FIRST LOOK: NEW NFL BOOK

DON AND TODD HEWITT

I am using this blog in a new way at least for me. It will comprise a book that my collaborator, Todd Hewitt, and I have been undertaking for the past year: NFL LOCKER ROOM CONFESSIONS. We have over 92,000 words and quirky graphics to go with the text. This is coming directly from myMac in Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawaii while composing this on the slick software of Scrivener—a fun word to spell—directly to the antiquated Blogger program that I got stuck with when I finally gave in to blogging and so all of my stuff is in their archives and getting to even my present work is such a pain in the ass this is fundamental guerilla publishing. And why not now?

ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM

S P S B S ???

SUCKING POST SUPER BOWL SYNDROME

If so, you are invited to follow along as I transfer to the Ron Jacobs Blog, Bra BREAKING TEXT bypassing any publishing precedents I’ve ever pushed. So here we go:

WhoDaGuy & Hewitt Do It

Ron Jacobs is the author of the 2009 best-selling nonfiction book in the Fiftieth State: Obamaland: Who Is Barack Obama?, the co-creator of American Top Forty in 1970; the Sixties radio rockumentaries The History of Rock & Roll and The Elvis Presley Story as well as producing records and concerts from the Hollywood Bowl to the Waikiki Shell. A legendary deejay and TV host in his native Hawaii since the 1950s, Jacobs began his broadcast career engineering high school football games and serving as backup trackside announcer at the Roller Derby when it visited Honolulu. He has won various awards for his work as a broadcaster and writer. This is fourth book—but the first one to roll like this baby!

This is also coming as a absolute surprise to his longtime faithful friend and editor since the last century, Carol Williams, who is no way responsible for the spelling, grammar, fumphs, typos broken out here without any advance warning to her of the authors’ impulsive and eager craving to kick this off.

Todd Hewitt worked in the equipment department of the then-Los Angeles Rams starting at the age of eleven in Orange County California where he was born. He started on the University of California Riverside team that won the 1979 College World Series. His father, Don Hewitt, played for the PCL Oakland Oaks, coached by Leo Durocher but injuries knocked him out of the game and back home to Fresno, California where he began coaching high school baseball and football. Moving to Los Angeles, his prep teams caught the eye of the University of Southern California. The Trojans hired him as the head football equipment manager in 1965. Playing in the same LA Coliseum as the glam Rams of Hollywood, in just two years the pro team lured Don Hewitt from USC to the NFL where he began his career as head equipment manager of the storied Los Angeles Rams, the first US professional major league sports franchise established in Southern California in 1946.

The team moved to Anaheim in 1994 and Todd Hewitt succeeded his dad in 1986, supervised the move to St. Louis in 1995 and was with the franchise through the end of the 2010 season, ending the Hewitt Era that kept things cool in the Rams locker room for forty-three seasons. Todd joined the Univeristy of California at Berkeley in 2011 as head equipment manager of all sports. He promises to finish this book by the time I post what we have done so far on this exclusive first draft, fumbles and all.

Old School off-field hi-jinks =

good methadone for NFL Junkies.

NOTICE

THIS IS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AND MAY NOT BE COPIED, PUBLISHED, FORWARED OR OTHERWISE TRANSFERRED WITHOUT THE ADVANCE WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

© 2012 by Ron Jacobs & Todd Hewitt.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A RUFF COPY OF PORTIONS OF A MANUSCRIPT. SECTIONS IN THIS EXCERPT MIGHT NOT APPEAR IN THIS SEQUENCE IN THE FINAL COPY OR AT ALL. PLEASE PARDON TYPOS, SPELLING ERRORS, ETC. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ANYONE LIVING OR DEAD IS WHAT IT IS.

ALL PUBLISHING AND MEDIA RIGHTS TO THIS PROJECT AVAILABLE TO THE RIGHT PLAYERS. FOR MORE INFO PLEASE CONTACT RON JACOBS AT RJ@HAWAII.RR.COM.

NFL Locker Room Confessions

By Todd Hewitt & Ron Jacobs

“The Equipment Department is a very important aspect of an NFL franchise. Players spend so much time in and around the equipment and locker room personnel it is critical to have the right people there. Believe me: Todd Hewitt and his staff were and are the right people. The hours these guys put in are way beyond a normal workday. I never heard Todd complain! He has great integrity, so you can always trust that he will do what is right for all the right reasons. If I ever return to coaching, I would ask Todd to come with me. Head Coach Dick Vermeil, 2011.

PREFACE

Ten years ago Todd Hewitt and I first joked about doing a book detailing his time with the Rams of the National Football League. Anything seemed possible then. The Rams had just competed the greatest run in the team’s history, one of the most sensational in the annals of the National Football League. It climaxed with the St. Louis Rams winning Super Bowl XXXIV on the first Sunday of 2000.

That kickoff of the twenty-first century marked my forty-fifth year of following the team that was a major part of Todd’s life since he was old enough to pick up inflated “pigskin.” He had every reason to live and inhale pro football. From the start Todd’s living room away from home was the locker room of one of the NFL’s most famous franchises, the Los Angeles Rams.

The senior Hewitt’s career was cut short by injury and he returned home to Southern California where he coached high school football, a job that included handling team equipment and just about everything else.

Tall, blonde haired, blue-eyed Todd was born and raised in Southern California. His father was a former athlete, coach and meticulous equipment manager of the USC Trojans and the LA Rams, Don Hewitt. Born and schooled in Fresno, California, after serving in the Navy during World War II, Don played baseball for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League, coached by Casey Stengel. Don’s roommate was another future New York Yankees great, the inflammable Billy Martin.

Don’s first son, Todd, played sports throughout high school and started on the Cal State Fullerton baseball team, capping his own athletic career when the squad won the 1984 College World Series. Todd had no illusions about “going to the next level” in pro sports; he longed to follow in his father’s cleats, working the locker room, where there are no secrets. Behind doors closed to the public repose naked truths about the players and coaches whose profession is pro football: the most popular sport in America.

Through the chain of circumstance that make life interesting, surprising and full of excitement, since we became close in the 1990s I have been privileged to share some of Todd Hewitt’s off-the-record anecdotes. These are stories that this assiduously tight- lipped team player kept to himself, telling no none other than, perhaps, his wife, Kathy.

Again and again I am amused by the offense taken by press and public when an NFL player makes the news, usually on a deplorable negative note about DUI, domestic abuse altercations or some other bizarre incident, most usually involving breaking the law, using alcohol, drugs or guns and in some instances, death itself. Ex-Rams equipment manager Todd Hewitt witnessed just about everything that we fans know nothing about from watching from our couch, a fancy suite high above the action or up in the cheap seats. Todd knows between-the lines, untold stories, from goal line to headline, tales never told before.

For Todd it was Fifties through Nineties Hollywood, living and cruisin’ through the decades within the Orange County, luscious, sunny Southern California, from the mountains to the sea, where athletes blazed in coliseums and the America’s most beautiful people were to be found. Then the team, and Todd moved to St. Louis in 1995. It would prove to be the scene of his highest highs and lowest lows.

Todd hung with the jocks, enjoying a bachelor existence most guys dream of until one night Rams All-Pro guard, hulking Dennis Harrah, carried a sweet young lass through a rowdy Anaheim sports bar and dumped her into Todd’s lap as he sat in a back booth surrounded by Rams players. They all thought it was hilarious and ordered up more beer. Todd never let go of Kathy, his former cheerleader high school sweetheart, who he married on March 9, 1985.

For anyone interested in fun in the sun there was no better place to be than SoCal, including me, away from my home in Hawaii. At 27 I held down a job that just about everyone in my profession wanted: Program Director of KHJ Radio, Los Angeles. Built in 1922, this pioneer station was older than the Rams, itself an enterprise begun in 1937. As my deranged obsession with this team deepened over the years it overwhelmed my mind in a way that resembled an addiction to drugs, sex or rock’n’roll. Unfortunately there is no RA, Rams Anonymous, with a Twelve Step programs to kill the deadly compulsion to follow the fortunes of this horn-helmeted junta of pro footballers.

My collection of Rams remnants includes scores of items Todd has sent me over the years, always out of friendship, postage paid. What kind of stuff? An autographed game-worn pair of Marshall Faulk’s personalized custom golden cleats. Kurt Warner material of every manner (all Sharpie signed with a Bible notation, chapter and verse). And if Mike Martz asks, tell him I have his Redskins offensive playbook from 1998. If just a few of the millionaire player signatures were on checks made out to me ...

Rather, insults about the team and my evangelistic dedication to it were hurled back at me, making fun of me, my obsession and, of course, the Rams themselves. By the time my daughter, Miki’ala, learned to howl with bad intentions her first manic mantra every time I mentioned the team was, “Rams suck, Rams suck!”

For over five decades I’ve sucked up minutiae about this football team. Whenever I exclaimed aloud about my discoveries, such as the fact that I was fourteen days old on the day the Cleveland Rams scored their first touchdown, all my wives, co-workers, non-football fanatics and Forty-Niners fans repressed the urge to smack me in the mouth.

I endured eight seasons as a season ticket holder for every Rams games played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. As noted on the Rams official web site I have never missed watching a game that this team has played since the annual Los Angeles Times Charity game in the summer of 1965 just a few weeks before the Watts Riots.

Football has fascinated me from the beginning when I knew I could never do it as well as the guys on the playgrounds and in school. I also did not fancy being hit. My dad took me to the 1944 Annual Shrine East-West All-Star Game played in Kezar Stadium, located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park where we lived across the street during the middle of World War II. The game ended in a 6-6 tie, dooming me to crave more action, seek resolution and pray for victory for our team.

Football is bigger here in Hawaii than everything else combined, including all the water sports. I attended Punahou School, once somewhat famous in intellectual and athletic circles for scholars and scat backs and now right up there, being the school attended by Barack Obama, Class of 1979. But what I knew and wrote of the man was second-hand knowledge no matter the scores of interviews and claimed veracity of the folks with whom I talked or corresponded.

I’ve been rapping with Todd Hewitt on the phone pretty much continuously for the past ourteen years. How this came about, and my thousands of miles traveling the country’s highways, flying around to cities that I would never entered other than to cash in the winning lottery ticket, and tuned to every communications device invented by man so that I could follow every play, all the action on the field on which the Rams were playing, is an entirely other story, mine, not Todd’s. Such a memoir might be called “A Fan’s Notes” (1968) had not that title been used by “brilliant one-book writer” Fredrick Exley during his prolonged stay in a New York mental institution contemplating his fascination about football star Frank Gifford of USC and the New York Giants.

Although I live in Kaneohe, right down the road from a state mental institution, and have worn official Rams workout shorts of three different sizes on all but 10 days since 1997 and caused many ridiculous scenes in various NFL stadia, I have avoided incarceration based on my beyond-religious devotion to this football team.

The Rams, as all NFL teams, have millions of fans. But other than family members, I doubt few, including journalists, have heard more many locker room stories as have I, 99% of them told me by Todd Hewitt in his “Aw, shucks,” down home, underplayed way. For a decade I was a close friend with All-Pro tight end Russ Francis, from his rookie year, with the New England Patriots to his days with the San Francisco Forty- Niners, where he finished his career. Russ won a Super Bowl ring; he played in 167 games, a respectable total.

In his career, Todd Hewitt worked in an incredible 738 consecutive National Football League games, never missing one, even on that Sunday when one of his four kids was born in LA, in he was on the road in New Orleans.

To put that into perspective, the all time position player is Hall Of Famer Jerry Rice, who played in 303 games. That's less than half the game checks Todd Hewitt received. Of course Rice's were loaded with lots more zeroes in the money column. But no player's career ended in a more sudden and shocking way than what happened to Todd following the final game of the 2010 NFL season, something that has left Todd's many friends and fans throughout the league still scratching their heads and sends me into a rage when I think about it.

The oxymoronic subtitle of “A Fan’s Notes” is “A Fictional Memoir.” One thing I can tell you is that Todd Hewitt’s story is 100% true with the referees looking the other way on only a few bizarre, hilarious or surrealistic occasions in his life and career. And this story would not be complete without his co-star, a woman every actress would want to play in the HBO special, Mrs. Kathy Hewitt, who has inspired not only Todd, but yours truly, to do this thing in a winning way.

Hopefully what follows will also satisfy the perverse curiosity of those few who are interested in the dimensions of NFL players' unmentionables and lots of other stuff you don't read about in Sports Illustrated, hear on sports talk radio or see on ESPN. NFL locker rooms are not posted KEEP OUT without good reason. Todd Hewitt tells the naked truth. Meanwhile, Kathy insists that the book should be called, “How I Hooked My Way Into The NFL,” and told from her special point of view.

If it doesn't matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?

Vince Lombardi

To be continued with stories of wild men doing crazy things.