NFL legend Earl Campbell still hits hard, compares current NFL to wrestling

Josh Peter | USA TODAY Sports

Show Caption Hide Caption Earl Campbell thinks NFL play has gotten soft Hall of Fame running back Earl Campbell compares the current state of the NFL play to his era.

AUSTIN — Earl Campbell, one of the most celebrated football heroes in Texas, leaned on a metal walker and shuffled to the front of his office last week to greet visitors.

He said he has had both knees replaced and had four back surgeries and battled substance abuse since his playing career ended three decades ago. Among the most punishing runners in NFL history, Campbell, 61, wants people who consider him a living legend to know he is, indeed, still living.

“I haven’t gone nowhere yet,” said Campbell, who starred for the Houston Oilers, earned induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1991 and about a decade ago spent 45 days in a rehab facility for abuse of painkillers and alcohol.

He is proud of his recovery — sober for almost nine years, he reported — and for helping Houston secure the right to host Super Bowl LI on Sunday at NRG Stadium. But he expressed little enthusiasm for watching the New England Patriots play the Atlanta Falcons.

In fact, Campbell compared current play in the NFL to professional wrestling.

MORE SUPER BOWL COVERAGE:

“And we all know now that we’re grown men that wrestling’s fake,” Campbell told USA TODAY Sports. “Well, football is not played like it was when I played.

“It was real football when Jack Tatum (a Hall of Fame safety for the Oakland Raiders) and I hit each other on the 2-yard line and I backed into the end zone. And after the game I said, ‘Hey, that’s the best I had,’ and he said, ‘That’s the best I had, too, Campbell.’ I mean, that was real football. But now … ”

Shaking his head at the excuses he hears from contemporary NFL players, Campbell said, “I can’t play because I’ve got a hangnail on my toe. I can’t play because I didn’t get a pedicure this week. I don’t play because my head hurt.

“That wouldn’t have got the job done back in my day.”

That disdain is one reason Campbell spends Sundays as he does.

“A lot of people would think on Sundays, with football going on, I’d be watching football, right?” he said. “But my wife and I watch golf.

“I’d give anything to be able to hit a 9-iron,” added Campbell, whose physical problems prevent him from playing golf. “I know everything about golf. I know all about Tiger (Woods), I know all about Bubba Watson and I know all about Jason Day. I mean, I’m really in on it.”

But his Saturdays are reserved exclusively for college football, and Campbell kicks off in the morning with ESPN’s College GameDay on the television and then hunkers down.

“I come out of my man cave at about 1 in the morning,” he said, and inevitably he emerges from the cave without having seen a running back whose style resembled his.

A bruising runner, Campbell rushed for 4,443 yards and 40 touchdowns at the University of Texas and capped his four-year college career by winning the 1977 Heisman Trophy. During his NFL career that included 6½ years with the Oilers and 1 ½ years with the New Orleans Saints, he rushed for 9,407 yards and 74 touchdowns, was named NFL MVP in 1979 and made the all-pro first team three times.

He said the only player in recent years who has impressed him is Marshawn Lynch, the powerful running back who played nine years in the NFL and was with the Seattle Seahawks when he abruptly retired after the 2015 season.

“I think he had two or three more good years in him,” said Campbell, who assured that he had nothing left when he retired in 1986 at 31.

Campbell said that he made the decision after a preseason game when his feet were so sore that he had to crawl his way to the bathroom.

“And I said, ‘Oh, hell, I don’t like it no more,’ ” Campbell recalled.

Rite of passage

Tracing his legendary toughness to growing up on a ranch in Tyler, Campbell offered snapshots of his rise to stardom.

His father died when he was in the fifth grade, leaving Campbell to work in the rose fields to help his mother pay the bills for seven boys and four girls. Campbell said he often went without socks.

Envisioning a life of poverty in the rose fields, Campbell said, at 15 he vowed to carve out a more luxurious life through football. As a high school junior, he was playing linebacker.

“I was the black Dick Butkus,” he said. “That was my hero, Dick Butkus.”

But in his senior season, the team needed a running back. Soon Campbell was plowing over linebackers in a sport he suggests is a rite of passage in this state.

“When you are born in Texas, you are going to play some football,” he said. “People in Texas love their football players. And any dad have a son, he might not directly push him into football, but he’s going to try to sneak it in there somehow.”

Though research shows football-related concussions lead to brain trauma known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Campbell questioned how safety concerns are being addressed.

“It’s great that they’re teaching guys about the CTE and the tackling and all that,” he said. “But to play football you’ve got to be pretty physical. Sometimes I think a lot of guys are getting hurt in the game of football now because they’re trying to remember how not to tackle someone.

“Like myself, if I were playing football, heck, I would get more 15-yard penalties than anybody ’cause I play football with my whole body.”

Taking care of business

Expressing regret that he failed to lead the Oilers to a Super Bowl despite three playoff appearances, Campbell predicted the Falcons will get their first Super Bowl title Sunday by upsetting Tom Brady and the Patriots, winners of four Super Bowls since the 2001 season.

“They’re the better team,” Campbell said of the Falcons. “They have younger players. They want it. I don’t think Brady wants it as bad as he did that second one and that third one.”

Asked for the favorite memories of his career, Campbell shot back, “Which one?”

He works with his two grown sons on business ventures that include Earl Campbell Meat Products, which his son Tyler said sold more than 14 million pounds of sausage last year.

Another priority is developing a non-profit venture called Project Rose, which will focus on research related to spine and joint issues that would benefit people such as Campbell.

After his football career, Campbell said, he discovered he suffered from a narrowing of the spine that contributed to his four back surgeries.

“I think if I’d gotten a real physical like they do now, CAT scans and everything, probably I wouldn’t have been able to play,” he said, adding he has no regrets about participating in a sport that has contributed to his using a walker and abusing painkillers. “I’m pretty happy. It don’t take that much to make a guy who don’t wear socks happy.”