Eric Dickerson - Watch My Smoke: The Eric Dickerson Story

Preface

B ob Irsay staggered his drunk ass over to me and some of my Colts teammates.

It was 1990 or 91, and we were at the Christmas party he used to hold every year at his barn. Nobody ever wanted to go. Everybody knew Irsay, the Colts owner, was a mean old alcoholic. We all had the feeling he was showing us off, as if he was saying, Look at these big, Black bucks I have working for me .

I was standing with wide receiver Clarence Verdin and a couple other guys when Irsay came over. His eyes were glassy. He was surrounded by two guys we called his handlers. They followed him around everywhere to make sure he didnt say anything stupid that would get him in trouble. This time, they failed.

Irsay told us he had a joke.

You got a kike, you got a wetback, and you got a nigger...

I didnt miss a beat. Id known people like Irsay my whole life. My mom, Viola Dickerson, told me from an early age the country was full of them.

Fuck that , I said.

The handlers tried to whisk Irsay away: Bob, lets go, lets go . Irsay snapped to his senses and began apologizing to us.

I repeated: No, fuck that. And I left that stupid party.

People wonder how Black athletes making millions of dollars can still feel used. People see us and think were on top of the world, that somehow the racism that this country was founded on doesnt apply to us. Sometimes you can even convince yourself this is true. And then a guy like Bob Irsay walks up to you and your teammatesguys who beat the odds, guys who overcame obstacles most people couldnt imagineand basically calls you a bunch of niggers.

The next day at the team facility, some management types called me into an office room, trying to smooth things over. They told me Bob was just joking, that hes not a racist, that you know how he gets when he drinks .

Yeah, yeah , I told them. I wasnt stupid or born yesterday and I resented the implication that I was.

Maybe the organization was worried I was going to go public with it. But that thought didnt cross my mind. This was three decades ago and if there was such a thing as a woke media, it didnt exist in Indianapolis, as far as I could tell. This was the city where during a game fans hung a banner with a racist caricature of a Black baby in my number 29 jersey. He wore red lipstick and held a fried chicken leg in his hand, with a stack of money on one side and a watermelon on the other. This was the city where I flipped on the TV and saw a Klan rally in the middle of the downtown area. The news covered it like it was just another local organization having a parade.

So I left that office room and went to practice. There was another game coming up. More hits to take and more checks to cash.

The crazy thing was that the day after, Irsay probably didnt remember saying what he had said. But I never forgot it.

This book is the story of my life. In a way, its the classic American tale: A boy from the other side of the tracks in Sealy, Texas, goes to L.A. He becomes a star and makes the kind of money he never knew existed.

But its also a darker tale about my conflicted relationship with football. About how I fell in love with the sport, but how by the end, all the bullshit surrounding it made me hate it.

How many of you know the feeling of running with the ball and breaking free into the open field when youre the fastest guy out there? I havent played in twenty-eight years and I still cant get over it. The first time I felt it was in seventh grade, in my first organized football game. I was wearing prescription glasses because sports goggles werent invented yet, and I scored six touchdowns. I chased that feeling ever since then, like an addict chasing the euphoria of that first hit.

I loved that feeling and everything associated with it, and still do. I love the way you feel the roar of the crowd when youre running for the end zone but you dont really hear it, because the only sounds you hear are your own breathing and the fluttering of your shoulder pads. I love the smell of the game. Every August, up until a few years ago, Id still smell the game in the air when the season approached. Thats how powerful of a hold it had on me.

I was lucky to get to chase that feeling for a living. I know what opportunities were like for Black kids from places like Sealy, and still are. God gave me a talent that was second to none. I have God and football to thank for the life I live today, and more importantly, for the life my kids live.

But then theres the bullshit.

The bullshit actually began way before I got to the pros. In high school, I quit the team temporarily because my coach was a racist who banned Afros and always worked the Black kids harder than the white kids. My senior year, after I got a certain Pontiac Trans Ammore on that laterI became the center of a scandal, like I was some kind of criminal. The NCAA came into town and started investigating me, my mom, and my grandma like they were the FBI.

The bullshit continued in college at SMU, with the Pony Excess scandal. Yeah, I got some envelopes of cashand sent half that money back to my momand I always had a car to drive. But with the money I was making for SMU, that was peanuts. The real scandal isnt how much I got paid, it was how little . Forty years later, people think of the scandal and they think of me. Youve been hearing a lot of talk these days about how society always assumes young Black men are criminals. Now, think back about the SMU scandal and how that was portrayed in the mediaand who was portrayed as the wrongdoer.

Then theres the pros, when the ugly business of football takes over once and for all. You start to feel the brutality of the sport, and the way some people say that NFL stands for Niggers for Lease. If youre an NFL running back, every time you touch the ball is like getting into a car crash. Now, at sixty-one years old, I feel those hits every second of every day in my body and, yes, in my mind.

And the money. Heres something people have a hard time understanding, and I cant really blame them: I might have been making more money than I ever thought possible, but that doesnt mean my contract was fair or even close to that. Nowadays, the media and fans are a little more tolerant of players wanting their just due. But that wasnt the case in the 80s, before free agency, when the Rams underpaid me for years before eventually trading me.

To Indianapolis. Bob Irsays team.

The trade broke my heart and hurts me still, because the Rams were the only team I ever wanted to play for. Do you think if a white guy broke the single-season rushing record and was in the middle of their prime as the best player at their position, they wouldve traded him? Theres no chance in hell.

Of course, the media made me out to be the bad guy. Eric the Ingrate , they called me, a coded word if ever Ive heard one. Thats the way it was back then and nobody questioned it: the media, which was mostly white, took the side of management, which was also white, and the message got out to the fan base, which was also mostly white. There was no social media. My reputation was dictated by what they wrote about me.

But Im not that guy at all. Im a guy raised by strong, proud, loving parents to know right from wrong. Im a guy who gave all he had to the game of football and paid the price. And thats why I decided to write this book.

Chapter 1

Viola & Kary

S ealy, Texas. When I was born in 1960, the population was 2,300. Even people who dont know Sealy as a town know the mattress company that was founded there. A dot on the map, fifty miles west of Houston. Its Texas, but in many ways it feels like the Dixie South.