Early in the fall of 1976, Phil Meyer returned to the apartment he shared with Mike Zimmer, back from a long day of classes and football practice at Illinois State University. Zimmer had just returned from the Mayo Clinic after suffering a broken neck in his C5 and C6 vertebrae, so Meyer figured he’d be sulking on the couch, stuck in a brace with his football career likely over.



But he couldn’t find Zimmer in the apartment and gave a quick look outside where he saw his roommate in an empty field behind the building. Zimmer held a football and was punting in the overgrown, unmarked space. And he was indeed wearing a massive neck brace. Meyer watched, perplexed.



“He had one football,” Meyer said. “I ain’t kidding you. He’d punt one ball, walk, go get it, punt it again. And he had his neck brace on the whole time.”



Zimmer, a man raised by a tough father in a blue-collar family, the coach of the NFL’s meanest...