He rises from a chair next to his Heisman Trophy in a room stuffed with dozens of silver and gold keepsakes that recognize a remarkable sports legacy. At 6-foot-3, Jim Plunkett still commands a room.
But underneath the tanned exterior anxiety grows over an uncertain future.
“My life sucks,” said Plunkett, 69. “It’s no fun being in this body right now. Everything hurts.”
The years of daily pain pulsating from the neck, back, knees, shoulders, hips and head have taken a toll on a quarterback who played 15 NFL seasons and led the Raiders to two Super Bowl victories.
His body is a patchwork of medical magic: Artificial knees, an artificial shoulder and a surgically repaired back. After 18 operations, Plunkett’s activities have been reduced to golf and light workouts at home on a Crosstrainer.
LIFE AFTER FOOTBALL
This is one in a continuing series of stories by Elliott Almond that examines the post-career struggles of players — from Super Bowl MVPs like Jim Plunkett to little-knowns like Rod Stensrud who never even got their NFL shot.
A quiet figure during his quarterbacking days, Plunkett represents a generation of men who played football with a taste for violence while locking their emotions in safety deposit boxes. For decades, Sunday’s heroes have suffered in silence from degenerative brain disease, depression, opioid addiction, Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The price for playing football has come due.
“Think of getting in 50 car wrecks a week for 20 straight weeks a year,” said Hank Bauer, a former San Diego Chargers running back known for his reckless play on special teams. “Everybody hurts at our age. We just hurt more.”
Latest health problems
A year ago, Plunkett contracted Bell’s Palsy, a temporary facial paralysis that causes one side of the face to droop. No sooner had the disorder disappeared than the throbbing headaches began. The head pain has been diagnosed as a neurological disorder that his physician thinks is connected to Bell’s Palsy.
These are the latest in a series of health problems that began four years after Plunkett left the NFL in 1986. He takes six pills in the morning, seven at night for his heart, blood pressure and other problems. Plunkett usually takes an opioid to play a round of golf, but otherwise stays away from the addictive painkillers. In early summer, he even tried hemp oil for a month but stopped when he didn’t see any results.
“There are a couple other drugs I take — I can’t know them all,” he said. “I’ve got to take them every day to quote-unquote survive.”
Plunkett’s football career began in the 1960s at James Lick High School in East San Jose. Then he played four years at Stanford, appearing in 32 games. After winning the Heisman Trophy in 1970 — he remains the only Heisman recipient in Stanford history — Plunkett was the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft by the New England Patriots.
He weathered 380 sacks in a pro career from 1971-86, and that doesn’t begin to account for all the times he was hit after throwing.
A year after Plunkett retired, NFL officials began addressing ways to protect their most valuable asset as quarterbacks were getting injured at an alarming rate. They prohibited pass rushers from taking two steps before smashing into a signal caller after the ball had been thrown. Such tactics were legal in Plunkett’s era. So was slamming quarterbacks to the ground.
Plunkett was sacked 36 times in his first season while playing for a team that went 3-11. One of the worst hits came from Miami’s Bob Matheson, a 6-4, 238-pound linebacker.
“He knocked me silly,” Plunkett said.
Afterward, Plunkett got to the huddle and called a scheme out of Stanford’s playbook. His linemen just stared at him. The Patriots had to call a timeout to give Plunkett a chance to regroup.
Still, he never missed a down during the rookie season. The next year, Plunkett was sacked 39 times, then 37 the year after that.
“He just got hammered — I mean hammered brutally,” said Randy Vataha, who played receiver for Plunkett for three years at Stanford and five in New England.
“He got up a lot of times when he shouldn’t have. Probably played some games when he shouldn’t have. That’s Jim.”
Former Raiders tight end Bob Moore, who also played alongside Plunkett at Stanford, blames the barbarity of the NFL for his college teammate’s steady decline.
“Most of them were OK when they left” college, said Moore, a San Francisco lawyer. “Now most of them are not OK.”
Plunkett recalls suffering at least 10 concussions dating to high school. He suspects he had many others. Back then, NFL officials asked players who got knocked out their name, who they were playing and how many fingers they were holding up.
“If you say, ‘Three,’ they say, ‘Close enough,’ ” Plunkett said. “You’d get a little smelling salt and you go right back in.”
Gerry Plunkett’s face carries the tension of her circumstance as she sits on a couch in the couple’s Atherton home.
Her husband has exhibited growing signs of symptoms of traumatic brain injury in the past few years. For example, Plunkett is lively with friends or at autograph signings but returns home exhausted. But, until recently, he mostly dismissed concerns.
“I think he was in denial,” Gerry said.
Her unease is supported by a new report by doctors at Boston University School of Medicine and the VA Boston Healthcare System. Researchers studying a link between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) found signs of the degenerative brain disease in 110 of 111 specimens donated by families of deceased NFL players.
Overall, researchers found evidence of the brain disease in 87 percent of the 202 donated cadavers of former players at all levels.
Plunkett doesn’t need studies to understand what might lie ahead. It’s all around him.
One of his Raiders teammates, Kenny Stabler, suffered from Stage 3 CTE, an autopsy revealed two years ago. In March, another Raiders teammate, Mickey Marvin, died at age 61. A month later, Oakland teammate Derrick Jensen was dead at age 60. Both suffered from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, that also afflicts 49ers great Dwight Clark.
“ALS and they were gone in a few years,” Plunkett said quietly.
He recently filed paperwork as part of the $1 billion concussion lawsuit settlement to begin testing. The program provides neuropsychological and neurological assessment examinations to determine whether retired players are suffering from cognitive impairment.
“I don’t know what there is to do,” Plunkett said. “If it happens, it happens. I don’t know how you stop it at this point.”
But he has called on NFL officials to support retirees, saying the league has an obligation “to help take care of these people.”
Gerry Plunkett sometimes feels helpless.
“At first it is frustrating because you want them to get help or do this or that,” she said. “Guys are pretty stubborn. You just have to be there and work together as a family. That’s what you do.”
Comeback with Raiders
Plunkett’s career should have ended after two mediocre years with the 49ers, who acquired him from New England in a trade before the 1976 season. But Raiders owner Al Davis picked him up off waivers for $100 before the 1978 season.
Davis told Plunkett to rebuild his confidence and regain his health. He hardly played the next 2½ years.
By the time Plunkett replaced injured Dan Pastorini early in the 1980 season, Plunkett felt revived. He won comeback player of the year after leading the Raiders to a victory over Philadelphia in Super Bowl XV. He won a second Super Bowl ring in 1983 after replacing an injured Marc Wilson.
But all the while, Plunkett’s body and brain still were taking a beating. A 1985 game against the 49ers summarized the destruction on any given Sunday. Plunkett was sacked six times in a 34-10 loss.
With 10 minutes left, 275-pound defensive end Jeff Stover plowed into Plunkett while going down hard on his left arm. Plunkett collapsed near the sideline when leaving the field. He had suffered a shoulder separation.
The Raiders’ physician twice put the shoulder in place but it popped out each time. Gerry Plunkett rushed to the locker room to check on her husband.
“That was the worst game of my life because people in the stands started cheering because they wanted Marc Wilson in,” she recalled. “I don’t care what team anybody is on whoever is getting hurt, you don’t cheer.”
After everything he has endured, Plunkett wants to help educate teenage football players on how to deal with head injuries. He joined about 40 former NFL players — half of them ex-Raiders — in June for the Game-Changer Celebrity Golf tournament in Rocklin to raise funds for research on traumatic brain injuries involving high school athletes.
“Kids are stubborn and when they get hurt they won’t report it,” Plunkett said.
He wants to help make football safer so it doesn’t disappear because of fears over concussions. Plunkett even hopes his 5-year-old grandson wants to play. For now, Grandpa throws footballs and baseballs to the boy on a vacant tennis court in the back yard that used to be Plunkett’s physical outlet when he could still run.
“I would love to see it,” he said of his grandson playing football, “but that would be selfish on my part.”
Then Plunkett considered another possibility.
“Golf’s a great sport,” he said. “Nobody hits you.”
