LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON : There Are Some Interesting Parallels to Football Careers of Jack, Jeff Kemp

He sits in a black leather chair in his office on Capitol Hill, but Jack Kemp once was where his son Jeff is--a professional quarterback sitting on a bench.

As the son backs up Joe Montana with the San Francisco 49ers, the congressman played behind Bobby Layne and Charlie Conerly. The father didn’t make it with Detroit, Pittsburgh, the New York Giants, Calgary and San Francisco.

But he made it with the San Diego Chargers, and especially with the Buffalo Bills. From there, he made it to Capitol Hill.

A professional quarterback has begotten another of stunning similarity: California looks, a Buffalo-tough body of similar height and weight, a remarkably strong arm, a make-it-happen scrambler type out of a small college (the father from Occidental, the son from Dartmouth) who barely skimmed into the pros but brought the wherewithal to make something of the opportunity.

Jack achieved stardom in his eighth season; Jeff is in his sixth.

Like the father, the son can make inspirational speeches (to youth and church groups), loves to ski and shares the same political and economic ideologies.

For a football trip back to the future--or forward to the past--consider the experience of Roy Gilbert of the 49ers’ staff: When he drove to the airport this year to pick up Jeff after his trade from the Rams, it was 27 years after Gilbert drove out to pick up Jack for his 49er tryout.

When the elder Kemp watches the younger play football--last Monday night was be the fifth time he has attended a 49er game this year--it’s with a canny quarterback’s knowing eye and a father’s concern for his son’s survival.

Take Jeff’s most recent game, from which he has just recovered, a particularly violent contest Oct. 19 against the Atlanta Falcons.

Jack and Joanne Kemp--wife and mother of pro football quarterbacks, a less emotional football parent, however, than her husband--flew to Atlanta in a celebratory mood. That changed.

“Brutal. Brutal,” said the father, in his big office chair, eating a ham and tomato sandwich and tortilla chips. “Not that I was any macho quarterback, but I’d always believed that there were enough rules to protect the quarterback.

“I don’t like the rule of calling him down just because a guy’s hanging around his neck or something. But after that game, as the father of a quarterback, I wanted to put up a picket fence around all quarterbacks.

“Both Jeff and (Atlanta’s) David Archer--David Archer took a shot.” Kemp’s voice lowered, in emphasis. “He had run to his right, was looking downfield, and the right-side linebacker was running full speed 30 yards across the field, hit this guy in the back. Full bore. Full bore!

“Now I’ve been hit in the back. Bobby Bell of the Kansas City Chiefs hit me in the back, and I didn’t see him coming. But it was only a six-yard sprint. This guy had a 36-yard sprint. It was brutal. The whole game was that way.

“Jeff is very courageous, and he is a scrambler, but I think he thought he was invincible. Somebody landed on his leg and . . . “

The congressman’s face fills with anguish. So does Jeff’s when he recalls an indelible childhood memory of his father downed. “I was 10 or 11 at the time,” he said. “I watched him play the Jets in Shea Stadium. That day he got knocked out and was lying for about a minute and a half in a pile of mud on the sideline.”

Jack Kemp continued: “Tough game. Tough game,” it having been his turn for vicarious pain. “I told my wife, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game in which someone had to perform under those circumstances. I shouldn’t say that. It wasn’t the worst ever. He took a real beating. But he hung in there. When he came off the field, he had an ice bag taped to his left elbow, and a crutch under one arm. Oh, boy, it was really sad.

“I was a father that night more than anything else. I couldn’t sleep thinking about it.”

But Jack Kemp leans back and says, “He’ll be back.”

Indeed, Jeff Kemp has demonstrated his father’s on-field tenacity. And off-field interests. While playing football, he’s gotten his MBA. With his father’s example before him, he seems to be preparing for power and success.

Talking to the two of them, Jeff’s life seems full of promise. One remembers the Adamses of America and the political Pitts of England. But that course upward has its dangers; Icarus, following his father, flew too high, lost his wings and drowned.

“I can honestly say that he’s surprised me,” said the father, considering the son’s six-year pro football career. “Not only has he stuck with it--he hung on by the skin of his teeth the first couple years--but he’s turned into a very competitive NFL quarterback. And he’s got a future.

“I forget where I was, in New York City or something, giving a speech. And I get this long-distance emergency call from Dartmouth. You know, as a parent a chill goes down your spine.

“Turns out that the Rams had seen him play against Brown. He hadn’t gotten drafted. But they wanted him. He said, ‘Do you think I should do it?’ I said, ‘Well, do you want to?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I really do.’ I said, ‘Well do it. You’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t.’

“I used to wonder if he could throw a little soft pass, a screen. I used to worry about that when I watched him play. He’s a very good long passer, very good on the sideline, the hooks, the comebacks, etc. But I wondered, at times, candidly, whether or not he’d be able to go back and then come up and just softly lay it out, just three yards away. This sounds boastful, but I had touch. Jeff did not have that touch. But Jeff really developed it. With pure raw tenacity.

“He’s not Montana. He knows he is a replacement for Montana. He’s got that all in perspective. He really is a pretty remarkable young man. I think he has good qualities that will transcend his pro football experience.”

Out on the Coast, Jeff Kemp comes in from the sunshine of a 49er practice. He limps; his hip hurts from the Atlanta game. He has a big red scrape on his chin. He’s not quite 6 feet, about 200 pounds, muscular, and a good thing, too, or maybe he wouldn’t be walking at all.

Indeed, he plays tough like his father, who in the days of Buffalo’s old War Memorial Stadium might, if Elbert (Golden Wheels) Dubenion were covered or Cookie Gilchrist simply could not dive into the line one more time, carry the ball himself and make out of the play whatever was needed. A Unitas, no. But the 1965 American Football League Player of the Year and quarterback of two Bills’ championship teams.

“I knew most of those guys,” Jeff said. “Cookie would give me Christmas presents. But it wasn’t like being Joe Montana’s son today. Dad was a big deal, but not nearly the big deal some football players are now. I think I always kind of assumed that’s what I’d want to do, be a quarterback. Since my dad did it, it didn’t seem like it was such a dream.”

Jeff Kemp has been schooled to be patient. With his father in Congress, he found himself third-string quarterback at Churchill High School in Potomac, Md. By his senior year, he started. While it was a championship team, it wasn’t a passing team.

Only a few Ivy League schools wanted Kemp. At Dartmouth, he had to wait until his junior year to start. When he played, his father and mother were there.

“We spent more money going to football games than we did for his tuition,” Jack Kemp said.

For fathers, it often is difficult to stay calm while watching a son play. To maintain demeanor, Jack Kemp, mostly, sits and rubs his trousers at the knees. But this one game, against Harvard, he could not contain himself.

The Crimson defense was playing so far back off David Shula, the coach’s son and noted Big Green receiver, that Jack saw an opportunity he could not resist.

Yes, the father came down out of the stands and right out to the sideline. “It’s not like he’s a meddling-type guy,” Jeff said. “But the cornerback was so far off, he came down and said,”--and Kemp the son used a stage whisper for this--” ’Jeff, throw the quick hitch.’ I guess, as he tells it, I said, ‘Get outta here,’ or something like that. But I ended up throwing it.”

For years, they have talked football (and economics), the father and son. When he was in high school, Jeff remembers his father saying things like, “ ‘When you get a chance early, audibilize. Let the guys know you’re in command of the game.’ He loved the chess game of it all, even though he was a physical quarterback. He scrambled, got hit and dove, got crunched. I can’t ever remember him sliding.

“That’s one of the notes I have in my playbook, that I’ve written to myself. The coaches remind me of it occasionally. ‘When running, slide before getting hit.’ I’ve slid, but usually not before getting hit.”

As a Charger, the elder Kemp broke a finger of his passing hand on the helmet of a defender, but told the doctor on the sideline to set it bent, to conform to the shape of a football.

At Dartmouth, the son, too, was a tough quarterback. But a pro career? Not likely. Yet, even after being passed by in the pro draft his senior year, he never ruled out the possibility of becoming a pro quarterback.

“Dad was as surprised as anything when I called him up and told him the Rams had called,” Jeff said. “I was so excited. And he was excited. And I was just thrilled. He said, ‘Gee, I never knew you wanted it that badly.’ Really, I thought there was no sense making it clear to him this was my dream and my goal because what if it didn’t happen.”

So Jeff spent five years prepping with the Rams.

“I sum it up as great. They were the team that found me and gave me a chance. And then ‘84, I got my chance and we won most of those games and went to the playoffs, and I think the whole process of being patient and going through the whole thing--third string, fourth string, second string, and them bringing in (Dan) Pastorini and Bert Jones and (Vince) Ferragamo and all those guys, not to mention (Dieter) Brock and (Steve) Bartkowski (who is renting Jeff’s house in Southern California)--that whole experience was one that built, quote, character, quote.

“I’ve always known my career wouldn’t take off quickly. Nothing’s really ever come that easily. If anywhere it’s going to come tough, it’s going to be in pro football.”

Jack Kemp, the third of four boys, grew up in a modest section of Los Angeles. The love of sports and the unswerving work ethic that he has passed along was inherited from his father and an older brother.

His father was a good baseball player but too busy working to pursue the game. First, he used a motorcycle to deliver things, then added a sidecar, then bought a truck, and eventually had a small trucking company. At 6, Jack wore the oversized jerseys of the second brother, Tom, who in high school would be a star left-handed quarterback.

“I was a sports addict,” Jack Kemp remembered. “My books were on sports. I loved playing sports games, both physical and mental. I knew trivia. All my schoolwork was on sports. Somebody asked me to write a paper on an invention; I wrote mine on the invention of the forward pass, by Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais of Notre Dame.

“That’s how I was thinking: everything sports. It didn’t bother my parents that I was monomaniacal about sports because they knew there was going to be a transfer of interest at some point to other things. There was. My love of books for sports has translated into a love of books in history and economics and politics.”

It was headline material in the mid-’60s that a quarterback of the Buffalo Bills could be reading “Human Action” by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.

Ludwig von Mises and Bobby Layne, Kemp loved them both.

“I just talked to Bobby Layne. He’s in Lubbock, Texas. Look at the picture. Look at that picture up there!” His voice is rising, he’s pointing at a wall of pictures, of football players and politicians. But one is special. It shows him sitting on the bench next to Layne. “That was my first game, in Briggs Stadium, playing the Cleveland Browns. Bobby Layne’s wife found that in his scrapbook and sent it to me. That’s one of my most cherished pictures. Look how young he looks.”

To say nothing of the crew-cut Kemp. “Jackie Kemp,” he’s listed in the Giants’ all-time roster. He was not an all-time Giant.

He did better as a Charger. On March 20, 1960, when owner Barron Hilton unveiled the new Chargers’ lightning-bolt uniform at a Santa Monica cocktail party, he picked Kemp to model the uniform. Although he quarterbacked the Chargers into two AFL title games, the team let him get away to the Bills for the $100 waiver price.

He laughs. “I think I was worth more than $100, my free-market value.”

He would play catch with Jeff in the yard in Buffalo, and later in Bethesda, Md., outside Washington. And when Jeff visits, he said, “I play catch with my little brother the same way. And Dad comes out and usually watches. But he’ll throw the ball. He throws a good spiral, still.”

Jeff’s younger brother--he has two sisters, Jennifer, a teacher, and Judith, a college senior--also is a quarterback.

Jimmy Kemp (Jack and Joanne like names that start with “J”) just finished his sophomore season at Churchill High. Jack attended 8 of this son’s 10 games, taking off weekends from campaigning. “I was probably the only politician in America who didn’t campaign on the weekends. Sundays were NFL football and Saturdays were Jimmy’s games.

“I think Jimmy’s got some potential. I didn’t see it as much in Jeff at that age as I see it in Jimmy.

“To me, quarterbacking is a unique opportunity to perform in a leadership position, and from a raw talent standpoint, I think Jimmy probably is more of a born passer than Jeff was. I have long arms and big hands, Jeff’s got shorter arms and huge biceps. Jimmy is long arms, big hands, natural thrower.”

Jack Kemp finishes his sandwich. “I was just thinking the other day how many football games we’ve seen our children play.”

Now Jeff has a son, Kyle Jeffrey, nearing 2. He may be a quarterback. “He’ll probably be a middle linebacker,” said the grandfather. “He’s a tank. He looks like Sam Huff. He may break the mold.”