Darryl Stingley dead at 55

Pretty sad, RIP....

 

The man was a true Profile in courage.

 

Just heard the news. What a sad story, and a sad day. R.I.P. :sad:

 

RIP, always sad when someone passes

 

Rest In Peace Darryl.

 

RIP Darryl.

 

Sorrow not guilt

By Jason Cole, Yahoo! Sports
April 6, 2007

Nearly 29 years after the fact and NFL fans are still missing the point.

It wasn't Jack Tatum who owed Darryl Stingley an apology. It was the football-crazed world that owed Stingley.

Stingley's death this week at age 55 is another reminder of that inconvenient truth. During an exhibition game in 1978, Tatum, then a safety with the Oakland Raiders, hit New England Patriots wide receiver Stingley. The hit left Stingley paralyzed for the remainder of his life.

In the time since, Tatum's name has become synonymous with cheap hits, leading to the ever-increasing rules about what is legal. Never mind the fact that Tatum had been trained for years to dish out such hits. And never mind the fact that to this day, hits like those are what the fans love to see. Those bone-jarring hits are popularized by everything from video games to ESPN's insipid "Jacked Up" segment.

Despite those realities, Tatum has been vilified because of the result. Tatum was reminded this week about that when Stingley's death hit the news and regurgitated all the old arguments.

"They said on ESPN the other day that I hit him in the back and that's just a lie," Tatum said. "It's amazing to me that they lie like that when they can just look at the hit. They have it on tape."

Tatum was made responsible because no one else, much less the fans and the NFL itself, wanted to look at themselves and think for one second about what they've created.

"Yeah, everybody is supposed to play really hard and then get up at the end like nobody is hurt," Tatum said Friday from his home in Oakland, Calif. "It's unrealistic. If you want to play football for a living, you're going to get injured.

"If you went out worrying about getting hurt, you couldn't be a player. You certainly couldn't be a great player."

This isn't to say that Tatum doesn't feel bad about what happened to Stingley. But for Tatum, there is a line between sorrow and guilt.

"I feel sorry for what happened to him," said Tatum, who lost his left leg recently because of diabetes. "I tried to apologize to him a number of times, but people around him wouldn't let that happen."

Tatum said he spoke with Stingley's attorney several times over the years, but nothing ever happened. In a TV interview several years ago, Tatum expressed sorrow again. That part was cut out, Tatum said, because of his steadfast defense of the deeper issue.

Tatum, as he has said many times, will never apologize for how he played. He didn't then and won't now. He is defiant in that regard.

The fateful play with Stingley was one that Tatum had done thousands of time in games and practice. The quarterback dropped back, Tatum dropped into coverage.

The quarterback went to throw over the middle and Tatum sized up the play. He went for the pass, figuring to break up the pass or prevent the catch. Nothing more, nothing less.

The thing that so many people don't understand about football is that there's no half-speed once you put on the uniform.

That was drilled into Tatum's head by men like Woody Hayes, his coach at Ohio State, and then-Raiders coach John Madden.

"The only way to play for Woody Hayes was basic and tough," Tatum said. "There were no fancy West Coast offenses or anything like that. It was your 11 against their 11. Let the best team win."

In that era of football, which we glorify to this day, intimidation won. Little has changed over the years. Tatum thinks the game has gotten worse with all the rules about what's allowed and what's not though the basic premise is still the same.

"It's about who can hit the hardest," Tatum said. "That's what the game is about."

That's also what the fans expect when they pay for tickets or tune in on television ? big hits and intimidation.

Of course, the fans don't want to deal with the consequences of hard hits. Sometimes people get hurt. Badly hurt.


Jason Cole is a national NFL writer for Yahoo! Sports. Send Jason a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.

 

The word Patsy comes to mind. Poor guy. Sorry to be cliched but Pawns in the world of the NFL.
Doesn't sound like he'll ever get over it.

 

Interesting that Tatum claims that he tried to apologize to Stingley several times over the years, since (for example) on PTI Kornheiser and Wilbon insisted several times that he never did. If it's true, they owe him an apology.

What Tatum conveniently forgets to mention, of course, is that the rest of the NFL did NOT play that way at the time. He was an incredibly dirty player, and he took great joy in hurting people, as the titles of his THREE autobiographies show ("They Call Me Assassin", "They Still Call Me Assassin", "Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum", which were to a very large extent the same book printed three times). The play that caused Stingley's paralysis was legal at the time, but Tatum spent an entire career making legal and illegal plays designed to injure people, and taking great pride in that fact. That makes him a thug, whatever the details of the Stingley incident were.

 

I wouldn't particularly call Tatum a thug. Many great players such as Dick Butkus and some of the old Steeler Linebackers enjoyed hurting people. They wanted to be feared, and used that as an advantage. I sometimes wish a really mean guy would come and play with that kind of intensity today. Many players such as Butkus were generally classless on the field, but they generally didn't get into trouble, so I wouldn't call them thugs.

 

There's a big difference between intensity and what Tatum did on the field, and as I said before, the vast majority of NFL players managed to play at that time and be feared without deliberately trying to go to the limits of the rules and beyond in order to hurt people (something that Tatum explicitly took great pride and joy in doing). Butkus most definitely tried to hit people as hard as he could to demoralize and intimidate them, but Tatum deliberately tried to hit them in a way that would hurt and injure them, and those are very different things.

I am very sure that the vast majority of people who saw people like Butkus, Lambert, and Tatum play would agree that Tatum did not play the same way the other two did. Nobody at the time accused Butkus and Lambert of being dirty players, but Tatum was universally (outside of Oakland) regarded as dirty long before the Stingley incident. As Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said about pronography, being a dirty player may be difficult to define exactly, but you know it when you see it.

 

You ever see the pic of Butkus in a pile up sticking his finger in some guys eye?

 

I'm not going to try to rebut every example someone might give of another player making a dirty play, as if that somehow changes my point, which is that Tatum was a dirty player. As far as I know, Butkus never wrote a book proudly proclaiming himself an assassin.

 

Your assuming Butkus knew how to spell assassin.