I saw Brown play the Bears at Wrigley Field but I was really young. Brown was a god among ants...it wasn't even fair. Saw Sayers a few times and he was poetry in motion. Pound for pound....I never saw a better NFL player with my own eyes than Payton.
The best player I ever got to be on a field with was Tony Dorsett. Played against him in a rainy game in 1973 where he ran for 265 yards...setting a Pitt record I think he broke a couple more times. We missed something like 25 tackles on him or something disgusting and he left foot prints on a few of us. He had a 79 yard touchdown that I had a view of from the mud. Wasn't a great day for the Wildcats.
Never got to the college level myself, and would've loved to have gone to NW. But as a South Floridian, in high school, I played against a number of future NFL'ers. Will never forget playing a pickup game out in the Glades, when a handful of local guys came back from college. Watched Devin Hester run right by me. Embarrassing, a blessing, and I'll never forget it.
Hardest I ever got hit was by Thom Darden. Never saw him coming and it took a while before I could even recognize who it was that just de-cleated me. He went on to play for that team up north and then the Browns.
My stories are not so impressive. I played with a couple CFL players though. I only played in my last year of high school just to try it. I did pretty well on my limited snaps but my coach liked to play his guys over his better performing guys at practice and limited snaps. We went 0-fer but my best performance came on a 4-man blitz all through my gap vs the best team in the country and probably the northern US (they travelled to and got run out of town by the communities they travelled to on tour). Anyways I blocked all those guys in time for our backup QB to find the open guy on a deep TD pass.
When Gus Frerotte was a senior in high school, he once rifled a pass at me when I was running a 7 yard in route out of the wingback (8th grade). I turned my head just in time for the ball to rip into my forehead and tear me completely off my feet. He was probably 15 yards away and threw an absolute BB. There was no arc. I'm pretty sure it was intended to do exactly what it did, lol.
Was playing wingback against Palm Beach Central, and my number got called for a B gap trap run off the motion. I just broke through the gap as my world turned upside down, something sending me cartwheeling from the left. I got up to see Jon Bostic walking away, high-fiving everyone. Next time they called my number, I grabbed my FB's facemask, and pointed to Bostic. "You get him, I got everyone else". Lo and behold, DT walks through the gap because my FB ignores him, and I juke right past the fatass... only to see my FB going backwards, decleated. Moving through him towards me is, of course, Bostic. That play didn't end well, either. I've got plenty of these. You grow up down here, and you'll recognize plenty of names at the next levels, in the coming years. You usually remember them kicking your ass.
OBTW: He was only a sophomore in high school at the time. I was a Junior and went on to finish 2nd in the state championships in the 50 yard freestyle and 3rd in the 200 yard individual medley later that year. At the end of my junior year, both the Head Coach in football and swimming called me into an office and suggested that I focus on swimming as I had already received some interest from Indiana on a scholarship (they were a power back then). I did get a partial scholarship to Ohio University and opted to go there as my oldest brother was already there in graduate school. Turns out I never cashed in on the partial scholarship at OU as I got tossed out by Thanksgiving (yes, alcohol was involved). I then ended up at Findlay College and was a walk on in football the following fall. A year and a half later I was an expectant father learning how to salute.
Nothing too incredible here on my behalf, but when I was at Ohio State in the early 90's, I worked at an athletic shoe store in Columbus. One night, just before closing, I sold the heavy weight champion of the world, James "Buster" Douglass a pair of air Jordans, and two Michael Dean Perry Browns jersey's that he was buying as Christmas presents....He was awesome. Signed an autograph for me. I know things didn't go well for him in his next fight, which was against Evander Holyfield, but for that one night against Mike Tyson, he created one of the greatest sports memories of my life, and I told him so. He appreciated it. Dude was cool as hell. Now he lives about 10 minutes up the road from me in Johnstown, OH, at a place he calls QUICK JAB RANCH...His kids played baseball with my nephew....
@TopDawg You're the second person I know of that met James in person and they said the same thing about him being sincere and down to Earth. I'd like to get a chance to meet some of the older fighters like Douglass, Tyson, Holyfield, Larry Holmes and Big George. Just to sit down and chat up some fisticuffs would be a really big deal to me.
And this was while he was the champ...James is as down to earth as it gets. He didn't have any entourage or anything. If ya didn't know who he was, you'd have never known he held such an impressive title...I recently watched "42 to 1" the 30 for 30 featuring his big fight with Tyson, and it really reminded me how much I miss boxing and those huge heavyweight fights. That was the best fight I ever saw...
If you ever hear me repeating the same story again I'm sorry but I literally only have like half a dozen football stories. Lol