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MIAMI -- Brian Urlacher isn't mean enough.
He's not tough enough.
He's not physical enough.
Too nice, too good-natured.
There's only one man in the world who even could hint at something so preposterous. After all, who's going to argue with **** Butkus?
"**** Butkus always has something to say about me, and it's not always good," said Urlacher, the Chicago Bears' superstar middle linebacker, as he prepared for Sunday's Super Bowl showdown with the Indianapolis Colts. "But he's Butkus, the best middle linebacker ever. I'm certainly not going to say anything back to him."
All these years later, Butkus, the barbaric Bears legend, still sets the standard for violence and viciousness in pro football. Urlacher is considered by most to be one of the toughest, most tenacious linebackers in the league, but to Butkus, he's a *****cat.
Butkus thinks Urlacher should try to intimidate more, play angrier; not just tackle ballcarriers but try to behead and bury them.
"I'm not picking on Urlacher," Butkus said this week in a phone interview. "He's obviously a great player. I'd just like to see him hit a little harder, not because it's a macho thing but because it causes turnovers. Hit 'em high, hit 'em hard and jar the ball loose.
"With his size and his speed -- are you kidding me? He could annihilate people. When backs are running the sweep and they see him coming, they should be saying to themselves, 'This guy is going to clean my clock.' When you have that intimidation factor, backs start worrying about protecting themselves instead of the ball."
That's how it was done in Butkus' day, when "middle linebacker" was synonymous with "psychopathic madman." Guys such as Butkus, Ray Nitschke and Hardy Brown didn't just try to hit players, they tried to maim them.
According to some accounts, Brown knocked more than 20 players unconscious in one season as the San Francisco 49ers' middle linebacker in the 1950s. New York Giants offensive lineman Tex Coulter grew up with Brown in a Texas orphanage, so during one game, he thought it would be nice if he said hello to his childhood buddy.
"I came up to the line and looked across at his linebacker spot, and his eyes looked like they belonged to some cave animal," Coulter recalled to a reporter years later. "I kept my mouth shut."
When I was young, my stepfather told me the story about a running back accusing Butkus of biting his hand at the bottom of a pileup.
"Look what you did to my finger," the running back supposedly said, holding up a bloody digit.
Snarled Butkus: "It wasn't me. If I'd bitten you, you wouldn't have a finger left."
Butkus laughs now.
"I think that story has been exaggerated over the years," he says.
Maybe so, but Butkus' effect on the game never can be exaggerated, nor can the game's effect on him. All the pain and punishment he once dished out has come back to him tenfold. His body is a scarred, mutilated mess, and he limps around on surgically replaced knees.
He actually sued the Bears in 1974, charging the team and its doctors with repeatedly injecting his knees with cortisone and other drugs during his career. The injections, he claimed, caused irreparable damage, and he hobbled away with a $600,000 settlement.
"That's just the way it was back then," says Mike Ditka, Butkus' teammate on the Bears. "You always played hard, and you always played hurt."
Sometimes, it seems, they played too hard and too hurt.
Judging by the way Ditka and Butkus are limping around on knee and hip replacements, maybe Urlacher has the right idea.
He may not be quite as tough as **** Butkus.
But he's a whole lot smarter.
Mike Bianchi can be reached at [email protected].
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/football/orl-bianchi0207feb02,0,6935477.column?coll=orl-sports-football
He's not tough enough.
He's not physical enough.
Too nice, too good-natured.
There's only one man in the world who even could hint at something so preposterous. After all, who's going to argue with **** Butkus?
"**** Butkus always has something to say about me, and it's not always good," said Urlacher, the Chicago Bears' superstar middle linebacker, as he prepared for Sunday's Super Bowl showdown with the Indianapolis Colts. "But he's Butkus, the best middle linebacker ever. I'm certainly not going to say anything back to him."
All these years later, Butkus, the barbaric Bears legend, still sets the standard for violence and viciousness in pro football. Urlacher is considered by most to be one of the toughest, most tenacious linebackers in the league, but to Butkus, he's a *****cat.
Butkus thinks Urlacher should try to intimidate more, play angrier; not just tackle ballcarriers but try to behead and bury them.
"I'm not picking on Urlacher," Butkus said this week in a phone interview. "He's obviously a great player. I'd just like to see him hit a little harder, not because it's a macho thing but because it causes turnovers. Hit 'em high, hit 'em hard and jar the ball loose.
"With his size and his speed -- are you kidding me? He could annihilate people. When backs are running the sweep and they see him coming, they should be saying to themselves, 'This guy is going to clean my clock.' When you have that intimidation factor, backs start worrying about protecting themselves instead of the ball."
That's how it was done in Butkus' day, when "middle linebacker" was synonymous with "psychopathic madman." Guys such as Butkus, Ray Nitschke and Hardy Brown didn't just try to hit players, they tried to maim them.
According to some accounts, Brown knocked more than 20 players unconscious in one season as the San Francisco 49ers' middle linebacker in the 1950s. New York Giants offensive lineman Tex Coulter grew up with Brown in a Texas orphanage, so during one game, he thought it would be nice if he said hello to his childhood buddy.
"I came up to the line and looked across at his linebacker spot, and his eyes looked like they belonged to some cave animal," Coulter recalled to a reporter years later. "I kept my mouth shut."
When I was young, my stepfather told me the story about a running back accusing Butkus of biting his hand at the bottom of a pileup.
"Look what you did to my finger," the running back supposedly said, holding up a bloody digit.
Snarled Butkus: "It wasn't me. If I'd bitten you, you wouldn't have a finger left."
Butkus laughs now.
"I think that story has been exaggerated over the years," he says.
Maybe so, but Butkus' effect on the game never can be exaggerated, nor can the game's effect on him. All the pain and punishment he once dished out has come back to him tenfold. His body is a scarred, mutilated mess, and he limps around on surgically replaced knees.
He actually sued the Bears in 1974, charging the team and its doctors with repeatedly injecting his knees with cortisone and other drugs during his career. The injections, he claimed, caused irreparable damage, and he hobbled away with a $600,000 settlement.
"That's just the way it was back then," says Mike Ditka, Butkus' teammate on the Bears. "You always played hard, and you always played hurt."
Sometimes, it seems, they played too hard and too hurt.
Judging by the way Ditka and Butkus are limping around on knee and hip replacements, maybe Urlacher has the right idea.
He may not be quite as tough as **** Butkus.
But he's a whole lot smarter.
Mike Bianchi can be reached at [email protected].
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/football/orl-bianchi0207feb02,0,6935477.column?coll=orl-sports-football
