I've been thinking about grudges and forgiveness -- seeking it and giving it.
A couple of weeks ago, Jack Tatum died. For those who don't know: Tatum was a defensive safety for the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s. He was one of the hardest and most feared hitters in the game. But a play in a meaningless preseason game changed his life and how he would be remembered.
On Aug. 12, 1978 in Oakland, Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley came over the middle on a crossing pattern. He went for the ball; Tatum went for Stingley.
But Stingley didn't get up. He was paralyzed from the chest down and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
It was, by the rules of the game, a clean hit; no flag was thrown and no fines or admonitions from Pete Rozelle followed.
Tatum never apologized or contacted Stingley to show any remorse for what had happened. By his own reckoning, it was a clean hit in a violent game and he had done nothing wrong.
"It could have happened to anybody," Tatum once said. "People are always saying, 'He didn't apologize.' I don't think I did anything wrong that I need to apologize for. It was a clean hit."
Still, Tatum wrote an autobiography when his career was over titled "They Call Me Assassin," playing up his tough-guy image. Two more books along the same lines followed. And he never talked to Stingley about what happened between Aug. 12, 1978 and April 5, 2007, when Stingley died.
But life after football wasn't good for Tatum. He lost one leg at the knee and the toes on the other to diabetes. And he was remembered not as one of the all-time greats, part of the Raiders "Soul Patrol" defensive backfield and one the most feared defensive backs to ever play the game, but as the guy whose hit paralyzed Darryl Stingley in a game that didn't even count.
Tatum's coach, John Madden, was deeply shaken by the incident and visited Stingley in the hospital regularly. He told his players that from that moment on, they should think of him as a Raider. And Stingley wrote in his autobiography that he was convinced what happened to him contributed to Madden's decision to abruptly leave coaching while he was on top.
Tatum didn't exactly treat Stingley like a Raider. He never reached out. Never expressed regret, even if it might not have been his fault. Never lost the tough guy facade. He was just playing football. He'd done nothing wrong.
But Madden knew better.
"He never talked about things, and you couldn’t get him to talk about it," Madden told the Los Angeles Times after Tatum died. "It was something that ate on him for his whole life."
On performance alone, Jack Tatum should probably be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But even in a game where big hits are celebrated and replayed endlessly in highlight reels, Tatum's role in one of the sport's ugliest moments left him a pariah. In a sport that glorifies violence, he was just too violent. He did what he was supposed to do and did it too well. And in a society that demands apologies from the heroes it builds up and knocks down, his lack of regret in the aftermath broke an unwritten rule.
At the time and for a long time, I hated Jack Tatum for refusing to apologize – what kind of monster puts someone in a wheelchair, on purpose or not, and won't even say he's sorry? I hated that he capitalized financially on it by writing a book. I hated that on an incomplete pass in a meaningless preseason game, he lined up and laid out a defenseless receiver.
So when Steve Grogan, when asked if he could say anything nice about Jack Tatum, said "I just can't do it," I understood.
"I have a hard time trying to find something nice to say," Grogan told ESPN.com. "That bothers me because I'm not like that normally. You may talk to guys that played with him, and they might tell you he was greatest teammate in the world and everybody loved him.
"The circumstance that we were involved with, just the way he handled it, that will never come out of any of our mouths or minds."
But Darryl Stingley forgave Jack Tatum. Even though Tatum never reached out.
"It's hard to articulate," Stingley said in 2003, according to The Boston Globe. "It was a test of my faith. The entire story. In who, and how much, do you believe, Darryl? In my heart and in my mind I forgave Jack Tatum a long time ago."
I thought about all this a couple of days later, when a judge on Connecticut rejected a motion by one of the two "men" accused of three murders in a brutal home invasion to remove the death penalty as a possible punishment for his crimes.
Those two "men" terrorized, sexually assaulted and killed a woman and two girls in the midst of their bid to steal the family's savings. Their unspeakable and violent crimes truly terrified and horrified the entire state and left a good man with only memories of his wife and daughters – and nightmares of how they were tortured and murdered after his attempts to defend his family were overpowered.
When I saw that news, I thought, "Good."
I'm not for capital punishment in most cases; I don't believe it to be an effective deterrent or a means to closure. And there's no wiggle room in "Thou shalt not kill" – it means what it says. Yet I have not for a second felt any pangs of regret that those two "men" will likely put to death by the State of Connecicut when they're found guilty as charged, because they went so far beyond the pale of human decency.
That's admittedly a double standard. Executions are bad but some are OK when you think they really deserve it? Yeah, not my clearest, most logical thinking.
But if Darryl Stingley could forgive the man whose hit took away the use of his legs the last 29 years of his life ... well, if he can forgive, shouldn't anyone be able to forgive? Or is there a line beyond which we can forget about forgiveness and seek revenge with impunity? Can even people who seem beyond redemption and repair, like the two facing execution for home invasion, rape and murder, be forgiven?
That's a big question and a bigger challenge.
I've seen the harm grudges can do, first-hand. I must admit that I've held a few, too. And I've been thinking that maybe it's time those grudges got let go.
And not because Darryl Stingley forgave, but because Jack Tatum didn't ask.
Let me explain.
Jack Tatum was probably not the monster he was made out to be, by the media or, somewhat unwisely, by himself. In the blink of an eye, he made a decision informed by years of practice and training at the highest level of his profession – he saw the ball, he saw the receiver, he made a play.
Football players all live with the possibility that every time they step on the field, they might not walk off. And yet they have to put that out of their minds in order to play at the highest level. It's why you see huge men who could bench press a city bus drop to their knees and pray when a member of their warrior society – even on an opposing team – goes down with what could be a spinal cord injury. It's also why they go right back out there and start hitting each other again after the injured player is taken off the field.
It's the cognitive dissonance inherent in the game. If you have to stop and think about making a play because you're scared you might get hurt or hurt someone else, you can't make the play fast enough. And in that case, you're done as a pro and can only hope you cracked open a book in your five years at State U.
So players act tough and they talk about serious injuries in measured tones, but not very often, because to acknowledge the wheelchair in the room or the EMTs on the sidelines is to acknowledge they are there and why.
I don't think it's a great logical leap to suppose Jack Tatum's apparent lack of empathy for Darryl Stingley had everything to do with that. If I can't be tough, I can't play this game. So I've gotta be even harder. Maybe call myself "assassin," even if no one ever called me that.
Thing was, even if it wasn't his fault, it was a preseason game and a man never walked again. There was ample time for him to put aside the game's macho bravado and the Raider mystique for a moment and embrace humanity – his own and Stingley's. He didn't even have to apologize if he truly believed that it wasn't his fault; "I'm sorry that this happened to you, I never meant for it to happen" would have been enough. And he simply wouldn't or couldn't do it.
So when he lost one leg at the knee and five toes on the other? The medical science says that's diabetes. But I see a metaphor there. I see the anger he built up to make himself an even harder competitor, the feelings he wouldn't talk about after the Stingley play, literally consuming him. Again, as Madden said, "It was something that ate on him for his whole life."
In the gospels, Jesus tells us to forgive. He tells us to love our enemies and to forgive not 7 times but 7 times 70. He accepts the cross and forgives his executioners. It's not offered as an optional exercise; it's what we're asked to do.
Jesus also tells us in the gospels that by seeking forgiveness, we set ourselves free. But Jesus doesn't say "only forgive those who ask." He tells us to turn the other cheek and when they take your cloak, give them your coat, too. It's one of the most pervasive themes in the gospels - and maybe the hardest for humans to heed, given our continuing penchant for shunning, hating and killing each other for slights real and imagined.
So what about those grudges? Can I learn anything from any of this? Maybe fall a little less short of that standard?
It would be poetic if I sat here and said "I've decided to let everyone off the hook who really hurt me or a friend." It would also be a lie. I'm just not there yet.
But Jack Tatum, of all people, has me thinking about it.
