So happy he could cry, Randy Gradishar gently rubbed the aching shoulders on which the Orange Crush was built, one slobber-knocking tackle at a time.
“That’s my cost of playing football for the Broncos,” Gradishar told me Wednesday, a smile as warm as the Colorado sun brightening every crag and crease on his 71-year-old face.
Four long decades after he made the last of his 2,049 bone-crushing tackles, but only five weeks removed from surgery No. 4 to rebuild his right shoulder, Gradishar has finally knocked down the door to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“All in God’s timing,” Gradishar said Wednesday.
About damn time, if you ask me.
Gradishar got a call Tuesday from the Hall with the good news a 12-person committee had reviewed long overlooked candidates in a pool of senior players and submitted his name alongside Chicago Bears defensive tackle Steve McMichael and New York Jets receiver Art Powell for what’s anticipated to be rubber-stamp approval during Super Bowl week for induction into the Class of 2024.
Halle-freakin’-lujah. Football justice has been served, even if it’s long overdue.
Only 10 linebackers in NFL history have seven Pro Bowl selections, 20 interceptions and 13 fumble recoveries to their names. Gradishar will be the 10th to be enshrined.
He’s the son of a grocer raised in a tiny Ohio burg called Champion Township, which sits only 60 miles away from the front door of the famous football museum in Canton. Gradishar, however, never dreamed as a teenager how far the sport might take him from his happy, little corner of the world.
In fact, when Ohio State came knocking to recruit him, the young linebacker’s first reaction was: “Who’s Woody Hayes?”
After tirelessly making the case for the face that made the Orange Crush famous, folks who have lived in Denver since it actually was a dusty old cowtown can finally feel vindicated the Rocky Mountain thunder of 1977 was indeed heard beyond the borders of our fair state and will reverberate forever.
Nobody in Broncos Country, however, was more pleased and relieved by this awesome piece of news than Beth Gradishar, a woman who might have felt the pain of habitual rejection by the Hall deeper than her husband.
“I wept. I wept far beyond tears,” confessed Beth, a cardiac nurse by trade who has been there to mend the broken heart of a tough linebacker. “I’m so happy for Randy, because a couple times in the past, he was so close to being voted in, only to be disappointed. And it was just so crushing. Now? My heart is filled with joy for him.”
Gradishar is honest enough to admit the wait sometimes wore him out. “What the heck is going on?” he wondered, when bypassed for enshrinement year after year. “What’s taking them so long?”
Gradishar, however, steadfastly refused to let the chronic disappointment of NFL politics embitter him. “He doesn’t have an angry bone in him,” Beth explained.
Wait a hot minute? Aren’t linebackers supposed to be made of nothing but angry bones?
“Yes, you’re supposed to be angry playing linebacker,” admitted Gradishar, chuckling at the memory of his on-field demeanor. “But I also always picked up the ball-carrier after every tackle and said: ‘Congratulations, on a good run.’”
And to tell the truth, most of the angry bones that made No. 53 the most feared player ever to wear an orange and blue uniform are long gone.
At my behest, Gradishar did a full accounting of the replacement parts in his body, the cost of being one of the most punishing tacklers ever to roam the gridiron.
“I’ve paid the penalty of playing football,” Gradishar said. “Because of the Broncos, here’s what I am today:”
Right shoulder? Replaced and retooled, a total of four agonizing times. Left shoulder? And both knees? Rebuilt with all new hardware. His left hip is now made of metal and plastic, with surgery to do the same overhaul on his right hip on the docket.
When I suggest to you Gradishar gave his body and soul for the glory of the Orange Crush, it’s no exaggeration.
With the Hall of Fame finally ready to immortalize him as a football god, was all the physical and emotional pain he has endured the past 40 years worth it?
“I don’t tell my wife,” Gradishar said, “but I would do it all again.”
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