The Voracious Life of Rosey Grier
From our July/August 2011 issue: From football star to entertainer, social activist and—yes—needlepoint advocate, Rosey Grier has devoured every experience life has brought his way.
Roosevelt Grier is now and always has been a man of considerable proportion, with a goatee that serves as a playful trademark and eyes that became legendary for their ability to freely shed tears. At the moment, those eyes are tracing a pair of balloons, lashed together at their base, as they drift through a parking lot outside Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles in the neighborhood known as South Central Los Angeles. “Those things,” he says, “have been bouncing around for a while.”
It's hard to miss the metaphor. Even today, fast approaching 80, decades removed from the peak of his cultural ubiquity, Grier ’56 H&HD has an eminently familiar face. Those who don’t immediately recognize him react as if they’ve seen him before; those who do act as if they’ve been graced by an unexpected visit from a long-lost friend. A few minutes earlier, the owner of the barbershop next door invited him over for a free haircut, and just a moment ago, a man in a Compton Baseball T-shirt saw him sitting on a bench, waiting for his table to open at Roscoe’s, and told him, “You’re still my hero.”
Of course, he was a football player before he was anything else, at Penn State and then in the National Football League. But over the span of several decades, he became much more than that, largely because he was not afraid to drift from one place to another, from one task to another, from one medium to another. One thing Rosey Grier will tell you is that he always refused to establish any sort of path for his existence. His life, he has said, is just one long happening. “You’re always open to go with the flow,” he says. “In that way, you’re just there. You are who you are.”
This leads him to the most unexpected places and has earned him the unlikeliest of friends. This is why one could argue that he has lived one of the most interesting American lives of the past century. “Forrest Grier,” Sports Illustrated once called him in a headline, and in this Gumpian comparison, there is more than a semblance of truth: Name a cultural fulcrum of the past 50 years, and the man most of us know as Rosey, the son of a Georgia farmer, was probably at least tangentially involved.
The greatest NFL game ever played? That would be the 1958 NFL championship, and Rosey was there, playing on the defensive line for the New York Giants when Baltimore’s Alan Ameche crashed through the line to win it in overtime. The history of rock ’n’ roll? Rosey, who serenaded the women’s dorms at Penn State as part of a group called The Midnight Cavaliers, went on to sing with Chuck Berry and Gladys Knight and Curtis Mayfield. The rise and fall of the Kennedys? Rosey Grier stood a few feet from Robert Kennedy the night he was shot to death and wound up with an assassin’s gun in his pocket; he later became good friends with Jackie Kennedy. And so it went, on through the late ’60s and into the ’70s, when Rosey hosted his own television variety show, and Rosey appeared on Kojack and CHiPs, and Rosey sang a song called “It’s All Right to Cry” that became an anthem for a generation of New Age males, and Rosey campaigned with President Carter, and Rosey wrote a popular book about—of all things—needlepoint for men (he appears on the cover, sewing a likeness of himself). He hung out with Shirley MacLaine and starred in a B movie with Ray Milland and once asked a favor of Frank Sinatra; he once sang with Peaches and Herb until 5 in the morning, until the former governor of New York, slumbering above them, banged on his floor, pleading for quiet.
ALWAYS IN THE FRAME: Grier was onstage in Los Angeles with Robert F. Kennedy (above) shortly before the senator was assassinated; a few years later, he served as bodyguard and confidant to Jackie Kennedy (below, left). In the mid 1990s, he played a minor role in the saga of O.J. Simpson, counseling the accused murderer in prison and later testifying (below, right) at the era-defining trial. Getty Images/Julian Wasser/Time Life Photos (above), Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives (below, left), and AP Photo/Lois Bernstein (below, right).
In the 1980s, Rosey, having found solace in Christianity, turned toward the Republican side, campaigning with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He showed up in a Bounty paper towel commercial. And in the 1990s, Rosey poked his head in the spotlight once more, counseling O.J. Simpson in prison as Simpson awaited trial. In 2008, the NFL Network flew Rosey out to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, just so he could witness the nomination of Barack Obama as well.
He still shows up in curious corners of the American zeitgeist: making public-service announcements about prostate cancer (worth finding on YouTube), working at a foundation named for Michael Milken, the once-disgraced 1980s junk-bond king whom Rosey counseled, and speaking eloquently on the recent death of his Los Angeles Rams teammate Merlin Olsen. He will get on the phone and call anyone about anything he views as an injustice or inequity; recently, when an official was hurt during a football game and the television announcers neglected to update his injury status, Rosey phoned the network to complain. “I think the referee needed that respect,” he said.
For years, rather than subscribing to a rigid ideology, Rosey has declared fealty to one unifying principle, which is nothing more complex than unconditional love for others. It may open him up to accusations of naïveté, especially for someone who came of age in the midst of the civil-rights movement, who lived with racial quotas in the NFL, and who, when he developed a friendship with a white female student at Penn State, received a warning from one of his coaches to “watch your step,” but Rosey doesn’t linger on bitterness or division. For him, love has always been the simpler route.
“You have to make up a reason why you get to hate somebody,” he says. “I don’t have to make up a reason why I still love you.”
On the corner of Florence and San Pedro, about 2 miles from the epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Margie Grier guides a mammoth sport utility vehicle into the parking lot of a muffler shop. Margie is her husband’s chauffeur this afternoon; several decades ago, she was his second wife, and then she wasn’t anymore, and then a few years after their divorce, Rosey and Margie and their son went to see a preacher named Dr. Frederick K.C. Price. After that, they reconciled, gave their lives to Christ—Rosey was ordained in 1983—and they’ve been together ever since.
WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD RAM? Along with Lamar Lundy, Merlin Olson, and Deacon Jones, Grier (76) was part of the Los Angeles Rams’ “Fearsome Foursome,” one of the most dominant defensive lines in NFL history. Below, the quartet reunited for a photo in 2001. AP Photos/NFL Photos (above) and Getty Images/Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated.
Once upon a time, Rosey Grier came to this neighborhood in search of gang members. It was not long after his friend Robert Kennedy’s death, back in the early 1970s, and Rosey was hurting, in search of a new purpose. He cried almost every night. (And it was not coincidental that around the same time, he recorded “It’s All Right to Cry” as part of a project called Free to Be…You and Me, devised by actress Marlo Thomas in an attempt to refute the gender stereotypes prevalent in children’s books.) When he saw that young black men were joining gangs and killing each other without reason or purpose, he came to South Central hoping to find them. What he would do once he found these kids, he had no idea, but this is typical of how Rosey works. He didn’t have a plan. He knew he’d think of something once he got there.
It took him a year and a half, and then finally, through a friend and intermediary, he got the call: The kids wanted to meet him. As Rosey remembers it, he showed up and stood before about 500 people, most of whom knew him as nothing more than a football player, another celebrity who would probably attempt to buoy them with empty promises. So thought Michael Tobin, a kid known on the streets as Fast Black, who claims to have been one of the original members of the Crips, who claims to have carried not one gun back then, but two at a time.
“What do you want?” Fast Black asked.
“I just came out,” Rosey said, “to tell you that I love you.”
“You love us?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing. But I love you.”
They asked Rosey who he represented. Rosey said he represented no one. They asked Rosey if he could arrange for them to get jobs. Rosey said he could. They told him to go get them some jobs right then. So Rosey went straight to the mayor, Tom Bradley—by then, Rosey was working as the mayor’s assistant, targeting youth and senior citizens, the two groups Rosey figured needed love most of all. The mayor promised him 15 jobs, and Rosey went back to the kids and shared the news. “Who wants to work?” he asked.
The room went silent. They thought it was some kind of setup. Finally, Fast Black raised his hand. He showed up at Grier’s office at 9 the next morning.
“There was truth in him,” Michael Tobin says now, almost 40 years later. “There’s a lot of people who come down here, and there’s no truth in them. We gathered truth in what we said to each other. And it’s been like that ever since.”
At one point, Rosey and Margie pawned their Mercedes to get Tobin out of prison. Soon after, he abandoned the Crips; these days, he works in the community, and he’s a close friend of a man named Brian Weaver, a former Blood, now a preacher, who also became friends with Rosey years ago.
The muffler shop proprietors are old friends of Rosey’s; years ago, they were some of the biggest troublemakers in the neighborhood. Today, they sit here all together, in the part of town now officially known as South Los Angeles, playing games of dominoes under a tent that keeps threatening to blow away in a stiff wind. In the early 1980s, Rosey started a center called Are You Committed, which trained and ministered to local youth. He lives about 20 miles and a world away in tony Brentwood, but his ties here remain strong. He is a man with an uncanny gift for making connections, a human being so thoroughly disarming that he once convinced Jackie Kennedy to show up at Michael Tobin’s home, next door to the muffler shop, and play dominoes with a group of men who were once considered some of the most dangerous in the city of Los Angeles.
It is impossible, when examining the grand scope of Rosey Grier’s public achievements, not to return to the Kennedys, and to the brand of American idealism they came to represent. A cynic could argue that Rosey fell into a unique position because he was willing to be used, that Bobby Kennedy reached out to him in an attempt to help establish credibility with the Black community. (At the time, Rosey was best known as a member of the Fearsome Foursome, the Los Angeles Rams’ legendary defensive line, though a leg injury had just brought his career to an end.) You could say this, and Rosey would not deny it, though he would tell you that he allowed himself to believe Bobby Kennedy’s intentions were as genuine as his own. He accompanied Bobby to rallies (and sang at them) when Kennedy began his bid for president in 1968, and served as a makeshift bodyguard because the candidate didn’t want to be surrounded by police officers.
Rosey had a name as an athlete, and he had helped bridge the racial divides among some of his Rams teammates, but he felt intimidated among celebrities and politicians. Over time, Kennedy drew him out. Once, on an airplane, they sat before a group of men Rosey had never seen before. The men asked him why Kennedy should be president. They asked him why the Black community should vote for him. When his comments showed up in the paper the next day, Grier was furious. He had no idea there were any reporters on board.
“All those guys you were talking to?” Kennedy said.
“Yeah?” Rosey said.
“They were reporters.”
If that’s being used, Rosey would argue it did as much for his own psyche as it did for Kennedy’s presidential hopes. At one point, Kennedy asked Rosey to stand in for him at the Brentwood Country Club, a fancy, whites-only establishment. The crowd was A-list Hollywood, full of celebrity friends of the Kennedys; Rosey followed Shelley Winters to the stage. “I realize,” he began, “that I’m not one of you. Though if I had you out on a football field, I could drive you all into the dirt.”
And then he burst into an impassioned and unpractical argument for Bobby Kennedy. The crowd fell silent. He was so taken aback by the fact that these people were listening to him that he checked his fly to make sure it wasn’t unzipped.
“I learned,” he says now, “that if you talk to people from your heart, they’ll hear you.”
Those lessons carried on for Grier long after the night he wrestled the gun away from Kennedy’s assassin amid a blur of activity at the Ambassador’s Hotel on June 5, 1968. (Among Kennedy’s last words to his audience: “Rosey Grier said he would take care of anybody who didn’t vote for me.”) They carried over to a summer day 26 years later, when Grier, having determined that a former Buffalo Bills running back accused of a double murder was in need of spiritual counsel, walked into a Los Angeles prison and offered it to him.
“Somebody lied,” Rosey says now, which seems inevitable when a man willingly embroils himself in one of the most culturally complex trials of the 20th century. There was a rumor that O.J. Simpson shouted a confession to Grier in prison. He says it never happened. He says he and Simpson talked about nothing, really, except the Bible.
What possessed Rosey to visit Simpson in the first place? It’s the same instinct that led him to counsel Nixon’s White House aide, John Dean. It’s the same instinct that prompted him to call and confront the father of John Hinckley Jr. not long after his son attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and to strike up a friendship with Michael Milken. He doesn’t plan these things; it often seems more like he’s genuinely stumbled into the public eye rather than courted the attention.
“All the other stuff didn’t matter,” he says. This is back at Roscoe’s, where Rosey sits reminiscing about Bobby Kennedy, but also talking about what’s enabled him to carve such a unique niche in American life. “You were glorying in the fact that you were making a contribution to mankind.”
And then the food arrives, and the waitress sets before him a plate of chicken livers coated in gravy, and Rosey’s eyes widen and he breaks into an expansive grin. He lets loose with the most joyful noise you can imagine, a “WOOOOOOT!” that takes aback the waitress, his lunch companions, and half the restaurant. It is a spontaneous expression of joy, a revelation in one of life’s simple pleasures, and Rosey Grier sees no reason to hold back.
Michael Weinreb writes for Grantland.com, the new sports and culture site from ESPN. His most recent book, Bigger Than the Game, will be released in paperback in August.
