| The second in a series Former NFL WR Bob Long was
having a stroke, which seemed about as misdirected as a wrong number.
Long was only 50 years old at the time, which might sound ancient to a teenager but
isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things. It certainly wasn’t the age
typically associated with stroke victims.
Even more baffling was the fact that Long’s weight was good, he didn’t have
vices and he exercised regularly. It was as though he mistakenly had been given someone
else’s stroke.
The date was January 16, 1991. Long hadn’t been feeling well for about a month.
Two weeks earlier he broke out in hives. Long’s wife insisted he go to the doctor,
who checked him out and made the hardly life-threatening proclamation, "Yes, he has
hives."
You don’t call in sick because of hives. You don’t clear your schedule. So
Long went about his business.
On the day that would change his life forever, Long went downtown to close a business
deal. Everything seemed fine. Looks were deceiving.
At 1:00 that afternoon, a secretary called Long’s wife and said, "Your
husband doesn’t feel well, and there’s nothing more going on today. Why
don’t you come in and get him."
This didn’t set off any alarm bells for Bob’s wife, Joan, but when she
arrived to his office and learned that he was lying down she started to get concerned.
Warning bells started going off for her when she saw the door to his office was closed,
something he almost never did.
Joan knocked and called Bob’s name. No answer.
She opened the door and saw Bob lying down, still wearing his overcoat and a scarf.
"It looked like he was dead," she says.
She again called out his name. Loudly. No answer. Joan shook Bob and yelled in his ear.
He responded, "I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t feel well."
Bob was slurring his words and one side of his face did not look right. Joan knew
immediately that Bob had suffered a stroke. She screamed for someone to get an ambulance.
When they got to the hospital, Bob started having major seizures.
Bob was placed in intensive care. His situation kept going downhill.
"I was in shock," Joan says. "I was in shock that this could happen, and
it was unbelievable because he was such a vital, active person."
The days kept passing, and Bob kept getting worse. It looked like there was nothing
more the doctors could do for him. It looked like he was going to die.
Joan told Bob’s doctor, "(My husband is) such a wonderful person that even if
he’s only 75 percent of what he was before, that’s fine. I’ll take
it."
Flashback: This was not the first time that Bob was virtually given up for dead. Back
in 1968, Long was having the season of his life for the Falcons. Nine games into the
season, he already had what was at the time a career-best 22 catches and was averaging an
impressive 22.0 yards per reception.
"I was on my way to an All-Pro season," he says.
Then disaster struck as unexpectedly as a 50-year-old man suffering a stroke.
The morning after the Falcons’ game against the Rams, Long was sore and decided to
head toward the stadium for a hot tub and a massage. The teammates he normally drove to
the stadium with had been out late partying the night before and weren’t up to a 9:30
a.m. trip to the stadium, so Long drove alone. It was the first time he had made the trip
by himself.
He drove through downtown Atlanta. Just as Long was coming out of a traffic jam, it was
raining lightly. Then Long looked up and couldn’t believe what he saw.
"I saw this car hurling through the air right at me," he says.
The airborne car had come off the ramp from the opposite side of the road, went across
the freeway and flipped up in the air.
Long’s car was going 55 miles per hour. The other car was going 70. They met head
on. Long’s car would later be taken to Georgia Tech where a study said it looked like
a car that had been going 125 miles per hour and hit a brick building. The block of
Long’s engine was driven back through the front seat.
Long would lose a kidney and suffer injuries to the lumbar vertebrae in his back. The
lacerations and stitches on his body would total 200.
"I got beat up pretty bad," he says.
Initially, it looked even worse than that.
Long was unconscious for a minute or two. When he came to, he saw blood all over
himself. A state patrolman was standing outside the car and said, "We’ve got
another dead one over here."
Long called out, "Wait a minute, I’m not dead yet."
Fast forward to January 1991 and Day Six of Long’s stroke.
"(That) was the day I thought he was going to die," Joan says.
Bob wasn’t responding to what the doctors were trying. His breathing was slowing
down. He’d go for what seemed like much too long without taking a breath.
"You’d have to make him breathe by yelling at him or pushing at him to get
him to take a breath," Joan says. "It was very scary."
The doctors were running out of ideas, running out of time. One doctor said, "We
don’t know what to do for him. He’s fading fast."
Finally, a doctor said, "There’s only one thing I can think of to do, and
that’s give him a massive dose of cortisone."
This was a very dangerous course of action. Too much cortisone can kill you, but
desperate times call for desperate measures. Either this would work or Bob was going to
die anyway.
Bob was given the massive dose of cortisone. It saved his life. Within six hours, he
came out of what Joan calls the "semi-coma" he was in. Three days later he was
out of intensive care.
Very shortly after that was that season’s Super Bowl. Giants vs. Bills. The Giants
were coached by Bill Parcells, who just happens to be a former college teammate of
Long’s.
The day of the Super Bowl was the first day Long really seemed to be making a concerted
effort to rally. He wanted to watch Parcells and the Giants play in the Super Bowl. The
problem was that Long was seeing triple. One eye had to be blocked and he couldn’t
look directly at anything or he’d get sick. Still, Long wanted to monitor
Parcells’ team in the worst way.
"That was the day that I felt he might have a chance to make some kind of
comeback," Joan says. "But I tell you, this was a man (who) could not walk,
could not talk, could not open his eyes. It was unbelievable."
Bob was unable to watch the game, but he listened. His family was with him, telling him
what was happening in the game.
And what a game it was. One of the most dramatic Super Bowls of all time, it went down
to the wire with Parcells’ Giants winning 20-19 when Bills PK Scott Norwood missed a
47-yard FG attempt with mere seconds remaining.
"Stroke victims get so emotional (and) he just sobbed," Joan says of
Bob’s reaction to the game’s final outcome. "It was really hard to see him
crying."
Walking and talking were going to be the biggest challenges to Bob after his stroke.
Lessons learned in the past would carry him through the rehab he faced.
Flashback: From 1964 to ’67 Long played for the Packers. This was during the
Packers’ glory years. Long was part of three championship teams during his time in
Green Bay, where he came under the watchful eye of coaching legend Vince Lombardi.
Lombardi had a philosophy in those years that would serve Bob well during his recovery
from his stroke.
"The team never gave up," Bob says. "That was one of our sayings.
Lombardi used to say to us, ‘We didn’t lose, fellas, time ran out.’ That
was his theory. He’d say, ‘We never lose, time ran out.’ If we lost, time
ran out. If it would have been overtime, we would have won the game. If we had more time.
So that was the kind of approach we took to the games."
Lombardi was not the only person to teach Bob how to attack a difficult situation. Bob
also learned this lesson from his father Bernard. Bernard worked in the Pennsylvania steel
mills when Bob was growing up. Specifically, Bernard worked for U.S. Steel outside of
Pittsburgh.
"He worked in the open hearth," Bob says. "These big, open-hearth blast
furnaces where they used to melt the metal and steel and iron. It was hard work. Imagine
your body temperature in front of a blast furnace. That’s where all the flames
were."
It takes a tough man to do a tough job. This was no mismatch.
"He was a tough guy," Bob says. "He demanded discipline. There were
rules in the house. He expected us to follow the rules. My father was really tough."
How tough? Well, consider an exchange Bob once had with Lombardi. The Packers’
head coach had just chewed out Bob during the 1965 season. Afterward, Bob went up to the
coach and said, "Coach, please don’t yell at me again. You know, my dad was
tougher than you are."
Lombardi, a hard-nosed, tough-talking, tornado of a coach, responded in surprising
fashion. He laughed.
Bob had learned toughness from the best of them. He would need every ounce of this
trait as he rehabbed from his stroke.
Fast forward to the start of Long’s rehab after his stroke: "He had to learn
how to do everything all over again," Joan says.
As Bob did just that, he kept hearing a voice in his head: "Never, never, never
give up," he’d hear Lombardi say.
He heard the voice. He listened to the voice.
"That was kind of the mark of our football team," Bob says. "As it
turned out, that’s been the mark of my life. Never give up."
Over and over Bob heard Lombardi’s voice tell him that a Packer never lost. Time
just ran out. If there had been more time, the Packers would have won.
Long was only 50 years old. He had more time. He never gave up.
"I told people, ‘I’m going to get pretty close back to normal,’
" Long says. "So I kept fighting to get back. I never gave up after my
stroke."
A lesser man would have. The road to recovery was long and bumpy.
Six weeks after his stroke, Bob was in his hospital room and was given soup to eat. He
was a disaster.
He lifted the soup spoon. Whack. He hit himself in the forehead with it. He tried
again. Splat. He hit himself in the cheek with it.
"He couldn’t even feed himself," Joan says. "It was pretty
bad."
"Never, never, never give up," said the voice in his head.
There were other indignities to endure.
"Trying to learn how to tie his shoes again and put his shoes on was so
frustrating for him," Joan says. "I had to give him showers for a very long
time, because he couldn’t stand in order to take the shower, which was one of my more
sad moments," Joan says.
"Never, never, never give up," said the voice in his head.
"You’re 50 years old and you have to learn to talk and walk again," Bob
says. "You feel like you’re a little kid. So I had to overcome some of that,
realizing I had to go through these small tasks and simple games. They gave us simple
games to play, which I hadn’t played since second grade. That’s part of the
rehab. Mentally I had to overcome that, saying, well you have to go through this stuff to
get better. So that’s what I did."
What he did was he battled. He scrapped. He clawed. He never gave up. Never, never,
never. Lombardi would have been proud. Heck, even Bernard "tougher than
Lombardi" Long would have been impressed by the effort.
"He was determined he was going to be able to do it," Joan says. "He was
so driven to be able to take care of himself.
"He fought, fought, ohhhhhh did he fight.
"It has to be that athletic training. That drive to just do the best that you can.
I’m amazed. Amazed."
Bob’s battle to walk again on his own two feet started in a wheelchair. Then one
day he was given a walker. He didn’t much care for the walker.
"I felt old when I used that walker," Bob says. "I threw the walker away
and told them to give me a cane."
Eventually, Bob was allowed to leave the hospital and return home. That first day home
his family looked for him. Bob was nowhere to be found. He’d gone out.
When he finally returned home, he said, "I just wanted to go for a walk."
This was a good news/bad news type of situation.
The good news: "It was a good thing," Joan says. "He was making himself
do this."
The bad news: "The problem was he couldn’t walk very well at all, and
he’d fall down or he was out playing, wanted to play frisbee with his sons, but
he’d fall down constantly," Joan says. "But he insisted on doing it.
That’s compulsive without thinking of the consequences."
Perhaps, but it brought about rewards. Two and a half months after coming out of his
semi-coma, Bob was walking on his own. To this day his balance is not the greatest, but he
is walking.
His speech took longer to come around. He couldn’t speak at all for about a month.
"Never, never, never give up," said the voice in his head.
Gradually, his ability to speak improved. Just a few words here and there at first.
"Never, never, never give up," said the voice in his head.
Then more words. And more.
"He sounded like a robot for a long time," Joan says.
To help Bob, Joan would play oldies music, his favorite, in the car as they drove to
rehab each day. Bob wasn’t much to listen to in the singing department even before
the stroke, so imagine the assault on Joan’s ears.
"He was so bad after the stroke," Joan says. "But I felt he loves that
music, and he would sing with it back and forth to the hospital. That really helped him.
That helped him regain his speech."
It took Bob six months to get the bulk of his speech back, and he went through 10
months of rehab. These days he gets hoarse if he talks too much and says he stutters every
now and then, but someone talking to him for the first time probably wouldn’t notice
anything unusual about his speaking pattern.
Bob is not back to where he was before his stroke, but he is closer than anyone would
have originally imagined.
"His doctors were calling him their miracle patient," Joan says. "He had
this drive to come back."
Bob says, "I think I’ve done pretty well. I never gave up. I think one of the
reasons I was able to come back so fast was because I was pretty young when I had my
stroke. Regardless, I’m very thankful it wasn’t worse. That it was only my
balance and my speech that were damaged. I’m very fortunate that my mind wasn’t
damaged, because I still have my memory and whatever intelligence I have."
Frank Woschitz, director of the NFL Players Association Retired Players Organization,
says, "I think it’s very inspiring. It would have been easy for him to say, oh,
the heck with it and just let it go and let somebody take care of him the rest of his
life. He wouldn’t do that."
Actually, it’s very difficult to imagine Long letting someone take care of him.
He’s the kind of guy other people turn to for help. Even after a serious medical
problem.
Flashback: Even after the car wreck during his playing days, people were constantly
asking Bob to help them out.
During his first training camp after recovering from the car wreck, Bob was still in a
lot of pain. A friend of his in Philadelphia had cancer and would die soon thereafter.
Before the friend died, Bob left training camp — a no-no — to see his friend
before the cancer took his life. When Bob returned to training camp, the Falcons’
head coach, Norm Van Brocklin, gave him a hard time about leaving. Bob tried to explain
that his friend was dying, but Van Brocklin would hear none of it. Fed up, Bob said he was
retiring and left training camp.
One night, Bob was in his Atlanta apartment when the phone rang. Bob answered and heard
the voice on the other end of the line say, "Bob, this is Coach Vince Lombardi."
Long: "Hi, coach."
Lombardi: "How are you feeling?"
Long: "Pretty good. Why are you calling?"
Lombardi: "I’ve been just named the head coach of the Washington
Redskins."
Long: "That’s right. I knew that. What about it?"
Lombardi: "Bobby Mitchell, my All-Pro, Hall-of-Fame receiver is retiring. I need a
receiver to replace Bobby Mitchell."
Long: "Coach, I can’t replace Bobby Mitchell. He’s one of the all-time
greats."
Lombardi: How do you feel? How much of a player are you now than you were in Green
Bay."
Long, aware that he had lost some of his speed from the car wreck: "Probably 80
percent."
Lombardi: "That’s good enough for me."
Long gave in and played for Lombardi and the Redskins that season. Long had done a lot
of running and weight lifting after his car wreck in order to get off of crutches, start
walking again and toughen himself up for football.
"But nothing could prepare me for the hits," Long says. "That was really
a painful year."
Nonetheless, it was his most productive season as a pro. He caught 48 passes that
season, more than twice as many as his next best year as a pro. Even coming back from
serious medical problems, Long was someone who came through for other people.
Fast forward to how Long keeps himself busy these days: Just as he came through for
Lombardi in the aftermath of the car wreck, Long is coming through for others in the
aftermath of his stroke.
He comes through for Wisconsin-based members of the National Football League Players
Association.
Long is the president of the NFLPA Retirees for Wisconsin. He started doing that in the
late 1980s.
Shortly after Long’s stroke, someone asked Woschitz, "Do we have to replace
him?"
Woschitz responded, "No, we don’t need to replace him. Give him a couple of
months, and he’ll be back."
Reflecting on this story, Woschitz says, "And by gosh, he came to the next meeting
in a wheelchair."
Long has been off and running for the NFLPA’s Wisconsin retirees ever since. He
acts as the liaison between the NFLPA’s Washington D.C. office and the NFLPA members
who live in Wisconsin. He sees the retired players on a regular basis and reports to them
on key NFLPA issues such as pensions and health issues. He also answers whatever questions
they have.
He doesn’t get paid for the work he does. At least, he doesn’t get paid
money. There are other rewards, however.
A couple of years after Long’s stroke, he was at a charity golf tournament when a
former NFL player named Pat O’Donahue came up to him. O’Donahue was a pre-59er.
He played in the NFL in the early-to-mid 1950s. As such, he is designated a pre-59er. For
a long time the pre-59ers did not receive any benefits from the league after they retired.
Finally, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, benefits were negotiated and then
increased for the pre-59ers by the NFLPA from the league.
So it was that O’Donahue went up to Long at the golf tournament, introduced
himself and said, "I want to thank you and the NFLPA for getting the pre-59ers a
pension."
Long may not get paid for his NFLPA work, but he felt like a million bucks that day.
"I don’t care if I get any remuneration," Long says. "It’s not
that important. That’s what is important to me — him saying that to me."
A couple of former Packers recently thanked Long for a rumored pension increase. Long
explained that he really had nothing to do with such things, that they were handled at the
national level, but a certain sense of pride was still felt.
"It feels great," Long says. "I’m proud. I’m very proud to
tell people and ex-players that I’m the president of the Wisconsin chapter of
retirees. That’s a big deal. That’s becoming bigger and bigger as the years go
on."
Woschitz says, "His energy level is as high as any that I’ve known. He’s
honest. He’s enthusiastic. He goes further than he really should because of his
medical condition, but he likes it. He likes to do it. That’s half the battle.
He’s one of the outstanding ones.
"He’s an idea person. He’s very cooperative. If we need people for
something, he’ll get them.
"He’s the guy that (the Wisconsin retirees) look up to, and he’s gotten
into organizing charity golf tournaments for our players up there. He takes the message
(from national conventions) back to the players. He’s done a wonderful job of getting
those people up there involved in our programs."
Long does more than help former NFL players through the NFLPA. He helps charities
through his own efforts. He is in charge of fund-raising for his local Rotary club. A
couple of years after his stroke, he got the idea for The Long Journey to the Super Bowl.
Every year, two Super Bowl tickets are raffled off along with a trip to the Pro Bowl and
other prizes. The program has spread to other Rotary districts throughout the state like
wildfire. More than $600,000 has been raised through these raffles, the proceeds of which
go to a variety of charities.
"I was so grateful that I got better (after the stroke) that I do whatever I can
for charity and other people to make their lives better," Long says. "That keeps
me real busy."
Long always seems to be helping individual people in small ways since his stroke.
Initially, the people he helped were others in rehab. When he would arrive for rehab,
it would take Bob and Joan an extra 10 minutes to get where they were going, because Bob
was constantly shaking fellow rehab patients’ hands and asking them how they were
doing or offering encouragement.
"I don’t feel either hospital wanted (Bob) to leave because of all the good
he was doing with patients who were in such terrible situations, and he was bringing a lot
of happiness," Joan says.
Bob continues in this role to this day. Call him the Ambassador of Goodwill. Or perhaps
the Dear Abby of his neighborhood.
"A lot of his friends call him and talk to him about their problems," Joan
says. "And he tries to help out.
"He is very positive and very uplifting to be around, and people love talking to
him. I always call him a chatty Cathy, but since the stroke he’s even worse.
He’ll talk to anybody, and they end up telling him their life story. They definitely
relate to him, knowing that this football player had this terrible thing happen to him.
"They’re drawn to him now because he’s human. Yes, this person does have
Super Bowl rings and played in the Super Bowl and was part of this fabulous team and went
through this tragedy, and it makes him more approachable."
Bob always knew how to prioritize matters. He could always cut to the chase.
Flashback: Long had just been drafted by the Chargers of the AFL and the Packers of the
NFL in 1964.
The Chargers flew Long to San Diego. He went out to a team practice and saw a little
receiver jumping all over the field, displaying speed and great hands. Taken aback, Long
asked who the player was.
It was Lance Alworth, who would go on to have a Hall of Fame career.
Then Long looked at a Chargers program and saw that the team had a bunch of young
receivers.
When Long went to visit the Packers, he looked at a game program and learned that Green
Bay’s top receivers were getting up in years.
"I said (Green Bay) is the place for me," Long says. "I said my best
chance to make it is Green Bay, because they have older receivers. That and Lombardi.
That’s how I made my decision. I mean, who wouldn’t give a chance to play for
the greatest football team I think of all-time and probably the best coach?"
You can’t knock the logic. Avoid competing with a future Hall of Famer for playing
time when you can be coached by a future Hall of Famer.
The decision to play for the Packers allowed Long to play on three championship teams.
Now that is prioritizing extremely successfully.
"Just to play with that team, the experience of playing on that team was one of
the most wonderful experiences of my life," Long says.
Fast forward to Long’s life since his stroke: He still prioritizes with the best
of them.
"My lifestyle has really changed," he says.
He had enjoyed an extremely successful business career before the stroke. He’d
always been a family man, but the stroke gave him the opportunity to enjoy his family even
more. A receiver to the end, he didn’t drop that pass.
"He’s got the time to talk to his children and sit down on the back deck and
laugh with the kids when they come home," Joan says. "And he depends on me a
great deal, so he feels closer to me — I think because he knows I help him in so many
ways."
Bob says, "I appreciate my family and my kids and the fact that I survived.
That’s what it really meant to me. When you’re an athlete, sometimes you think
you’re indestructible. This proved to me that I wasn’t indestructible
whatsoever. I appreciate much more what I have — my family and my kids. That’s
really the whole bottom line of the stroke. That’s what a stroke did for me."
There is a saying that when people die, nobody ever says, "I wish I had worked
harder and longer hours at my job."
Sure the stroke took some things away from Long — although his fierce competitive
nature kept those losses to a minimum.
The stroke didn’t take away Long’s most prized possessions. The love of his
family. A love of his fellow man. A love of life.
It enhanced them.
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