20 YEARS LATER, THE HITTER’S HURTING

Any fool knows when you hit someone with your best shot and he is still able to think, then you’re not a hitter. My idea of a good hit is when the victim wakes up on the sidelines with train whistles blowing in his head and wondering who he is and what ran over him.

--Jack Tatum in “They Call Me Assassin.”

*

He is on the phone, his voice weary, as if he hasn’t slept well in years, maybe decades.

“All these years I’ve been vilified, nobody will ever tell me what I did wrong,” says Jack Tatum. “I mean, what did I do wrong? Was it a bad tackle? What?”

Twenty years after the biggest hit of his life, the train whistles blow loudest through the head of the assassin.

Twenty years after turning receiver Darryl Stingley into a quadriplegic it is Jack Tatum who sometimes wonders who he is, and what ran over him.

On this precise date in 1978--Aug. 12--Stingley was running a slant pattern for the New England Patriots in an exhibition game when Oakland Raider defensive back Tatum tackled him in the neck.

Stingley would never walk again while Tatum would soar, becoming a best-selling author one year later by writing about hits just like that one.

Yet today it’s difficult to determine who’s moving, and who isn’t.

Stingley has advanced far beyond the tragedy, quietly working for his youth foundation in Chicago, refusing to respond to numerous interview requests, saying earlier that he has put the hit behind him.

Tatum remains mired in its muck. As he tries to defend his reputation against an onslaught of self-created evidence to the contrary, the tough guy comes across as a strangely tortured one.

Not only does Tatum respond to interviews requests, his book publisher sends out a release asking for them, almost begging in bold letters for a chance to set the record straight.

“A lot of this has been the NFL having a feud with Al Davis, and I’ve been caught in the middle,” Tatum says curiously.

Oddly enough for two players whose names will be forever intertwined in NFL history, the only thing Tatum and Stingley share is distance.

Twenty years later, and they still have not spoken to each other.

Jack Tatum still has not apologized. Darryl Stingley still has not accepted.

*

I am simply a warrior in a very physical way. As a warrior I must discourage running backs and receivers whenever they attempt to gain yardage against the defense. It is a physical and violent job, and quite often the end results are knockouts or serious injuries to my opponent. But it is just part of a very risky business.

--Tatum in “They Call Me Assassin”

Twenty years later, Jack Tatum says he now understands risky business.

It’s laying a hit on a guy without realizing you might see and feel that hit for the rest of your life.

Let’s see what kind of warrior you are then.

When Tatum, 49, sees today’s players lying on the ground too long on TV after a play, he walks out of the room.

“I can’t stand looking at it,” he says.

His 8-year-old son, Samuel, does not play football.

“I don’t encourage it,” Tatum says. “He swims. He does things that are non-contact.”

He said he still sometimes thinks about looking down at Stingley, motionless on the field.

“You expect him to jump up,” he recalls. ‘I was hoping he just had the wind knocked out of him.”

He sometimes remembers the Raider trainer greeting him in the locker room afterward with the news that Stingley was paralyzed.

“It changed my life,” he says.

But not immediately in a bad way, which is what started Jack Tatum down this rutted road in the first place.

One year after the incident, Tatum co-authored the book, “They Call Me Assassin,” in which he detailed a life of football violence. It sold a stunning 1.2 million copies.

Nobody was more surprised than Stingley, who was reportedly outraged that Tatum would capitalize on his misfortune.

“That book was written before the hit,” Tatum claims today. “We just added a chapter about the hit before it was published.”

Later, there was a sequel, and then a third book, in which Tatum added a final chapter to a compilation of the first two.

The last tome runs 348 pages . . . but not one word about a meeting with Darryl Stingley.

Tatum says he tried, but was initially rebuffed by doctors, then lawyers.

Stingley has told people Tatum never tried.

In October 1996, it seemed a meeting would finally take place. It was scheduled for a nationally televised football show.

Then Stingley backed out. He said he’d learned that Tatum was only meeting with him to promote that third book, “Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum.”

“I’m numb now,” Stingley told the Boston Globe at the time. “I have a headache. I knew nothing about a book. . . . Here Jack Tatum is, still getting money off me after 18 years for destroying my life.

“No, he didn’t destroy my life. For altering my life.”

Tatum denies that he was trying to use the interview for monetary gain, and said it was Stingley who was being mercenary by asking the network for $25,000.

Stingley later said that was to have been a contribution to his foundation for Chicago youth.

“Here I was trying to find all the good that’d come out of this, and now it’s just another negative,” Stingley told the Globe after their failed meeting. “My friends were all telling me this and they were all saying about Tatum, ‘A leopard can’t really change his spots,’ and they’re right. This leopard can’t change his spots.”

They have not come close to speaking since.

When asked this week if he wanted to hear Stingley’s quotes again about that failed meeting, Tatum said it wasn’t necessary.

“The media has handled it badly, the NFL has handled it badly, and I think Darryl and I have handled it badly,” Tatum says today.

And perhaps leaving the word “assassin” in the title of anything written by a guy who had just paralyzed another guy might not exactly be perceived as a fence-mending maneuver.

“I guess if a meeting ever occurs, it’s just going to have to occur naturally,” Tatum says.

In the meantime, Tatum patrols the sidelines of Raider home games on fall weekends. His job? Are you sitting down?

He looks for players whose shirts are untucked or whose socks are too baggy. He warns their coach before reporting them to the league.

“Yep, I’m part of the uniform police,” he says. “That’s, uh, quite a change.”

Twenty years later, all you need to know about Stingley is the message on his answering machine, which ends, “Thank you for calling and remember, if you have a setback, don’t step back. Keep the faith.”

It is a message that can undoubtedly inspire many through trials that don’t even compare to the ones faced by a man who will spend the rest of his life in a chair. But first you have to call.