‘I would not play’
Buoniconti’s life of football deteriorates
The list grows and so does the sadness. One wonders if it will ever end. One fears it will not. In the May 15 issue of Sports Illustrated, S.L. Price pens a moving piece about another fallen NFL warrior, but this one, for those of us who lived through an uncertain time in Patriots history, the sadness hits closer to home.
Nick Buoniconti, the undersized altar boy from the south side of Springfield who gave all of us normal-sized kids hope when he went off and became a 5-foot-11 All-American linebacker at Notre Dame and a Pro Football Hall of Famer, can’t figure out how to put on a T-shirt.
He can’t remember how to tie a tie. Or how to lace his shoes. Or how to make his left arm listen to the muddled commands of his damaged brain.
The epitome of agility and aggressiveness, Buoniconti once said when comparing his style to that of the greatest linebacker who ever lived, Dick Butkus, “When Butkus hits you, you fall down the way he wants. When I hit you, you fall down the way you want. But you still fall.”
Now it’s Nick Buoniconti who falls down for no apparent reason but that his mind no longer works.
Buoniconti is a casualty of hand-to-hand combat fought on football fields from Cathedral High to South Bend to Boston and finally on to Miami. Fought for our viewing pleasure for 14 years, seven with the Boston Patriots and seven more years of glory with the hated Miami Dolphins. That’s where Patriots management, in its infinite wisdom, sent the future Hall of Famer in 1969 for a quarterback named Kim Hammond, a linebacker named John Bramlett and a fifth-round draft pick who became linebacker Bob Olson. At the time, we thought the Patriots had brain damage for making a deal like that. We were right. In 2001, Buoniconti entered the Hall of Fame while we were still saying “who?” when looking at what he was traded for.
Buoniconti went on from the Patriots to win two Super Bowls, including one with Miami’s undefeated 1972 team that finished 17-0. After retirement he served as a successful agent and lawyer before becoming a multi-millionaire running U.S. Tobacco and working for 23 years as host of HBO’s “Inside the NFL.”
No matter how successful you become, you are never bulletproof from life though. In 1985, his son Marc was paralyzed with a broken neck making a tackle in college for the Citadel and together they turned that pain into the Miami Project, a charity that has raised millions and helped many suffering from similar injuries through research and services.
Buoniconti never blamed football for that pain he, his son and their family shouldered, but faced with what he believes the game has done to him he tells Price when asked if he knew then what he knew now would he still play, his answer is damning.
“The answer would be no,” he said. “I would not play football.”
Nick Buoniconti now wishes he never played? If you remember the kind of player he was, that thought boggles the mind. Maybe fittingly so.
At one point Buoniconti tells Price, “Someone said I took 500,000 hits to my head,” and if you ever saw him play back in the day you wouldn’t doubt it. Tiny even by the reduced standards of the game back then, he wasn’t even drafted by the NFL, but that was all right with us because it meant the Patriots got him on the 13th round of the 1962 AFL draft. Maybe he only weighed 215 pounds, but he was an instant hit when he came home, emphasis on hit.
His college coach, Joe Kuharich, once said when theorizing he was too small for pro football that “He’ll run through a brick wall for you but he’ll leave a small hole.” Maybe so but he made a big hit for seven years with the Patriots and a bigger one in Miami.
He’s in both teams’ Halls of Fame as well as in the one that counts the most, and he’s got the rings to prove it. He also has, according to Dr. David Ross, “holes in his brain.”
Nick Buoniconti is not alone among NFL players in that, as we’ve come to learn. In fact, Price also writes about one of Buoniconti’s now-suffering former Dolphins teammates, running back Jim Kiick. He, too, is struggling with football-caused brain damage. The difference between them is Buoniconti became wealthy enough to pay for full-time aides, a driver and a long string of doctors, tests and experimental therapies, while Kiick became lost and nearly destitute, a former player cast aside by a league that seems still to consider these broken men acceptable casualties in a sporting war that gets bigger and bigger but has left them little to show for their role in its growth.
Buoniconti is critical in Price’s piece of the NFL’s nearly billion dollar settlement of the concussion lawsuit that for a time threatened the game to its core, claiming it was “for the NFL. Not for the players.” Many others feel the same, just as they feel the NFL denied for decades any connection between concussions and head trauma with long-term brain damage, a lie they perpetrated long after they knew otherwise.
Now 76 and believed to be struggling with the three most feared letters in sports — CTE not NFL — Nick Buoniconti is broken in ways that cannot be repaired. S.L. Price’s story on the Sports Illustrated website will tell you that, but a video that accompanies it and runs for only 88 seconds says it louder than any words.
For those of you who remember the kid from Springfield who made a lot of us believe you didn’t have to be a giant to play like one, watch Nick Buoniconti try to figure out how to put on a T-shirt. Then wipe away a tear and ask yourself what you’ve really been watching all these years.