Jim McMahon: An American Original
Published: 2/18/2009 4:27 PM
Last Modified: 2/18/2009 4:27 PM
You've never met anyone quite like Jim McMahon.
I met him this week at the Davey O'Brien Awards in Fort Worth. It will no doubt go down as one of the highlights of my professional career.
A little background: before I became a sports writer, I was a Jim McMahon fan. As something of a rebellious teen, I just always admired the way he never backed down from the establishment – namely the NFL. After he had been fined by the NFL for wearing headbands – at first, they bore the names of his own sponsors; eventually he just started making political statements – he finally wrote on one, "Rozelle", the name of the NFL commissioner. Classic.
Anyway, Monday night at the Fort Worth Club, as I'm waiting for the Sam Bradford press conference to begin, I'm interviewing Chuck Long, the former OU assistant who was fired in December from his head coaching post at San Diego State. In walks Jason White, and he and Long begin catching up.
While we're chatting, a stranger in a slick black tuxedo approaches. I first notice his fancy sunglasses. Then I notice his shiny, bald head. Then, as he shakes Long's hand and introduces himself to White, I notice his huge smile inside a graying goatee. Then, I notice a pair of bright white running shoes on his feet.
Although there is little resemblance to the Sports Illustrated poster I used to have in my bedroom 25 years ago or the cover of the autobiography "McMahon: The Bare Truth About Chicago's Brashest Bear", which I still have in my home office, I begin to understand that Jim McMahon has entered the room.
He raises his sunglasses and looks at me at of the corner of his eye.
"Who the hell are you?" he asks.
I tell him I'm a newspaperman from Tulsa. He looks at my notebook and says, "Oh (expletive), I'm getting the (expletive) out of here."
He's joking of course. McMahon never met a microphone, a camera or an audience he didn't like.
He begins regaling stories of dislocating his shoulder in high school, the woes of a teenager moving from California to Utah, his disagreements with the medical staff of the Chicago Bears as to exactly how dislocated his shoulder was (he said it used to slide out of socket when he threw a pass, and he'd painfully have to slide it back in after every throw). His left shoulder, he said, also was torn up from all the hits he'd taken. Together, they hurt so bad, "I can't comb my hair any more, so I just said (expletive) it and shaved it all off." His feet, he said, hurt too much to wear those shiny, hard, tuxedo-uniform black shoes that everyone else had on.
My favorite tale was that of one of his linemen blindsiding him after a play with a head-butt to the ear hole. He said the referee raced in and looked at them as if to reach for his flag, but, with a stunned look on his face, actually verbalized, "You guys are on the same team. . . ." Before the next play, while McMahon was calling an audible, he kicked the offending lineman in the butt as hard as he could, and the linemen looked back and cussed him out. The ref just shook his head.
McMahon's constant stream of expletives could embarrass a sailor, yet, in this setting, it almost never seemed inappropriate (his audience, remember, was two quarterbacks and a sports writer, and he had us laughing nonstop; had there been a lady in the group, I suspect he'd have reined it in).
Even in the '80s, McMahon was a breath of fresh air. I still remember the 1986 SI football preview cover of him sitting on top of Brian Bosworth's shoulders. What a pair.
In a world where political correctness causes everyone to hold their breath and just plain verbal caution has drowned every soundbite and suffocated every good newspaper quote, getting to spend 15 minutes with Jim McMahon was like taking a long, desperate pull from a scuba regulator – pure, sweet, lifesaving oxygen, with more than a touch of laughing gas.
– John E. Hoover
Written by
Guerin Emig
Sports Writer
