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Article about Ironman Jim Marshall


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Jim Marshall: Chronic Pain

Kent Youngblood, Star Tribune

August 21, 2005 PAIN0821

Page: 1 2

 

 

 

First you notice the hands. Big. Still strong. When Jim Marshall reaches out to shake, his hand engulfs yours. His speed is what got him to the quarterback so often, but it was those big hands that so often dragged quarterbacks off their feet.

 

Today, though, Marshall's right hand is on a cane, which helps him get back on his feet.

 

It is a temporary crutch, the former Vikings Pro Bowl defensive end insists. The most durable man in NFL history is convinced he will jog again, maybe run. It's only another setback, and he's overcome a few.

 

How many surgeries? "No idea," he said. "I have lots of scars, though."

 

The price of a 20-year NFL career -- 19 as one of the most beloved Vikings ever -- continues to mount for Marshall, who pays a little every time he moves. He's had his left hip replaced, and his right knee. He's had multiple surgeries -- on both shoulders, ankles and feet. His neck is sore, and his back aches. All this pain now because he refused to acknowledge it as a player.

 

"Marshall didn't know when he was hurt," longtime teammate Bill Brown said. "You had to tell him."

 

You don't have to tell him now. He knows. Back in March, Marshall had surgery again, and this one was bad. He was to have four of his lower vertebrae fused, a process that would hopefully stop the pain that had been radiating from his lower back down his legs.

 

"They did an anterior and posterior fusion," Marshall explained in rather chilling detail. "They had to cut me open in the front, move all my intestines out of the way and work on my spine. Then they had to put me back together, sew me up, roll me over and cut open my back."

 

But Marshall said there were complications. Kidney failure, and he lost blood, pints of it. A clot moved into his lungs. "I remember the doctor saying he had good news and bad news," Marshall said, laughing again. "I said, 'Let's have it.' He said, 'The bad news is you have a blood clot in your lungs. The good news is it's not the first blood clot that goes in that kills you.' "

 

Complications compromised the surgery; the first time Marshall tried to get up, he said, "it collapsed. It went back to worse than it was before the operation."

 

And so the pain, the cane, the struggle to get back on his feet. After months on his back and weeks in therapy, Marshall thought he was making progress. Incremental, but steady. "I was getting to the point where I was looking at walking, unassisted. And then to go back to ground zero?"

 

It happened last weekend. Marshall was sleeping when the pain woke him. He found it nearly impossible to get out of bed. He wound up back in the hospital for most of a week, rendered nearly immobile by the pain.

 

But here's the thing: He would do this all again. Knowing what he knows, feeling how he feels, he would put on his helmet, block out the pain, and play.

 

He's not alone. Marshall, 67, is part of a generation of players who took the NFL from a Sunday diversion to a seven-day-a-week obsession. He played from 1960 to 1979, never missing a game. Former Vikings tight end Joe Senser, whose career overlapped Marshall's by one season, swears to this day he saw a tear in coach Bud Grant's eye the day Marshall retired. Marshall is an icon of a different era. Today he, like so many of his contemporaries, has found that all those games are still being paid for.

 

It is intuitive, of course. Play a violent game and pain will follow.

 

"We have all experienced it," said Senser, whose career apogee was affected by a knee injury early on. "It's fun to get together with all the old players. We all smile, we all tell everyone how great we're doing. We all know it's a lie."

 

Tim Irwin played 13 seasons with the Vikings, at one point starting 181 consecutive games at right offensive tackle. Today he is a lawyer in Knoxville, Tenn. He represents NFL players.

 

"You go to meetings with older guys and you think, 'darn, so and so looks bad,' " Irwin said. "Then you pass a mirror and you see you're looking more like so and so every day."

 

But start talking about old times, and Marshall's eyes light up. Talk about the future, and Marshall, his energy evident, says it will be brighter.

 

An iron will to compete

 

They've had one disagreement, one spat, one instance in which voices were raised.

 

Longtime Vikings trainer Fred Zamberletti and Marshall worked together for nearly 20 years and have known each other for more than 40. Listen as each tells his side of this story.

 

This goes back to a preseason game decades ago, back in the dark ages before the bright lights of "Monday Night Football." It was a time when NFL veterans got $32 a week to beat each other up in training camp, when rookies got to spend their summer vacations as tackling dummies, sometimes not making a nickel.

 

Marshall was building a streak of resiliency and toughness that has yet to be matched. Zamberletti, the only man who has been on the sideline for every Vikings game, was the trainer.

 

Marshall had separated a shoulder making a hit. What happened next depends on whose memory you believe:

 

Zamberletti: "He wouldn't come out of the game, and we had words. I remember him saying, 'You can't keep me from playing.' The coaches sat him down and oh, boy, was old Marsh mad. Of course, he played the next week."

 

Now, Marshall: He says he informed both Zamberletti and the coaches in language both precise and unprintable that there was no way they were going to take him out of the game.

 

Marshall laughed. "That," he said, "is what they paid you for."

 

This story rings true. And that's important, because sometimes you feel the need to investigate all the stories that involve Marshall simply because they tend to sound so apocryphal. As if it's not enough to report that as a defensive end -- right in the middle of the weekly mayhem -- he played an NFL-record 282 consecutive games. Bump that up to 409 if you include preseason and playoff games.

 

There is the story about Marshall rising from a hospital bed on a Sunday morning and driving himself to the game (true).

 

Or the one about how he played one week after tearing a knee ligament (true).

 

And then there's the supposed time he parachuted onto the Met Stadium turf before a game with the Green Bay Packers.

 

False.

 

"Hey, I hear that one from time to time," Marshall said, his high-pitched laugh echoing around his downtown Minneapolis loft. "Don't know where it comes from."

 

That's easy. When you're dealing with the NFL's iron man, it's easy to make the transition to man of steel.

 

That makes this day so, well, ironic. Marshall is talking about how he managed to stay in the game, but right now he is on the sideline.

 

"I laid there, on my back, for 3½ months," he said, recalling the weeks after his most recent surgery. "Twenty-two hours a day, getting up just to go to the bathroom. I had never done that before. I just completed the roughest four months of my entire life."

 

Now, Marshall is the first to admit that some of his pain is due to the way he lived his life. "My life is a contact sport," he said proudly. "Football was just a part of it."

 

But he doesn't regret his career, which he would play all over again.

 

With reservations, of course. Sitting in an easy chair, Marshall looked around his living room; it was in a state of flux; mementos, awards, pictures all leaning against the walls instead of hanging on them; Marshall, a man who spent his life on the move, is about to move again, to another loft, he said, soon. That he is himself unable to move like he wishes he could?

 

That's the price.

 

"I would love to go back to that time and go through that experience again," said Marshall, who left Ohio State early to play in the Canadian Football League. He played one year with Cleveland before coming to the Vikings in time for their inception. "I would like to correct some of the mistakes I made during that period of time. I regret playing in four Super Bowls and never having won. I remember the last one, the only game in my whole career that I didn't make a tackle or a sack. That affects me. But you can't change history. So you ask me, would I do it all over again? Yeah. It was the most fun I ever had in my life."

 

Occupational hazards

 

That fun comes at a cost.

 

A 1989 study done by Ball State University that was commissioned by the NFL Players' Association showed that 65 percent of players reporting suffered at least one major injury during their careers, and 46 percent cited injury as the reason for retirement. A follow-up survey done by the NFLPA in 1996 showed that 55.6 percent of players said they suffered from arthritis after their careers, compared with 10 percent of the overall population.

 

"The NFL alumni have an annual meeting, and you can see them hobbling around," said Dr. James Andrews, a well-known surgeon who has operated on countless athletes at his Alabama Sports Medicine & Orthopaedic Center in Birmingham. "Some have both knees and hips replaced, and they're just 50 years of age."

 

Perhaps no team was tougher in this way than the Vikings. Marshall stands atop the list of consecutive games played, though the record likely will be broken by the New York Giants' Jeff Feagles -- a punter. Fourth on that list is longtime Vikings center Mick Tingelhoff. The Vikings' toughness was forged early, then passed on later. It started with coach Norm Van Brocklin -- "The most brutal coach in the history of mankind," Marshall said.

 

"He would take us out and scrimmage us for hours in the morning, hours in the afternoon, just to see how tough we were," Marshall said.

 

Tough? Marshall and Tingelhoff are among the top five all-time iron men. Bill Brown missed one game because of injury in his career, and he's still chagrined about that. Milt Sunde, Karl Kassulke, Roy Winston -- one day this summer Zamberletti sat down to talk about his old friends, and his biggest fear was that he'd leave somebody out. Ron Yary, Grady Alderman, Carl Eller, Alan Page.

 

"Tremendous players," Zamberletti said. "They taught me how much the human body can endure. You'll never be able to replace those players. ... I see them today, and I regret that the medical technology wasn't there that could have prevented some of the residuals they have today. There are a lot of things I can't remember, but when those alumni get together, I can remember all their injuries. I can remember every one."

 

It was an ethic of toughness that Grant perpetrated. As a player, Grant was an NFL all-star who once played much of a season with a torn anterior cruciate knee ligament. He knows tough.

 

Atop it all was Marshall, who, along with Alderman, was a longtime team captain. They used to go to Zamberletti and ask if any players were taking too long to come back from injury. " 'If he is, tell us,' they'd say," Zamberletti said. " 'And we'll straighten that out.' "

 

And Marshall? Grant is not one for hyperbole, but when it comes to Marshall he practically gushes. "You're not talking about a mortal," Grant said. "Twenty years, he played nearly every minute. He had a bionic body, so to speak. But he accumulated a lot of scars that have shown up later in life."

 

They are scars Marshall feels every day but still wears proudly.

 

"We had a responsibility to our teammates; they depended on you to do a job," Marshall said. "We took that very seriously. I played with a broken wrist. My fingers have been broken so many times it's ridiculous. It didn't count. I remember setting Alan Page's finger once, between plays. It was broken, off to the side. I set it. I always carried some tape inside my helmet. I took it out, wrapped it up just in time to line up again. Gotta go -- that was our understanding, our philosophy, our esprit de corps. Pain and injury are two different things."

 

Today, pain is a very real thing for Marshall. But he would line up and volunteer to do it all again. He is, as he said this week, a Minnesota Viking for life.

 

"Maybe I would have taken better care of my body," he admitted. "But, to me, it is such an important part of life that I lived. I can truly say that I had the highs and the lows that few people on the face of this Earth have had."

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Marshall stands atop the list of consecutive games played, though the record likely will be broken by the New York Giants' Jeff Feagles -- a punter.

 

940768[/snapback]

 

 

 

:D

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:D

 

940782[/snapback]

 

 

 

 

 

:D

 

On a serious note those guys that played back then, did it strictly for the love of the game and not for the money. At least the players who retire today can live a pretty good life. I am sure most players during that era are in the same boat.

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Great read Mike, thanks! :D

 

Nagurski was another knucklehead that played both ways. :D

 

The true meaning of real men.

 

Today (or lately) you watch people like Deon Sanders fall down 5 yards before he encounters any type of contact. You touch a receiver and it's a first down from the spot of the foul. :D

 

Still the absolute best game there is, but even with all the hype about how violent it is and how terrible people are like the Raiders D or the Broncos D, it doesn't even come close. Guess that's why I laugh so hard when people here start saying those things about how horrible some players are. I'm not advocating that anybody should intentionally hurt another player, i'm just saying it was a completely different game 40 years ago.

 

Thanks again for the post!

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