RIP Dick Butkus

Dick Butkus, who died at 80 in Malibu this week, was exactly the kind of player that got me interested in NFL football when I was around 6 or 7 years old. We had the home-team St. Louis Cardinals and my older brother was into the Dallas Cowboys, but nothing about those teams made me tick. I eventually saw the Pittsburgh Steelers, with Jack Lambert's teeth knocked out, Swann and Stallworth acrobatically and elegantly catching Terry Bradshaw's textbook-beautiful tosses, and their intimidating black-and-gold uniforms.

If I would have been born a little earlier, I think something about the villanous Butkus could have just as easily turned me into a lifelong Chicago Bears fan. That never happened, but I've seen his highlight reels, and Butkus was every bit as iconically violent as Lambert, and Mean Joe Greene, and many other Steelers I could name. He was clearly a real football lover's football player.

And while it's easy and totally fair to say violence of Butkus's sort leads to awful brain injuries and ruined lives, its also fair to say that football is a form of choreographed war and if someone wants to play it, who is to say they can't?

I love the way USA Today started its obit for Butkus. It says it all:

Dick Butkus was brutal. He was fierce. He was mean. He would punch you in the face and when he played, punching someone in the face was illegal, but barely. He'd run you down, past the out of bounds line, and push you into the bench and wait for you to do something about it. You wouldn't. You'd be too scared. Dick Butkus was an enforcer in an age when enforcers ruled the Earth. This isn't to say he wasn't a superb athlete. He was.