Massive Sacks of Sport: LT sacks Theisman

LT Sacks Joe Thiesman

The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein. - Joe Theisman

18 Nov 1985

Monday Night Football, Giants and Redskins, Gibbs and Parcells.   Heaven, eh?  

The Giants and Redskins were the class of the mighty NFC East for most of the eighties. This was the front end of an era when the NFC was winning the Super Bowl year after year.   The coaches, the players, they were all hardcore...athletes, partiers, and men of god.   Hell, even the Booth was interesting in 85.   It was O.J., Namath, and Gifford, together calling plays and backslapping...using bedpans to piss in because they were all too wasted to walk to the restrooms.   Okay, that last part is fictionary, but it was the eighties after all, when we learned once and for all that nothing was what it seemed.

Except for what happened on the football field.   Early in the 2nd half of a close game at RFK Stadium, Joe Thiesman took a snap for a flea-flicker.   Moving much better than your average 36-year-old old, catty, talks-in-the-third-person, quaterback, Thiesman sees Harry Carson about to take him out and deftly steps out of the way, looking for that open receiver.   Then Thiesman's world changed when an extremely motivated Lawrence Taylor, who moved much much faster than your average crackhead, leapt from behind and squashed Thiesman in the backfield.   As this bit of contact happened, everyone watching the game from their living rooms heard what sounded like a plastic bottle getting crushed for recycling.   It was Thiesman's leg.   The visual, which was replayed about 200 times that night, made it seem as though Thiesman had an extra joint between his knee and ankle, until his tibia shot out into the open.   It made not a few people lose their appetite, or even their dinner.   A man's leg is not meant to bend like the face of a hockey stick, especially the leg of a 36-year-old quarterback.   We all knew, that moment, that Joe Theisman's playing days had come to a twisted end.

LT, of course, went on to greater and more debaucherous things, including two super bowl rings, and a bust in the pay to lay hall of fame.   We also came to wonder if LT was crazy off the magic rock when he shattered Theisman's leg like a glass pipe slammed onto concrete.   As LT had said regarding one particular 4-sack performance: “Imagine how good I’d be if I got some sleep.”

Indeed, just imagine, even though Theisman probably chooses not to. Joe's done okay for himself. He's made the transition from obnoxious quarterback to uber obnoxious color man for ESPN. Thiesman in the booth makes Bill Walton sound like a moral relativist ...calling out players and blabbering ceaselessly about the good ol days of football. Sometimes, when my mood is dark enough, I wonder if LT meant to cripple Joe, just to get him off the field and to shut his yap. It's like how I used to wish that Biggie would backhand Puffy with a tire-iron after one of those girlish yeah-uh  simperings on the otherwise flawless Ready To Die. Now, I'm not saying that Thiesman literally deserved this, no one does, nor to I advocate someone giving Puffy a brutal beatdown for blemishing the greatest MC of the 90s, but, you know....