Tales from the wayback

One of my favorite sportswriters is Dr. Z of Sports Illustrated (Paul Zimmerman, if you must), who's a throwback to the days when beat writers lived and breathed their sports instead of throwing out fancy-schmancy prose about anything that catches their fancy.

Dr. Z writes about the NFL, with occassional snippets about wine. His credentials are deep (in both areas, actually), and I really like his down-to-earth, wry writing style.

He wrote this week about some of his favorite training camp memories, from back in the day when journalists didn't have to stay in the roped-off areas:

I remember the Jets used to have a 12-minute run when the players first reported to camp. We had a pool going on the sidelines. The writers put up a dollar a man, and you had to pick the last-place finisher, winner take all. Dropouts didn't count.

So one time the run started, and coach Weeb Ewbank noticed all the action in our section. "Whatcha all doing?" he said and we told him. "Too late to get in?" he said and we said no and took his buck and he picked Randy Rasmussen, the starting left guard.

This was an upset because you seldom picked a regular, not with so many fat free agents around. But after a few laps Weeb had a definite contender in the slow-moving, heavy-legged Rasmussen. He was struggling near the back of the pack as they came around.

"Take it easy, Randy boy!" Weeb yelled at him. "We're not trying to make a miler out of you." Randy finished next to last, 30 yards upfield from fullback Jim Nance. Vinny DiTrani of the Bergen Record took the pot.

Heh heh, Weeb's a hall of fame coach, too....

I got a tremendous kick out of Ken Shipp, the receivers coach, from Murfreesboro, Tenn. At the end of a meal, he'd tilt his chair back and launch into his favorite diatribe -- receivers who dropped passes.

"You know something?" he'd say. "In Russia they know how to deal with guys like that. 'Candidates for elimination,' they'd call them. No fuss, no problems, they'd just take them outside, put 'em up against the wall and ... " he'd cock his finger and squeeze an imaginary trigger.

At practice, when one of his receivers dropped the ball, Shipp would look over at me on the sidelines, cock his finger, squeeze the trigger and mouth the words, "Candidate for elimination."

It's interesting that nobody realizes the Communists actually were the pioneers in sports psychology, as well as fields like sports nutrition and fitness training... bullets, at least in athletics, would've been too crude for them.

I wonder what Shipp would have done to Joe Don Looney. In 1964, Looney's rookie year as the Giants' No. 1 draft pick, I covered my first NFL training camp. I guess covered is the wrong word. I filled in for Joe King, the NY World-Telegram & Sun's regular NFL writer. I did sidebars, features, oddities. And the oddest of those oddities was Looney, the 224-pound halfback.

What did I know? I thought there were a lot of guys in the league like him. I was wrong. There was only one. Or as Jets' wideout George Sauer, Jr., once said, "Never was a man more aptly named."

In college he had logged time at Texas, TCU, Cameron JC and Oklahoma, where he was thrown out for slugging a student assistant coach. In the NFL he saw action with five teams in five seasons, before he settled into what he said was his real life's work, taking care of the elephant belonging to a guru in India. But no one really knew what to make of him in his first training camp, in '64, except that they had never seen one like him.

He had a personal grievance against coach Allie Sherman's new recoil blocking dummies, and he used to attack them with a fury, punching and pummeling them long after the coach whistled for another guy to step in. One day trainer Sid Morett told me -- and these were the days when we could actually talk to trainers and equipment men and the like ... they didn't put on a furtive look and say, "Better clear it with coach" -- he had never seen one like Looney.

"He won't throw his used socks and his jock into the bin with the sign on it," Sid said, shaking his head. "He said, 'No sign's gonna tell me what to do.'" Once, after he had been fined for missing the 11 p.m. bed check, I asked Looney how come.

"It's not fair," he said. "I missed it by 10 minutes. The night before I was in bed by 10. They still owe me 50 minutes." One night I saw him hauling a sheet and blanket out to a nearby cemetery. I asked him if he were going to sleep there. "Yeah," he said, "it's nice and peaceful." Next day I asked him how it was.

"I had a pretty good talk with some guy about death," he said.

An ex-NFL player taking care of elephants in India? I know Ricky Williams went there, but it sure wasn't to shovel up after pachyderms... although Ricky actuallly would do something like that, he's one of the more humble players.

We'll give Paul's official CNNSI bio the last word:

Paul Zimmerman, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated since 1979, videotapes and charts as many as eight NFL games a week from his home. It’s safe to say that Dr. Z has watched more NFL games than any other person on the planet. In addition to his regular columns for SI, he contributes Insider, Power Rankings and Mailbag columns to SI.com.

Dr. Z is the author of seven books on the NFL, including The Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football. His inside analysis and opinions are rooted in more than 50 years of playing and watching football.

As a 15-year-old, Zimmerman sparred with Ernest Hemingway in a Manhattan gym. He sustained four broken noses as an offensive lineman in high school (Horace Mann High in the Bronx, N.Y.), at two colleges (Stanford and Columbia) and for his Army team (the Western Area Command Rhinos, in Germany). He also played semi-professionally in New Jersey for the Paterson Pioneers and the Morristown Colonials.

Before joining SI, Zimmerman worked for the New York Journal-American and the New York World-Telegram & Sun, and spent 13 years at the New York Post, where he covered pro football and three Olympic Games. He was one of the few journalists to get close to the Israeli compound during the 1972 hostage-taking in Munich; he bucked two lines of security guards and took a rifle butt to the head.

Zimmerman and his wife, to whom he often refers in his columns on CNNSI.com, live in Mountain Lakes, N.J.

Uncredited photo of Zimmerman with Gil Brandt from the Pro Football Hall of Fame.