John Riggins, Running Back

DECEMBER 19, 1983

John Riggins, who spent 14 years as a running back in the NFL, has learned that performing for an audience of 78 can be as rewarding as playing for a crowd of 55,000. The Hall of Famer recently completed a monthlong run in Gillette, an off-Broadway drama at New York City's tiny Storm Theatre. He played Mickey Hollister, a drifter from Texas who comes to a Wyoming oil boomtown to earn enough money to buy a fishing boat in Alaska. Like any good actor, Riggins, 52, found a way to identify with his character. "There was a time when that appealed to me," he says, "but by the end of the play Mickey makes the decision that you've got to fit in. You can't hunt and fish forever. You've got to accept your lot in life. I think that's kind of where I am."

Such an attitude would have been unthinkable for Riggins three decades ago. During his playing days—first with the Jets (1971-75), who made him a first-round draft pick out of Kansas, then with the Redskins—Riggins cultivated a reputation as an iconoclast. At one time or another he sported a Mohawk, an Afro and a bare scalp, while his off-field wardrobe ranged from leather pants (worn without a shirt) to white tie and tails. Most famously—or infamously—he urged Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor to "loosen up, Sandy baby," at a 1985 banquet, before falling asleep on the floor. On the field, though, Riggins was all business, rushing for 11,352 yards and 104 touchdowns. In '83 he put together one of the greatest individual performances in playoff history, carrying the ball 136 times for 610 yards in four games and leading Washington to a 27-17 victory over Miami in Super Bowl XVII. "A flake is somebody who's undependable," he says. "I've never felt that way about myself."

After retiring in 1986, Riggins lived off deferred payments from his playing days and made a few halfhearted attempts to live the frontier life he had always loved, even residing for 18 months in an Airstream trailer on his 12-acre property in Leesburg, Va. After appearing in a play, in '92, he began taking acting lessons. In 1994 he added television to the radio work he'd been doing for the Redskins since '89. Divorced in 1991 from his first wife (with whom he had four children), Riggins remarried in '96. He and wife Lisa-Marie, a Fordham law student, have a daughter, Hannah, who is five.

These days the small-town boy from Centralia, Kans., has made a home for himself in New York City. Though Gillette received less than a rave from The New York Times, Riggins remains undaunted about his new career and about assimilating himself back into "the machine," as he winkingly refers to society. "I don't know how and why, but I've kind of become a city guy," he says. "I like people. I like noise. New York is my town. Eventually you've got to go back to town for beer anyway."