9. Assassin
Forty-one years ago, on a Saturday night in northern California, a professional football player named Jack Tatum delivered the most infamous and tragic hit in the history of football.
It happened during a National Football League preseason game between the Oakland Raiders and New England Patriots inside Oakland-Alameda County Stadium. With 1:12 remaining in the second quarter, the Patriots, who had the ball, ran a pass play that involved a wide receiver running a slant pattern, which calls for a receiver to run from his position near the sideline, toward the middle of the field. The player that ran this particular slant, on Aug. 12, 1978, was a 26-year-old Chicago native named Darryl Stingley. He was beginning his sixth season with Patriots. Most people considered him the team’s best wide receiver.
Tatum was playing defense for the Raiders that night. His position was free safety, meaning he lined up fifteen or so yards away from the ball, more or less in the middle of the field, so he could watch the opposing team’s offensive players from a distance, diagnose what they were attempting to do, and react. Tatum was fast. He also had good hands—in ten seasons as an NFL free safety he intercepted thirty-seven passes. But that’s not why the Raiders took him in the first round of the 1971 NFL draft. “I picked him,” Al Davis, the Raiders’ owner, said, “to tackle ball carriers.” Tatum’s approach to tackling involved hitting opponents very, very hard, often knocking them unconscious. He became known for this at Ohio State University, where he played college ball. “By the time my college career ended,” he once said, “I had more knockouts than Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali combined.” Once he reached the NFL, his nickname became, “The Assassin.” By August 1978, Tatum was 30, and one of the most feared players in the NFL.
Video footage shows that when the Patriots snapped the ball, Tatum began back-pedaling away from the action. He did so, most likely, because his eyes were on the Patriots’ quarterback, Steve Grogan, who, after taking the ball from the center, began back-pedaling himself, with his own eyes downfield, surveying the action. Tatum would have known this signaled a pass play, and, as a free safety, he did not want to let a defender get behind him. So he backed up. Stingley, meanwhile, from his position near the sideline, ran approximately five yards straight down field before angling toward the middle of the field. After making the turn, he turned his head back to look for the ball. At the same time, Grogan stopped back-pedaling, shuffled his feet, cocked his arm, threw the ball. His aim was off—it was the second preseason game—and the ball’s trajectory lifted it to a height that no one on the field could reach. Stingley, probably because of instinct, lunged for the ball anyway, his body momentarily becoming almost parallel to the ground.
All of this took—from the snap of the ball to Stingley’s lunge—about three seconds. During those three seconds, Tatum stopped moving backward. The moment he saw Grogan cocking his arm and Stingley on a slant route, he began moving forward. The Patriots had run the same pattern several times that game, and, out of instinct, Tatum went toward the spot where Stingley would likely meet the ball. “It was one of those pass plays,” Tatum said, “where I could not possibly have intercepted, so because of what the owners expect of me when they give me my paycheck, I automatically reacted to the situation by going for an intimidating hit.”
Tatum’s right shoulder pad, angled for impact, met the crown of Stingley’s helmet. Both men fell to the ground. Most football fans know what happened next.
Tatum stood for the next play.
Stingley spent the rest of his life as a quadriplegic.
What most football fans do not know is that Tatum had spent the summer prior to that game working on a memoir about his time playing football.
The book, published in the fall of 1980, is more or less what you’d expect from a player nicknamed “The Assassin.” He tells about his journey from a “country bumpkin” in rural North Carolina, to his days as an “All-American” player at Ohio State University, to his time as a Super Bowl champion in Oakland. He explains why he played the way he did—“I quickly learned that it hurt more to get hit than it did to actually do the hitting”—and the reputation he developed. (Some opposing players and coaches considered his play borderline criminal, and Bob Hope once joked that he was so strong he had muscles in his fingernails.) And he makes no apologies. “My idea of a good hit,” he writes, “is when the victim wakes up on the sidelines with train whistles blowing in his head and wondering who he is and what ran over him.”
Then, during the final 30 or so pages of the 250-page book, Tatum does something else: He begins passionately advocating for a series of rule changes the NFL should make for the safety of its players. “Otherwise,” he writes, “the violence and brutality is going to increase and the life expectancy of professional football players will be measured in games instead of years.”
The changes he suggested were drastic.
He said zone defenses should be banned, meaning that defenders should not be allowed to cover certain areas of the field but, instead, they should be forced to cover a specific offensive player on each play. Doing so would reduce the number of collisions, Tatum believed, because “there isn’t any camping in the middle of the field and looking for those head-on shots that can render a man unconscious or break his neck.”
He said blitzes should be banned. On each play, a defense sends a certain number of players after the quarterback, hoping to tackle him or at least rush him into poor judgment. A “blitz” is when an additional player—or two or three—go after the quarterback, often in surprise. As Tatum wrote, blitzes “create weaknesses in the pass protection and usually are designed to give one defender a free route to the quarterback’s head.” This, obviously, is a recipe for getting someone hurt. (In making his argument, Tatum noted that the league does not allow blitzes in the annual Pro Bowl because it does not want its star players getting injured. “Why not exercise that same reason and sanity for the regular season?” he writes.) To this end, Tatum believed every team should be required to rush the quarterback with five—AND ONLY FIVE—defenders, the same number of players offenses use to protect the quarterback. Doing this would leave five players on defense to cover the five offensive players who are eligible to catch a pass, and one defender to cover the quarterback, who holds the ball.
Tatum also said slant patterns should be banned. Because those routes develop so fast, defenders cannot try to knock down or intercept the ball. Instead, they must target the receiver, and try to force, through impact, a drop or fumble. “For the safety of the player,” he writes, “they absolutely should outlaw the quick slant.”
It is not surprising that Tatum would want slants outlawed: It was that route Stingley was running when Tatum hit him on Aug. 12, 1978. What is surprising, though, is that according to Tatum, he was working on the section regarding the dangers of slants sometime in June 1978—at least six weeks before Stingley’s injury.
Darryl Stingley died on April 5, 2007. Jack Tatum died three years later, on July 27, 2010. They famously never spoke.
After Tatum’s death, some people criticized his 1980 memoir, titled, “They Call Me Assassin,” as an attempt to capitalize on his infamy following Stingley’s injury. No one mentioned that in 1989, Tatum revealed that he had made arrangements for Stingley to receive some of the memoir’s royalties. Nor did anyone mention the rule changes Tatum urged the NFL to consider or the reason he wanted them:
“I can’t undo yesterday’s misfortune,” he said, “but I might be able to prevent some of tomorrow’s pain.”
Meanwhile, the changes he suggested have never been implemented on any level. Go watch any football game, anywhere, on a Friday night, a Saturday morning or a Sunday afternoon, and you will more than likely see defenses playing zones, quarterbacks getting blitzed, and wide receivers running slants.
What you will most certainly see is an injury.