Atkins a study in pride and pain

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- I drive slowly past the small red-brick house on the narrow, winding road in the hills outside town.

I pull into a driveway a quarter-mile farther on. A dog barks somewhere. It's a few days before Christmas.

The dog stops. Silence.

I turn the car around, drive past the house again.

I don't know.

The house has its curtains drawn. There are two old cars in the carport, one of them very old, I'm guessing 30, 40 years. Fins. Rusty.

There's a wooden wheelchair ramp that looks weathered and unused leading to the front door. A ''No Smoking'' sign in the front-door window. Two tiny American flags on the wall next to the carport.

No lights on. No decorations.

Doug Atkins, 76, the legendary Hall of Fame defensive end for the Bears, lives here.

''I don't want to see anybody,'' he had told me during one of our phone conversations. People had their minds made up about a lot of stuff, he said. Predetermined. The country was going to hell. No middle class. Only rich and poor.

I didn't need to ask which side he fell on.

''I'm doing OK,'' he had said. ''I cracked my hip awhile back. Never got well since then. I can walk with a cane, but it's getting rough. I got sick, and I've been poisoned from some of the medicine they gave me -- lead poisoning. They don't put out the truth about medicines. So many crooks in the country nowadays -- politicians, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, lobbyists. A lot of people are worse off than I am. But I don't need to see any reporters.''

Everybody knows that football is a rough game, that the NFL is the roughness polished bright and turned into performance art, the brutality into religion, the cracking bones into the percussive soundtrack that suits our times.

But not many know the toll the game takes when the players themselves, the artists, have left the stage.

A shocking number of the men, starting sometimes well before middle age, begin to limp, then hobble, then stop moving much at all.

Dementia, mood disorders, osteoarthritis, surgery, more surgery, pain -- the wheel of football repercussion spins and spins.

And often, the longer a man played -- meaning the better player he was -- the worse his debilitation.

Doug Atkins played 17 years in the NFL, the best 12 for the Bears.

In that time, the long-legged, hickory-tough 6-8, 260-pounder did things that hadn't been done before on the gridiron. A scholarship basketball player at Tennessee as well as an All-America football player, Atkins sometimes jumped over blockers like a hurdler vaulting rolling logs.

He went out for track at Tennessee and won the Southeastern Conference high jump, clearing 6-6. In the NFL, he went to eight Pro Bowls from 1958 to 1966.

''I didn't know what I was doing in the high jump,'' he said on the phone. ''In high school one time, I scissored 6-1½.''

All that talent came together on the football field like a rainbow palette.

George Halas, Atkins' coach with the Bears and the man who helped found the NFL, said of the giant from Humboldt, Tenn., ''There never was a better defensive end.''

But now there's the embarrassment the game has exacted.

Mike Ditka hosts a golf tournament each year wherein Ditka and sponsors earmark money for Hall of Famers in need.

Sometimes it's a payout for surgical procedures or medicine.

Sometimes it's a wheelchair ramp.

One time it was for a tombstone.

''It's pitiful,'' says Ditka, tearing into the NFL's stingy pension plan for old-timers, the NFL players union and all PR aspects of the league. ''Rip 'em all. I don't care.''

The league's frugal pension plan is complicated, but it's simplified nicely by the fact that the veterans die at a swift pace.

There's a new pension agreement being put into place, but as of last year, NFL players who had reached age 55 might typically get between $200 and $425 a month.

Enough for aspirin, for sure.

While the current Bears swagger down the road to success and the NFL wallows in money, the old men who helped build the brand suffer in silence, often lame, often nearly destitute, their pride too great to allow pity.

Atkins had mesmerized me when I had asked him, please, just for me, to detail his injuries.

The groin pull that tore muscle off the bone, leaving a ''hole'' in his abdomen. ''My fault,'' he said.

The big toe injury. The broken collarbone. The leg that snapped at the bottom of a pile. (''I got to the sideline, and it didn't feel right.'')

The biceps that tore in half, Atkins' arm hanging limply.

''It's just a show muscle,'' he said, explaining why he never got it fixed.

''I see these old football players,'' says Dr. Victoria Brander, the head of Northwestern University's Arthritis Institute, ''and every joint is ruined -- their toes, ankles, knees, hips, fingers, elbows, shoulders. The supporting structure in the joints is gone. Their spines are collapsed. I see one former star who is bent like a 'C.'

''But they are noble. They played their game because they believed in something. They were warriors. They never complain.''

I have gone past Atkins' house four times now. I take a deep breath.

I dial his number on my cell phone.

His wife answers and gives him the phone. I just happen to be in the area, I say. Would he mind if I stopped by, maybe for a minute or two, on the way to the airport?

''Damn it, why do you all keep bothering me?'' Atkins yells into the receiver. ''I told you I was sick!''

And then the line is dead.

''These guys don't need much,'' Ditka will say later in barely controlled fury. ''Your best players? Ever? Why can't the league give them enough to live out their lives in dignity? Is that so f---ing hard?''

I drive on, feeling terrible, feeling cruel. I never should've imposed on Doug Atkins. On his pride.<

In the midst of our bounty, I feel lost.

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