G.D. HOLLOWAY
Collecting the Autographs of Pro Football’s Top Stars
If you’re reading this brochure, it’s because you, like thousands of your fellow people, are interested in collecting the autographs of pro football’s top stars. From the sunny beaches of San Diego to the light-starved canyons of New York, from the bulgur farms of Minnesota to the gumbo-soaked jazz alleys of New Orleans, Americans of all sizes are being enriched and rewarded by the pursuit of autographs from pro football’s top stars.
You’ll find here the names and contact info for some of the gridiron’s greatest, as well as best tactics for landing their signatures. Once your lust is whetted, just send $22.95 to the P.O. box on the back page and prepare yourself to receive the complete hardcover volume of Collecting the Autographs of Pro Football’s Top Stars, which includes extremely personal information on hundreds of players and is mailed to you with a special gift. (Hint: It’s a flashlight keychain shaped like a football.) Congratulations! Let us begin.
Jack Talleyrand, DE, Pittsburgh, 1970-79:
The unquestioned leader of football’s most ferocious defense, Talleyrand played his whole career in Steel Town, USA. He earned two defensive player of the year awards, won four championships, and terrorized countless quarterbacks. You’d think his missing front teeth would have made him look funny, but they didn’t.
No autograph collection is complete without this fan favorite. Just mail him a polite letter requesting, firmly, his signature in black Sharpie marker on a postcard. Don’t be scared to insist on the Sharpie. It just looks better that way. Make sure to include a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE).
Tom “Brewski” Barnett, TE, Kansas City, 1971-75:
Known best for his habit of pounding three beers before every game, “Brewski” Barnett certainly earned his nickname. On Sundays, Kansas City’s equipment manager always knew to have a cold sixer waiting on ice in Brewski’s locker—three for before the game, three to get things going after. The equipment manager sure didn’t want another chair thrown at him. The job was hard enough.
Brewski loves to sign. He gets a kick out of hearing from his old fans, so don’t be afraid to send that SASE and remind him about that Sharpie. If you’re a real dedicated, old-time Kansas City maniac, you could even write Brewski a letter recalling the night you saw him sitting alone at Kelly’s Westport Inn after a game. Maybe he remembers that you offered to buy him a beer. Maybe he remembers why he took a swing at you when all you wanted was to show him how much you enjoyed watching him play. Brewski gets more notes like that than you might think, but he doesn’t always write back. It’s a gamble with Brewski.
Hudson Hornbrook, QB, Washington, 1960-71; Miami, 1972-73:
Nobody stings like the Hudson Hornet. This wiley veteran was the lone bright spot on some very bad Washington teams, but finally got his shot at the big game in Miami, where he won a championship despite his obvious creeping obsolescence. Talk about going out on a high note.
The Hornet used to sign for free, but these days asks for a five-dollar contribution to Buzzing Bees, Inc. It’s a “contribution” and not a “donation” because Buzzing Bees, Inc. is a private, for-profit company set up by the Hornet’s oldest son, Kevin, to pay for his father’s care and expenses. Kevin’s a lawyer, but closed his struggling practice a few years ago and now spends much of his time compelling the Hornet to sign postcards, footballs, helmets, jerseys—anything he can move for a good price. Sometimes, if the Hornet isn’t feeling well, Kevin just signs the stuff himself. It looks better when he does it anyway.
The Hornet’s house is paid for, so enough comes in through Buzzing Bees to cover 24-hour nurse care. That’s good, but Kevin still spends most of his time at his dad’s house, anyway. He needs to focus on the business — framing the jerseys, wrapping the footballs in plastic, packing everything into crisp cardboard boxes. He needs to update the website. Then he can go home at night. Sometimes he doesn’t get home until well after dinner. His wife suspects he has secrets. But Kevin’s secrets would shock her in their mundanity.
Interest in the Hornet isn’t what it used to be, and Buzzing Bees business is slow, so Kevin often finds himself sitting in the tiny family room at his dad’s, watching cable on an old tube TV. The nurse does everything. She fixes the Hornet’s meals and helps him to the bathroom and takes care of the accidents. It’s a different nurse that comes through every seven hours, and Kevin tries to remember their names, but sometimes he can’t. He barely needs to talk to them unless they have a question about where some linen or cleaning supply is. Kevin doesn’t need to be there, but he goes every day and stays until after the light in the windows begins to change, until night penetrates the house and slips its tendrils around him, threatens to suffocate him. Then his wife will text and he snaps back to everything—his failed law practice, his failing father, the familiar alienness of his father’s house.
The Hornet has only lived here five years. Kevin downsized him after the Hornet’s second wife, Susan, passed away. This place is just another way station where his father can wait before going someplace else. The Miami house had been like that, a three-bedroom rented bungalow in Kendall. His mother had been furious. What was the Hornet chasing, going down there, to the bottom of America, to be a backup, to have a fake job? She refused to move. Kevin remembers going to the Miami house when he was on the cusp of junior high, in the last weeks of summer and the first weeks of training camp, his mother reminding anyone who would stand within sound of her voice that they’d be returning to Bethesda before the start of the school year, sans Hornet—unless, of course, the Hornet got cut, she’d add. Kevin had expected to see the ocean, but the ocean was miles away, across an impassable waste of swamp air and irradiated concrete that no adult was willing to traverse with him. There was little in the house to entertain three kids—a couple board games and some silverfish-eaten paperbacks, all Sugar Creek Gang and Hardy Boys. But there was air-conditioning, and Kevin and his brother and his sister would sit there watching TV under the vent, forcing themselves to stay in that one tight spot until their skin would goosebump in spite of the ninety-plus heat outside. Kevin barely saw his father in those weeks. On weekdays, the Hornet would go for dinner or beers with the other players. On weekends, he would take the ball out to the weedy square of lawn that was the frontier of their rented universe. Kevin and his brother would hear their dad call for them. They would come, tolerate the exercise for a few minutes, then beg off. They’d blame the heat, or the mosquitos. The Hornet would surrender and send them back inside. Then he’d move on.
When they returned the next summer, after the championship, before the start of that second, final, disastrous season in Miami, Kevin was disturbed by the light nesting his father had engaged in—the toaster oven, the patio chairs, the completed jigsaw puzzle on a card table.
It’s true-dark outside, and a commercial is on. The Hamburgler. Kevin maybe dozed off in the chair. He looks around, sees a framed Washington jersey and a photo of the Hornet hoisting his championship-game MVP trophy on the wall. This smattering of his dad’s things in a place where they do not belong reminds him again of the Miami house. Kevin slows his breathing, believes that if he finds the right rhythm, if he clears his mind, he can scale the boundaries of space and bridge the gulf of time and be, for a while, in Miami again, under the air conditioning vent, alone, yes, but alone with his brother and sister and mother and father. He should stop this. He should stand up. He can hear his father calling him—not the nurse, but him, his name, over and over like one long word without end, “KevinKevinKevinKevin…” The nurse is calling to him, too. “Sir, please come.” He should go to his father, kiss his father’s temple and ask for forgiveness and offer forgiveness, go home and do the same to his wife. But instead he just sits there, trying to believe that he feels cold.
Ronnie Lane Sr., CB, Denver, 1969-77:
These days, fans know Ronnie Lane Sr. best as the proud papa of Ronnie Lane Jr., the superstar Dallas wide receiver. But those of us with longer memories (and more than a few gray hairs) recall when Lane the elder was one of the most feared defensive backs in the league, able to keep up with the fastest receivers and unafraid to put his head down and deliver a big, permanently debilitating hit.
Those of us whose memories run longer still might remember that Ronnie Lane Sr. paved the way for free agency in football. When Denver tried to trade him to Atlanta, Ronnie Sr. refused to go. Instead he called the head of the players’ union and said he wanted to sue his bosses in Denver. He said that he should be allowed to decide where he works and whom he works for. The head of the players’ union told Ronnie Sr. that he was unlikely to win such a lawsuit. The head of the players’ union told Ronnie Sr. that even if he did win, he would get nothing out of it, that no team would ever hire him to play football again. Ronnie Sr. said that was fine, he still wanted to sue Denver. When the head of the players’ union asked him why, Ronnie Sr. said, “Because I’m not property.”
The head of the players’ union was right. Ronnie Sr.’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against Ronnie Sr., 5-4. The justice who wrote the decision was a football fan from Georgia. Ronnie Sr. didn’t go to Atlanta, but he didn’t go anywhere else, either. He did get a lot of death threats.
A few years later, when free agency was written into the collective bargaining agreement, the new head of the union praised Ronnie Sr. as a pioneer and a hero. So did some players. The sportswriters still didn’t like him, though. Neither did the fans. Ronnie Sr. got more death threats.
He didn’t want the boy to play football. Football had brought Ronnie Sr. nothing but financial ruin and the typo-riddled hatred of a milk-pale sea of people who disagreed with Ronnie Sr., who felt that he was, after all, property, and that the fact that he had ever been allowed to entertain a notion to the contrary was a symptom of a disease that had spoliated the body of society, proof of the decline of the order of things. But the boy was gifted, and the boy loved football, and the boy thought football loved him back. The more Ronnie Sr. tried to teach him that it didn’t, the more the boy insisted that it did.
Ronnie Sr. doesn’t sign—not for free, and not for pay. He doesn’t do card shows or entertain autograph dealers. He doesn’t need to. The semi-poverty of his immediate post-playing years was extinguished by the boy’s success, by a wave of money and fame that overflowed the boundaries of his son’s life and flooded the landscape of his own, a landscape that had been left charred after the lawsuit. Ronnie Sr. is comfortable now. He doesn’t get death threats. When people recognize him in the parking lot at the grocery store, they don’t spit at him. They don’t do things much, much worse than spit at him. Now strangers walk up to him and tell him gosh, he must be so proud, and Ronnie Sr. tells them oh, he sure is. Then they ask him if they can have an autograph, and Ronnie Sr. says no, sorry, he’s trying to get home in time to catch Junior on TV, and then he goes home and the TV stays dark, and Ronnie Sr. takes out all his old letters and reads them and reads them until he falls to sleep.
John “Four Eyes” Fonseca, QB, Detroit, 1959-73:
What a character. Known as much for the distinctive horn-rimmed glasses he wore on the field as for his deadly accurate arm, John “Four Eyes” Fonseca was just one of the many short, fat, slow little white guys with howitzer arms who dominated football in the good old days, but wouldn’t be able to make it through training camp today. Good thing he played when he did.
Four Eyes always had bad vision, but never that bad. If you were to walk into the Hall of Fame, smash open one of the cases, remove Four Eyes’ glasses, and gaze through them, you would find your view of the world changed not very much. For Four Eyes, the glasses just sharpened the details.
But it was his eyes, or one of them, that ended his career. One day during training camp in 1974, Four Eyes woke to see a black dot, like a tiny flying saucer, hovering in his vision. The doctors called it a central retinal vein occlusion of his right eye. Glaucoma caused it. Three surgeries did not fix it. In Detroit, they named the road leading to the south end of the stadium John Fonseca Avenue. They held a John Fonseca Day, and 70,000 people cheered for him. That was nothing new to Four Eyes. They retired his number at halftime, and just minutes into the third quarter Four Eyes left the stadium via the road that had been named for him, in a car he still drove because there wasn’t a cop in Michigan who would pull over John Fonseca, no matter how blind he was going. He didn’t think at all about the crowd cheering behind him. They were cheering for some play he hadn’t stuck around to watch. They were cheering for someone else now.
Ellen, Four Eyes’ wife, told a reporter that the changes started soon after. He would pee as soon as he got out of the car—in the driveway, in front of restaurants, just unzip and let it go. One day, Four Eyes locked Ellen in the basement, as punishment for something or other. He left her there six hours. Another time, when Ellen locked herself in that same basement to get away from him, he took the door off the hinges so he could join her downstairs. He did other things. And the reporter found other women, women who were not Ellen, who also wanted to talk about Four Eyes.
The street leading to the stadium is still named after Four Eyes, and his jersey’s still retired. And it’s pretty easy to get his signature, so long as you’re willing to pay. Four Eyes makes a decent chunk through frequent appearances at card shows, which is good for him, because the money comes from a million different places, so it’s almost impossible for Ellen to have his wages garnished. The judge took pity on Ellen. Ellen knows this because the judge said, from the bench, in front of people, in front of reporters who had for some reason been allowed into a courtroom to witness the dissolution of Ellen’s marriage as if it were a playoff game, “I’m going to take pity on you.” Ellen got half of everything and was promised a big slice of whatever came in the future (and, of course, the judge’s pity). For days after, Ellen would jump when the phone rang, would keep the lights off, would imagine that Four Eyes or the state police or the Detroit starting offensive line would come to take away her cash-out, the only thing she had to show for a whole adult life spent making a home, managing charity work, crafting a public image, turning a marriage into not just a project, but a sole vocation. They would come for her half of everything and for the alimony and the judge’s pity and maybe even for Ellen herself. After a week of this, she turned the lights on again. She went outside. She scooped up a pile of newspapers and tossed them into the fireplace without removing the plastic bags, even though it was June. She could do this, she told herself. She could live off alimony and pity.
But Ellen would have to do so much more than that. Four Eyes never intended to pay her a dime of alimony. She discovered this when he called her one night, or one morning, around 4 a.m., and told her that he would never pay her a dime of alimony. He told her that he would do a bunch of other things, things meant to frighten her. She screamed at him to come on and get it over with then. She slammed the phone down. Then she stayed in bed shaking. After all, there wasn’t a cop in Michigan who would pull over John Fonseca.
These days, Ellen works as an assistant to an architect in Northville who designs malls. She’s had the job a long time, and felt good about it until one day, the architect’s wife, whom Ellen had started to think might be her friend, told her, “You know, when you applied, I said, ‘That’s the woman from the paper. We have to help that woman.’ I’m so glad you found us.” Then she leaned in and whispered, like a conspirator, “We don’t care much for football in this house.” So now Ellen knows she’s not good at the job, but she shows up for it anyway. And when she comes home in the evenings, she does what she is good at, the calling that finally found her. She calculates her past-due alimony to the cent, with penalties. She updates the tally monthly. She researches ways to pursue her money without having to hire lawyers she can’t afford. She fills out forms, stuffs them in envelopes, checks what time the courthouse opens. She chases Four Eyes. She will run him down and she will lead with her head, wrap herself around him, flatten him to the ground. She will catch him in her teeth, and tear.
David Dawkins, RB, Los Angeles, 1972-76; Tampa Bay, 1977; Oakland, 1981:
If you watched football in the ’70s—and of course you did, because here you are—you remember the craze for Double D. A college sensation, Dawkins became the first player ever to win rookie of the year and MVP in the same season. And his 312-yard game against Buffalo is as much a part of Los Angeles lore as the tram ride at Universal Studios or the pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen. Sadly, those Hollywood lights got in his eyes, and his career flamed out as quickly as it flamed up.
This is a hard autograph to get, because to do so, you will need to stop caring for the animal inside you. You know which animal. It’s small with oily gray fur and claws like Kahle hooks. It’s the one that never quite sleeps, no matter how much you care for it, feed it, tend to it—the one that always stirs and grumbles restless, that cuts you when you touch it, that cuts you again and again. You feel its claws, its saliva burning your flesh, but you cannot take your hand away, do not want to. You stare down into yourself, straight at it, and watch with half a smile on your face as it devours your hand.
Sometimes you think you created it, that its egg was always inside you and that you gave birth to it in the dark long ago, when no one was watching. Other times you think someone gave it to you. But regardless, it is yours, and you have poured so much into its care that you cannot release it now. You wince to even think about turning away from it, at how it would whine and screech and howl and come at you claws-forward, the things it would do to you, the things that might happen to you if you stopped, if you changed.
But you know that you need to change. Not every autograph collector can do this, because for most of us, that animal is the hardest-won thing we have. Someone was supposed to love you, and they didn’t. Someone was supposed to see you, but they decided you weren’t worth looking at—or, worse, they looked, saw you in full, and recognized you for being less than what you should be. Someone was supposed to take care of you. Someone was supposed to want you around. But now you’re not around, and they’re not around, and the only thing that’s left is that animal. And you are in its thrall. You feel you cannot stop yourself from giving it the energy and devotion, and, yes, love that you now find impossible to give anyone else, because you know from experience that no one else can love you back. That animal is the only thing that can do that. It is all you need. Except now, as you contemplate flipping this pamphlet over, copying the address there onto an unblemished legal envelope, making out the check for $22.95, you are, for the first time in years, questioning your reality. Is that thing inside you really all you need? Or do you also need an autograph from former top pro-football star David Dawkins? And when you have so little, what are you willing to sacrifice to get more?
You have some tough choices to make.