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Viola Dickerson was Eric Dickerson’s great-great aunt and adoptive mother, and she was the valedictorian of her high school class in Sealy, Texas. Despite her academic accomplishments, she was like so many Black women in her place and time; she went on to clean houses for White people on the other side of the tracks, never fulfilling her promise, never earning what she believed she was worth.
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Eric, her adopted son — his biological mother, Helen Johnson, had him at 15 and was more of an older sister than a mother — saw all of that and it informed his behavior and his approach to the business of football as his gifts as a running back opened up a whole new world to him.
“(Viola) grew up in the segregated South, and she was a brilliant woman, but the only job she could get was cleaning houses on the White side of town,” said Greg Hanlon, the co-author of “Watch My Smoke: The Eric Dickerson Story,” which will be published in 2022. “And it always grated on Eric because he knew how smart and proud his mom was. To watch her bust her hump day in and day out, say ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘Yes, ma’am,’ to White men and women who were significantly younger than her, that always stuck in his craw. He recognized the unfairness of the situation, how White people were always getting over on Black people, and that stayed with him even when he found himself in a position where he could make a lot of money playing football.”
There are two Eric Dickerson stories to be told here.
One focuses on his otherworldly rushing skills, which landed him in the Hall of Fame.
The other is the never-ending contract disputes that marked — some would say sullied — his marvelous career, his tenures with the Rams and Colts ending because of disagreements over money and, in Dickerson’s mind, basic fairness.
“He was always called a malcontent,” Hanlon said. (Dickerson declined an opportunity to speak for this story.) “He was called an ingrate, and worse. All these words that were used, they were kind of coded and had the same racial undertones. ‘Just shut up and dribble,’ right? ‘Just shut up and run.’ But he felt he was standing up for what he felt was fair. A good example is the SMU scandal, where he is commonly portrayed as representing the biggest excesses of those SMU teams and it was said he took a pay cut when he got to the pros. Nothing could be further from the truth. The amount of money he made for SMU versus the nominal favors, the idea he was being portrayed as this spoiled athlete, it’s completely backwards.
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“As he said in our book, the real scandal wasn’t how much money he was making but how little.”
Hanlon continued.
“During his entire career, there was a vague aura or negativity surrounding him, propagated by the media, in large part,” he said. “But when you read this book and see his situation through a more enlightened, contemporary lens, the reader will see he was completely reasonable about everything he was criticized for. He was just asserting his rights and doing something that is now commonplace.
“But you’ve got to look at it in context: This was the 1980s, an age of exploding sports salaries. And when guys asked for more money, especially Black athletes, it was not looked at kindly by the establishment — White sports ownership, White sports management, White sports media. And a largely White fan base. We’re talking here about Orange County, Calif., (where he played for the Rams) and Indianapolis. So he got portrayed as a malcontent, a locker room lawyer, ‘Eric the Ingrate.’ Fact is, this guy was drastically underpaid his entire career. And he spoke up about it, as he should have.”
On the field, Dickerson had few rivals. To start, he looked different; he wore a neck collar, normally reserved for linebackers, which he got from old SMU teammate Craig James. He wore rec specs — he had myopia — because contact lenses kept popping out. In an era when players were wearing as few pads as possible, Dickerson wore the biggest, boxiest pads imaginable, looking like a cross between a hockey goalie and the Michelin Man. And that running style; has anybody ever had Dickerson’s almost-regal gait, his ability to get his pads low through the hole and then explode into space running straight up like an Olympic sprinter? He was a long strider, someone who made the difficult look perfunctory. He was the personification of athletic grace.
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“I blocked for 37 different running backs,” said Jackie Slater, the Hall of Fame offensive lineman for the Rams, during his Hall of Fame introduction of Dickerson. “And you know, all these guys had unique talents. They had a gift that kept them in the league. You know, it could have been their vision, it could have been their quickness, their power or their speed. And most of these guys kept their jobs because of one or two of these talents.
“But in my opinion, Eric Dickerson was the original freak in that he possessed all of these, and the greatest of them was his speed. You know, they say speed judges speed better than people who don’t have it, and I’ve found that to be true. We were playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Tampa and I remember we ran the 47-Gap. And I kicked out on a guy and rolled around, and all I could see was two defensive backs with an angle on him. All they had to do was keep running. Close right in on him. But, you know, speed judges speed better than people who don’t have it, and they adjusted those angles, and they tried to head him off at the pass. But they couldn’t head him off at the pass. Forty-two yards later, he went into the end zone untouched. I’m telling you, the man was great.”
The production was undeniable: He set rookie records for most rushing attempts, most rushing yards and most touchdown runs. His second season, he set the single-season rushing record with 2,105 yards. In fact, Dickerson had more rushing yards than the Rams’ quarterback, Jeff Kemp, had passing yards that year. He reached 10,000 rushing yards faster than any other back in history, doing so in 91 games, faster than Jim Brown, Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith, among others. Even after a substandard third season in 1985, Dickerson went for 248 yards in a playoff game against the Cowboys. One year later, in 1986, Dickerson rebounded with 1,821 rushing yards.
But there was trouble beneath the surface. Contract discussions, which began all the way back in 1985, had become extremely contentious by 1987. The Rams had enough of the give-and-take, the holdouts, ultimately executing a three-way deal with the Colts to send Dickerson to Indy.
“I remember the feeling we had in the locker room after we made the trade,” said Colts Ring of Fame wide receiver Bill Brooks, who played in Indianapolis from 1986-92. “It was a sign that Jim (Irsay, the owner and then-GM) was committed to putting a winning team together. Bringing Eric in, a big name and a big talent like him, it put us on the map as a franchise and put us in a position to reach the playoffs. Remember, we’d just moved to Indy a few years earlier, so we were in our infancy at that time. I felt like Eric brought big-time football to Indianapolis.”
There were some good moments in Indianapolis — a playoff appearance in 1987 — and one year later, Indy had a Monday night moment on the national stage, beating the Broncos 55-23 with Dickerson scoring four touchdowns on Halloween night. But slowly, Dickerson’s production dimmed and the constant demands for better pay became tiresome. Finally, in April 1992, the Colts traded him to the Raiders for a fourth- and an eighth-round pick.
“He’s still sad about the way things went down (in Los Angeles) because he loves, loves, loves L.A. and he loved his Rams teammates and felt they were this close to joining the 49ers and Giants as a real powerhouse,” Hanlon said. “He considers himself an L.A. guy through and through — the energy, the diversity, the fun it was. He loved so many things about being a Ram, but it didn’t work out with team management.
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“Indy? He didn’t have those same feelings. There were things about his experience in Indy that really hurt him and still hurt him to this day. In the book, he talks about a high-ranking team official telling a joke using the n-word as kind of a power play to sort of show the players what they could get away with and how little recourse they had. Once, when he was having contract issues, he saw a banner in the Hoosier Dome that showed him as a baby with a 29 jersey, holding fried chicken and a watermelon.
“He had a cousin who lived there at the time and this cousin called Eric to tell him to turn on the TV, so he did and what he saw was a Klan rally in Market Square and the TV reporters are treating it like some kind of American Legion group. That’s really seared into his consciousness.”
The experience of his mother informed his actions throughout his football life. He would not accept a penny less than he felt he was worth. And he got castigated for that.
“A lot of people passively consumed the media depiction of him, and it’s not true,” Hanlon said. “He’s a very thoughtful, interesting, warm, generous man. It’s a shame much of his career was spent with the press trashing him for daring to stand up for himself.
“But here’s the thing: He’s not bitter because he thinks he was in the right. He doesn’t have any regrets. He doesn’t.”
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photo: Rick Stewart / Allsport / Getty Images)
