Pro Football

Football players are fussier about their helmets than any other piece of equipment. Most wear the same helmets in practice as they do in games. So the helmets get pretty beat up. If an equipment manager so much as looks as if he's about to shine one up, change a decal or—heaven forbid—replace the old headgear with a new model, he'll be sacked mighty fast.

Colts defensive end Donnell Thompson has worn the same helmet since he joined the club six years ago. At North Carolina he wore the same helmet four years. "I don't want anybody messing with my helmet," he says. "When your hat doesn't feel just right, you don't feel right. Your frame of mind is ruined. If I lost this hat, I don't know what I'd do."

Kiki DeAyala, the Bengals linebacker, drives Tom Gray, the team's equipment man, nuts. "He's got an air-filled helmet," Gray says. "He only wants to change the air pressure about 10 times before kickoff. Ever since he joined this team [in August], I've had to carry the air pump around in my pocket. Before, I kept it in the trunk, which is where it belongs."

At last year's Pro Bowl the Jets' Joe Klecko became so enamored of Howie Long's all-American model, he wore it in practice. And he wouldn't give it back. He had the Jets' colors painted on it, wore it in the Pro Bowl game and then took it home with him. "Good thing Howie had an extra with him," says Dick Romanski, the Raiders' equipment manager.

Walter Payton wears a model that Wilson Sporting Goods stopped making seven years ago. "I gathered up all the ones I could when they stopped. I've got three left," says Bears equipment manager Ray Earley.

The inside of Mike Webster's helmet is fashioned from leather. "The guts are more important than the shell," says the Steelers center, who also stuffs a knee pad inside the helmet so it sits properly on his head. "If you take the pad out," he says, "the helmet comes down too far. It's important for a center to see."

Bob Golic, the Browns nosetackle, has deep gashes in his helmet directly above the forehead because he initiates so much contact.

Golic thinks Webster, against whom he plays twice a season, is responsible for most of the gashes: "I told him [at the Pro Bowl last year] he did most of it. He said he was sorry, so he just traded helmets with me."

On Dec. 1 the federal government filed a sentencing memorandum in its case involving Dominic Frontiere, the husband of L.A. Rams owner Georgia Frontiere.

Dominic, who was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 19, has pleaded guilty to two counts—filing false income tax returns and willfully making false statements to the IRS. The charges relate, in part, to large amounts of unreported income from the sale of 1980 Super Bowl tickets—"approximately $500,000 in cash," the papers say. Frontiere claimed as a business expense $96,486 worth of Super Bowl tickets. Frontiere said he had given the tickets away; the government said he had scalped them. Frontiere was scheduled to be sentenced Monday.