Watch My Smoke: The Eric Dickerson Story

By Eric Dickerson and Greg Hanlon

His style was iconic, and vintage ‘80s: aviator goggles, Jheri curls, neck roll, boxy pads.

Eric Dickerson is the greatest player in Los Angeles Rams history and the NFL’s single season record holder for most rushing yards. In 2019, Dickerson was named to the National Football League’s 100th Anniversary All-Time Team. With an elegant upright running style that produced some of football’s most-watched highlights, it was said he was so smooth you couldn’t hear his pads clack as he glided past you.

But during his Hall of Fame career, his greatness was often overshadowed by his contentious disputes with Rams management about his contract. In the pre-free agency era, tensions over his exploitative contract often overshadowed his accomplishments. What’s his problem? went the familiar refrain from the media. Can’t he just shut up and run?

It’s time to reexamine how Eric Dickerson was portrayed. For the first time, he’s telling his story. And he’s not holding anything back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Jan 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642596663

Book preview

PREFACE

Bob Irsay staggered his drunk ass over to me and some of my Colts teammates.

It was 1990 or ’91, and we were at the Christmas party he used to hold every year at his barn. Nobody ever wanted to go. Everybody knew Irsay, the Colts’ owner, was a mean old alcoholic. We all had the feeling he was showing us off, as if he was saying, Look at these big, Black bucks I have working for me.

I was standing with wide receiver Clarence Verdin and a couple other guys when Irsay came over. His eyes were glassy. He was surrounded by two guys we called his handlers. They followed him around everywhere to make sure he didn’t say anything stupid that would get him in trouble. This time, they failed.

Irsay told us he had a joke.

—You got a kike, you got a wetback, and you got a nigger …

I didn’t miss a beat. I’d known people like Irsay my whole life. My mom, Viola Dickerson, told me from an early age the country was full of them.

—Fuck that, I said.

The handlers tried to whisk Irsay away: Bob, let’s go, let’s go. Irsay snapped to his senses and began apologizing to us.

I repeated: No, fuck that. And I left that stupid party.

People wonder how Black athletes making millions of dollars can still feel used. People see us and think we’re on top of the world, that somehow the racism that this country was founded on doesn’t apply to us. Sometimes you can even convince yourself this is true. And then a guy like Bob Irsay walks up to you and your teammates—guys who beat the odds, guys who overcame obstacles most people couldn’t imagine—and basically calls you a bunch of niggers.

The next day at the team facility, some management types called me into an office room, trying to smooth things over. They told me Bob was just joking, that he’s not a racist, that you know how he gets when he drinks.

—Yeah, yeah, I told them. I wasn’t stupid or born yesterday and I resented the implication that I was.

Maybe the organization was worried I was going to go public with it. But that thought didn’t cross my mind. This was three decades ago and if there was such a thing as a woke media, it didn’t exist in Indianapolis, as far as I could tell. This was the city where during a game fans hung a banner with a racist caricature of a Black baby in my number 29 jersey. He wore red lipstick and held a fried chicken leg in his hand, with a stack of money on one side and a watermelon on the other. This was the city where I flipped on the TV and saw a Klan rally in the middle of the downtown area. The news covered it like it was just another local organization having a parade.

So I left that office room and went to practice. There was another game coming up. More hits to take and more checks to cash.

The crazy thing was that the day after, Irsay probably didn’t remember saying what he had said. But I never forgot it.

◆

This book is the story of my life. In a way, it’s the classic American tale: A boy from the other side of the tracks in Sealy, Texas, goes to L.A. He becomes a star and makes the kind of money he never knew existed.

But it’s also a darker tale about my conflicted relationship with football. About how I fell in love with the sport, but how by the end, all the bullshit surrounding it made me hate it.

How many of you know the feeling of running with the ball and breaking free into the open field when you’re the fastest guy out there? I haven’t played in twenty-eight years and I still can’t get over it. The first time I felt it was in seventh grade, in my first organized football game. I was wearing prescription glasses because sports goggles weren’t invented yet, and I scored six touchdowns. I chased that feeling ever since then, like an addict chasing the euphoria of that first hit.

I loved that feeling and everything associated with it, and still do. I love the way you feel the roar of the crowd when you’re running for the end zone but you don’t really hear it, because the only sounds you hear are your own breathing and the fluttering of your shoulder pads. I love the smell of the game. Every August, up until a few years ago, I’d still smell the game in the air when the season approached. That’s how powerful of a hold it had on me.

I was lucky to get to chase that feeling for a living. I know what opportunities were like for Black kids from places like Sealy, and still are. God gave me a talent that was second to none. I have God and football to thank for the life I live today, and more importantly, for the life my kids live.

But then there’s the bullshit.

The bullshit actually began way before I got to the pros. In high school, I quit the team temporarily because my coach was a racist who banned Afros and always worked the Black kids harder than the white kids. My senior year, after I got a certain Pontiac Trans Am—more on that later—I became the center of a scandal, like I was some kind of criminal. The NCAA came into town and started investigating me, my mom, and my grandma like they were the FBI.

The bullshit continued in college at SMU, with the Pony Excess scandal. Yeah, I got some envelopes of cash—and sent half that money back to my mom—and I always had a car to drive. But with the money I was making for SMU, that was peanuts. The real scandal isn’t how much I got paid, it was how little. Forty years later, people think of the scandal and they think of me. You’ve been hearing a lot of talk these days about how society always assumes young Black men are criminals. Now, think back about the SMU scandal and how that was portrayed in the media—and who was portrayed as the wrongdoer.

Then there’s the pros, when the ugly business of football takes over once and for all. You start to feel the brutality of the sport, and the way some people say that NFL stands for Niggers for Lease. If you’re an NFL running back, every time you touch the ball is like getting into a car crash. Now, at sixty-one years old, I feel those hits every second of every day in my body and, yes, in my mind.

And the money. Here’s something people have a hard time understanding, and I can’t really blame them: I might have been making more money than I ever thought possible, but that doesn’t mean my contract was fair or even close to that. Nowadays, the media and fans are a little more tolerant of players’ wanting their just due. But that wasn’t the case in the ’80s, before free agency, when the Rams underpaid me for years before eventually trading me.

To Indianapolis. Bob Irsay’s team.

The trade broke my heart and hurts me still, because the Rams were the only team I ever wanted to play for. Do you think if a white guy broke the single-season rushing record and was in the middle of their prime as the best player at their position, they would’ve traded him? There’s no chance in hell.

Of course, the media made me out to be the bad guy. Eric the Ingrate, they called me, a coded word if ever I’ve heard one. That’s the way it was back then and nobody questioned it: the media, which was mostly white, took the side of management, which was also white, and the message got out to the fan base, which was also mostly white. There was no social media. My reputation was dictated by what they wrote about me.

But I’m not that guy at all. I’m a guy raised by strong, proud, loving parents to know right from wrong. I’m a guy who gave all he had to the game of football and paid the price. And that’s why I decided to write this book.

CHAPTER 1

VIOLA & KARY

Sealy, Texas. When I was born in 1960, the population was 2,300. Even people who don’t know Sealy as a town know the mattress company that was founded there. A dot on the map, fifty miles west of Houston. It’s Texas, but in many ways it feels like the Dixie South.

The railroad tracks ran through town, Blacks on one side, whites on the other. Their streets were paved; I grew up on a dirt road. It was called Andrews Street when I was a kid but is now called Dickerson Street.

Racism was in the air we breathed, but it was subtle. Nobody ever called me the N-word, at least to my face. The town was so small that Black people and white people encountered each other all the time and got along, and kids of all races would play together. My elementary school was segregated, but then, with integration, we began attending middle school with the white kids, and it didn’t seem like a big deal because we’d been around those kids our whole lives anyway.

Black people were second-class citizens, though. Nobody had to tell anyone that; it was just a fact of life. The houses in the white area were nicer. The Black elementary school I went to was smaller and shabbier. All of the cops were white and almost all of the professionals were too.

My dad worked for Southern Pacific Railroad and my mom cleaned houses on the white side of town. It was the classic case of We were poor, but I didn’t know it. Unlike a lot of the kids I grew up around, I lived in a stable and loving household. We didn’t lack for food, necessities, or dignity. I never went to bed hungry or wondered where my next meal would come from.

My parents owned an acre and a half of land and had a nine-row garden with black-eyed peas, corn, cabbage, and some other crops. We were country, and thrifty: if we saw an armadillo dead by the side of the road, that was dinner. We’d shoot pigs between the eyes with a .22, then take them to our smokehouse out back. My dad would cut off the heads of chickens, and then I’d chase them down.

There wasn’t much for us neighborhood kids to do. When we were little, we chased rabbits or played by the streetlight. When we got older, we’d race cars down the dirt roads, or have bonfires in the woods, or hang out by the 7-Eleven playing music and flirting. White, Black, it didn’t matter. There wasn’t any separation among us kids.

We’d see guys not much older than us on street corners, drinking. Some of them looked more strung out than others, and that’s how we knew if a guy was also on drugs. Most of them were Black. We remembered when those guys had been teenagers a few short years ago. Everyone knew they didn’t want to turn out like those guys. A lot of guys did anyway.

Sealy is famous for the mattress company, but its economy was mostly farming. There was also a steel plant and the railroad, my dad’s employer. It wasn’t a bad place to grow up, but I always knew I wanted something bigger. I didn’t want my mom saying, Yes ma’am, No ma’am to a white lady much younger than she was, just because she cleaned her house. I wanted nice things. Like what my white friend Kevin Cubrick had. He lived in a two-story house with a bearskin rug, and his parents drove a Jaguar. My mom used to tell me that when I was a little kid, maybe five or six, I’d walk around our house saying, I’m the king! I don’t belong here! I wanted more from life.

How I’d make that happen, I had no idea. I had no idea how good of an athlete I was. I didn’t even know you could get paid lots of money for playing pro sports. But when I pictured myself as an adult, I didn’t picture being in Sealy.

Because everyone in town knew: if you had big dreams, if you wanted to be somebody in this world, you were going to have to do it someplace else. That was especially true if you were Black.

◆

My story begins like most people’s stories: with my mom and dad.

My mom: Viola Dickerson. Biologically, she was actually my great-great-aunt. She was fifty-five years old when she adopted me as a toddler after my biological mom got pregnant with me when she was fifteen. I was close to my biological mom (birth name: Helen Shavers) but there was no doubt Viola Dickerson was my mom.

Everyone in the Black part of Sealy called her Red because they said she looked like an American Indian. She had wavy hair and light skin with freckles. She was what they used to call a high yellow back when she was growing up. The yellow referred to her skin color, to distinguish her from the darker Black people. The high referred to the social class her light skin was supposed to give her among Blacks, with the darkest people at the bottom. But she didn’t see the world that way.

My mom was tough and firm and fierce but also loving, in a way that was often hard for me to see as a kid. She carried a gun at all times and cussed like a sailor, but she went to church every Sunday. She wasn’t sweet, but she was deeply moral. I can count on one hand the number of times she told me she loved me, but deep down, I never doubted she did. When she talked, I obeyed. If I didn’t, I’d get the belt or the extension cord or whatever else she could get her hands on. To her, the world was a rough place, with no room for error, and she raised me with that in mind.

She was born in 1904 in Wallis, Texas, about twelve miles from Sealy, the daughter of a Black mother and a mixed-race father who drank hard and worked hard as a sharecropper. I never knew the full story of why my mom’s dad was half-white, but when the topic came up, my mom would always say, The white man will have his way with the Black woman. I’ve always assumed my mom’s grandmother was raped by a white man.

So, you can say that my mom’s mistrust of white people ran through her blood. And then there were her life experiences. She was a generation older than my friends’ parents, so she’d seen racism at its rawest and cruelest. She’d tell me stories of Black men she knew who’d been tarred and feathered. She’d seen a man strung up on a tree with his private parts stuffed into his mouth, all for the crime of looking at a white woman.

Sealy had changed a lot by the time I was growing up. Nobody was getting strung up on trees. In eighth grade, me and a white girl named Sheila Tomlinson liked each other, and it didn’t seem like a big deal to me. But my mom wasn’t having it.

—There are two things that don’t last long in this world, she told me. Dogs that chase cars and negroes that chase white girls.

I listened because she knew what she was talking about. I listened because she was incredibly smart. She was really good with figures, especially money, and could multiply and divide things in her head in fractions of a second. She read a lot: I remember noticing as a kid that when she read a book out loud, she was so comfortable it was like she was just talking. She had been the valedictorian of her segregated high school class, and I always thought she’d make a great lawyer, or an accountant. But this was the 1920s in Texas, so there was no college and no career waiting for her. Instead, she spent her life cleaning white people’s houses.

She never complained—she had no patience for people who complained or blamed other people for their circumstances—but I know the injustice ate at her. Her big thing was fairness. If something wasn’t fair, if she saw someone getting over on someone else, she’d point it out. She wasn’t gonna complain about the unfairness she experienced, but she didn’t tolerate anyone else being treated unfairly.

Including me. I remember being eleven or twelve years old and trying out for Little League baseball. During tryouts, I hit three home runs. I could run, I could catch, I had a good arm. But after tryouts, they put me in the minor league, not the proper Little League. I was so shocked and hurt I started crying.

At that moment, I think my mom saw herself in me. Things had changed in Sealy, but in some ways they were still the same.

—Eric, I’m telling you, even if you’re two or three times better, sometimes it’s just not enough, she said. I’m telling you, it’s just different for us.

◆

My mom came from a world where only the strong survived, so she was strong herself. She grew up in the South at a time when women, particularly Black women, didn’t have many rights. But she was the opposite of a shrinking violet. She was known for her hair-trigger temper. The word was out in Sealy: you didn’t mess with Red. I knew that better than anyone.

The way she grew up, violence and death were just a part of life.

Example one: When she was a little girl, about ten years old, her dad blew the top of a man’s head off. The victim, whose name was Oliver Horse, had once been her dad’s friend, but they got into a fight, and the guy beat him within an inch of his life with an agricultural weighing scale. My mom’s dad was hospitalized, unable to move for months, and while lying in that bed, he made a vow: if he ever got out of that bed, he’d kill Oliver Horse.

It took more than a year, but he got out of that bed. One day, he got on his horse and buggy and went into town to get shotgun pellets so he could shoot some rabbits to eat. On the way back, he spotted his enemy on horseback. He loaded up his shotgun with the pellets and shot the guy dead. Telling the story, my mom would always say: He shot Oliver Horse off a horse.

In another time, in another place, he would have spent the rest of his life in prison. But in Wallis, Texas, in the 1910s, the government didn’t care if one Black guy killed another. Instead, they cared about the land my mom’s dad owned. The prosecutor let him skate, on the condition that he sign over his land to the government and get the hell out of town. That’s how my mom wound up moving from Wallis to Sealy, about twelve miles to the north and west.

Example two: My mom’s brother also killed someone. He was married to a woman who used to step out on him with a white police officer. My mom’s brother was a heavy drinker just like his own dad was, so the cop would find him in the bars and lock him up on a public drunkenness charge, go sleep with his wife, then let him out the next morning. One day, while nursing a bad hangover, my mom’s brother called his wife into the room and shot her dead.

Example three: My mom had been married before she met my dad. Her first husband, named Harold Jackson, was a drinker, a gambler, and an abuser—during one of the times he was hitting my mom she pulled a gun on him. At a certain point, she left Harold and took up with my dad, and one night, she and my dad went to a beer hall together. Harold was in the backroom playing cards with some guys, and at a certain point he came out with a big, boozy smile on his face. He’d won a lot of money in the game and was feeling good, so he grabbed my mom and started dancing with her, saying, I wanna dance with my baby.

But one of the guys from the back room had other ideas. He was sure Harold had been cheating in the card game. So right there, in front of everyone, he pulled out a gun and killed him.

So that was the world my mom came from. To her, being a good parent meant raising your kid to be tough. When I was about twelve, I came home crying one day because my cousin had beaten me up. My mom didn’t hug me or say, There, there. No, she scolded me for crying and told me to get back out there to show I wasn’t afraid of him. Boy, you cannot be doing this. You cannot have people pushing you around, she said.

At the same time, she knew how dangerous the world was, and she did her best to protect me. I was sheltered because she hardly let me out of her sight: kids from my neighborhood would play down the street on the dirt road I grew up on, but she wouldn’t let me past the streetlight. When I’d complain and ask her why she wouldn’t let me do this thing or that thing, she’d slap me in the mouth and say, Because I said so. And that was that.

I was careful