselves are responsible for some of the pressure. Yet he does not understand "the antagonism and mistrust" that have developed in sports in recent years.

The situation has so alarmed the N.F.L. Players Association that officials there are studying a system under which a union doctor would be appointed in each city to oversee the players' treatment. He would have final say as to whether or not a player was fit to play.

"There are all sorts of pressures on team doctors and we don't think they should be in that position," says Ed Garvey, executive director of the Players Association. Of course, the proposed system would probably meet vehement opposition from the owners and the league.

The average team doctor gets about $5000 a season, generally on retainer, often with extra fees for surgery. That closely guarded figure hardly seems enough to buy a man's soul, but as Pete Gent notes and several in the medical profession agree, assignment as a team doctor is good publicity and inevitably boosts a practice overall.

Garvey discussed the problem with former U. S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, who was also a former U. S. Secretary of Labor. Goldberg told Garvey he had already wondered about the system. He said he was shocked when he saw a player hit on the head in a game, leave the field, vomit on the side line, then return on the next play. He asked a neurosurgeon friend if the player should have been allowed back onto the field. The answer, expectedly, was no.

Gent remembers visiting a pro team doctor's office one season and watching a score of high school and college students shuffle in and out with crutches and neck braces. When Gent took his turn, the doctor smiled broadly and waved his arm toward the waiting room. "I love football season," he said.

Dr. S. Harvard Kaufman is a psychiatrist in Seattle, and he has become recognized as an authority on violence in sports. His interest in the subject began when he saw a psychiatrist friend run onto a field in the middle of a little-league football game and abuse his own son because he had ducked an offensive player. Kaufman says good clinical psychiatrists and psychologists are needed but are practically unheard of in all areas of athletics. The players, he says, are like slaves on an auction block. "Gladiators in ancient Rome were never more viciously brutalized."

Kaufman made the same observations to a recent seminar of sports doctors at a conference of the American Medical Association. His address was greeted with a deathly silence.

Which is the way most football doctors greet anyone asking them to discuss their work or their attitude toward it. New York's Dr. Scott, however, speaks openly of the problem.

"First of all," he says, "football is 22 people trying to hurt one another--22 people who are very big, very fast and very coordinated. Just from seeing the New York Jets, I can safely say there is not one football player who, after the first scrimmage, doesn't have some pain someplace. From a physician's point of view, playing hurt should mean he can play provided he is not going to cause himself any further injury."

But Scott is not naïve. He knows enough to realize such is not always the case. "I'm sure it isn't. There's good and bad in every profession. If a particular team wants a front doctor who's going to inject and do everything else to get a player going, I'm sure it can find him. It doesn't surprise me that, in the line of sports medicine, you can get somebody who will--literally, as they did in North Dallas Forty--inject them up before the game."

So how much on track is San Diego attorney Robert Baxley when he says that professional football could not exist in its present form without the use of numbing drugs to keep injured athletes playing?

"I suspect, in a way, that's true," says Scott, "but it depends on what you call painkilling drugs. The anti-inflammatories, for instance, are not painkilling drugs per se. They decrease inflammation in certain areas, which [subsequently] reduces the pain. That's totally different from giving the same player morphine. You couldn't give a running back a high dose of morphine and expect him to function. The only thing you could possibly do is give him an anti-inflammatory [injection] to decrease the inflammation in the area that's hurting him. That in itself is not going to eliminate the pain, but it probably is going to make it more bearable."

Part of the problem, Scott says, is that football physicians seldom deal in black-or-white situations. "Everybody asks, 'When can he play? When can he play?' That's not really the question. It should be, 'When can he play so he won't do any damage to himself?' At that point, I turn it over to the player. He knows. He knows very well."

•

"You always play hurt," Pastorini says. "Playing injured is different. That's where the mind takes over. It's how much the mind convinces the rest of your body that you can do it, that the pain is not as bad as it seems. You'd be surprised at the power of the mind sometimes. When you get your adrenaline flowing, you forget a lot of things.

"Sometimes when you're 70 percent, you feel that, chemically, you can make yourself 100 percent by shooting yourself up or taking pills. You take that chance. But is that the player's fault? Should the pressure be put on the player--especially when he's only 70 percent and everyone knows it, and the guy behind him happens not to be as good as he is? Should the player have to jeopardize his welfare by going out to play? Or is it management's fault for not getting a guy behind him who's qualified? The answer is for every team to be like the Pittsburgh Steelers--they have great backups everywhere."

Almost everyone you talk with about the situation finally turns the conversation to children.

"I don't agree with the little-league program," says Pastorini, sitting in a darkened bar in San Jose, still wearing the black-and-purple badges of courage halfway through the off season. "I think it's too dangerous, number one. I think it puts too much pressure on a kid at too early an age. I don't think winning should be forced on a child."

The man with the reputation for overtaking life in the fast lane thumps the table as he describes a documentary film he saw on 60 Minutes. "There was this coach shaking the shit out of a kid because he had done something wrong. If I saw a coach do that, I'd get out of the car and beat the hell out of him. I don't believe in that. It's totally unnecessary. It's such a traumatic thing for a kid. Winning is stressed so much at that age. If he fails, it can screw up the rest of his life."

Pete Gent agrees. He says we are all responsible for the instilled attitude that athletes should shake off injuries and risk others for our entertainment. "Think of the little children all over the country watching television on Sunday afternoon, being told over and over again, 'That's a great hit. This is what a great man does; here's a great human being.' Now it's down to the level that even young athletes believe you're supposed to play hurt."

He cites the Coca-Cola television commercial in which the Steelers' Mean Joe Greene encounters a young fan in a stadium tunnel after a game. Greene is battered and limping one step at a time. "Goddamn," says Gent, re-creating what he says is the real message of the ad: " 'Sonny, listen. For this Coke, I'm gonna give you this jersey and someday, someday in your life, you may be able to beat the fuck out of yourself like I'm doing--make yourself into a total, fucking lunatic.'

"It's chilling," says Gent. "That's what it is."

Gent speaks from experience. He was severely injured in his earliest days as a professional. "You suddenly see what they think of you, so the first thing you don't do is ever show them when you're hurt. When they find out you're hurt, you say it doesn't hurt."

He did that as his knees disintegrated and chunks of bone the size of thumbnails broke off inside his legs. "I was surprised how I took pride in the reputation I got for playing with pain. I was surprised because I really knew how it hurt. I was there when I was crying myself to sleep. Then I'd go out the next day and tape myself from ankle to hip and do it all over again."

Why? Lamar Hunt, the millionaire owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, sees a simple answer. "It's an inbuilt pressure for players. They're employees and have to perform. If they don't play, that's not what they're being paid for."

Pastorini laughs bitterly. He was Houston's number-one draft choice in 1971. In the nine years he played there, football sent him to the hospital "maybe 20 times." He long ago stopped wondering if anyone really cared. Especially the owner of that team, K. S. "Bud" Adams, Jr.

"I never once got a phone call [in the hospital] from my owner, or a card expressing any concern for my well-being or anything else. The majority of the owners don't give a shit about the players. They really don't. It's the southeast corner of the ledger sheet. Money. That's all they give a shit about."

•

There is more than a little irony in the fact that the very future of the game could, in part, be decided in a lawsuit against "America's team," a lawsuit filed by the son of a black sharecropper from North Carolina who had once dreamed of being a doctor.

Norman's present attorney, civil rights activist Frank Hernandez, is a graduate of Texas A & M University, where he was Bear Bryant's freshman team manager and then Jim Myers' head manager for three years. Hernandez sees the suit as having broad ramifications. If he wins, he feels it will lead at least to larger squads, to allow more relief for injured players. It also could lead to stricter, enforced controls over medical attention. More importantly, he hopes that it will lead to a change in attitude toward the game.

On its face, the suit addresses the key question of doctors' responsibility. It charges that the Dallas doctors showed "wanton and willful" disregard for their physician-patient relationship. It says they informed the team but not Norman. Then it claims the team ignored that medical advice. Further, the case has been filed as a class-action suit, covering anyone who has ever played for the Cowboys. Mike Gaechter, Willie Townes and Leon Donohue, all former Cowboys, have so far joined the suit.

The team is fighting back. So are the doctors, Marvin Knight and John Gunn. They say in their filed responses that a physician-patient relationship "did not exist as a matter of law" between them and Norman.

The suit is a source of annoyance to Dallas coach Tom Landry. "The one unfortunate thing we have in this country today is that every time something happens, someone sues somebody. It really is a weakness in the country, not a strength. Not that a guy doesn't have a right to have that kind of legal action, but there are certain things you do that you know you're doing. You know the price you're paying and if you want to do it, you do it. Ten years later, you don't turn around and sue somebody because something went wrong."

Landry, who dismisses pain he still has from his own days as a New York Giant, becomes paternal when he discusses Norman as an individual. "We could have cut him because he couldn't play 100 percent or he wasn't well, but he was a determined guy and we went out of our way to help him become the player that he was."

Asked about Norman's contention that he was not told what was wrong with him, Landry says he should not comment on pending litigation.

The case is unusual because, although similar suits have been filed by other players, few ever reached the courtroom; thus, little precedent has been set., Houston Ridge, a defensive end for Sam Diego, sued that club in 1970, claiming he was so doped up on amphetamines that he didn't know when his hip was broken in a game. In the spring of 1973, he settled for about $300,000.

Ironically, Tatum says that Norman's suit could bring about changes he has long wanted. "When I came in," says Tatum, "we were playing with 47 people, a five-man taxi squad, and we played 14 games in the pro season. Now we're playing with 43 people, we're playing 16 games and four exhibitions, plus they've now added another post-season game. That's a lot more games and people are getting injured more. And we've got fewer people.

"The answer is, you put on either more people or fewer games. The owners cut the size of the teams to save money and they added more games to make more money. They talk about player safety. They ain't doin' nothin'."

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Pettis Norman walks slowly now and not a day goes by that he is not forced to remember the price he paid for football. His knees continue to worsen. Doctors have told him that one hope might be found in a new frontier of medicine--total knee transplants. They have warned him that it's only a hope. Pettis' 15-year-old daughter dreads her father's future and it angers her. She is also confused: She cannot understand how he can remain such a devoted Dallas Cowboys fan--even to watching the team on television on Sunday afternoons.

Last year, the Cowboys held their 20th-anniversary reunion in the middle of the season. It was a festive weekend and a colorful gathering of some big names from the past. Don Meredith was there; so was former Olympic gold medalist and Cowboys wide receiver Bob Hayes. Once known as "the world's fastest human," Hayes was on a weekend pass from the state penitentiary, where he was serving five years for selling narcotics.

Pettis Norman was not invited Naively, he wondered why, since he had been one of the original organizers of the reunion. He asked Tex Schramm, the Cowboys' general manager, Thinking about it later, Norman wasn't really surprised by the answer.

"You," said Schramm, "have impugned the integrity of the Cowboys."