Jackie Wallace

Photo Credit: AP Photo

I was working on a piece yesterday before the Super Bowl (Hang in there, Lefty, It's still coming) and saw something on Twitter that caught my eye.

My friends (especially the Facebookers) have known of my recent discovery of the PC game Action Football (The detail is tremendous, no press and thumb game is this) and as usual, I concentrate on the years of my youth (70's and 80's) and the most fun for me is that they even have the defunct WFL and USFL.
I'm not a creative person when it comes to music and art and this is about my only outlet in some ways, but the one thing that I've always enjoyed in different things is formatting and finding the right fit for a certain position.
Cherie says that is my one creative "art" thing that I do and I think she's right.
In many ways, I enjoy the hunt for the right picture for a player in a game like Strat O Matic baseball (I refuse to try Action baseball, I just don't want to look at SOM any differently) just as much as playing the game itself and Action football has proven no different.

When you have as many players though on teams in football and you go back to the seventies with wanting to play before ten years go by, you take shortcuts.
I didn't know much about the game, other than Facebook ad's and I bought the cheapest version (the game is the same, the price goes up according to how many seasons comes with it) which had some "great teams" and it was a free weekend, where if you bought the game, the 1975 season was free.
It didn't take long for me to order the three USFL season's and the WFL year, but I started putting pictures into 1975.
The shortcut was this- pictures for main players or "commons" in card parlance that for some reason or another I wanted to do their picture.
I had to do it this way as 1 full Action team takes the same time as 3 SOM baseball teams, so if I wanted to play, I could work on the rest as I went.

I have written here a lot about my love for NFL Films and in the 70's, I was a casual Vikings fan ( I might have never left had they not went to the Metrodome), so I discovered as I went through the NFC rosters there were teams that had many more "Commons' than others, All the NFC East teams, the Vikings, the Rams had many more than anyone else.

Photo Credit: Me

It struck me that was because I watched all the Redskin games and the Vikings and Rams were the 1970's powers of their divisions, so those players stuck with me.
One player that I remembered from those NFL Films yearbooks that received a picture was Jackie Wallace, who I best recalled blocking a punt on a film and from this picture from the Super Bowl above.
Wallace didn't have a Topps card as I searched so I settled for a Google search of him at Arizona and moved on to the next player.

Yesterday, As I took a break from working, I saw a retweet from Ted Jackson and an article entitled "The Search for Jackie Wallace".
I wondered if this was the same Jackie Wallace and as I read the article (it was), a roller coaster ride of film level proportions.
Jackie Wallace as high school and college football star, NFL player on three teams that played in Super Bowls (losing all three) to living under a bridge and more up and downs to come.
I hope you'll read the story, so I don't want to ruin it for you and I really hope I didn't talk too much about myself to avoid getting you this far.

I'll just say this, I was quite taken by the story and I'm sure some of it is not unique among former NFL players in particular (It does seem that former footballers are more vulnerable to this than other sports retirees, perhaps another issue to be looked at medically).
I often battle myself with thoughts on these issues.
How much help do people really want?
Are you always really one mistake away from losing everything from a rebuilding of your life?
No matter what you have done in your life in the past (good or bad) are we really that vulnerable?
All these things make me wonder and think about just how fragile the good life is.
I've never been an addict (at least to things that could ruin my life that is!), so I don't know how that would be, but it's scary to think how close we could be to losing all we cherish.

Read the article, think about Jackie Wallace and wonder how many more people are nowhere to be found tonight.