I was waking up to the way the league worked, no longer a wide-eyed rookie who was just happy to be there.
Dexture dickerson pro#
That’s robbery.īy the end of the ‘84 season, my outlook about being a pro football player had begun to change. For the first two years of my career - the best two-year period a running back has ever had, statistically - I earned an average of $167,000 at a time when the top-paid backs were getting close to a million per. The contract was for four years and $2.2 million, but my $600,000 signing bonus was actually a forgivable loan, and after I got traded to the Colts in 1987, the Rams decided not to forgive the loan. Under my current contract, negotiated by an agent I later fired, that wasn’t happening. As the years went by, it took more and more effort to push it to the back of my mind.īefore it did, I wanted to make some real money. After that, the fear popped into my head every couple of months. Ever since I started playing football, I’d been afraid of getting paralyzed on the field. I think it was my junior year of college at Southern Methodist when I had it.
It was the most terrifying dream I’d ever had. People would visit me, with sad, pitying looks on their faces. I don’t remember the hit, but I remember lying on the field. In this excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, “Watch My Smoke,” written with Greg Hanlon, Dickerson revisits the stalemate that would mark the beginning of the end of his relationship with his first NFL team. Beneath the veneer of those accomplishments was an athlete at war with the power dynamic that remains at the heart of the NFL story nearly four decades later. Three years into his NFL career, Eric Dickerson set the rookie rushing record (1,808 yards in 1983), the single-season rushing mark (2,105 yards in ‘84) and helped lead the Rams to the NFC Championship game (‘85).
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