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A beloved Bengal deals with his new knees
Good column today from George Vecsey from the New York Times on former Bengal Reggie Williams, who is dealing with recent problems with one of his two artificial knees. The column’s first lines are attention-getting:
Lying in his hospital bed, Reggie Williams watched a flow of blood, four or five inches high, coming from his postsurgical knee.
“A fountain!” Williams called it.
That was May 2. Today, Williams, the one-time 14-year Bengal and a popular man throughout the league, is waiting for another procedure on the knee. He’s not sure what’s going to happen, but he insists that nothing will keep him from his College Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony this summer and that he doesn’t regret playing football for a living.
Williams knows that an alarming number of his peers are dying young, but he says he has no regrets about his violent occupation. He tells how his father fled Birmingham, Ala., for Michigan after fighting back against racial slurs. He notes that he was born in September 1954, only months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, outlawing school segregation, a timing Williams sees as mystical.
“There was a dearth of opportunity for my father and his father,” Williams said. “I had the chance to do a little good. There is no way I would have been a member of the city council. A few months after our vote, I was at a private house party and Bishop Desmond Tutu was there, saying that ‘the city of Zinzinnati’ helped free Nelson Mandela. If this was the only cost I had to pay, I can swallow the pain today.”
There are plenty who want to see Williams as healthy as possible. He was a humanitarian both during and after his playing days, and he was even a dark horse candidate to become the NFL’s next commissioner after Paul Tagliabue.
Richard Lapchick, probably the country’s leading advocate for diversity in sports, has more great information on Williams from this column of two years ago advocating his choice as commissioner.
Bottom line, one of the NFL’s good guys is dealing with some hard times because of the toll his body took on the field. But, he’s not blaming the game he played.
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