George Atkinson is the nicest fellow you’d ever want to meet—unless you’re an opposing receiver and you think you want to catch a pass.
Lynn Swann is floating across the field. His long legs are rippling through the air, his arms are pumping, evenly, smoothly, slowly. Behind him, is another man, also moving in slow motion. Not quite so fluid a runner as Swann, the second man is dressed in a black jersey with a silver helmet. He seems to be measuring his steps, carefully trailing Swann. Then it happens: We see the second man’s arm jut out in front of him, lock into place, then swing toward Swann’s neck. Slowly, slowly, the arm whips through the air, so stiff that it scarcely seems a human arm anymore, rather a board, or the limb of a tree, or perhaps the locked arm of a Frankenstein, wildly sweeping away medicine bottles and tables. Yet, there is a difference: Frankenstein was a brute out of control, terrified, unable to comprehend the world he was thrust into. But the man smashing Lynn Swann seems cool, seems to know exactly what he is doing and why. His arm crashes into Lynn Swann’s head, and as we watch Swann go down, we see the arm fall back to the side of the attacker. Once again, the arm seems human, relaxed, at rest. It has ceased to be a club. Swann, of course, is unaware of all this, because he has been knocked momentarily unconscious. When he comes to, he feels as though he is in a tunnel, a great roaring place where everything is very far away, and there is a terrible pain in his head. When he tries to get up, his balance is gone, and he wishes somebody would get him out of the tunnel, pull him to his feet, get him moving again.….
Of course, you have seen this tableau on TV several times by now. It happened in the Oakland Raiders’ first game of the 1976 season, against the Pittsburgh Steelers, a match between the once and future Super Bowl champions. The arm-club involved belonged to George Atkinson, the veteran Oakland safety who, after eight years of relative obscurity, emerged suddenly as the embodiment of football evil, surpassing such prototypical villains as Mean Joe Greene and Dick Butkus and even Atkinson’s teammate, Jack Tatum. Atkinson’s assault was one of the highlights of the first Monday Night Game last season, and it was rerun in slow motion, again and again, on Monday nights and on local sports shows and as a prelude to the playoff games that carried Oakland, and George Atkinson, to the peak of pro football.
As soon as Lynn Swann’s head cleared, Pittsburgh coach Chuck Noll said, “Apparently, there’s a criminal element in the National Football League.” Ed Levitt, a columnist for the Oakland Tribune, stopped rooting for the Raiders long enough to write that George Atkinson “could have killed Swann, instead of giving him a concussion.” Atkinson responded by filing three million dollars’ worth of lawsuits against Noll, the Steelers, and Ed Levitt. And as the 1976 season roared toward its Super Bowl anticlimax, George Atkinson inspired the same sort of bloodthirsty prose on the sports pages that a fellow named Gary Gilmore was stirring up on page one: Was Atkinson a cold-blooded killer? Or did he wake up at night sweating with remorse? Did he really—as Pittsburgh fans suggested—deserve to be shot at dawn? In search of answers, I went to Oakland to see Atkinson.
Outside the Oakland Coliseum before the last regular-season game, a well-dressed man with silver-grey hair parked his Lincoln Continental, swept out of the car and slammed the door as if he were testing the metal. From the other side of the car, a small boy emerged. The boy was also dressed in a suit, and his shoes were so polished you could see the clouds in them. Smiling affably, I approached the man and his double, and explained to them that I was a reporter from New York working on the Atkinson-Swann affair.
“How do you feel about the fact,” I asked, “that Chuck Noll called Atkinson one of the ‘criminal element’ in the National Football League?”
“Well,” the man said in a deep baronial voice, “some people called it a ‘cheap shot,’ too. And it was a ‘cheap shot’—a ‘cheap shot’ by the media. They took one play a guy made… one that he is not particularly proud of… and they pick it out and call him a ‘criminal.’ George Atkinson has been around nine years, young man.…. Isn’t that right, Little Don?”
Don, who looked about twelve going on forty, nodded confidently.
“As I was saying,” the man said as he took blankets out of his car, “George Atkinson has played for nine years. He used to run back punts for the Raiders, and in one of those years he was the AFL Defensive Rookie of the Year. Isn’t that right, Little Don?”
“In 1968,” said the boy. “Atkinson graduated from Morris-Brown College in Atlanta. He holds all the Raider punt-return records and he’s played one hundred twenty five consecutive games. A great player. Let’s go, Pops.”
“Don hates to miss the players warming up,” the man said, looking down at his son. “You write in your magazine that Don and Little Don Burns of Oakland love George Atkinson, and are damned proud of him.”
Five minutes after the Raiders had wiped out the Chargers, 24–0, I nervously made my way through the Oakland dressing room in search of the man who had been labeled a killer. Squeezing by monstrous Otis Sistrunk, and coolheaded Ken Stabler (who hadn’t even played), I expected the worst. As I approached George Atkinson, I pictured him to be a tough, slightly crazed guy with blood coming off his teeth, and a hard dumb look around the eyes. Instead, sitting stripped by his locker, was a muscular black man with a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, and a pair of very luminous eyes. Still nervous, I introduced myself, expecting him to mumble something about “not wanting to talk,” but he smiled and said he had looked forward to meeting me. “Be right back, as soon as I shower,” he said. “Meanwhile, why don’t you meet my son, Craig?” Sitting next to the locker was a handsome child, well-groomed and polite. I said hello to the boy, then went over to ask wide receiver Cliff Branch what kind of guy George was.
“A serious guy,” Branch said, “a really dedicated guy. He’s very talkative and likable. The minute you meet him you establish a real relationship with him. Actually, I can’t say nothing but good things about him.”
In minutes George was back, and getting dressed in a very flashy continental suit. He smiled again, and offered his hand to his son, pulling him up. There was a look of obvious pride on his face, and one had a tough time recalling that the hand was on the end of the same arm that had clubbed Lynn Swann unconscious two months before. That was the second time Atkinson had knocked out the Steelers’ best receiver. In the third quarter of the 1975 AFC Championship game between Pittsburgh and Oakland, Swann caught a pass slicing across the middle, and Atkinson almost sliced his head off with that scythe-like right arm of his. The ball fell loose and was recovered by Oakland, and Mean Joe Greene ran out and recovered the comatose body of Lynn Swann, carrying him off the field in his arms, as a father might carry a stricken child.
Swann was asked at the time if Atkinson’s blow had been a cheap shot, and Lynn said through a sardonic smile: “I had the ball and nobody blew the whistle. I was an open target, head to toe. He clubbed his arm and caught me in the head, and if you’ll notice, Oakland is a team that goes after the head more than any other part of the body.”
Atkinson was fully dressed now and talking in his very soft, melodious voice, interspersing his words with an infectious, easy laugh that tended to blur the memories of his terrible swift arm.
“No,” Atkinson said, “I don’t consider myself a dirty player. And no one else did for the last nine years. But football is about hitting. That’s what it is. I weigh 185, and I go up against tight ends: 220, 230, 240. You take a guy like Russ Francis. He’s 245 pounds. You aren’t going to do a lot of intimidation on a guy like him. But you got to have tactics all the same.”
“Tactics?” I said. “What do you mean by tactics?”
Atkinson’s smile revealed a charming army of teeth. “Well, for example, a guy is coming off the line. Now he’s going to be thinking about his pattern, about catching the ball. That is, unless you use some tactics on him. Suppose I give him a shot around in here—?”
George made a motion with The Arm in the general area of his own neck. “You see,” he said. “That’s going to slow him down. He’s going to be coming off the line like this—”
Atkinson hunched over like Quasimodo, and put his hand over his face, as if to fend off an attacker. “See?” he said, laughing. “Now he’s got to run the pattern like that. Hell, he ain’t gonna catch no ball running like that, is he?”
“Heck no,” I said. “But isn’t there something we are overlooking here? What about the morality of your ‘tactics’?” I mean, what you did with Swann, wasn’t that a little… a bit much!”
Atkinson smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so. First of all I was caught at a bad camera angle. It looks like I just came up and hit him in the back of the head. But if you had seen the play from my point of view… it looked like Bradshaw was throwing to Swann.…. So I was just trying to stop the play. Besides, as far as Lynn Swann goes, I don’t have much respect for him anyway. He’s got good hands, great speed, and he runs his patterns well, but he doesn’t have any guts. Not like Cliff Branch or Fred Biletnikoff. I’ve seen Biletnikoff play with a broken nose. Or Lance Alworth. Now he was a great player. He was the kind of guy you just can’t intimidate. He took his shots and he didn’t bitch.
“I mean, football ain’t no pussy sport… they haven’t put any dresses on us yet, as far as I can see… but Lynn Swann… hell, I hit him a good clean shot in the playoffs, and even that wasn’t right… he was bitching about that. Him and that Chuck Noll. That’s why I’ve got my three million dollar lawsuit out there. Noll said Jack Tatum and I were a ‘criminal element’ in the game. Well, that’s ridiculous. I’ve played this game nine years. I’ve been hit lots of times by guys.…. You know that the backs and the linemen aren’t supposed to clip you or hit you below the knees, but they do it all the time… but Howard Cosell doesn’t mention that. I been hit below the knees so many times I’ve lost count.…. Man, I have played hurt, but I didn’t go running to the commissioner. I’ll tell you, Pete Rozelle or nobody else is gonna alter my style of play one bit.”
“I take it you are not an undying fan of Howard Cosell?”
“Him? All he knows about football could be shoved up a gnat’s body. How could he know anything about it? He doesn’t hang out with the players. He doesn’t come down and prepare for a game with the team… he doesn’t even know anything about strong-side rotation or keying on players… I mean, all he can do is come down on somebody. I can’t remember the guy… but a couple of weeks ago on the Monday night game a player was smiling on the sidelines, and Cosell says, ‘He shouldn’t be smiling when his team is losing so badly. If Vince Lombardi was out there he wouldn’t be smiling.’ Well, hell, maybe the guy was smiling at the craziness of it all. Or maybe he wasn’t even smiling. Maybe he was grimacing in pain. Cosell doesn’t know what the guy was thinking… and he doesn’t care. Just like the Swann thing. He brings on Lynn Swann to talk, and tell his side, but he doesn’t have me on. He wanted to have me and Jack Tatum on afterward. I said, ‘Let’s have us all on together, and talk about it.’ But Cosell figured he’d get me on, and say Lynn Swann said this and that… he could throw his big vocabulary at me. So I said forget it, we either go on together or not at all. Cosell, whew… I’ll tell you what he does best. ‘I remember on such and such a day that this great man…’ That kinda crap.… Talk about cheap shots. I have no respect for his knowledge of the game at all.….”
Atkinson had been talking for a half hour and Craig was getting jumpy so George and I decided to call it a day.
“I’ll walk out with you,” I said, and moments later Atkinson, his son, and I stood at the wire gate that marks the Players’ Entrance. A group of teenage kids started cheering, and yelling Atkinson’s name. Charming, and dashing as ever, Atkinson smiled, and signed his name in their autograph books. He signed an Oakland Raider pennant for one young boy with light hair and perfectly bronzed California skin.
“Thanks, George,” the kid said. “You guys gonna play the Steelers again soon?”
“I hope so,” George said.
“Me, too,” the kid said. “Then you can get that crybaby Lynn Swann again. Oh, I loved the way you took him out. That was some hit. It was almost as good as the time you guys got Boobie Clark. Ooooh… was that great!”
“See you tomorrow, Bob,” George said to me.
George Atkinson lives in a beautiful A-frame house high atop the Oakland Hills. He paid sixty thousand dollars for the place but it’s probably worth twice that much now. Divorced, Atkinson and Craig live alone (Atkinson’s wife and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Michelle, moved to Atlanta) and Atkinson claims he doesn’t have much of a social life.
“I like to go to a club once in a while. Jack Tatum is very close to me, and some of my friends are in show biz. Smokey Robinson is a pal. But really I just like to stay here.”
It’s easy to see why. His house is extremely comfortable, tastefully furnished. There is a stone fireplace, and the photos above it are Atkinson’s special passion… horses. He’s started racing them, and wishes he had more time for it.
“It’s not a hobby,” Atkinson said, as he got me a beer. “It’s more like an addiction.”
After a few beers, and some small talk, our conversation returned to the Swann affair, and the Commissioner’s attitude:
“Rozelle had us in his office. Me and Jack Tatum. He showed us some rolls of film. They had four shots of me hitting people, and one of Jack.…. It was a joke, really. You could do the same thing to any player in the league. But they were picking on me because it got on the tube. They fined each of us fifteen hundred dollars, and warned us.…. I think it’s all over but it might not be. But it’s crazy. Then this writer Ed Levitt from the Oakland Trib writes that I could have ‘murdered’ Lynn Swann. That’s why I’m suing him, too. Hey, he writes that I’m a murderer and I’ve never even met the man.”
While I pondered this non sequitur, Atkinson went on: “It’s like I was telling you yesterday. Football is about hitting. I play strong safety. That means I am the last line of defense. I can’t afford to let anybody get by me.… You let a few guys beat you and the next thing you know you are out of a job. So I have my tactics.”
“Yes,” I said, “but Swann had a concussion. He couldn’t see. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No. First of all, I had strong doubts that he even had a concussion. With a concussion, you usually regurgitate; he never did. But he was walking off and talking to his teammates.”
“George,” I said, “I’ve got to admit that you seem like a good guy. But I can’t believe that blow doesn’t bother you. Don’t you ever wake up late at night and think that was a cheap shot?…”
“No; I don’t.…. Look, I know the theories.…. There is one guy who did a study of defensive backs… a doctor. He said that defensive backs were under the most pressure of anyone in the game, and that for anyone to be a good defensive back, he had to love to hit people. He quoted Dick Night Train Lane who said, ‘I wasn’t a nice guy.’ Well, that’s how I feel.…. We have to be able to read a play in a second… we have to know whether to come up fast and stop a run, or watch for a deep pass.….
“Man, you sweat out there.…. It’s tough.…. So you don’t have time to sit back and think, ‘Oh, I’ll get this guy.….’ You just react. If someone comes in your area, you have got to make him pay. Swann came in my area once and I kind of hit him with my knee on the way up; and he said, ‘What the hell you do that for?’ I said, ‘What the hell you come in here for, muther?’ I mean, it might sound cold, man—but that’s the way it is. I don’t think I have to make any excuse for it. It’s the law of the jungle. You know, it’s exactly like nature, the survival of the fittest. But I will say this: I don’t try to intimidate the really quality players… like Riley Odoms, or Charley Joiner, or Otis Taylor… or Russ Francis… you only do it to the ones you know will be affected by it.”
“You sound like the former Baltimore Colt and New York Jet villain, Johnny Sample,” I suggested.
Atkinson laughed appreciatively. “Now there,” he said with more than a trace of nostalgia, “was one of the really great dirty players. He wasn’t really much of a defensive back, you know? Hell, he’d trip a guy as he went by him, hold, do anything he could.…. He was a real dirty player. Pat Fischer of the Redskins is another one. He’ll do anything. But the problem isn’t dirty players so much. I think it’s the way the American people see football.…. They think it’s an All-American game and all that. What it is is a jungle… where the guy that hits the most, who intimidates the most…he is the winner. You take the new offensive players. They are physically better than the older players, but they don’t have the same spirit, the guts. Older players like Pete Lammons, Hewritt Dixon, they were tough, man. They didn’t whine or bellyache. They played the game the way it’s supposed to be played.”
“I’m familiar with the theories that shrink mentioned,” I said. “He contends that defensive backs are the most insecure people, that they have to get by with a superhuman macho quality. He says the great ones have that kind of superman complex to fend off huge anxiety, and fear… and the other ones crack up and quit.”
Atkinson shrugged. “If you want to know if I am a psycho, the answer is no. I’m very solid. I have a business in town. Own a bar and restaurant. I did come from a very competitive background. I grew up in Savannah and went to Morris-Brown College, where we had a very competitive situation. A lot of great players come from my school: Tommy Hart, Alfred Jenkins, a whole lot. My father worked at the Union Bag and Paper Plant… my mother was a registered nurse. Now they live here and run my liquor store. I had my share of fights as a kid, but nothing unusual.…. Really you know, all this is comical to me. If they want to make me out a bad guy, it’s okay with me. I’ve been around a long time, and nobody said nothing much, but now… I’m the villain of the year.”
I couldn’t help but laugh with him. Atkinson seemed to be a living embodiment of an old line I remember from T. S. Eliot. “It is better to be evil than mediocre.” And then a line from Reggie Jackson came to mind: “Before Atkinson, the Raiders were faceless, bland. They didn’t have an identity. Now they have it. He gave it to them. A kind of team image to live up to.”
I left George Atkinson thinking: He’s one tough, mean dude on a football field, but he is also one of the nicest guys I have met since I started covering sports.
Cut to the New England game and Patriot tight end Russ Francis, one of the “quality players I don’t try to intimidate,” Atkinson had said. Francis came off the line to the inside and a linebacker shadowed him. Francis turned to his right to lose the linebacker. At that moment, in front of a national television audience, George Atkinson struck again. Leaping up, Atkinson sent The Arm through Francis’s facemask, and broke his nose in three places. As I sat watching the replay in total disbelief, I wondered if Atkinson had consciously chosen to be the Bad Boy simply because it gets him more ink. After all, no one wanted to do feature stories on him in his pre-“tactics” incarnation.
Whatever, a day after the Super Bowl I discussed my confusion with Lynn Swann himself.
“So George thinks I’m not a man because I griped about that?” Swann said over the phone. “Well, first of all I don’t play football to prove my manhood. George is a headhunter. Watching a film of him before the playoffs, we all noticed that he hardly ever makes a tackle. Practically every play he is involved in he goes for the guy’s head. It looked like he was just trying to take the shot where it would do the most damage. I don’t think this is football at all. There have always been cheap-shot artists. They hit a guy in the head because they can’t take him down head on.”
“How serious was the hit on you?”
“I had tunnel vision for quite some time. I had bad headaches. What was worse, a lot of other defensive backs began to think they could take cheap shots at me. In Cincy, Lemar Parrish, who is a small back, he thought he could hit me and I had to go after him. I had to say, ‘This is enough!’ I’ll tell you, the joy of playing football is just about gone from me. People think I’m just saying this stuff about the violence in football because I’m trying to get my salary up… but that’s not true. I’m serious. The penalties aren’t strong enough. If a team can take out a Kenny Anderson, or an Isaac Curtis, do you think a mere fifteen-yard penalty is going to stop them?”
“The whole thing reminds me of the movie Rollerball,” I said. “More and more escalating violence.”
“That’s right,” said Swann. “And you know what is really the scariest thing about it? George Atkinson really believes that what he is doing is right. He believes it a hundred percent. And he is absolutely wrong. Sure, intimidation is part of the game… you can hit a guy once before he gets off the line… but you don’t go for his head and try to injure him. How can anybody call that ‘sport’? It’s a sad thing. And the fans love it… or seem to. They look forward to their team putting out the other quarterback. I’ll tell you, it’s very demoralizing to me.…. I’m thinking seriously of finding a new way to make a living.”
Russ Francis echoed Swann’s sentiments, but he added a few thoughts of his own: “So Atkinson thinks that he is a real man?” Francis said in a conversation I had with him just before the Pro Bowl game. “Well, if that’s the case… if that’s what it comes to in football, then I’ll make sure my son never plays the game. But I don’t think it will come to that.”
“Why not?” I said. “From every indication football is getting more savage every year.”
“I know that,” Francis said. “But there is one group of people who can really stop it, and that’s the players themselves. And, believe me, there has been an awful lot of talk about these guys like Atkinson in the past few months. I personally don’t believe in revenge. I’d rather go out and catch a touchdown pass like I did off Atkinson, than come at him. But I thought about it hard. It took every bit of restraint I had in me not to simply come off that bench and kill him. And there are a lot of other players in the league who are talking quite openly about getting rid of players like George. George says that Lynn Swann isn’t a man for complaining to the commissioner? Well, I hope George remembers that next year or the year after when he’s not making his big salary, when he’s sitting in a wheelchair without the use of his legs, I hope he reacts like a ‘real man.’ And doesn’t say anything at all.”
This piece on George Atkinson seems to me to be prophetic. Back in his day little was done to deal with concussions. They weren’t even really considered injuries. But these days everyone in football (and for that matter, baseball, as well) knows just how deadly they can be. A few “harmless concussions” and soon a world-class athlete can’t remember his car keys or what day it is. Full-on memory loss and early Alzheimer’s disease are so common now among football players that the league has had to step in and stop the antics of players like Atkinson and Tatum. But think how long it took them. What Swann said was right. The fans do love violence, and there is a Rollerball-like mentality when it comes to football. Francis was right as well. The players have stepped in, and hopefully football is headed for a more sportsmanlike future.