The Rams, the 49ers, and the Beautiful Stupidity of Conviction

I’ve always hated the 49ers.

And they—meaning the 49ers, their fans, the entire Bay Area apparatus of smugness and fog and sourdough-based self-satisfaction—have always hated the Rams right back, which creates this beautiful, terrible equilibrium, this mutually assured animosity that’s been humming along for three-quarters of a century now like some vast engine that we all keep stoking because, what else are we going to do? Find meaning in our work? Connect authentically with our inner child? Please.

I once asked my grandfather (a Niners fan to the marrow of his bone) to take me to a Rams game and he told me, “I ain’t going to see no goddamn Rams.” And it’s been this way for 75 years. He was not interested in dialogue, in finding common ground, in the undemanding reconciliation that contemporary culture insists upon. He had chosen his side, and that was that.

The thing about my grandfather’s refusal—and it was a kind of absolute refusal that suggested he would sooner have taken me to witness a public flogging or to tour a horse shit plant—was that it arrived like some ancient decree handed down from Mount Sinai, chiseled not in stone but in that particular California bedrock of sports fanaticism, that stratum of collective identity running deeper than family loyalty, political affiliation, or religious devotion. He simply thought, with the certainty that others reserve for religious conviction, that the Rams were an abomination.

Consider the theology of sports fandom. It demands faith without evidence, loyalty without reciprocation, hope in the face of repeated disappointment. It asks you to invest emotional capital in the performance of millionaires who have no idea you exist, who may leave your city tomorrow if offered a better contract. And yet we comply. We transmit our allegiances generationally. My grandfather could have spared me. He could have said, “You’re right, let’s go see the Rams, they’re just another team.” But that would have been a kind of spiritual fraud.

The beauty—and I mean this sincerely, without irony, though I recognize the absurdity even as I defend it—the beauty of my grandfather’s refusal was its purity. In an age of promiscuous enthusiasm and non-committal dabbling, when people speak casually of “rooting for” five different teams across three different sports, when allegiance has become as fluid and temporary as a Hollywood marriage, my grandfather’s stubbornness stood as a kind of monument to an older, fiercer way of being. He would no sooner have attended a Rams game than he would have voted Republican, eaten sushi, or worn a pair of designer jeans. These were not options available to him within the circumscribed universe of his convictions. He had built a self, and unfortunately the load-bearing walls of that self included an undying devotion to the 49ers.

Those sorry ass 49ers.

Hacksaw Reynolds: The Man Who Once Sawed a Car in Half

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The thing about Jack “Hacksaw” Reynolds is that he earned his nickname by sawing a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air in half. Not metaphorically….actually in half. With an actual hacksaw. Thirteen blades’ worth of sawing, after Tennessee got embarrassed 38-0 by Ole Miss in 1969.

“I came back to school and I was very upset,” Reynolds explained. “I had to do something to relieve my frustration.”

So naturally—and here is where Reynolds reveals himself as either a lunatic or a poet, and possibly both—he sought out that beached whale of Detroit iron, rusting in some campus lot, and proceeded to bisect it through the night, presumably by the light of the moon and his own burning rage.

Does this man look like a lunatic to you?

This, it turns out, was entirely characteristic behavior.

Reynolds spent eleven years with the Rams—from 1970 to 1980—where he patrolled the middle linebacker position as if it were a sacred trust requiring both violence and vigilance in equal, unreasonable measure. He made two Pro Bowls, anchored one of the league’s better defenses, and generally went about his business with the sort of single-minded intensity that made teammates simultaneously admire and fear him. The New York Times once observed that “he can be grumpy one moment and charming the next.” Which feels like diplomatic understatement, honestly.

When the Rams released him after the 1980 season (a mistake they would come to understand in that particular way organizations understand their errors: with mounting horror), Bill Walsh snapped him up for the hated 49ers. Walsh would later claim this was the best decision he ever made, which, given Walsh’s curriculum vitae, was saying something. “Jack gave us leadership and maturity and toughness and set an example for everybody,” Walsh explained, then added: “As strange a guy as he was, he really put us on the map.”

Strange doesn’t quite cover it. Reynolds showed up to his first 49ers training camp carrying his own film projector…because of course he did. He materialized at team breakfasts in full pads and eyeblack, as if breakfast were merely another form of combat. He once refused to lend a pencil to rookie Ronnie Lott, informing him he wouldn’t succeed in the NFL until he brought his own pencil to every meeting, a koan of preparedness that was either profound or insane or, most likely, both. Walsh put it plainly: “He is consumed with football, even more than any addicted coach.”

”I roomed with him in training camp,” said Craig Puki, the 49ers’ other starting inside linebacker. ”I was dreaming one night that someone was chasing me with a chain saw. I woke up in a cold sweat, and there was Jack sharpening pencils with an electric sharpener. I asked him why he was doing that at 3 A.M. He said he had to be ready for the team meeting at 9 A.M.”

Reynolds won two Super Bowls with San Francisco before retiring in 1984, then he disappeared to a house he’d built himself on a remote Caribbean island called San Salvador—where Columbus landed, he’d tell anyone who asked. The symbolism here is almost too perfect, too on-the-nose: the man who spent his career discovering new territories of obsession, who’d planted his flag on the unmapped continent of absolute commitment and stood there, wild-eyed and uncompromising, once again reminding everyone else they’d barely left the harbor.

One Sunday in December

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Willie Ellison’s story begins, as most stories do, in obscurity. A man born into a game that rarely remembers its middlemen. Drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1967 out of Texas Southern, he arrived quietly, another hopeful body among many, his future undecided. The league was different then — slower, grittier, less performative. Ellison didn’t enter with a roar. He entered like a shadow slipping across the field at dusk.

For years he waited — patient, disciplined, almost invisible — while others carried the ball, while others were celebrated. It’s easy, looking back, to think of him as a footnote, a supporting actor in someone else’s film. But one Sunday afternoon in December 1971 changed everything. The Saints were the opponent. The Rams, a team of great promise and equal disappointment. And Ellison, finally given the stage, ran for 247 yards, an NFL record at the time. (broken 2 years later by O.J. Simpson) It wasn’t supposed to happen. And yet, it did. As though the universe, for one afternoon, had decided to let him exist fully.

“Everything just seemed to go right today,” Ellison told the Los Angeles Times that evening. “The line was opening holes, and once I got through, I just kept running. It was one of those days.”

The next morning, the New Orleans Times-Picayune called it “one of the finest rushing performances ever seen in the Los Angeles Coliseum,” noting that “Ellison made the Saints’ defense look as if it were standing still.” Rams coach Tommy Prothro, typically sparing in praise, admitted afterward, “Willie earned every yard. He’s waited a long time for a game like this.”

Fame, like light, is fleeting. The following seasons returned him to the margins. Injuries, trades, time — all of it accumulated, layer upon layer, until the name faded again. He left football quietly, the same way he entered. No farewell tour, no parade. Just another man moving forward into the anonymity of ordinary life.

There’s something quietly haunting about that idea. Something tender, almost dreamlike. Every game, every carry, every forgotten yard drifts somewhere beyond the reach of statistics ; not captured on film or preserved in any archive, but floating instead in the invisible memory of the game itself. Like the echo of a song you can’t quite recall, yet still feel somewhere deep inside.

Willie Ellison belonged to that memory. For one strange, luminous afternoon, he seemed to move in perfect rhythm with the hidden pulse of the world — every step in tune with something larger than himself. And then, as dusk arrived and the crowd dispersed, he faded back into silence.

My Football Cards: Jim Everett

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I decided to read Franny and Zooey again after all these years and found a Jim Everett football card tucked inside. I must’ve used it as a bookmark. It had been waiting there through all my mistakes and minor humiliations–wedged neatly between pages 42 and 43, like a slightly bowed time capsule sealed shut by accident. The card was from 1991, Topps, number 532 in the set.

Holding it, I was carried back to a ridiculously pastel living room in the suburbs, me lying belly-down on the plush, shit-brown carpet, watching Everett throw post routes to Henry Ellard and Flipper Anderson. The Rams were in those royal blue and yellow uniforms that looked like something out of mythology. Back then, I didn’t understand the cruelty of the game, or how short the arc of a hero’s flight could be. I thought quarterbacks lasted forever. I thought glory was permanent. I thought the world rewarded the competent, the handsome, and the hopeful. I didn’t know yet that time dissolves everything.

I bought that book, I think, sometime after college, back when I believed J.D. Salinger could explain things to me — about understanding this mysterious thing called life. Everett, meanwhile, was explaining something else on the field: how cruel sports could be. He had the rocket arm, the charisma, the Hollywood setting. And then came that playoff game in January 1989, the one every Rams fan remembers for all the wrong reasons — the one against the 49ers where Joe Montana, calm as a surgeon, turned the Rams into irrelevant background noise. By the next year, the whispers began: soft, inconsistent, maybe not a “winner.”

Years later, I saw that interview with Jim Rome again. Everett’s anger—the sudden table flip, the lunging—became one of television’s favorite jokes. But I didn’t laugh. There was something horrifyingly human about it, the nakedness of being mocked beyond endurance. Rome smirked, the audience laughed, and Everett became a meme before memes existed. Yet what I saw was a man collapsing under the weight of too much visibility.

Holding that card, I thought of Franny Glass praying herself into madness, Zooey drowning in irony and intellect. Both crushed by the awareness of being watched, by the impossibility of authenticity. Maybe Everett experienced the same thing, in another language: the slow psychological rot of performance, the exhaustion of being perceived.

I slipped the card back into its place and started reading again, though I already knew how it would end: in exhaustion, in longing—in the quiet understanding that, like Everett, like Franny, no one is ever really saved. Only remembered for a moment, tucked between the pages.

Detroit Blues, L.A. Heat

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Honestly, if you are a Rams fan, and I mean really a Rams fan, the kind who has watched every single snap for a decade-plus —you find it laughable, bordering on offensive, that the talking heads on television, radio, or whatever medium question whether Matt Stafford is a Hall of Famer. Because we see him week in and week out, dealing with the logistical absurdity of an offensive line that could generously be described as “perpetually transient” and a city that, for years, seemed almost willfully indifferent to his considerable talents.

The eye test says everything.

But here’s the problem: the Hall of Fame isn’t about “week in and week out.” It’s not about the quiet Sunday afternoons when Stafford throws a 14-yard out on third-and-12 to move the chains. It’s about mythology. It’s about how the guy fits into a narrative you can summarize in one sentence to your cousin who doesn’t even like football. Joe Montana was “the cool assassin.” Brett Favre was “the reckless gunslinger.” Tom Brady was “the perfectionist who sold his soul to avocado ice cream.” What is Stafford? “The guy who played in Detroit for twelve years and then won a Super Bowl in L.A.” That’s a little clunky.

The problem with Stafford’s case is that he’s both overrated and underrated at the exact same time. Overrated in the sense that when he won Super Bowl LVI, people immediately started tossing around the Hall of Fame conversation like it was inevitable. Underrated because—if you actually study the numbers—he’s already one of the most statistically prolific quarterbacks in history. He’s top 10 all-time in passing yards and touchdowns, and he’ll keep climbing. The dude was essentially marooned on an island of futility in Detroit for a decade, where his best wideout (Calvin Johnson) literally retired early because he was too good for the situation. That should count for something.

Now, because I can’t resist a music analogy: Stafford is the Black Sabbath of quarterbacks. Stay with me here…in Detroit, he’s cranking out heavy riffs—4,000-yard seasons, jaw-dropping bombs—that only the nerds and masochists (read: Lions fans) truly appreciated. That’s the Paranoid era. Loud, brilliant, buried under bad vibes. Then he gets to Los Angeles, plugs into McVay’s amp, and suddenly it’s his Heaven and Hell moment. A masterpiece that made everyone step back and say, “Wait, this guy’s for real?”

So, will he make the Hall? Yeah, probably. Not on the first try, because voters love a clean myth and Stafford’s arc is more like a messy, psychedelic prog-rock double album. But at some point, they’ll look at the yardage, remember the Super Bowl run, and admit he belongs.

And if you still doubt it, just watch him get obliterated by a pass rusher, pop up grimacing like he just stubbed his toe, and then zing a 25-yard dart on the next play. That’s not just football. That’s Sabbath cranked to 11, live in Birmingham, burning holes in the sky.

One Yard Short

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There are these moments—I swear to God there are—when the whole country, every last bit of it, just sort of shows its hand. Like you can suddenly see through all the gum-chewing and Pepsi ads and halftime shows and it’s right there, the naked truth, if you’re looking. That tackle Mike Jones made on Kevin Dyson in the Super Bowl—Super Bowl XXXIV, if you’re counting—was one of those things. You couldn’t miss it. A guy from Missouri, not flashy, not some big-shot star, just this journeyman linebacker who’d been passed around like a cheap suit, and all of a sudden he’s the hinge everything swings on.

The thing about tackles—and this is something that our sports commentators, with their relentless need to narrate every goddamn thing into oblivion, consistently fail to grasp—is that they are fundamentally about the denial of possibility. Jones didn’t just stop Dyson; he murdered a dream in its infancy, and did so with the kind of bureaucratic efficiency that would make a mid-level insurance adjuster weep with recognition.

Think about the picture of it—no, really picture it, because the replay has been playing for like twenty years now in some eternal ESPN loop and it’s always the same: the Titans—Tennessee Titans, which, if you say it a couple times in a row, starts to sound more like a team from a Nintendo cartridge circa 1991—needing just one yard, one stupid yard, and the guy stretches out like he’s reaching for the promised land. Like he’s Moses or somebody. Horizontal in the air, ball stretched out, the kind of thing you see in a stained-glass window if stained-glass windows had shoulder pads. And the line he’s reaching for might as well be the whole American Dream, that counterfeit horizon everybody’s chasing.

But Jones was there, had always been there, really, representing not heroism but simple physics, the immutable law that two bodies cannot occupy the same space. His tackle was less athletic achievement than cosmic inevitability, the universe’s way of reminding us that for every Disney ending, there must be a corresponding moment of crushing banality.

What I can’t get out of my head, though, isn’t the highlight-reel part. It’s the look of it after. Jones doesn’t even look like a hero. He looks like some guy who just happened to be standing in the right place when history went walking by. That’s the part that keeps me up sometimes. The randomness of it. The whole terrible maybe-ness of existence. And if you still believe in hard work always paying off, or people getting what they deserve, or whatever fairy story they’re peddling this week—you watch that play long enough and I don’t know how you hold on to any of it.

The Phantom Quarterback: Terry Baker

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Here’s what I find fascinating about Terry Baker: he won the Heisman Trophy in 1962, played professional football for the Los Angeles Rams, and somehow managed to become the most forgettable person to ever accomplish both of those things. It’s like being the most anonymous man to have ever walked on the moon. Like you got there, all the way up in that dead silver light, and no one even bothered to notice. Shouldn’t happen, but it does—same way some dreams keep rotting in your chest until they start to feel like the only true thing about you.

Baker was Oregon State’s quarterback, back when Oregon State was the kind of program that could realistically win a Heisman Trophy, which now seems as antiquated as rotary phones or believing that professional wrestling was real. He threw for 1,738 yards and ran for 538 more, numbers that in 1962 meant something entirely different than they would mean today, not because the game was slower (though it was) or because the players were smaller (though they were) but because everything was smaller: the expectations, the media apparatus, the entire cultural machinery that transforms athletic achievement into meaning, or at least into the simulation of meaning that we’ve all agreed to pretend is the same thing.

The Los Angeles Rams selected him first overall in 1963, which should have been the beginning of something but was instead the beginning of zilch for exactly three seasons, during which he completed 50 percent of his passes and threw more interceptions than touchdowns—statistics that represent not so much failure as they do the mathematical expression of someone gradually disappearing from his own life, becoming translucent and fading like an old photograph.

But here’s the thing that haunts me about Terry Baker: he represents the exact moment when being talented stopped being enough. He was probably the best quarterback in America in 1962, but 1962 was still operating under the rules of 1952. By the time he reached the NFL, the game had already started becoming something else—something faster, more complex, more unforgiving. He was a Heisman Trophy winner caught in the static space between what football was and what it was becoming.

Baker eventually became a lawyer, which seems not so much a career change as a recognition of his true calling: the practice of arguing cases that history has already forgotten, in courtrooms where the only witnesses are dust motes and the gentle tick of institutional clocks marking time in a world that has moved on to more pressing forms of disappointment.

In the end, Terry Baker’s legacy is that he has no legacy, which might be the most honest thing any Heisman winner has ever achieved.

The Beast in Horns

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He wasn’t supposed to be this good. Too small, too short, not enough length—that was the knock on Aaron Donald coming out of the University of Pittsburgh. A defensive tackle built like a fire hydrant, with arms like loaded pistons, he slipped to the 13th pick in the 2014 NFL Draft while scouts drooled over taller, longer, prettier prospects. The Rams took him anyway, and it was one of the best decisions they ever made.

Donald didn’t just make a name for himself—he erased everyone else’s.

The screen flickers. The film reels through the darkened room. Snap after snap, line after line, a man emerging from his stance with the immediacy of physics, not thought. He doesn’t move—he detonates. He collapses space. The guard flinches, the center leans, and suddenly the quarterback is gone, eaten by a shape that barely seems human. A body of muscle, yes. But also motion, design, and silence.

In a league built for noise, for slogans and optics and microphones pressed into sweat-slick faces, Donald remained a low frequency hum, a signal buried beneath the clutter. He lifted. He trained. He studied. And then he obliterated. He racked up three Defensive Player of the Year awards and over 100 sacks—from the inside. That’s supposed to be impossible, and he made it routine.

The numbers tell one story. The fear tells another. Ask guards across the league who kept them up at night. Donald’s name comes up…Every. Single. Time. Their dreams interrupted and quickly becoming nightmares by thoughts of Number 99.

And let’s not forget 2022. SoFi Stadium. Super Bowl LVI. Bengals threatening, 4th and 1, game on the line. Donald grabs quarterback Joe Burrow mid-throw, spinning him like a toy top. In that moment, a championship was born. Donald walked off the field, pointed to his ring finger. Mission complete.

He retired in 2024, still dominant, still feared, still the baddest dude on the field. No farewell tour, no drama. Just a quiet exit, a man content with the carnage left behind.

In a league that worships offense and overlooks grinders, Aaron Donald didn’t just get noticed—he rewrote the blueprint. He played every snap like he had something to prove. Maybe because, deep down, he always remembered the scouts who said he was too small. That was the poetry of it. Because Aaron Donald didn’t just rewrite the blueprint.

He tore it in half.

The Dangerous Myth: Night Train Lane

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They found him on a porch in Austin, Texas—an infant bundled in a blanket, tucked into a wicker basket, no note, no name, no call to action. It was the kind of origin story that begged for embellishment, that seemed to exist halfway between Horatio Alger and Clark Kent. A foundling, a cipher–someone’s secret, but no one’s responsibility. That he would become Richard Lane, adopted son of Ella Lane, was less an act of fate than of narrative necessity. He needed a name. He needed a mother. The rest—well, the rest came thundering down the tracks.

He wasn’t born “Night Train.” The nickname didn’t come until later, from a song, of all things, and it stuck not because it was accurate but because it felt right. A thing of steel and speed, howling through the night. Lane’s life was full of those sorts of mythic alignments, the random details that in retrospect form the spine of legend. No college ball. No campus heroics. Just four years in the Army, a stint punching rivets in a Lockheed plant, and then, one day in 1952, he walked into the Rams’ office carrying nothing but a scrapbook and an unreasonable confidence in his own inevitability.

And then the season started.

Fourteen interceptions in his rookie year. Fourteen. The number hangs there in the air, like a telephone pole-sized exclamation point. (14 is still the NFL single season record) He wasn’t just reading routes—he was reading minds. The man played as if he had stepped sideways into the game from some better, faster, angrier dimension. And in a league where the forward pass was still treated like a fancy toy or a wartime experiment gone awry, he was a saboteur.

But what really set Night Train Lane apart was the way he hit. The physics of it. The sheer malicious poetry. He didn’t wrap you up. He didn’t guide you gently to the ground. He collided. He detonated. His tackles were so violent, so arresting, they needed a name: the “Night Train Necktie.” It was a hit so brutal the league banned it, as if the sheer act of Lane’s existence needed regulation.

He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t dance or taunt. He loomed. He lurked. Six-one, two hundred pounds of coiled menace and hard-won elegance, a man who looked like he could play linebacker, sculpt marble, and seduce your favorite jazz singer—and he in fact did. He dated Lena Horne, married Dinah Washington, wore sharp suits, and declined the circus of fame with the polite efficiency of a man refusing dessert. It was as if the moniker, “Night Train” only existed only between the whistles, a phantom that disappeared with the final gun.

From the Rams to the Cardinals to the Lions, Night Train Lane kept rolling. He retired in 1965 with 68 interceptions, and while the number is staggering, it only hints at the full weight of his myth. In 1974, the Hall of Fame made it official what the fans and players had known for years.

Richard “Night train” Lane died in 2002, and still, his shadow drapes itself across the field. You see it in the cornerback’s stance. In the wide receiver’s nervous glance. You hear it in the helmet-crack silence that follows a hit.

Because when you played against Night Train Lane, you didn’t just play football.

You survived it.

Dieter Brock: The Canadian NFL Anti-Hero

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The first time I heard the name Dieter Brock, I thought it sounded like a character in a German New Wave film—leather jacket, chain-smoking in some brutalist stairwell, probably quoting Nietzsche and throwing perfect spirals through the smog. Instead, he was a 34-year-old quarterback from Canada who walked into the Los Angeles Rams locker room in 1985 like some ghost from a frozen past. No one knew what to make of him. CFL stats don’t mean a damn thing in Southern California, especially when your home games are played in the sun-bleached Coliseum and the only wind you feel is from a passing convertible on Sunset.

But here he was—tight-lipped, awkward, joints already screaming with age, and slinging footballs like heat-seeking missiles. His arm was still dynamite. His motion? Sidearm, weird, like a guy skipping stones across a lake. But it worked. It was wild to watch—a redheaded guy who looked like he belonged in a car insurance commercial just calmly dismantling NFL defenses.

Brock didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He wasn’t part of the Southern California ecosystem—the agents, the sushi lunches in Santa Monica, the USC connections. He was all grit and gristle. He wasn’t there to make friends. He was there to win. And for a short, weird, brilliant stretch, he did. He led the Rams to an 11-5 record and then dismantled (‘Merica’s Team) the Cowboys 20-0 in a playoff game like it was no big thing. The city didn’t quite know how to feel. Was this guy for real?

He wasn’t Hollywood. He wasn’t Malibu. He was closer to a noir anti-hero: half-football player, half-mystery, all grit. You could picture him drinking whiskey with his orthopedic surgeon and muttering about blitz pickups in Saskatchewan. He didn’t smile. He didn’t pose. He just won. Until, of course, he didn’t.

The NFC Championship in Chicago was like walking into a buzzsaw. That 1985 Bears defense wasn’t just legendary—it was mythological, like they’d stepped out of some Norse saga to sack quarterbacks and eat souls. Dieter Brock’s soul got eaten that wintry day. The Rams had 3 turnovers and were sent back to Valhalla 24-0….and just like that, the dream ended.

Brock retired after that season. One and done. A blip. You can’t find many highlights on YouTube, and you won’t see his name in the Hall of Fame. Hell, even most Rams fans wont remember him; but for one season, Dieter Brock—Canadian outsider, walking medical bill, total anomaly—came down from the cold, stepped into the sun, and made the NFL feel like indie cinema: strange, sudden, and a little bit sublime.

And then he vanished. Poof.