Herculean Efforts Give Him a Name in Ram Mythology
The Rams call him Herk, which is short for Hercules. He looks like something they recruited off a pedestal in St. Peter’s Square. He wasn’t born, he was quarried. You could tattoo “Saskatoon, Saskatchewan” on his biceps and have room left over for a heart with an arrow in it.
“Even his muscles have muscles,” former teammate Bill Bain used to say.
The headlines all went to Eric Dickerson for the Rams’ victory over Tampa Bay last Sunday. It was Dickerson’s 42-yard run into the end zone that gave the team the 26-20 overtime win.
Nobody noticed the demolition firm of Slater, Harrah and Associates who went ahead to make sure the coast was clear. They were like sappers blowing up fortifications for the main army advance.
Jackie Slater took the inside charge, and Dennis Harrah “kicked out the middle linebacker.”
“I didn’t catch his number,” Harrah was to admit later. After 12 years, they’re beginning to look alike to Herk. He’s been kicking out linebackers since Nixon was President, Shack Harris was the quarterback, Lawrence McCutcheon and Wendell Tyler were the running backs and the Rams were in Los Angeles.
The Rams call Dennis Harrah Hercules because of his tremendous upper-body strength. He is built along the general lines of the battleship Missouri, and the gag has it that they use him in the off-season to crush cars at a junkyard.
Dennis Harrah goes 6-5, 270. If he had snow on him, you’d climb him. He’s one of the peaks that make the Ram front line look like the Dolomite Alps.
But there’s another reason to compare this Herk with the strong man of mythology. In Greek lore, the original Hercules sold his soul for immortality, not for riches and jewels, women and song.
He bound himself to a life of stoop labor, endless, dangerous, thankless taskdom to make up for the crazed killing of his wife and children and to get his place in the heavens as a star cluster. He ransomed that place with a life of service.
Among his 12 labors, he had to kill the lion, slay the Hydra that kept growing two new heads for each one he lopped off, catch the stag, destroy the wild boar, clean the Augean stables, capture the bull, get the belt worn by the queen of the Amazons and bring the three-headed dog to earth.
It sounds like a more or less perfect description of the task of an NFL offensive lineman. Offensive lines are the coal mines of football. It takes a special kind of heroic, sacrificial type to play there. In real war, you’d have to call for volunteers. The labors of the mythical Hercules are not all that distinguishable from those of an offensive lineman. He had invincible lions and three-headed dogs and Cretan bulls--but he never had the Refrigerator to block, or Randy White to keep from eating you, or Louis Kelcher to knock down.
Dennis Harrah estimates that he has laid 65 blocks a game in the 125 or so he has started over the years and at least half that many in the 20 other games in which he merely played. Any way you look at it, that comes to nearly 10,000 head-on collisions. That’s a whole lot of Augean stables to clean. And even though some of the defensive linemen he faced didn’t have three heads or a mane, they did have terrible tempers. Also a ferocious pass rush.
Kicking out Hacksaw Reynolds has to rank with any of the 12 labors of the original offensive lineman. The phrase Herculean task usually refers to something no one else can--or wants to--do. Offensive linemen understand perfectly.
The beauty of being an offensive lineman is like the beauty of being Hercules. Not too many people want your job. Kids don’t grow up dreaming of kicking out Mike Singletary or hoping William Perry doesn’t bite.
Offensive line play is like diamond-cutting. Not that it’s handed down from generation to generation; it’s just that, once you learn it, you never need go hungry again. It’s one of the skill positions of industry--but so is putting out oil-well fires.
Harrah has been able to rise above the anonymity of the job in that he was a rarity for an offensive guard--a first-round draft choice. And he was visible enough, and canny enough, to open a highly successful Long Beach restaurant called Legends. Herk does not rhyme with jerk.
The play that beat Tampa Bay Sunday was a bread-and-butter John Robinson stratagem called a “46-Gap.” This describes the place in the line where the hole will--hopefully--be when the running back comes through.
The public thinks Eric Dickerson invents these holes or makes up his runs as he goes along. Dennis Harrah and Jackie Slater--and the two or more guys they “kick out”-- and Eric Dickerson--know better.
This Hercules has 16 labors--more if the Rams get in the playoffs. The original Hercules was rewarded by becoming a constellation in the heavens. This one would be satisfied just to get his picture in the paper.