That's why I started with "IIRC", I'm remembering something Madden wrote in his book "One Knee Equals Two Feet and Everything Else You Need To Know About Football". That book came out in the mid 80's (I must have read it around 1987, nearly 30 years ago). He had a section devoted to the best players he ever saw and that's where I read the story. I'm 100% sure about the muscle beach part. He also wrote about Jack playing with the broken leg. That's the first time I heard about it because I was too young in '79 to really be aware of the situation when it actually happened. I must be wrong about the 2x a season part, good catch. I must have been thinking of something he said about a Chief or Bronco and mentally attached it to the Youngblood story? He really liked that old Chief's Defense, Willie Lanier, Mike Curtis (wrote about him crushing the dude running onto the field), Bobby Bell, etc. Funniest part was when he wrote about Tom Jackson (the ESPN host). Apparently, Tom wasn't very polite on the field. Madden wrote that Jackson would make a tackle and then yell at him "Take that, Fat Man!". Insults like that all game long. If I ever meet Tom Jackson, I'm dying to ask him about that. It was a different NFL back then.
I also remember Madden saying how wrong he was about Eric Dickerson (who was a huge superstar at the time in the mid-80's). Coming into the draft, he thought Dickerson was strictly an astroturf star and would struggle playing on muddy grass (the Raider's field at the Colosseum tended to be damp all the time). He wrote that he found out pretty quickly that Dickerson could play on anything, turf, grass, mud, parking lot, marbles, broken glass, anything.
Alex.
