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COPYRIGHT 2001 South Florida Sun-Sentinal
NDEZ)
By Dave Hyde
ALBANY, Ga. _ It is 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, and 25 years after his final play, the meter is still running for Bill Stanfill. He can't look up the flight of stairs in front of him. He wraps five crooked fingers around the handrail beside him.
He lifts a metal cane onto the first stair, moves his right foot up to it, then brings his left foot to join them. He repeats the process on the next step. And the next.
This is how the Dolphins' career sacks leader reaches his second-floor office this morning.
"Just too many hard miles on this body," he says, maneuvering to a desk chair that has a 6-inch cushion on it to ensure his surgically replaced hip remains positioned above his knee. That guarantees proper blood circulation.
A can of Coke sits on his desk from the day before, one-third full, as his always remain. Four fused discs won't allow his neck to tilt back and drain the rest.
In his eight-year NFL career, Stanfill chipped teeth, splintered a forearm, twice bruised his liver, broke or dislocated nine of his fingers, wore a back brace for four months (taking it off to practice every day in training camp) and ruined those four neck discs _ all while happily throwing his body in harm's way.
But, decades into his retirement and on the downside of middle age, the game keeps coming after him in a way that strikes at the core of who he was _ at who they all still are, in fact, all the Boys of `72, these soldiers of the Perfect Season and heroes of the Undefeated Dolphins, celebrated in song, myth and every-five-year anniversaries across South Florida.
They're all paying today. Their bodies are under assault. Go ahead. Pick a name. Pick a position. Pick a body part, if you want. Pick Nick Buoniconti, who has a titanium hip. Pick Doug Crusan, whose arms go numb each night. Pick Manny Fernandez, who has bone spurs and no rotator cuffs in both shoulders, no cartilage in either knee, a torn-up ankle and a back that would need two metal rods and a handful of screws to begin repairing.
Vern Den Herder gets headaches if his neck moves too much. Dick Anderson has an arthritic neck, a bad shoulder, a worse back and a left knee that feels each morning like it has been whacked with a tire iron.
Mercury Morris, named for the fleet-footed messenger of Roman gods, receives a message about football every time his neck moves and has a nerve deficiency that makes, "everything on my right side smaller than my left side _ shoulder, deltoid cap, biceps, triceps, forearm, pectorals, lat, everything," he says.
"The only person that could truly understand how we feel would be a test-crash dummy for General Motors if he had a 10-year career," says Tim Foley, whose deteriorating hip highlights an anatomy of aches. "And that's if you looked in on him after he got some age on him."
Worthless knees, replaced hips, bum shoulders, elbows that don't open, fists that won't close, headaches, neck aches, wall-to-wall back aches and numbness in arms and legs caused by pinched nerves due to wayward discs: these are the souvenirs for the 1972 Dolphins, the daily reminders of the mountain they once climbed and the hill they're now over.
Maybe this is neither surprising nor revealing. You can walk down any wing of the Hall of Fame and find similarly burned-out villages for bodies. It's football. It's time. It's expected. But for this Class of `72 it's also the equal and opposing truth for being addicted to today and only today, now that tomorrow's football tab has come _ "Just like anyone who has smoked or drank for years pays more later on," as Anderson says.
You have to grasp this wonderful, unbreakable, totally irrational addiction to today that was central to the Perfect Season before appreciating how corticosteroids _ cortisone, to be exact _ continue playing in Stanfill's body, attacking it, eroding it, damaging it in some ways he can measure and others he can only fear.
No complaints
Football was such a contagious habit on those Dolphins that Anderson played two years without an anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee (six operations later, the knee still doesn't work), and Buoniconti played two seasons with a cast over his right wrist and hand, the result of two surgeries and a bone graft that didn't take (arthritis prevents him from picking up coffee with that wrist some mornings).
Jim Langer allowed then-team doctor Herbert Virgin to set a piece of wood atop his right knee and hammer it so hard that three loose screws were reset into the knee. They remain embedded today. But the hammering was so furious it split open a five-week-old scar on the knee, and passersby drawn to...
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