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.
As a linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals for 14 seasons, Williams was trained to react when he saw something ominous coming around the end, but this was even more personal, because it involved his life.
“I can’t believe I am going to go out like this,” Williams thought to himself on May 2, when the knee began to spout. Days later, he recalled, “You’re waiting for the cavalry to come through the door.”
The cavalry did arrive in the form of nurses and his orthopedist, Dr. Steven J. O’Brien, who had once played quarterback for Harvard against Williams’s Dartmouth squad. Now these Ivy Leaguers were meeting again with, as the saying goes, the game on the line.
One nurse aggressively stanched the arterial pseudoaneurysm with a copious number of four-inch gauze pads, but Williams’s ordeal is hardly over. His artificial right knee must be replaced as soon as the leg heals, and even then there are no guarantees. But, yes, he said, playing football was worth this trouble.
Williams, 53, is not just any retired player. He has been a shining light of the N.F.L., his name even floated around when the commissionership was open a couple of years ago. And he won awards for citizenship and sportsmanship while playing in two Super Bowls.
Before the 1982 Super Bowl near Detroit, not far from his childhood home in Flint, Mich., he told reporters how he had been underachieving in the third grade until his teacher, Geraldine Chapel, sent him off for tests that proved he was quite smart but hard of hearing. The hearing improved, and so did his self-image and his schoolwork.
Williams majored in psychology at Dartmouth and was all-Ivy linebacker for three years as well as an Ivy heavyweight wrestling champion. Undersized at 6 feet and 228 pounds, Williams merged his intelligence and his outsider’s drive to make the Bengals.
In the second of two Super Bowl defeats to the San Francisco 49ers, in January 1989, his unpenalized late hit on Joe Montana might have spurred that great competitor to his last-minute heroics, or so Williams suspects. The winning touchdown came with Williams on the sideline because the defensive coordinator, Dick LeBeau, chose to send in an extra defensive back. He tries not to dwell upon whether he could have stopped Montana.
By that time, he was a member of the Cincinnati city council, leading a drive to join other cities divesting themselves of stocks connected to South Africa. In the following year, Nelson Mandela was freed and the dismantling of apartheid began.
After his playing career ended, Williams worked in the World League of American Football and later the N.F.L., setting up a Youth Education Town in each Super Bowl city. Then he ran the sports complex at Disney World until his knees began to erode, as joints do among aging athletes.
He received implants for his knees in 2005. The left one worked, but the right one led to a lingering bone infection, so Williams resigned from Disney. (“You’re either in or you’re out,” he acknowledged.)
After loading his iPod with soul and jazz to get himself through, in April he drove from Orlando, Fla., to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.
“I was preparing myself for losing my leg,” he said the other day. “I drove up here to quickly be able to retrofit my car, in case.”
Expected to be in the hospital for six days, Williams was in for 23 days. Last Monday, he watched on a monitor as a vascular radiologist, Dr. David W. Trost, repaired the artery at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell — “like fly-fishing in a waterfall,” Williams described the process of feeding a catheter through his left hip across his abdomen and inside his right leg.
By last Friday, Williams was released to a sublet artist’s studio, crammed with frames and work tables. Unable to climb to the loft, he is sleeping on a mattress on the floor, pulling himself around with one functioning leg.
He is becoming acquainted with visiting nurses and a physical therapist. His Dartmouth pal Steve White looks in on him, and his three sons, from a long marriage that ended in divorce, will be coming up from Florida. He insists he will drag himself to his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind., on July 18 and 19.
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.”
Williams calls the medical care “a blessing” and insists he will walk out of New York on two functioning knees, able to hoist future grandchildren. After the arrival of the cavalry 10 days ago, he vows, “I will never be negative again.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 14, 2008
The Sports of The Times column on Monday, about Reggie Williams, a retired Cincinnati Bengals player known for his leadership in and out of the N.F.L., misstated the sequence of events and the timing surrounding the end of apartheid in South Africa — political change for which Williams lobbied while on Cincinnati’s City Council in 1989. Apartheid was dismantled over several years beginning in 1990; the white government was not ousted a mere “months” after Williams played in the 1989 Super Bowl. And Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for fighting apartheid, was freed in February 1990, which was before — not after — the “white government fell.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/sports/football/12vecsey.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin
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