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I spent last night watching basketball, continuing to enjoy the NBA playoffs even though the officiating makes me nuts and Bill Walton makes me wish I were deaf. But as I watched the Kings — just between you and me, my choice as future NBA champs — rip through the Mavericks in the second half of Game One of their series, I noticed something scrolling across ESPN’s Bottom Line at the bottom of the screen that hit me like a ton of bricks.
David Woodley was dead.
That’s former Dolphins QB David Woodley, who led Miami to the Super Bowl in 1983. Forty-four years old, and dead of liver and kidney failure. Woodley underwent a liver transplant in 1992, something I didn’t know about, but his health progressively got worse and he passed away Sunday. Now, I haven’t thought about David Woodley in I don’t know how long. He wasn’t one of my favorite players growing up, and it’s not like I was ever a Dolphins fan. But still, the news of Woodley’s death really shook me.
It’s odd how some news can hit you. I know why Woodley’s death struck me so hard. It’s because he was an integral part of developing my love of football when I was young. When I was a kid, just like now, I simply loved football. Hell, all sports for that matter. Football, basketball and baseball took up pretty much my entire waking time. I spent my time reading about the history of all the sports, playing them whenever humanly possible and developing a love of the games that exists to this day.
I’m the son of a Rams-fan father and a Bears-fan mother, but being born in the Chicago area, I’ve always been a Bears fan. The Bears, however, didn’t bring a lot to the table in the early 1980s except the best running back of all time in Walter Payton and a string of quarterbacks that had great names and little talent. Mike Phipps, Bob Avellini and Vince Evans were the signalcallers at the time for the Bears, and Neill Armstrong was the head coach. When my father let me know that the guy coaching the Bears did not, in fact, walk on the moon, I had no more use for the fake Armstrong.
But my love went well beyond the Bears. I also loved the Rams (just a little influence from Norm), hated the Raiders (cheaters), liked the Bengals (great uniforms), despised the Cowboys (America’s Team? Not in Indiana). But the 1982 Redskins really caught my eye because they had a quarterback who had a helmet like the ones I was seeing in my history books, and a kicker who still kicked straight on. They also had the Fun Bunch and the Hogs and the Smurfs, all things that appeal to a 9-year-old who is just making his way in the world.
Which brings me back to Woodley. Woodley was the quarterback when the Dolphins played the Redskins in Super Bowl XVII, only the third Super Bowl that I actually remember watching live. I was completely into the hype surrounding the game, to the point that my mother bought me a Redskins T-shirt to wear for the game. And I had to hear story after story about how David Woodley, the hated David Woodley, was the youngest quarterback at the time to start a Super Bowl, how he was an eighth-round pick who had won the job over veteran Don Strock and was trying to follow in the footsteps of Bob Griese to lead the Dolphins to glory.
Hey, when you’re a kid, you’re pretty emotionally charged, and I had no love for David Woodley in that game.
And right off the bat, he justified my hate. He threw a 76-yard TD pass to Jimmy Cefalo to give the Dolphins a 7-0 lead in the first quarter. My hate got cranked up to 11 at that point, and it pleased me to no end to see Woodley struggle after that. So much so, in fact, that he had to be lifted in favor of Strock late in the game after going 4-of-14 passing for 97 yards.
John Riggins took care of the Dolphins, however, in the fourth quarter, and for the first time in my long and illustrious three years of watching the Super Bowl, the team I was rooting for had won. The Redskins beat the Dolphins and that big jerk David Woodley, and all was right with the world. Again, when you’re 9, there rarely is a whole lot wrong with the world.
Woodley, of course, didn’t hold that starting job for much longer. Some kid out of Pitt named Marino won the gig the next year, and the year after that, Woodley was just a memory in Miami. And for me, he became a memory I rarely thought of.
But the news of Woodley’s death brought all of those memories back, although they have taken on a different form in the two decades since he was Ken’s Enemy No. 1 in January 1982. Now I just smile at how ridiculous I was, and I hope Woodley realized how much of an impact he had on people. He gave the Dolphins a Super Bowl run and helped give at least one little boy in cold and windy northwest Indiana a reason to have a passion for football that continues to this day.
My fiancée, Lauren, gets upset with me because I don’t always remember the names of her cousins, but the name of David Woodley has stayed with me through the years. Woodley is a man I never met, I never talked to on the phone and I never really thought about all that often. But that doesn’t mean that his life didn’t have an impact, or that he should be forgotten. The news of his death is sad, but in passing away, he has brought back a lot of fond memories for football fans, and that’s a testament to the impact he had on the game.
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