Ken Margerum Has Found Life Very, Very Good : Free-Spirited Receiver Looks to Make Comeback in Chicago

You can sense a certain confidence in Ken Margerum’s stride as he walks down a street in this small Chicago suburb and compliments a woman for the dress she is wearing.

You get the same feeling as he waves to another woman he doesn’t know at a Lake Michigan beach, not really soliciting any response, but just to be friendly.

To some, Margerum may seem a bit presumptuous, but those who know him know better. He simply is a man who loves to show his zest for living, one who is happy with his lot in life.

And why shouldn’t he be? Life has been pretty good.

After a successful athletic career at Fountain Valley High School, where he starred in football and track, Margerum received a full scholarship to play football at Stanford. He set several pass receiving records that remain and says he probably had the most fun anyone has ever had while attending the school.

He recently signed a two-year contract with the Chicago Bears that will pay him $150,000 and $175,000 for the next two seasons, and also includes incentives that could double his salary each year.

Margerum--yes, the same Ken Margerum who put his head through oil paintings and smashed beer bottles over his head at college parties--also has been extremely successful in the investment field this past year, as several of the stocks he purchased have tripled in value. He has been able to buy three homes, two in Woodside, Calif., and one in Lake Forest.

So, it comes as no surprise that a knee injury, which forced Margerum to miss the entire 1984 season with the Bears and could have possibly ended his playing career, wasn’t at all depressing.

“Why be down?” Margerum asked. “I made the injury into a positive situation. I considered it as something that gave me a year off in which I could go to Hawaii, have a good time and get to know my friends better.

“I’ll probably look back at it as being a good thing because I got my act together, got myself squared away financially and got the respect from the coaches for coming to camp in such good shape. Hopefully, I can be an inspiration to other players who have the same type of injury to prove that they can come back.”

Margerum always knew he’d be back, even on that day in May, 1984, when he tore a main ligament in his left knee during the Bears’ Lake Forest mini-camp.

In a non-contact practice without pads, Margerum, covered by cornerback Leslie Frazier, jumped for a pass over his head. While trying to avoid landing on Frazier, Margerum came down with his left leg straight and stretched his knee backward. When he got up, he had lost control of his knee and the bottom part of his leg was dangling back and forth.

“I thought it was a joke at first, but it was no joke when I started to walk,” Margerum said.

Arthroscopic surgery revealed the ligament damage, and Margerum was told he would be out for the year.

A week later in Lake Tahoe, he underwent successful surgery, in which Richard Steadman, the U.S. Ski Team doctor, reinforced the damaged ligament with tendons.

It was the first major injury Margerum, 26, had suffered. It was his first real setback. But there was no sulking.

Margerum attacked his rehabilitation with the same vigor that he attacks life. He put as much energy into his comeback this past year as he did into partying during college.

“I’ve never seen an athlete work as hard as Ken worked in every way,” said Steve Aimonetti, the assistant strength coach at Stanford who monitored much of Margerum’s weight training during rehabilitation. “He totally dedicated his life to getting his knee back in shape.”

Said Margerum: “The thought of this ending my career never even crossed my mind.”

With that out of the way, Margerum has turned his thoughts to the task at hand--beating out Willie Gault for the No. 1 wide receiver position.

Margerum, who came to the Bears’ Lake Forest practice site last week to work out with the team’s rookies, has the look of a determined player.

Gone is the long, curly hair, which had been a Margerum trademark, in favor of a short, more businesslike look. He also has added about 10 pounds of muscle to his 5-foot 11-inch frame and weighs 180 pounds. Tests have shown that his left knee is 10% stronger than his right knee.

Said Aimonetti: “He wants to show (Bear Coach) Mike Ditka that he’s a regimented machine.”

Margerum enters camp rated as the third receiver behind Gault and Dennis McKinnon, who started last season, but he won’t be satisfied in a reserve role.

“I plan on making it a competitive situation with Willie Gault,” Margerum said. “Either I’m going to make him a better receiver by making him work harder or I’m going to beat him out and make us both better.

“I don’t think beating Willie Gault is going to be any tougher than what I’ve done over the past year. I want to get into the flow of things the first few weeks of camp and make it a slow, painful death for him by beating him out in the last week.”

Those who are familiar with Margerum’s rehabilitation program wonder how he ever made it to training camp alive.

There was the usual assortment of leg exercises and weight lifting and Margerum mixed in some Ultimate Frisbee and tennis when he was healthy enough to run. By last January, he was running pass patterns and catching footballs at Stanford.

But it was bicycling that occupied most of his time. He rode at least four hours a day--from 30 to 60 miles--in the Palo Alto foothills. Some weekends, he’d take off for Monterey, about 120 miles to the south, or to the beaches, about 30 miles west over the Santa Cruz Mountains.

He always changed his bike routes, so not to stagnate or get bored with one trail, and he rode with many different friends, among them former Olympic speed skater Eric Heiden, now a bicycle racer.

But even Heiden, whom Margerum said “doesn’t know the meaning of pain,” might cringe when he hears what Margerum did in Hawaii last January.

Margerum had just watched the Bears defeat the Washington Redskins in a playoff game on TV and was feeling a little pumped. He thought he was healthy enough to play at the time, and he had to blow off some steam.

So, he persuaded a friend to accompany him on a bike ride to the summit of Maui’s Mt. Haleakala, an extinct, precipitous volcano (elevation 10,023 feet) that most people wouldn’t drive up.

The pair rode 30 miles to the peak, straight uphill from sea level, for seven hours without stopping. It was 85 degrees at the start; 28 degrees at the peak. Margerum’s friend was hyperventilating at the finish. Margerum was beaming.

“That was probably the most difficult physical thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Margerum said.

Maybe not the most dangerous, though.

Margerum would find a steep hill near Palo Alto, and without a helmet, go downhill as fast as he could without using brakes and by leaning into the turns.

“We’d pass cars going about 40 or 45 m.p.h.,” he said. “That was crazy. We’d go with some girls and they’d make it to the bottom 15 minutes after we did, and we’d scare the heck out of them.”

Margerum had only two bike wrecks, one which tore most of the skin off his shoulder. He paused for a moment after recalling his days of reckless riding and seemed to realize how insane it was.

“You know, I’m glad and grateful and lucky that I am here and healthy in camp and ready to go,” he said.

Others wondered if he would ever make it out of Stanford alive.

Margerum was the ultimate party animal in college. A skinny Bluto. A Monday rarely went by without a juicy Ken Margerum story from the previous weekend.

“You always wondered if he was going to cash it in,” said Aimonetti, who was a sophomore offensive tackle when Margerum was a senior in 1980.

“I admit, I was out of control,” Margerum said. “I didn’t care about sleep, I didn’t care about anything but having a good time, and I did have a good time. I probably had the best time anyone has ever had who went to Stanford.

“College is the place to do those kinds of things. College is the place where you’re protected by the university--you’re on campus and there are campus cops, and you can get away with so much stuff, it’s wild.”

What kind of stuff?

One year, Margerum lived in an on-campus house near the Stanford practice field with quarterback John Elway, Dave Morze and Rob Moore.

On occasion, after two-a-day practices, Margerum would call the campus radio station (KZSU) and request a song. The four roommates would meet back home, and when Margerum’s song came on, they would see how many beers they could consume for the duration of the tune.

“They did a case and a half one time,” Aimonetti said.

And you can bet the song wasn’t Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

Margerum can’t remember many other stories.

“A lot of them are just fog,” he said. “They’ve all blended in, one night after another. I honestly don’t believe I graduated and played such good football with all the stuff I did.”

Margerum may not remember everything he did, but he knows why he did all those things. To get a rush.

We’re talking about a guy who once dove into Northern California’s shallow Lake Lagunita from the top of a boathouse, 30 feet high, who was once caught tossing a Frisbee at 3 a.m. in 85,000-seat Stanford Stadium, who loves to windsurf, who tried acrobatic plane flying and thinks it’s something everyone should do at least once.

Margerum loves to do what other people wish they could do. His actions are usually spontaneous, sometimes shocking.

“I don’t really think about what I’m going to do,” he said. “I just sort of do what comes along.”

But he takes exception to those who have called him a flake.

“Hey, I’ve never been arrested, never been in jail, never had a speeding ticket, I’m a good citizen,” he said. “That’s not being a flake. My friends all did the same things, but because they’re not NFL football players and don’t get written up in the paper, they don’t have that reputation. But you wouldn’t believe some of the stories about them--they’d make mine look like a joke.”

Margerum doesn’t regret any of the things he did, and he said he’d go back to college and do it all over again if he had the chance.

“But now, if I’m to live to be 100, I can’t continue at that pace,” he said. “I’ve realized what’s important and I’ve matured. I still do the same fun things, but I do them a little more under control.”

Friends say that the knee injury last year changed Margerum--made him more serious about his life and career. Margerum isn’t so sure. He thinks he might have just matured a bit with age.

But if it wasn’t for the injury, Margerum might not have spent so much time researching what he calls “obscure investment devices.” How fitting.

Margerum subscribed to about $500 worth of investment newsletters this past year and spent about four hours a day devouring financial information. With no professional advice, he invested in several Vancouver Stock Exchange gold-mining companies, oil in Southern California and the three homes he purchased and now rents--and he has done well.

For instance, Margerum studied the highs and lows of several Canadian gold-mining companies, took the ones with the most fluctuations during the past five years and invested in them when they had reached their all-time lows. In one company, he bought 10,000 shares at 65 cents apiece and, in three months, the stock rose to $2.10 a share.

That’s a $14,500 profit in three months.

“I consider the business world a big poker game, a big crap shoot is what it is,” Margerum said. “Everyone else is afraid to come along with me, but I tell you what, my results speak for themselves. I’m doubling and tripling my money in everything I do, so I figure I must be doing something right.”

Margerum recently purchased a 1920 Victorian three-story triplex for $163,000 in Lake Forest, an upper-class community of 15,000 people which is sort of the Beverly Hills of Chicago. The mortgage will be $1,600 a month and he’ll rent the first two floors for $1,400.

“I’ll live on the third floor for $200 and get all the tax benefits,” Margerum said. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that’s a good deal. I can walk to practice from home, there’s a couple of restaurants nearby and one watering hole. I figure, what else does a guy need?”

How about a successful and rewarding professional life?

Margerum may be happy with his overall position in this world, but he knows he hasn’t fulfilled many of his professional goals.

After setting career records at Stanford for touchdowns (30) and receiving yardage (2,430), Margerum had an excellent rookie season with the Bears in 1981, as he led the team in receptions (39) for 584 yards. He made his first start in the fifth game that year and caught 10 passes for 140 yards against the Minnesota Vikings.

He started all nine games during the strike-shortened 1982 season, but had only 14 receptions. It was Mike Ditka’s first year as the Bears’ coach, and one of his moves after the season was to use a first-round draft pick to obtain Gault, who had most of the playing time in 1983 and caught 40 passes, while Margerum caught just 21.

Margerum planned to challenge for the starting job when he reported to camp in 1984, but the knee injury ended his chances.

“Ken has planned his life pretty well, in and out of football,” Ditka said. “He understood what he had to do investment-wise, and now he has other goals in football. Not fulfilling those has been frustrating to him, but I still think he has a heck of a chance.”

Margerum, as usual, looks at the bright side.

“Basically, I feel as if I’m starting my career in Chicago right now,” he said. “The coaches here know I have the ability, but I haven’t really gotten my act together yet.”

Margerum has been blessed with all the natural ability in the world. He doesn’t have great size but has excellent speed and hands, a 38-inch vertical jump and a knack for catching anything thrown his way. The game has always come easy to him, so he doesn’t think sitting out a year will affect him much.

“The hardest thing about coming back will probably be finding a car to drive around Chicago so I don’t slip around on icy streets,” he said. “As far as playing, though, I think it’s pretty simple. You run your patterns and you catch the ball. If you get knocked down, you get up and go back to the huddle.

“It’s so natural and I’ve done it for so long that I don’t think missing a year will be much of a problem at all. It will improve my attitude because I’ll be more enthusiastic and I’m not gonna fall asleep during the meetings.”

Fall asleep during the meetings? Now, that would be a good one to add to the Margerum file.

May it continue to grow.