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The Longest Yard for Doak Walker
by Rick
Reilly
Posted: Tue May 12, 1998
Before
there
was
Dateline,
Nightline,
Outside the
Lines,
Inside
Edition,
60 Minutes and
48
Hours, there were
heroes.
They were handsome and swift, and we knew just enough about
them to keep them as gods. They played offense and defense
and kicked and punted and dated the homecoming queen, and
that was enough. They
didn't go on Leno or
Oprah, and they never cried on Roy Firestone. You only saw them
on magazine covers and in newsreels, and on the back of
your eyelids when you slept because all you wanted to be
was
them.
That man, lying so still there, learning how to talk again,
he was one. He's Doak Walker, and he was as golden as
golden gets. He had perfectly even, white teeth and a jaw
as square as a deck of cards and a mop of brown hair that
made girls bite their
necklaces. He was so shifty you
couldn't have tackled him in a phone booth, yet so humble
that he wrote the Associated Press a thank-you note for
naming him an
All-America. Come to think of it, he was a three-time
All-America, twice one of the Outstanding Players in the Cotton Bowl,
a four-time All-Pro. He appeared on 47 covers, including
Life,
Look
and
Collier's. One time, Kyle Rote, another gridiron golden boy, saw a
guy buying a football magazine at a newsstand. "Don't
buy
that one," Rote said. "It's not official. It doesn't
have a picture of Doak Walker on the
cover."
Fifty years ago they gave
Doak Walker the Heisman Trophy because who the hell else were
they going to give it to? That season he was among the
nation's finest in rushing, passing, punting, punt
returning, kick returning, field goals, extra points and
interceptions. The Cotton Bowl
added more than 20,000 seats just so more people could see
him. He led SMU to two straight Southwest Conference
championships. After a game he'd come out of the locker
room in a coat and tie, hug his girlfriend, who really
was the homecoming queen, and take her for a malted. Thirty
million mothers
sighed.
That's why Doak Walker,
motionless, can't possibly be. Are you saying that the man who won
two NFL titles with the Detroit Lions, who was inducted
into the college and pro football halls of fame, is a
quadriplegic? Are you saying somebody finally stopped Doak
Walker?
What gets you is that it was an intermediate ski slope.
Doak Walker never did anything intermediate. He was a
wonderful skier, one of the best at Steamboat Ski Resort,
along with his wife, the former Skeeter Werner, an
Olympian. But there he was, on the
last day of January this year, on a slope called Rainbow,
carving those beautiful giant arcs of his, when he hit a
change in the rolling terrain and traveled 20 to 30 feet in
the air. He fell forward and tumbled, severely bruising his
brain stem. When
the first skiers arrived, he had no pulse. Luckily, one of
them was a dentist who knew CPR.
Doak Walker is at Craig Hospital in Denver now and, at 71,
working harder than ever. He speaks through a tube and he's
up to four words now:
yes,
no and
thank
you. But the eyes are still bright, and when he disagrees with
you he sticks out his tongue. Here's a guy who in college
and the pros gained close to 10,000
all-purpose yards—most of them effortlessly—yet you wonder
what he'd give now to run just one foot
of
that.
Doak Walker
doesn't want people to make a fuss over him. He never was
much for fusses. Still, it's unthinkable. One of the most
vital, virile men in American sports history, a guy
football barely left a mark on, will have to learn how to
sip and puff
on a straw to get his wheelchair around. Some Rainbow this
turned out to
be.
There's a little hope that he might get back some movement.
But he's going to have to have his house redone—lower
sinks, wider doorways, showers he can wheel into. Long-term
care is going to cost a small mutual fund, so proceeds from
this year's
Walker-Lundquist Steamboat Invitational golf tournament will go to
the Doak Walker Rehabilitation Fund.
Anyway, the point of all this is just to let you know that
every day
isn't Saturday in the open field anymore for number 37. A
lot of days are fourth-and-11, actually. So, if you think
of it, write Doak Walker. The fax machine is right down the
hall,
303-789-8330, and he reads every message.
Tell him he's still your hero. After all, everybody likes a
thank-you
note.
Tell us what you think. Sound off on the CNN/SI Message Boards.
Past Editions of Life of Reilly
photograph by Robert Beck
Issue date: May 18, 1998
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