The 36-year-old defensive tackle, once called by his coach as “the greatest lineman I’ve ever seen in Detroit,” noticed something unnerving in how that same coach was now behaving whenever the defensive tackle was in his presence.
It was July, 1971 and another grueling football training camp at Cranbrook, the private school off Woodward Avenue in tony Bloomfield Hills. And Alex Karras began noticing something strange about Joe Schmidt, the Lions head coach.
“Whenever Joe would ask me if I still felt like playing, I’d tell him, ‘Yeah, I feel great,’” Karras related in a book he wrote called Even Big Guys Cry. “But he wouldn’t look me in the eye when he asked me. And when I answered he’d kind of look down and just nod and say, ‘OK.’”
Karras said that Schmidt would ask him the same questions occasionally: How do you feel, Alex? Still think you can go another season?
The exhibition season came and went. Karras played, but not always very well. Sometimes he was pretty good; other times, he was pedestrian. And Karras knew it. He knew when some young whippers ...
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Article written by Greg Eno
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