The Man on Aisle Seven
A Tribute to George Sauer Jr.
“Wind-driven fight blows in my marrow,
Light narrows and clouds invite.
Bent by long shadows, longer time,
An old man dances in my heart —
His broken brain rattles mine.”
George Sauer, 1994
The middle-aged man lived alone in a small apartment in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He had no family in the area. He had apparently chosen the city at random. He slept in a sleeping bag in the floor of his apartment because of an old back injury. He worked at the local Sunshine Food Stores stacking shelves by day. After work, and in his free time, he wrote.
He called the back room at the Sunshine Store “Paradise.” Until you got to know him, the man who helped stock the grocery store shelves kept such a low profile that not many people knew anything about him. He was a slightly imposing figure, standing six feet, two inches tall, but otherwise he looked like a college English professor. The few people who took the effort to get to know him soon learned he was one of the most intelligent and interesting people they had ever met. He was well-read and could carry on an informed conversation on almost any subject.
They wondered why he was living in Sioux Falls and working in a grocery store in an hourly position, not because they looked down on the job, but because he seemed an odd fit for it.
Little did anyone know that twenty-six years before, he had caught eight passes for 133 yards and set up his team’s only touchdown in Super Bowl III. He should’ve been the MVP in that game, but it didn’t matter to him.
He would walk away from the game only two years later at the age of 27, one of the best receivers in the NFL, and leaving a highly-lucrative contract on the table. And now, over a quarter century later, he had found some measure of peace and contentment stocking the shelves at the grocery store and writing in his free time.
He was born on November 10, 1943, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. His father was a lifelong football player, coach, and administrator. His father had played for the Green Bay Packers from 1935–1937 and been a member of the Packers’ 1936 NFL championship team. His father would go on to coach football at New Hampshire, Kansas, Navy, and Baylor.
Growing up, the son had been an outstanding student with a wide variety of interests. Those who knew him as a boy say he was a poet at heart. His father was a football man.
And, as so often happens, the father would win the inevitable clash of wills that was bound to ignite when a son shows talent in other areas beyond sports. The father would win because the son preferred peace to confrontation, wanted to make his father proud, and in any event, the son really had no other choice, being on the much weaker end of the power balance before reaching full adulthood.
This is part of how it happens. And in practice it’s a very subtle thing. Like so many young boys in these situations, the son just happened to be very good at playing a sport that he did not really enjoy. This is actually very common; after all, when you think about it, people can be very good at something although they don’t particularly like or enjoy it.
Consider it; how many people are better-suited to do something else, something they are more naturally-suited to do, that they would enjoy much more, that they do not do because of a family or societal pressure? How many dreams are delayed, put off, or never attempted? How many avocations are delayed? How many careers are never taken up? How many possibilities are simply forfeited? How many desires are never followed, all in the name of going along to get along?
In the inception — in the very earliest of days — this is how it happens. This is how boys like the one in this story, my former teammates, and me, are created. It doesn’t take much, and the seeds are firmly planted, the heading is set.
Parents, if you care and seek wisdom, pay attention now. Because this is how it happens. The irony is, in most cases there is nothing malicious in it — at least in the beginning — although the results can consume many years of the child’s life and continue into early adulthood.
The father (and perhaps, the mother too) was a very good athlete; hence a high likelihood that he and/or she passes those genes on to the son. So what does the father do? He starts tossing a football or baseball to the son when the son is maybe two years old, or whatever the thing may be. Basketball, hockey, name it. And the son — who can barely walk and can’t even speak yet — can catch the ball.
How is this possible? Well, because the parent gets excited, and the two-year-old senses this, and it goes from there. The two-year-old learns how to get praise, attention, and self-value very early on. And then the son can throw the ball. And then, the son can kick and punt the ball. Or hit the baseball, or whatever the thing may be, and so on and so forth.
Parents, pay heed. I know the father does this because my father did it with me, and I confess that I did it with my sons. I didn’t realize I was doing this at the time. At the time when you are a young father, it just seems like the normal thing to do. This is not an indictment of fathers — including me — it’s just a recitation of facts.
But in the inception, the parent soon observes that the son is pretty good at the thing, whatever it may be, because after all, again, he is the parent’s son. And then one day, the son looks around and learns that he’s being praised for being able to throw that ball, or catch that ball, or kick that ball. He is getting lots of affirmation for being the kid who is really good at, for example, throwing or catching the ball; or hitting the baseball. And this affirmation is not just coming from his parents. It starts flowing in from neighbors, other parents, teachers, coaches, and other kids.
And all of this gets very deeply embedded in the son at a very early age. Pretty soon, if you are the son, you don’t even think about whether you like it or not; you just do it, because it has almost become your entire identity. It is how you gain personal value.
People like you because you’re good at throwing around the ball. The pretty girls in school like you. Other parents like you. And at a very young age the sport takes over your life. And there’s really no thought or discussion about you doing anything else.
And that’s how it happens. That’s how it happens to hundreds of thousands of young men in America, and it’s how it happened to the man on aisle 7, George Sauer Jr.
Some are able to move beyond the affliction, and some are not. And still others are able to move beyond the affliction, but its remnants somehow remain for the rest of their lives.
George Sauer really had no choice in the trajectory his life would take for its first 27 years, because he was offered a football scholarship to the University of Texas on the day he was born. Imagine that for a moment.
His father, George Sr., had played for the Longhorns’ coach, Dana X. Bible, at the University of Nebraska in the early ’30s. After three seasons with the Green Bay Packers, Sauer Sr. went on to a long and successful career in coaching and scouting, including seven years with the New York Titans/Jets as their general manager in 1962 and as the director of player personnel from 1963–1968.
George Sauer Jr. would later observe, “We had about thirteen trees in our backyard when I was a kid in Waco, Texas. My dad would throw the ball to me close to the trees and I’d bounce off of them after I caught it. I remember my father telling my mother one time, ‘With his hands he should be an end.’”
Not surprisingly, the younger Sauer was a standout football player at Waco High School. His school would win a share of the Texas State High School Football Championship (AAAA) in 1960. Although he was recruited by several schools, he never really had any choice of where he was going to attend. Like so many other decisions up to that point, and like so many others, that decision had already been made for him.
When Sauer finally decided to go to Texas in 1961, his mother showed him the letter they received from Coach Bible all those years before. “As for George Jr.,” it read, “don’t worry. I’ve got a uniform reserved for him here in 1961.”
George Sauer Jr. would later note, “It was as though some unseen force was driving me from behind to do those things.” I can identify with this sentiment, because this same unseen force influenced the first 22 years of my own life. “The memory of that letter has stayed with me because I think it was important in my eventual retirement,” Sauer would later observe.
But before abruptly leaving it all behind, George Sauer Jr. would leave his one unique and indelible mark on the game that never fulfilled him and that he never enjoyed. He would eventually follow it up with one of the first indictments of the game ever to come from one its insiders.
Sauer’s Super performance in Super Bowl III was the greatest of any pass catcher until Lynn Swann’s spectacular show in 1976, and yet he played only two more seasons after that, retiring at 27, too young by even the merciless standards of the NFL. He left with one year still left on his contract, which was certain to have been extended.
Then he did something that almost nobody had done before and astonishingly few have done since: He opened up about just how awful it was to play professional football. The words he used were not ambiguous.
He described how “the structure of pro football generally works to deny human values” and criticized its “chauvinistic authority.” He told The New York Times that “for me, playing pro football got to be like being in jail.”
He said, “Football does not do what it claims to do. It claims to teach self-discipline and responsibility, which is its most obvious contradiction. There is little real freedom. Instead, the system — the power structure of the coaches and the people who run the game — works to mold you into something they can manipulate.”
A few years after Sauer retired, in 1973, another disillusioned football player, Peter Gent, who played five seasons for the Dallas Cowboys, published a dark novel called “North Dallas Forty,” which dramatized the ruthlessly competitive, militaristic elements of the game. In Gent’s voice, you can hear Sauer’s: “When an athlete, no matter what color jersey he wears, finally realizes that opponents and teammates alike are his adversaries, and he must deal and dispense with them all, he is on his way to understanding the spirit that underlies the business of competitive sport. There is no team, no loyalty, no camaraderie; there is only him, alone.”
Ten years later, Sauer remained just as disillusioned. In an interview with The New York Times, he called professional football “a grotesque business.” “When you get to the college and professional levels, the coaches still treat you as an adolescent,” he said in an interview. “They know damn well that you were never given a chance to become responsible or self-disciplined. Even in the pros, you were told when to go to bed, when to turn your lights off, when to wake up, when to eat and what to eat. You even live and eat together like you are in a boys’ camp.”
Years later, like many football players before him, and surely many, many more to come, Sauer suffered from dementia at the end of his life. Watching how football is played now — in which every single achievement on the field is ridiculously celebrated, as if human experience scales no greater heights — it is hard not to wonder how much of this is compensatory, a high-pitched attempt to disguise the inhumanity of football. Could these really be the happiest, most exuberant men on earth, or are they compelled to behave that way for the enjoyment of the masses? How many George Sauers are trapped behind those facemasks, dreaming of something else they would rather do with their lives if only they could escape? Every now and then, the secrets spill out.
A few years ago, people around the N.F.L. were shocked when John Moffitt, a journeyman offensive lineman, up and quit the Denver Broncos, leaving a hefty salary on the table and leveling an indictment of football even bigger and more sweeping than Sauer’s. “How much do you really value intelligence,” Moffitt observed, “when as a society you continue to do unintelligent things?”
Glen Hines is the author of five books, including the recently published Of Time and Rivers, and the highly-regarded Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. He is the writer and producer of the book and podcast Welcome to the Machine, available on most podcast platforms. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.
