 |
| |||
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
Tough Love Buffalo Bills linebacker Chris Spielman is a monster on the field but a pussycat at home with his familyBy Austin Murphy
"I was scared to death, but I made myself do 10," says Spielman. So what had he been trying to prove with that diving exhibition? Was he out of his mind? He takes the question literally. "No, no, no, no," he says. "I was very much in my mind. Even at that age I was putting myself through mental tests. I've always wanted to make the training and everything else as difficult as possible. That way, the game is easy." Spielman, who last March signed as a free-agent linebacker with the Buffalo Bills after eight seasons with the Detroit Lions, sees life as a series of self-imposed ordeals designed to make Sundays proceed more smoothly. At age four this son of a high school football coach was ambulating around the house in a curious, bent-knee gait: He had already learned to assume the linebacker's "break-down" position. One morning last spring Spielman drove to Rich Stadium around six o'clock to enjoy a half hour's suffering on the Stairmaster. Already on a treadmill was his new boss, Bills owner Ralph Wilson. "He came up and put his face really close to mine," recalls Wilson. "He said, 'Thanks for bringing me here. You won't be disappointed.' He didn't smile. I was a little afraid." Wilson smiles at his Spielman anecdote, then adds, "He's the most intense player we've had here in 37 years." That same warrior's intensity made him much beloved in Detroit. But the Lions couldn't come anywhere near matching the four-year, $8 million package the Bills offered Spielman, which didn't exactly break his heart. Detroit has not advanced past the first round of the playoffs since 1991, and Spielman, who speaks of "a sadness" he will feel if he concludes his career without having played in a Super Bowl, felt as if he were spinning his wheels in the Motor City. He wanted to join a team with a real Super Bowl shot. The Bills gave him one. That didn't mean he had to speak to his teammates. By 7 a.m. on the first day of a May minicamp, he was sitting in his stall, ankles taped, staring straight ahead like some oversized gargoyle. His teammates began trickling in a couple of hours later. "He really didn't talk to anybody until somebody talked to him," says fullback Tim Tindale. On the field, without discussing it with anyone, Spielman assumed the responsibility of calling defensive signals. "He didn't know anybody on the team," says defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, "but he was going to take over because that's the way he thought it ought to be. That told us a little about his mentality." The Bills' newest alpha male has not disappointed. Signed to add starch to Buffalo's interior run defense, Spielman has done just that. He had nine tackles in the Bills' 10-7 win over the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday and helped limit Emmitt Smith to 25 rushing yards. In Buffalo's season opening 23-20 overtime win against the New York Giants, Spielman had a team-leading 17 tackles -- most of them of Rodney Hampton, who gained an insignificant 50 yards on 18 carries. "That guy must read film pretty well," Giants guard Ron Stone said afterward, "because he would see the formation and know what was coming. He was always in the right spot." Indeed, Spielman's fumble recovery set up the game-winning field goal. His teammates awarded him a game ball. Sitting in his stall, his pants splotched with blood from abrasions on both elbows, Spielman said of his night's work, "Not bad for an overachiever." Two days earlier he had responded crankily to the suggestion that he has overachieved in the NFL. "A lot of stuff doesn't bother me," he said, "but that's one thing that does. I've heard that a million times." Gosh, Chris, why would people think you are an overachiever? Could it be that you're undersized (six feet, 247) and not overly fast for a linebacker, that you conduct yourself like the 53rd man on a 53-man roster, that most days you're studying film by 6:30 a.m., that you make it a point of pride to be the last guy out of the weight room, that you subject yourself to a masochistic off-season workout regimen, that you shuffle sideways up stairs in your own house the better to increase your lateral mobility, that you perform "rip" and "swim" moves on phantom blockers as you go through doorways, that you have admitted that every day you try "to do something in practice to convince them not to cut me"? The guy has been to four Pro Bowls, yet he acts as if he'll be waived if he misses a practice. "If I ever lay down on the football field," Spielman told reporters last March, "one of you guys get your hunting rifle out and put me out of my misery." He expects his teammates to have similarly stratospheric pain thresholds. During camp defensive end Phil Hansen missed a few days of practice with a shoulder injury. Naturally Spielman sought to make him feel bad. What's the problem, he asked? "It's my A-C joint," said Hansen, referring to his left achromio-clavicular joint. "A-C joint?" Spielman replied. "You don't even need that thing. I had mine taken out, and I've never had a problem!" While that surgery to repair Spielman's A-C joint was being performed six seasons ago, Lions coach Wayne Fontes put Spielman on an injured reserve list, causing Spielman to miss four games. "They did it while I was on the operating table," he says with a trace of bitterness, the implication being that the only way to make him inactive is to do it while he is under the influence of a general anesthetic. He has missed only those four games in eight years, none last season, despite tearing his right pectoral from his rib cage in the Lions' opener. "I thought I'd broken my collarbone," he recalls, "so I said, 'We'll just finish her out.' "Maybe I do bring it on myself," he says of that overachiever tag. But then, if he didn't do what he calls "the extras, maybe I wouldn't be where I am." Which raises the question: Is all this necessary? Couldn't he cut back, say, 10% on the weightlifting, the bounding up stadium steps while wearing a weight vest, the poring over film, and still enjoy comparable success? "I'll never answer that question," he says, "because I'll never cut back. The trick is to find time away from football to be a good husband and father." It is a trick he has mastered by banishing everything from his life but his obsessions -- family and work. The balance he has struck, he says, "would not be possible without the supportive, loving wife I have." As she spooned cereal into the mouth of 5 1/2-month-old Noah one recent morning, this supportive, loving wife was asked what drew her to Chris in the first place. "It wasn't his wardrobe," said Stefanie Spielman. Neither Stefanie nor Chris remembers what unfortunate ensemble he sported on the night they met, at a school hangout in Massillon 13 years ago. She was 15; he was 17. She was dancing to a slow song with the quarterback from another school. Employing bodily force on the QB, Chris cut in. They attended Ohio State and were married seven years ago, but it was not until their daughter, Madison, was born in March 1994, Stefanie says, that she began to detect signs that her husband was mellowing. During the couple's childless years in Detroit, Stefanie spent extended periods in Chicago doing modeling work. "When I was gone," she says, "Chris would seal himself off from the rest of the world. Our friends called him the Hermit." Nowadays, rather than sequester himself in the house each night, he takes Madison and Noah for a walk and often ends up playing with the neighborhood kids. During Madison's equestrian lessons, he sits in the bleachers at the stables, cheering and performing one-man waves. Stefanie reports that while watching a trailer for a movie in which misfortune befalls a child, her so-called brutish husband "covered his eyes and said, 'I can't watch. It's too painful!'" He has approached fatherhood the way he approaches the gap for which he is responsible on goal line defense: by hurling himself into it. He became so excited and full of wonder during both of Stefanie's pregnancies that he wrote short poems, which he shared last summer with The Sporting News. An excerpt from one:
I can't wait to see Robert Louis Stevenson he ain't. Still, it took guts to share that. Why make his poems public? "I don't think it had anything to do with showing my feminine side," says Spielman. (We didn't think so either.) "I am such a strong believer in marriage and family, I have no problem with people seeing how passionately I feel about my kids." He had the camcorder out this month for Madison's first day of preschool. He had already interviewed the teacher. Having given the place the once-over, he said, "I see a lot of toys. Where are the letters and numbers? Are we going to get any work done?" Before driving to that interview, he had made a wisecrack about making sure his daughter wouldn't be subjected to any "Communist" influences. This is a frequent vein of Spielman humor: He has posited that artificial turf and domed stadiums are "a Communist plot" to weaken the U.S. Even his conspiracy theories have a quaint, retro flavor, in keeping with his reputation as a throwback player. If there was ever a doubt that he sees himself as such, it was erased during a 1994 game against the Chicago Bears, when having stripped a receiver, he raced 25 yards into the end zone, slid on his knees and touched the ball down with both hands -- which is what you had to do to score a touchdown in the NFL's Jurassic era. This arcane act, Spielman explained, was his way of "paying tribute to all the men who have played this wonderful game before me." Did we mention that Spielman was born in Canton, Ohio? When his playing career is over, he would like to coach. Would he hold his players to the same gonzo standard that has made him one of the most intense, most extreme players in NFL history? The answer is no. "I realize there's more than one way to skin a cat," he says. Just because he enjoys denying himself water during off-season workouts ("I know it's stupid," he says) doesn't mean he would make his players do that. As he expounds on his coaching theories -- he's big on consistency and positive reinforcement -- Spielman sounds almost progressive. Until the subject of his son arises. The question is posed to Stefanie: Will Noah play football? "Chris will be supportive of whatever he chooses to do," she says, "whether it's golf or science projects." "Anything but soccer," says Chris, who is eavesdropping as he forages through the refrigerator. "Americans will never take to soccer. It's too slow." "Baseball's not slow?" says Stefanie. "Yeah, but baseball is America's game." He is walking around with blades of grass on his back. He has been rolling around in the yard, playing with Noah. When Spielman lifts his son, you can't help noticing in his left biceps a golf-ball-sized divot, which deepens, then flattens. It is the result of his having torn the muscle several years ago. It is a reminder of his rough trade. He has not had the last word. Says Stefanie, "Would you change Noah's diaper and put him down for a nap?" It really isn't a question. Silently, obediently, he carries his son out of the room and up the stairs. Issue date: September 30, 1996
|
