One goodbye, lots of football

ST. LOUIS -- Time out.

I know this is the biggest football weekend of what has been a very strange season, and I have plenty to say about the two games I witnessed in person ( Donovan McNabb became an NFL man in Chicago) and the two I didn't (New England sports lore added a Snow Bowl classic) and the dumbest rule we've all ever seen (sorry, Raiders). I hope you don't mind if I put those thoughts off for a few paragraphs. I'm going to write about our family's golden retriever.

Woody

We had to put Woody to sleep last Wednesday. He was a month shy of 12. Four tumors, including one puffing out of his neck like an oval goiter, and a bad case of arthritis in his legs had left him a sick old man of a dog. I had to carry him into the house after he used the outdoor facilities for most of the last couple of weeks, and when I wasn't home because of my job, my wife, Ann, and daughters, Laura and Mary Beth, were left to do the same. I'd toss him his beloved tennis ball at Mount Hebron School up our street in Upper Montclair, N.J., and he'd catch it, feebly, and fall awkwardly to the cold ground. His legs just couldn't hold him anymore. And that is no way to live, even for this low-maintenance dog.

Everyone has great pet stories. Ours are no better, no worse, except to us. But they are everlasting. In 1990, Laura was 7 and Mary Beth 4, and we told them we would investigate the idea of getting a dog. Laura immediately researched everything dog. We got her a book, The Right Dog for You, and she went about memorizing every trait about every dog. We'd quiz her at dinner. "Dalmatian," I'd say. "Not good around children, needs a big yard," she'd say, shaking her head. She narrowed down the list of breeds we should consider to a small group including golden retriever, labrador retriever and Bernese mountain dog because they were so good with kids and so easy to live with, and not very rambunctious in comparison to other breeds. One July afternoon in 1990, we found a poor golden at a going-out-of-business sale at a pet store in nearby Cedar Grove. He had outgrown his cage, and when we took him out of it, he stumbled around like a POW who'd been in solitary for six months. We got him for half-off. Ann thought of the name Woody, and the kids loved it.

1. St. Louis (15-2). On a great day, no one beats them. On a good day, no one beats them. On a mediocre day, someone might have a chance.  2. Pittsburgh (14-3). Bill Cowher ran off the field after the rout of the Ravens yelling the words, "Two more! Two more!" He looked pretty confident.  3. Philadelphia (13-5). Dangerous. Very dangerous. When Donovan McNabb plays like that, the Eagles can beat anyone.  4. (tie) New England (12-5). I don't know whether to call them lucky stiffs or heroes of our time.  4. Oakland (11-7). How about this: The Raiders' plane was three hours late leaving Logan Airport in Boston because of weather and mechanical concerns. Didn't get off the ground till around 5 a.m. Imagine being on that plane for nine hours. What a party.  6. Green Bay (13-5). News flash: You can't hand the Rams the ball three times in the first 17 minutes, lose the turnover battle for the game and expect to stay within 20.  7. Baltimore (11-7). Raves went down pretty darn ingloriously, didn't they? By the way, a leftover from my chat with Brett Favre last week: When Breleigh Favre's father walked in the door after the Pack's big win over the Ravens in October, Favre asked her: "Who'd we beat today?" And she said: "We beat the Raisins, Daddy!  8. Chicago (13-4). Interesting stat, and a telling one for the Bears offense: Jim Miller went out with the bum shoulder Saturday trailing 6-0. By the time Chicago had a 14-13 lead in the third quarter, Shane Matthews had completed zero passes.  9. San Francisco (12-5). The expansion list comes out Tuesday. Terrell Owens probably won't be on it. Probably.  10. New York Jets (10-7). I had to laugh the other day when Mike Greenberg of ESPN Radio said that if Mike Tannenbaum left the Jets it would be a "disaster" for the franchise. Tannenbaum is a very bright man, and a fine asset to the Jet front office. BUT HE'S A SALARY-CAP GUY! HE'S NOT CURTIS MARTIN !  11. Miami (11-6). Dave Wannstedt just went to the Bahamas with Jimmy Johnson and spouses. I hear they went fishing for 12-ounce green bottles.  12. Washington (8-8). Here comes the pressure, coach Spurrier.

Right away he fit in perfectly. One bathroom accident before he understood. One! Affectionate but not a licker. Loved to wander, but always came home from his forays; only once did we have to send out a search party. Loyal. Ridiculously loyal. I used to wait with the kids in the morning at the bus stop, 50 yards away and around the corner, with Woody and the neighbor kids. One late afternoon, the kids weren't home yet, and Woody was missing. I couldn't find him. And some business-suited guy just off the New York bus at the same corner saw Woody laying by the bus stop with no collar on. (We weren't much for collars.) "Go home!" the man said, and Woody trotted to our front doorstep.

Woody liked me. He loved the girls. But he worshiped Ann. She was the one who fed him usually and she always had a stray piece of fish for him at dinner. She used to tell him she liked him better than most humans. "Remember when we used to play, 'Woody, come?'" she asked at dinner a couple of nights before the end. "We all stood in corners of the room with Woody in the middle and we'd say, 'Woody, come!' And he'd come to me. Then I went into the kitchen and you did it again without me, and he ran into the kitchen."

"Remember when we used to play doggie in the middle?" Mary Beth said. Two kids, a tennis ball, 30 feet apart, throwing and catching the ball, Woody pirouetting to try to steal it.

One Sunday last winter, with Woody two surgeries into his demise, we had a good snowstorm. I decided to take both our dogs for a five-mile walk. Much tail-wagging over that one. A mile into it, we passed a house that had its front door left open for some inexplicable reason. And a black lab, a young one, sprinted out of the house 30 yards down to the sidewalk and began doggie-playing with Bailey. "Go home!" I told the dog, but he wouldn't leave, and we were powerless to keep walking because the dog was magnetized to Bailey. I tried pulling the collarless dog by the scruff of the neck and prodding him home. No use. Bailey sensed my frustration and began barking at the dog. The dog pounced on Bailey angrily, barking rapid-fire and baring his teeth. Something triggered in Woody, a bored spectator to this point. Woody leaped up, grabbed the bizarro dog's neck with his mouth, shook it a few times menacingly and let go. "Yelpyelpyelpyelp!" the dog whimpered, running back to the house. "Good dog, Woody!" I said, petting his head. "Good dog!" Unimpressed, Woody looked straight ahead into the snowfall at dusk, as if to say: "Can we continue the walk now? I've got some snow to eat."

Last Monday, after I returned from Green Bay, Ann said Woody had had a tough weekend. We decided to make his appointment with his Maker for Wednesday, the day after I drove Laura back to college in Boston. Laura had a tough goodbye with Woody Tuesday morning. And even though she loves Tufts -- as do her parents -- she was filled with such melancholy when I dropped her off Tuesday afternoon. "I don't know why I'm so sad," she said. I did. Woody sickness. I had the same affliction.

Ann and I asked each other if were doing the right thing a few times Wednesday, in between 67 phone calls I made about various NFL coaching jobs, and we wished the other would come up with some good reason to hold off another week. We decided there was no reason, other than our own selfishness. And so at 4:40 p.m., Mary Beth, who would stay home (we thought it was best, and she agreed), said goodbye. She tried to be brave. It was no use. I lifted Woody's shrinking and lumpy 84-pound frame into the back of our Explorer. He always loved going for a ride in the car.

"I'm sorry, Wood," I said, closing the trunk hatch.

"When you drove away," Mary Beth said later, "I was wishing so hard that you'd come back. I thought you'd come back."

We were ushered into one of the examining rooms at Brookside Veterinary Clinic in nearby Bloomfield. We have a terrific vet, Keith Samson, who we know prolonged Woody's life with deft surgery in June 2000. We began to say our goodbyes. But how do you say goodbye to one of the best friends, and one of the most loyal, you've ever had? How do you tell him how incredibly sorry you are for doing this? How do you tell him, with moments to spare before he dies, what he has meant to you for the past 11 years? How do you tell him you've learned so much from him about things like dignity and love and friendship? How do you tell him about the spot in your heart that no living thing will replace when he dies?

Words failed us. That's because there were no words.

Ann, voice cracking, tried it this way, cradling his head in her arms: "Good dog. You're a good dog."

I looked him in his whitened face. "There has never been another dog like you, and there never will be," I whispered. "We will never forget you."

Now Dr. Samson was trimming the golden hair from the area around a vein in Woody's right forepaw. He swabbed the two-inch shaved area with alcohol. He'd told us death would come within 15 seconds when he injected the syringe of Sleepaway sodium pentobarbital euthanasia solution, and so we were ready when he found the vein. The injection took five seconds. The moment Dr. Samson finished, the absolute moment, Ann said, "Ohhh," and she gently let his head drop to the table. Woody's eyes fluttered shut.

"That's it," Dr. Samson said quietly. "He's gone."

Typing these words makes my eyes go wet. I can't help it. The powerful sadness will only go away with time. It's hard to believe how powerful it is, in fact. The death of a dog cannot equate to the death of a loved human being, can it? It shouldn't. But it does. With Woody, it does. Because Woody, those who knew him would tell you, was the best dog in the world.

There is one thing I do know. The only way not to feel such intense sadness is to never feel intense love. And that is certainly no way to live.

Well, I guess I've now broken the gridiron journalistic record for Column Most Far Afield From Football. Woody wasn't much of a football fan. He liked the orange ball in field hockey, but football ... well, I never took him to a game. He wasn't much for TV either, so there's a good chance he wouldn't know John Madden if he smelled him. But I like football. And I'm going to take a deep breath and start writing about football now because I love to do that, and it's what I do.

Fifth-grader Gunnar Esiason won the Geography Bee at his Long Island Middle School last week. The two questions that won him the bee:

What major Texas city flooded in 1999?

What state had rolling blackouts last summer?

Houston. California.

"I guess I did well because I travel a lot," Gunnar told CNNSI.com in an exclusive interview.

OFFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE WEEK: Philadelphia QB Donovan McNabb, whose 299 total yards, two passing touchdowns and one rushing TD dominated Chicago and spurred the Eagles to the NFC Championship Game. More compelling, perhaps, is how a pretty good football player became The Man under intense pressure in the biggest game of his career. Did you see how every decision he made was the right one? I mean, every one -- except the dumb throw into double-coverage that was picked off and returned for a touchdown by Jerry Azumah. And he did it in his hometown. If I'm the Rams, I'm not scared of anyone. I am, however, quite concerned about McNabb.

DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE WEEK: Team Award, St. Louis Rams. We take you to the first series of the Rams' 45-17 win over the Packers. Brett Favre had taken Green Bay 27 yards to the Rams' 39. First down: Defensive tackle Jeff Zgonina knifes in to tackle Ahman Green for a three-yard loss. Second down: Defensive end Grant Wistrom slaps a big paw at an end-sweeping Green, downing him for another three-yard loss. Third-down: Nickel lineman Tyoka Jackson bursts through on a shotgun snap to sack Favre for a 10-yard loss. Fourth-and-26. Statement made. The defense just discombobulated the Pack.

SPECIAL TEAMS PLAYER OF THE WEEK: New England K Adam Vinatieri, who made the most clutch kick in recent NFL history, a 45-yarder into a Foxboro blizzard with 27 seconds left in regulation to tie a classic game at 13 and send it to overtime. "I lost sight of it in the snow," said CBS analyst Phil Simms. As did all of us. But to make a kick of that distance, with your team's season on the line, when you can barely see the goalposts ... well, that's what legends are made of.

COACH OF THE WEEK: St. Louis defensive coordinator Lovie Smith. Not only did the Rams pick off Favre six times, but they had designed something to combat all the Packers' little misdirection plays and confusing offensive wrinkles. Smith has done such a terrific job with this unit. Owners are missing out if they need a coach and don't interview him.

GOAT OF THE WEEK: Baltimore QB Elvis Grbac. Fit him with the goat horns for the entire year. He was awful. Two picks in the first quarter of the divisional playoff game brought a fitting end to a disappointing Baltimore season. Someone has to tell me. I must know. How can a guy throw for 4,100 yards one year and turn into such a limp dish rag the next? Mind-boggling.

In the lobby of the Philadelphia Eagles' new practice facility are poster-sized photos of Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr., with interesting bios about their contributions to the human race. Seems that owner Jeff Lurie wanted to show his players and coaches that there's more to life than football. Sources very close to the human race say Lurie's right. I asked him about it. "It's making a statement without making a statement," Lurie said.

1a. I think the rule that ended the Raiders season stinks. There is no doubt in anyone's mind after watching the video of Charles Woodson jarring the ball loose from Tom Brady that Brady had stopped his throwing motion. It positively, absolutely was a fumble, even though the two-year-old rule clarification about quarterbacks having to have the ball tucked makes the call technically correct. The Competition Committee simply must improve that rule this year at the league meetings. NFL Supervisor of Officials Mike Pereira, working the Rams game, clarified the rule thusly: It was rewritten in 2000 to mean that no fumble is called if a quarterback's arm is in a throwing motion or a pump-fake, and the ball comes loose before the ball is literally tucked back into the body or is back in the start of a throwing motion. "The ball has to be all the way back at the side of your body, then get jarred loose for it to be a fumble," Pereira said. He admitted, "Brady, at the point of the fumble, was not trying to throw the ball," which is the exact reason why this rule must be further clarified. The Raiders are sitting home today and the Patriots playing on because a quarterback who really fumbled was judged not to have fumbled because of a dumb rule.

1b. I think that was one of the best second halves I've ever seen. I missed the entire first half, which I hear was not such a big loss. Wow, what a ballgame. Weather. Suspense. Blinding conditions. One of the most compelling games, all told, that I've ever seen.

1c. I think the Raiders got jobbed. But is it too much to ask them to make one play, offensively or defensively, in the second half? They could have made this very easy.

1d. As much as Bucky Dent is reviled in New England sports history, that's how much Adam Vinatieri and Tom Brady will be treasured.

1e. Walt Coleman, too.

2. I think the worst thing about the Bill Parcells fiasco is that the Parcells camp had told the Bucs that he'd take the job, thus taking the team out of the Steve Spurrier sweepstakes. So they missed out on the first TWO coaches on their list, which is an awful double-whammy. Maybe that's why Parcells sounded so dispirited, so beaten down, when I talked with him Friday night. Man, was he down. He took the Bucs down the primrose path and then screwed them for the long term. Moral of the story: No NFL team should be tempted by Parcells again, even though he says he'd never coach again. If he ever puts out feelers, teams should run the other way.

3. I think you can cross Jimmy Johnson off the Bucs' list, or off anyone's list. When I reached him Saturday at his Florida Keys home, he told me he was loving life on his boat and still enjoying dallying with his stocks. I asked him if he'd consider, in any way, returning to coaching if the Bucs rang his phone with a silly offer. "I guess they've got a soap opera there, huh?" he said, chuckling. "I think everyone understands I'm retired. I mean, I can't spend all the money I've got now anyway. I doubt very seriously I would ever get back into it. I mean, ever. I'm loving everything I'm doing. I don't think I'll ever get tired of it. Really, I've got no interest in coming back. I'm 99 percent sure, or more, that I'd never come back." I asked him if the Bucs could fiddle with that one percent. "No," he said. "And really, I wouldn't want to put someone through that." His point: It would take some sick offer to get him back into it, and he wouldn't have his whole heart into it, and so the Bucs would be risking another kettle of Parcellsian fish if they chased Johnson. That won't happen.

4. I think these are my thoughts about the Ravens and Steelers:

a. I don't see how Elvis Grbac can regain the confidence of his teammates this offseason.

b. The Steelers will regret not firing Kris Brown a month ago. Sometimes you have to make the hard decisions, coach Cowher. To me, cutting a guy who missed a league-high 14 field goals is a no-brainer. The Steelers should still do it today. He has to be a head case by now, the NFL's Chuck Knoblauch.

c. And you, Brian Billick: Is there some reason why Randall Cunningham is chained to your bench when Grbac is so god-awful?

d. Tony Siragusa will be a TV star. A big one. In many ways.

e. I love Chris Berman's nickname for Heinz Field. The Big Ketchup Bottle.

5. I think they can't rebuild Soldier Field fast enough for me. The columns are good and classic-looking. But let's face facts. It's an absolute dump, the worst stadium in which I've worked, by far -- and that includes the bygone Cleveland and Washington mausoleums. But those Chicagoans must be used to it. Saturday night around 8:30 p.m., I was walking through the parking lot on the two-mile walk back to my car and a party of four outside a small camper was playing Hearts. In parkas, with a brick holding down the cards because of the 12ish-mph winds, with longnecks for all and Kansas on the CD player.

6. I think these are my personal thoughts of the week:

a. A fan outside Soldier Field Saturday saw me, recognized me, evidently read my story about Brett Favre in Sports Illustrated this week, looked at me and said: "Hey King! Can't you ever write about Brett Favre without telling everybody what you guys had for dinner?" Guilty as charged.

b. One of my 10 best movies of all-time is Groundhog Day. I stopped in my tracks when I found it on TV the other night and wasted a full hour. Bill Murray is beyond good. "Ned? Ned Ryerson!" And: "Hey, morons! Your bus is leaving!"

c. Coffeenerdness: I needed it bad Saturday night before writing my Eagles-Bears piece, ordering up a Triple Venti White Mocha and a Grande Latte.

d. Is this an indictment of TV, or an indictment of me? Other than The West Wing, the best entertainment on TV is Seinfeld in reruns.

7. I think Tony Dungy, Dennis Green and Herman Edwards deserve a triple pat on the back today. They've gone to Washington to honor Martin Luther King Jr. by volunteering for the day. The concept: Don't take the day off. Work the day. Volunteer for the day. Good lesson.

8. I think this is how great the Rams are: Kurt Warner is as average as a great quarterback can be and his team still wins by 28.

9. I think Walt Coleman won't work a Raiders game next year.

10. I think Jon Gruden's not going anywhere, and I think the Bucs wouldn't trade their first-round pick for him if he was. Though I think they should.

For the second weekend in a row, I'll pick the homers -- Pittsburgh and St. Louis. The Rams just look too good for anybody, don't they? I'll be interested to see how their defense chess-matches with Donovan McNabb, who is the toughest guy in football to pin to the pocket.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Peter King covers the NFL and appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated and CNN's NFL Preview. Click here to send a question to his NFL Mailbag.

 

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