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'I did do it right' Dickerson makes a run for NFL Hall of Fame
Posted: Friday August 13, 1999 07:57 AM
By Tom Rinaldi, CNN/SI LOS ANGELES -- The goggles and the neckroll. The stiff, straight-up running style. The sensational second season. Eric Dickerson was all those things, but even more, he was the 6-foot-3, 218-pound running back so commanding on the field but so demanding off it. He seemed to elude his own legacy. At least, until now. "He was just fluid in everything he did, it made me question his effort," said Hall of Fame tackle Jackie Slater who blocked for Dickerson with the Los Angeles Rams. "But when we got to the first game and he turned it up and the speed he played with, it was pretty impressive." Someone else who came away impressed was his then-coach with the Rams. "He came to win," said John Robinson. "He had a tremendous responsibility on our team, because we weren't very good in anything else really. We were a running football team. He was the best runner in the NFL when he was there." "I'm not gonna say it was easy to play, but sometimes it was easy," confided Dickerson. "It came so easy for me to run around guys and outrun guys. It was almost like, 'God he can't catch me!' I'm like a kid out there with little kids. That's how it honestly felt." Picked second in the 1983 draft behind a quarterback named Elway, Dickerson came out of tiny Sealy, Texas and then SMU, to be labeled the savior of the Los Angeles Rams. He didn't disappoint. After setting the NFL rookie rushing record with 1,808 yards and 18 touchdowns, Dickerson did even better in 1984, breaking O.J. Simpson's single-season rushing record with a stunning 2,105 yards.
It was a record Dickerson told Simpson he'd break the first time the two met. "I went over to S.C. [Southern Cal] on my very first recruiting visit," Dickerson remembers. "And I met O.J. before a Rose Bowl game over on the campus. All of us were trying to talk to players during the recruiting trip, and we wanted to say something to him. So I said, 'Hey, O.J., my name's Eric Dickerson. I'm a running back.' 'Really, yeah?' I said, 'You know, I'm gonna break your record.'" But the next season, Dickerson would begin his pattern of holdouts and management hassles over money, a pattern he never seemed to outrun. Out two games in a salary rift in 1985, he still finished with five team rushing records and led the Rams to the playoffs. Still, while Dickerson would average 1,742 yards in four seasons with the Rams, his money demands wore out his welcome. He was traded to the Colts in 1987 for a total of eight players, a decision and deal that would haunt his career forever. "Just pay me $1 million. I was making $250,000 I think. Pay me $1 million. 'Nope, you have a contract and this and that.' I said, 'Man, I'm not playing for $250,000.' It was just a bad situation and it broke down."
By 1989, Dickerson had become the first player in league history to rush for 1,000 yards in seven consecutive seasons, and was the fastest to gain 10,000. But the public seemed fixated on his perceived greed. Over the next two years, he'd miss 10 games grappling with management and then with injury. He was dubbed, "Eric the Ingrate" and "The Re-negotiator." After 11 seasons, including brief stops in Los Angeles with the Raiders and Atlanta, he called it a career. Said Dickerson, "After that '91 season, I just didn't have the desire." Dickerson retired to his home near Malibu, Calif., as the second leading rusher in NFL history. For all his holdouts and missed games, he may have negotiated his way right out of history. "If Eric Dickerson had stayed with the Rams, he'd be the NFL's all-time leading rusher right now," Slater says. "I'd like to think that'd be the reality of it all." "We had the offense built around him," Robinson added. "He'd have broken Walter Payton's record by quite a ways I think if he'd have stayed." "'If you'd stayed with the Rams.' I hear that all the time,"Dickerson said. 'If you'd only stayed with the Rams.'"
So what does he think when he hears that? "I laugh like, now. 'Only if...' Who knows what would've happened?" "When Eric Dickerson is inducted into the Hall of Fame, he'll be bringing with him about 30 of his closest family and friends to Canton, Ohio. But one of the most important members of the audience will be there in memory only. His uncle Kary raised Dickerson like a father, but died when Eric was just 17. He never had the chance to see Dickerson play a single down in the NFL. But Dickerson says he will be with him just the same when he gets inducted in Canton.
"He won't be there in the flesh, but in spirit," he said. "I know he'll be there watching and listening to what I have to say. When I see him again, I hope he'll say 'Son, well done. I'm proud of you.'" If there were a record for most misunderstood, Eric Dickerson might've broken that one, too. But the records he broke on the field, his statistics and style, need no interpretation. Just the recognition found in the Hall of Fame. "I did do something right. No matter what people think, or the media thought of me, I did it right. I didn't do it perfect, which some people do, but I did do it right."
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