This whole thing started with the O. J. Simpson story, with all the talk about the downfall of a sports hero. We could not help but take a collective pause . . . and ponder: How exactly do we come up with our heroes? How do we keep one? Or is that possible?
I kept wondering about my own childhood sports hero, Bert Jones, star quarterback of the Baltimore Colts, and a friend. What was it about Bert that made him such a big deal? What if I spent some time with him now? Would it still be possible to think of my childhood sports hero as a hero? Would the powerful memories of my years as a ball boy with the Colts be reinforced or would time and age chip away at them, creating something of a void?
I want to know. Might even need to know.
I want Bert to throw me the football again, and I want to throw it back, just like we used to do, over and over, before a game or practice. Helping him loosen up was always such a thrill, the laces of the football burning my hands because he threw so hard and with such a tight spiral. Maybe having a catch with him now will help me to understand more about then.
I also want Bert to take me fishing. He has always been such a dedicated outdoorsman. He has invited me several times, but I have never been fishing, with or without him. Maybe some time together on a quiet pond, learning something new from Bert now, will help me understand what exactly I might have been learning from him then.
And so here I am, a free-lance writer visiting Ruston, La., 35 miles south of Arkansas, midway between Texas and Mississippi, population 20,000, a hearty collection of folks enjoying the rolling hills, growing the best peaches in the world, studying and partying at Louisiana Tech.
This is where Bert was born and raised, where he has lived since the day he stopped throwing footballs, where I find him behind his desk at his lumber mill. Bert is speaking into a headset connected to his telephone, selling lumber. Bert Jones, selling lumber?
He and one of his brothers, Bill, own and operate Mid-States Wood Preservers, buying, treating, manufacturing, selling and shipping wood. Fifteen years ago, when Bert was still playing football and Bill was practicing law, they took a watermelon patch, hauled in some heavy machinery and started stacking wood. Now they employ about 50 locals, and the 18-wheelers keep kicking up dirt as they come and go.
Bert is 42 years old. He does a few television gigs here and there, a celebrity appearance now and then, when asked, but he has no interest in parlaying his football past to pay his bills now. No, the new Bert is taking care of his wife and four children by manufacturing and selling lumber.
But wait. The old Bert is not gone altogether. That red Swiss
Army knife. That leather case holding it on his belt. Those same old baggy shorts, just like the shorts he used to wear to and from practice each and every day during summer training camps at Goucher College in Towson.
One of my jobs before practice was collecting valuables and locking them up. Most players would turn in wallets, watches, dorm keys. Bert would just tuck that knife and its case into those baggy khakis, fold them up and turn in the whole thing. His valuables. Something about seeing them again, something to do with familiarity, I guess, is reassuring now. Maybe, just maybe, he is still the Bert Jones I knew, even though he is on the phone, selling lumber.
And then, thank goodness, I hear the clincher: "Right hee-uh." Bert has finally located a missing purchase order under some papers on his desk. He is employing the same country cadence he has been using all these years. "Right hee-uh." As in right here. As in pay attention, something important is about to happen.
That old country cadence is carrying me back to Goucher. Back before the shoulder injuries. Before the falling out with Robert Irsay, owner of the Colts. Before Bert demanded a trade and was shipped off to the Los Angeles Rams following the 1981 season.
"Right hee-uh," Bert is calling out, gathering the offense. "Right hee-uh." I see him kneeling in the huddle now, guard Robert Pratt leaning over him on his left, running back Lydell Mitchell on his right, tight end Raymond Chester facing him, and Bert is in absolute command. "Red right 72 whirl. On two."
Roger Carr, the wide receiver, will run a curl pattern, turning in at 20 yards. Bert will make sure the football meets him there. And the Colts, my Colts, will again be marching down the field.
We met the summer of 1974. Bert was preparing for his second season with the Colts. I was a sports-loving 11-year-old from New York, attending tennis camp at the McDonogh School, and was excited to learn it was also the summer home of the Colts (they moved to Goucher the next year). The football practice fields at McDonogh were right next to the tennis courts.
The first few days I ran around collecting autographs. Then I got to know some of the players, and they came to treat me like a little brother, playing catch, taking me for ice cream, always making me feel welcome. The equipment man, Mike McVean, let me hang jerseys in the lockers and hand out towels. The trainers let me stand on the back of their pickup and pour Gatorade for the players.
I did not know much about Bert then. I had no idea his father, William "Dub" Jones, himself a Ruston boy, had paved the way by playing 10 years of professional football, eight with the powerful Cleveland Browns, then coaching with the same team. I was too young to realize Bert had been an All-American at Louisiana State, and certainly did not understand the significance of the position he was in with the Colts, heir apparent to the quarterback job defined in Baltimore by Johnny Unitas, simply the most famous and worshiped of all the Colts. Bert was being asked to sing after Frank Sinatra.
Toward the end of the summer, McVean, the equipment man, asked me if I'd like to go to the stadium with him for a preseason game against the Detroit Lions. It was incredible. I was in the locker room. On the sideline. In the huddle with towels during a timeout. I'll never forget it. McVean let me help again when the Colts played in New York that season. Each year I helped at a game or two. And I always tried to keep in touch with my new football friends in Baltimore.
Ray Oldham, a defensive back, became my pen pal. Toni Linhart, the kicker, and his wife, Renate, became my second family. And I had other favorites. But Bert developed into the player I admired more than any other.
He led the Colts to three straight AFC East titles starting in 1975. In 1976, he was voted most valuable player in the NFL. He was always the center of attention. Sure, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but that was not enough. He was also on the cover of People, one of the magazine's 25 most intriguing folks in the world for 1976, right along with Robert Redford, Farrah Fawcett and Jimmy Carter.
It was not fame alone, though, that drew me to Bert. Fame is too vague, and what does it really mean in the solitude that comes with the end of a day? No, the qualities that drew me to Bert were much more tangible than that.
He was the ultimate competitor. As a youngster he had suffered from rickets, which left him pigeon-toed and knock-kneed. But even when he had to wear braces, he never played games, he attacked them. Same with professional football. He was always the leader.
Still, the most enchanting thing about Bert was that he always seemed to be having a good time. Always seemed like such a kid, an overgrown country kid with special permission to run and throw and laugh, always laugh, as he claimed victory after victory in an adult world.
Take his way of greeting the hottest, most miserable days of training camp. He would storm onto the practice field with a grin, a hoot and a holler. "Can't work me hard enough on a beautiful day like tuh-day," he would yell over and over. Some of the other players would just roll their eyes; some actually drew on his enthusiasm.
Take the sworn affidavit he wanted the lovely Danielle Marie Dupuis to sign on the 24th day of March 1977 as a condition of their impending marriage. "She will never oppose any plans of Bertram Hayes Jones to engage in the manly pursuits of hunting and/or fishing," it says. The document was duly signed and notarized. But it was just a joke. Sort of.
Take the way Bert initiated rookies during training camp. He would wrap his body with bed sheets, covering all but his eyes and hands, and would pull a baseball cap low in the front to help conceal his eyes. Then he would surround himself with offensive linemen for protection and break into the rookies' dorm rooms just before curfew -- all so he could blast them with baby powder and water.
He got my room, too. I hated cleaning it up. And I loved it. It was the summer of 1979. After I'd spent five years helping at a game or two each season, the Colts had finally hired me. It was my first of four training camps working full time and living with the team, and by trashing my room, Bert was letting me know, yes, I was one of the guys.
It would be impossible to describe how good it feels to be 16, living with a professional football team, and having your idol be the one to confirm that you belong.
Bert sometimes asked me to hold a can of Copenhagen snuff for him during practice. I was happy to because he would have to call out my name to get a dip. Talk about recognition.
Bert always made some time for me. He even let me borrow his car once for a date. I got a kiss that night. And I think I know why. The girl knew whose car it was. She was impressed.
"Did you even know I looked up to you the way I did?"
It is difficult to ask probing questions of your childhood sports hero. Makes me a bit uncomfortable. But I am doing the best I can.
"I knew what it was like for you," Bert is telling me now, 20 years after we met. "I had been through it myself when my father was coaching with the Cleveland Browns. Living in the dorm. Helping the equipment man and trainers. Same things you did. Same age. Started when I was 11. Did it till I was a high school senior."
We are approaching downtown Ruston in his black Chevy pickup, the one with the bumper stickers saying "Wood Is Wonderful" and "Trashy People Litter." Bert wants me to see a few of the sights: the one-man barber shop, the old Dixie Theater, his favorite little lunch counter where all he has to do is sit down and order "a plate" and not a soul in the place exhibits one iota of interest in the fact that he was once a football star.
"Did you have a favorite," I ask Bert? "Someone you thought of as a hero?"
"More than one. Gene Hickerson was probably my best friend. Offensive guard, No. 66. I'll never forget when I played my first pro game. We were in Cleveland. Gene used to do this thing where he would lean up against the goal post. That was his pre-game warm-up. Well, he was still with the Browns, so I went right out there before the game and started leaning against the goal post, same way he used to do it. He definitely knew it was time to retire when he saw me there."
Bert laughs. He loves that story.
"Who were the other players you looked up to?"
"Let's see. Paul Warfield, Jim Brown, Leroy Kelly. They were the best of the best. Also friends. And, of course, Frank Ryan, the quarterback. And I warmed him up every day. Same thing you did."
"What was it that made them your favorites?"
"Because they always said hello. They treated me like somebody. Doesn't mean they were always kind. They ridiculed you and had fun with you. But you were somebody to them."
"Sounds familiar," I say.
"Yes, it does," Bert says.
"Did you ever have a chance, later, to tell them how much they meant to you as a kid?"
"I think they all knew. But no, not really."
We say nothing for a minute or two, which, for some reason, seems like a long time now. I think back to something author Larry Fox once wrote in a book about Bert and the Colts.
Ball boy. A euphemism. The ball boy is the jack-of-all-dirty-jobs in a football training camp. Pick up towels, pick up jocks, launder socks, shine shoes, haul ice, sweep the floor, be there before the players, stay late. Long hours, hard work -- heaven.
When I was 15, I photocopied that paragraph and pinned it to my bedroom wall, where I maintained a gallery of favorite quotes from sports figures and writers.
"When you were with the Colts, would you actually take the time to think about the way you were treating a kid like me?"
"Probably did. I would hope I did. I mean, yeah, without question. But I was doing what was natural."
"What about the whole idea of kids having sports heroes? Should football players -- any athletes, I guess -- be heroes?"
"They can be," Bert says. "But should they be? No, not necessarily. I came to a conclusion many years ago about team sports. What you have with the players on any team is a very diverse group. The only common denominator is that they can physically perform well, and, hopefully, they can also handle it mentally. But does that make a so-called hero? Not necessarily. I think our society is somewhat distorted to place the emphasis on sports that it does. We're certainly not performing a necessary function of life. It's not like we're providing water or utilities. We're performing an entertainment function."
I tell Bert, "Must be kind of weird to have me asking you all this stuff. Kind of weird for me, too, but I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you did for me, the impact you had on me."
Bert offers no immediate response. Then he says it again: He was just doing what was natural.
I'm somewhat disappointed. I don't know what I'm expecting out of him, what exactly I want him to say about our relationship, but that's definitely not it. Then again, I cannot allow myself to forget the great divide: Yes, we are both adults now. But he was the star. I was the ball boy. Of course we are going to have different feelings about the whole thing.
"There are few things sacred in life," Bert is telling me later in the day. "Of which a man's fly rod is one."
If it were opening day of the dove-hunting season, he would probably be saying the same thing about his double-barrel 20-gauge. Bert will go just about anywhere to fish or hunt just about anything. At the same time, he is proudly declaring that he will always protect and conserve the natural resources of America, and especially those of Louisiana, which contains nearly half the nation's wetlands. Bert's father taught him to be a conservationist, and Bert is teaching similar lessons to his own -- sons, Tram, 16, and Beau, who is 9.
Bert is completing his sixth and final year of a gubernatorial appointment to the state Wildlife and Fisheries Commission, to which he is extremely devoted. He was chairman for a year. It is no wonder, then, that friends sometimes refer to him as "Bert, who's next to dirt," meaning he is second only to the soil itself in harmony with his environment, according to a recent story in Outdoor Life.
He started buying up land with money from his first professional football contract, and has been accumulating ever since. His favorite tract, some 500-plus acres, includes a perfectly serene pond about a mile into the woods, where we are now unloading the pickup. Work is done. Bert is going to show me how to catch a fish.
Tram and Beau are along with us, too, and Tram knows exactly what he is doing out here, checking the dock for snakes, tying lines, preparing our boat, trying to get his little brother to leave him alone for even a minute. Beau is nonstop chatter, constant motion, making like he wants to help but mainly pestering big brother. Beau is intentionally splashing Tram, pretending it is an accident, but Tram knows better, and he threatens to dump Beau head first into the water. Bert sees himself and his own brothers as he watches Tram and Beau, letting them have at it by the dock as he and I push off onto the still water.
I am thrilled when I catch my first and only fish, even though the largemouth bass weighs less than a pound. Bert is equally excited about it, offering a celebratory high five, and then we throw the fish back. The rest of the evening I catch nothing but weeds and sticks. Hardly matters, though. I am again learning from Bert.
It makes me feel so good to see him interacting with his sons, who are out in another boat now. I admire how patient he is with them, how much he enjoys them, no matter what they are doing. Makes me think of the way he used to be with me. But I never said "yes, sir" and "no, sir" the way his children do, especially Tram.
As dark is setting in, Bert turns to me, out of nowhere, and says, "Wonder what Glenn Doughty's doing."
Doughty, of course, was one of the Colts' best receivers when they were winning those three division titles.
"No idea," I say.
"Lydell Mitchell?"
"No idea."
"Kind of embarrassing," Bert says. "I oughta know."
I'm not surprised he doesn't. It is a long way from here to Baltimore and the 1970s. I'm just surprised to hear him bring up anything about football. All day I have been the one initiating conversation about the Colts. This is the first time Bert has brought it up.
He hurt his shoulder again almost two years ago. No defensive linemen crashing down on him this time. Fell out of a tree checking to see if a deer stand was safe before he let Tram up there. It was not. Bert dislocated the same injury-plagued shoulder that kept him out of 25 games in 1978 and 1979.
"Can't hardly lift my arm up," he says. It is 7 the next morning. We are starting to play catch out on the lawn in front of his house, which is 7 years old, antebellum-style, wrapped with a 10-foot porch, punctuated by large windows all the way around and swings in the front corners. The children -- daughters Molly, 16 (Tram's twin), Stephanie, 14, and the boys -- have a trampoline and a volleyball net ready for action in the back. They have more than enough bicycles in a rack by the driveway, near the green 1963 Chevy Impala, which Bert considers a member of the family. It all sits on an 18-acre lot tucked away in the back of a subdivision, less than a mile from his childhood home, where his parents still live.
Bert begins throwing slowly, hoping the shoulder will cooperate, then zings one, and I feel the laces burning my hands.
"That's what I was looking for," I tell him.
"Yeah, used to be able to do a few things with the ball," Bert says. "I think hearing 'em was the most fun."
True, they used to whistle in the air. I remember that. His passes whistle no more. But so what? Having this catch is not nearly as important to me now as I thought it was going to be.
That all changed first thing this morning after flipping through another old book about Bert. It was up on a shelf in Beau's room, along with a few other reminders that his father had more than his 15 minutes of fame: a game ball dated Oct. 9, 1977, when the Colts beat the Dolphins, 45-28; one of Bert's old helmets; a trophy awarded to him for his contribution to those Miller Lite commercials he used to do with Rodney Dangerfield and Bob Uecker and all those other clowns.
And I got to thinking: Do his sons really understand who he was? What he did? Probably a little early for Beau to really get it. Tram needs to know. Just like that, playing catch with Bert does not seem at all crucial anymore. My new priority is spending a few minutes alone with Tram.
Continuity is everything to Bert. His father passing down to him. Him passing down to his children. One of the most cherished stretches in his life was what he calls his "Mr. Mom stage," the 2 1/2-year period during which he filled in for Danni while she was making the daily commute 70 miles to Shreveport, studying and earning a master's degree in physical therapy. The Mr. Mom stage -- cooking and driving car pools and tucking in the children, "very taxing but very rewarding," Bert says -- came to an end about a year ago. Well, Bert gave something to me as well, and I am determined to share it with his elder son.
I find Tram at Mid-States, pulling lumber off the line. This is his third summer working for his father, and he enjoys learning the business. This fall Tram will be playing tight end on the Ruston High football team, although he is a better student than athlete. We go outside so we can hear above the machinery.
"I want to try to explain some things to you," I begin. "You know, about your father, why I'm here, the whole deal. I don't know if he's told you anything about it."
"Not really."
So I take him through the background. And I finish with this: "Tram, it's like I came here wanting to find out something from your father again. But I've been thinking a lot about you and Beau. I want you guys to know how special your father has always been to me, want you to know how he was with young people, with me, the impact he had. Might not mean much to you now, but it might someday."
Tram does not say anything. He nods his head, looks at the ground, kicks at the dirt.
"The way you and Beau are with him in the woods or at the pond, that's the way it was with me and football. He always took the time to care. He was kinda like a hero to me."
Still is, I guess.
I am ready to go now. I walk to Bert's office, where he is again connected to the headset, and I start telling him about the talk with Tram. Bert is glued to what I am saying. He drops his head for maybe 10 seconds, then starts tugging at the headset, removing it. He is wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. Bert Jones is crying.
"Sentimental in my old age," he says. "Close the door."
And I do. He wants to speak again but it takes a minute.
"Guess I had pretty much everything I could ever want," he says. "Playing in the stadium where my daddy did. Leaning up against the goal post with my old friend, Gene Hickerson. Only remorse, I guess, is my little guys not being there to see any of it. Not knowing some of the things I did. That's the only sadness."
His index finger, the one on the hand that threw footballs, traps a tear rolling down his cheek, and he flicks it away.
"They probably know more than you realize," I say.
He is trying to get himself back together now, picking up a book, a book about knots, which only someone like Bert would keep nearby. He is flipping through the pages.
"Are you fascinated with knots?" he asks me.
"No."
"I often wonder how many knots I've tied where my life was hanging on them."
"Bert, you should call the Colts. Maybe you can get some films or something. Show them to your kids."
"Could do that. Think I've got some films somewhere."
We talk for a few more minutes before the receptionist interrupts on the intercom. A salesman is here to see Bert.
"End of the month," he says, jumping up. "You realize the craziness? It's like game day."
Bert Jones laughs, but not at full strength yet, and he opens the door, welcoming the real world back into his office. I walk out. Looking backward with a lifetime renewal on some of my favorite childhood memories. Looking forward with a sense that maybe another 20 years from now I will want to know what Tram and Beau have done with their lives.
JEFFREY MARX is a free-lance writer living in Washington.