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See Dick run
Posted: Tuesday August 03, 1999 03:23 PM
The disrespect is mutual. Often Dickerson has an itch to hop fences and do a Linda Blair to certain necks in the stands. "In San Francisco people spit on us going into the locker room," he says. "In Cleveland they throw batteries and bones. Why not just let them have loaded guns and shoot at us?" Dick is not overly fond of the average NFL customer. "Most of the guys I see watching football are wanna-be athletes," he says. "It's always, 'Oh, I hurt my knee, or else I'd have been in there.' Right. I wonder what they'd feel like lying in a pile of guys, hearing a knee snap and the guy scream a scream like they'd never heard -- and then have to line up for the next play with that scream on your mind." More to the point, why should he love the fans when they've never loved him? For seven years Dickerson has been the best running back in the league, yet football fans have never cuddled up to him the way they did to O.J. Simpson , Walter Payton and Gale Sayers . Nor have they worshiped him the way they did Jim Brown and Earl Campbell . The criticism has never been harsher than this year, perhaps because the Colts are having a droopy season and because the hamstring he pulled on Sept. 24 shrink-wrapped his numbers for a while -- he ranks only seventh in the rushing race -- and sidelined him for a game. ESPN's Pete Axthelm recently called Dickerson "one of the most overrated players in the history of the sport." On NFL Live this year, Simpson said Bo Jackson was better. Dickerson has had few endorsement deals, to say nothing of hawking a Hertz with Arnie. Here is a man who has 56 career 100-yard games, four rushing titles and the alltime record for yards in a season (2,105). Here is a blur who got to 10,000 yards in fewer games (91) than anybody else in history -- seven fewer than Brown, 19 fewer than Simpson, 22 fewer than Payton. With 933 rushing yards this year after the Colts' 10-6 win over the San Diego Chargers on Sunday, he's about to become the first player ever to run for 1,000 yards in seven straight seasons. At 29, with 10,848 career yards, he has a chance to surpass Payton's alltime rushing mark of 16,726 yards. Yet many fans don't know who he is. Maybe they can't see who he is, what with the extra-large shoulder pads, flak jacket, hip pads, neck roll and goggles. Even his pinup poster shows him being assembled in a laboratory, piece by piece, and features the tagline ROBOBACK. Maybe we're reluctant to trust a running back who is so sane he is afraid of pain. Dickerson has been known to find happiness on the sideline. "What are the out-of-bounds lines there for?" he says. But can a man who never missed a pro game because of injury until this season really be trying? Maybe that's it exactly. O.J. wriggled past would-be tacklers with moves that would make a chiropractor grimace. Brown looked as if he were ready to run through the side of a bus. But Dickerson makes running with the football seem so painless, so seamless. In the off-season before he set the season-yardage record while playing with the Rams in 1984, Dickerson rarely worked out. When L.A. coach John Robinson first saw Dickerson practice as a rookie, in '83, he kept yelling, "You've got to run faster, Eric," and, "You've got to run faster." Finally, Dickerson said, "Coach, come out and run with me. I'm running as fast as I can." The memory still tickles Robinson. "He runs without making noise," says Robinson. How can a back be so fluid his pads don't even rattle? Or maybe its just that football fans have the feeling that Dickerson has never loved to run as much as they thought he should love it. They're right. See Dick worry Ten hours after the Denver game, Dickerson endures another night course in American ceilings. Despite a two-hour flight to Los Angeles for an appearance the next night on The Arsenio Hall Show and a three-hour interview with a reporter, he cannot sleep. So he lies in his 10,000-square-foot Malibu mansion and frets. He paces around the house. His mind is a Betamax, replaying the game backward and forward. Visions of Broncos clomp through his head. Maybe I should've run outside there, should've cut it up inside there. It will be like this tomorrow night too. After some losses -- like the one to the 49ers that opened the season -- he barely sleeps for four nights. "I really want it (winning) bad, worse than a lot of people I play with," he says. Dickerson is a black-belt worrier. One night he dreamed that he found an old friend, Harold Slaughter , sitting on the end of his bed. "Harold, what are you doing here?" says Dickerson. "You got killed." "I got killed?" "Yeah, you got killed in a car accident, and I couldn't make it to the funeral because we had to play. I'm so sorry." "Oh, don't worry yourself, Dick. I know you would've come." That dream ended, but death and Dickerson still do not get along. He worries about people trying to kill him. He keeps a gun by his bed and two slightly underfed rottweilers in his house. He worries about the day when the woman he calls his mom -- she's actually his great-aunt Viola -- will die, even though she's in the cream of health at 85. "I know I'll be depressed when it happens," says Dickerson. "I don't know what kind of person I'll be then." He worries about getting hurt. He spends a couple of hours before every game steeling himself for the first hit. "For the first few plays, there's a lot of fear," he says. When he was with the Rams, he refused to run certain pass patterns because he thought they were splints waiting to happen. With the Colts, he won't run shovel-pass plays because it means he must have his head turned while running amid 280-pound linemen who are not hoping he has a nice day. "Nuh-uh," says Dickerson. "Not for me." He worries so much that he gets headaches, which is one reason he's looking forward to turning in his washroom key. Viola is looking forward to it too. "Don't you think you've made enough money?" she asks him. "I don't want to see you a cripple." Maybe it's the insomnia or the loss, but Dick is starting to see her point. "People think it should be an honor to run in the NFL," he says. "Hell, it's no honor. It's an honor to be alive. To have two legs that work, two eyes that work." In fact, the only honor Dickerson wants from playing in the NFL is a paid-off home. He has $500,000 to go on the Malibu house. "If I get it paid off, oh, my days playing football will be over. I'm serious." Excuse us, but what about Payton's record? What about the Super Bowl? What about your place in history? "I already have a place in history," he says. "The Payton record is no big deal to me. There's more to life than getting 16,000 yards. Viola doesn't care about the record. She'd love me if I mopped floors. I used to really worry that I might never make the Super Bowl. Now I don't. If I don't get to one, I don't get to one." The weird thing is, he looks as if he means it. See Dick walk Fifty-three hours after the Denver game, Dickerson is about to board a red-eye to Indianapolis. He will land at 5:18 a.m., sleep for two hours (not bad!) and be at practice by 9:00. "I feel like going in tomorrow and saying, 'I quit. I'm tired of it. I'm turning my stuff in,' " Dickerson says. "Sometimes I feel like I've burned out. Most of the fun is gone from the game. You've got to love football, and right now I sure don't love it. "When we lose, everyone looks at me. 'How come, Eric?' I hate it. I feel like I have to do everything myself. I can't block for myself. I can't run every time. Maybe it's not so much my teammates that think that, but the fans do. They expect you to do it all." Long pause. "Sometimes I wish I'd never started playing, you know? I get 80 yards, and it's a bad day for me. Do you know how hard it is to get over 100 yards in a game or over 1,000 in a year? Or 1,200 or 1,400 every year? There's only one guy in our backfield (despite his injury and sitting out a game, Dickerson has three times as many carries this year as any other Colt back). It's , fourth-and-one. Who do you think they're going to hand it to? The galloping ghost?" All this unhappy talk is either 1) a pose designed to inflate his next contract even further, 2) a new way to cope with losing, 3) a reaction to his first real injury since his freshman year in college, or 4) the real thing. One of Dickerson's friends, Lewis Coleman , thinks it's No. 4. "The first time I heard him talk about retiring was a couple of weeks ago," he says. "He never used to talk about 'after football' before." Then again, it could be 5) a way to rile his coworkers. The Colts are 6-6, and Dickerson still gets that Gary Cooper look on his face every time he talks about them. "If we want to be 7-9 or 8-8, that's fine," he says, "but I don't want to be a part of that kind of team. "I think about how unhappy I am. I know I am a very unhappy person. Sometimes people say, 'How can a guy take a gun and blow his own brains out?' Now I can see how someone can do it. Maybe this life wasn't for me, football." With that, Dickerson drags his Louis Vuitton carryon full of troubles down the jetway and back into a life he would just as soon forget. It's funny. A guy can run 10,000 yards and it's still not far enough.
Issue date: Dec. 4, 1989
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