Everybody Loves Me; What’s The Matter With You?

Fran Tarkenton’s two daughters, one 25, the other one 7 years old, walked into his office in Atlanta on Thursday afternoon. He stopped talking on the telephone to speak to them.

“Y’all like me?” Tarkenton asked.

His daughters were across the room, and their answers couldn’t be heard on the other end of the line. Presumably, they said they liked him.

“I’ve got four kids and two grandchildren,” Tarkenton said. “They all live in Atlanta, and they all like me. They all think I’m a good guy.”

He laughed.

In a lighthearted way, Tarkenton was trying to convince me he’s not such a bad guy. He wanted to make the point that Fran the Man isn’t Fran the Bitter Man. Which was one way I described him in an earlier column (at far left on this page). I also called him Fran the Jerk.

The Thursday column was prompted by remarks Tarkenton made to a Los Angeles Times writer, criticizing the National Football League for not, as I put it, “fawning over him as Miami’s Dan Marino gets closer to breaking his passing records.”

That column also included comments from some of Tarkenton’s former teammates. Not all of those teammates had fond recollections of him. For instance, Chuck Foreman said, “Everybody on the team knew he was for himself… . He was just a ‘me’ guy.” Ron Yary said, “I sense an insincerity in him.”

The column also mentioned that over the years Tarkenton has never returned a phone call of mine. Thursday, finally, he got back to me, after the first column had appeared. He was returning a call made to him Wednesday.

Tarkenton said he had called back earlier Thursday and left a message, which he did. In between that message and his second call, he said, he got wind of what was in the column. He said three former teammates who were “absolutely upset” called him.

Tarkenton said the column didn’t upset him. He spent more than an hour on the phone expressing that view, and others.

“I’m not rapping anybody. I’m not rapping you,” he said. “I’m not about that. I’m not bitter. I’m the most blessed human being ever. I have lived through wonderful articles, and I’ll live through articles that just trash me. We’re in a time of tabloid press. It sells more TV, more papers. That’s why we’ve got Oprah Winfrey and everybody else.”

Just for the record, the former teammates quoted in the earlier column were asked to describe Fran Tarkenton. They chose the words they used.

“‘My friends love me. My family loves me,” Tarkenton said. “I love the teammates I played with and died with. I love them today as much as I did then. I’m not as close to them today as I was 15 years ago, but I love them just as much.

“Tell Chuck I love him. I don’t think one thing less of Chuck Foreman or one thing less of Ron Yary. Nobody can break my love for these people, today or yesterday or tomorrow.”

It was mentioned to Tarkenton that Foreman said he has left phone messages for him several times and never heard back.

“I have never gotten a call from Chuck,” Tarkenton said.

“That’s not Chuck Foreman talking in that article. I have just arranged in the last two weeks for Chuck Foreman to make some money out of state. I got some of the other guys involved, too. I have nothing but the highest respect for Chuck Foreman. He was a great player. These were great people.

“I’ll even say Ron Yary belongs in the Hall of Fame. God bless Yary. He’s a sweet guy. For some reason, he got (bad feelings) for me after I stopped playing.”

In our conversation, which lasted 75 minutes, Tarkenton did most of the talking. I’ll give him this: He was personable, even charming. But was he also, as the first column suggested, being self-serving? Was he trying to make himself look good after being portrayed so harshly?

Whatever he was, he sure was talkative.

He talked about his love of football: “I love the history and legacy of the game. I was a bubble-gum card collector as a kid. When Bronko Nagurski was alive, I went fishing with him. I was thrilled to see him because he was a legend in the history of the game.”

He talked about how the NFL should show more respect for its history: “I think baseball has done a great job honoring the history of the game and the legacy of the game. When you see baseball revere Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, and Babe Ruth, who’s been dead 50 years … football has lost that. We’ve got Bronko Nagurski, Sid Luckman, Otto Graham and Sammy Baugh. Let’s keep these legacies alive. I’d like to see the NFL honor the legacy of great players and not lose the tradition and history of the game. Maybe someone in the league will get ticked off at me and think I’m a self-serving jerk and an SOB. That’s fine if it gets them to promote the Luckmans, the Grahams and the Baughs.”

He talked about what drove him in games: “I had one job. I wanted to beat our opponents as well as I could. Third-and-5 was life and death for me. I was hard and unforgiving. I was an animal. That is what it’s about. It’s about winning that football game for all of us. That’s what you play for. Is that bad?”

He talked about why he rarely returns phone calls he gets from writers: “My life isn’t about talking to sports guys. If a person never writes another article about me, I’d be very happy. It’s no fun picking up a paper and reading a negative article. I’d just as soon not talk to writers.”

Too bad. When you finally do get him on the line, he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy.