Stingley Refuses Offer To Meet Jack Tatum

After 18 years, Darryl Stingley was going to meet face-to-face with Jack Tatum, the man who ended his football career and put him in a wheelchair for life with a neck-high tackle.

Then Stingley, the former New England Patriots wide receiver, was told that next Tuesday’s meeting with the former Oakland Raiders defensive back was a publicity stunt, not a simple reconciliation.

Stingley’s agent said Tatum wanted the meeting, which was to be taped at Stingley’s Chicago home for airing by Fox-TV, to promote his new book, “Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum.”

“I’m numb,” Stingley told The Boston Globe “I have a headache. I knew nothing about a book. They told me nobody was making money off this. I’m sick.”

Even before the revelation about the book, Stingley’s friends had warned him not to meet with Tatum, because “if Tatum couldn’t even once come to see me in 18 years, that he even couldn’t lift a phone once in those 18 years and call me, what could he want now?”