McConkey No Stranger to War Zone

You might vote for Tunney against Dempsey in the first fight, Donerail in the 1913 Kentucky Derby, or the Miracle Braves in the 1914 World Series, but the longest shot I ever saw in sports was Roger Staubach at the Dallas Cowboys’ 1969 training camp.

Staubach had been a Heisman Trophy winner but he had not played a competitive game of football in four years. He’d been in the Navy, and all he had to do to get to be the Cowboys’ quarterback was beat out Don Meredith, Craig Morton and Jerry Rhome. I made him 999-1 on the morning line.

The next-longest shot I ever saw was Rocky Bleier, the ex-Notre Damer when he came out of Vietnam with his foot so shot up it looked more like something you’d see caught in an animal trap than a human foot. I played golf with him and he couldn’t hardly even walk and he was talking optimistically about playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers. I made him 500-1. With this in mind, I went down to the Super Bowl training camps the other day to look into the life and times of another returning American serviceman, the honorable Philip Joseph McConkey. Some people think his first name is Little, it’s been printed that way so often: “Little Phil McConkey.”

Little Phil McConkey might have been my third-longest shot in history, had I known about him when he reported to a Giant tryout camp in the summer of 1983.

Phil, too, had been in military service to our country and had not played a down of football in five years. He, too, had played his undergraduate football at the Naval Academy, which no one ever mixed up with Ohio State, or even Memphis State.

He was sub-Heisman. He was small even for service academy football, and, even though he set records at Annapolis for most touchdowns caught, most yards per catch and most punt and kickoff returns, he didn’t have anybody negotiating to have his shore duty some place within easy commute of Sunday afternoon football.

McConkey didn’t go to Annapolis because he wanted to be Admiral Halsey. He went there because no one else wanted him. He weighed 140 pounds, he was short, not slow but not fast. But he wanted to play football. “Nobody else wanted to waste a scholarship on me,” he recalls. “Not even Syracuse, which was just down the road.”

A free-agent tryout camp in pro football comes fuzzily into focus as a bunch of 380-pound guys wearing their mothers’ stewing kettles for helmets, sneakers with holes in them and an old jersey that says Pizza Shack on the back.

No one really expects to get a football player out of one. It’s just a kind of complicated Amateur Hour. It’s the football equivalent of a lot of guys trying to get into show business playing the swinette or the washboard or the national anthem with dinner forks.

Phil McConkey was not your basic day-dreaming fat boy when he showed up. He was an officer and a gentleman, a lieutenant in Uncle Sam’s Navy, a helicopter and fighter pilot, and you knew his courage had been put to the test when you learned he flew off carriers.

But to the NFL, he was just another swabbie. A guy who can handle a pitching deck in rough seas is not necessarily a guy who can catch punts with one ton of malice in plastic bearing down on him.

McConkey, however, could do that. Incredibly, he made the team. He had not played a down of football in five years, he was undersized and underweight but he would go down with deck guns blazing.

“(Giant Coach) Bill Parcells gave me a legitimate look,” is the way McConkey recalls it.

Others remember it as an eye opener. “You had to like the way he got up--he had this light in his eyes. You had the feeling he’d be hard to discourage.”

But before he could play in his first regular-season game since 1978, the Navy stepped in again and he was gone for that season.

The NFL figured it was anchors aweigh for Lt. McConkey. He was as long gone as Capt. Bligh. But this Barnacle Phil was as hard to stop as a battle wagon at long range and he kept turning up. When he got out of the Navy, after six years, he showed the landlubbers by rolling up 1,001 all-purpose yards with the Giants--kickoff returns, punt returns, pass catches. He would have blown up the football and picked up the towels if they liked.

A tough kid, the son of a Buffalo police detective, McConkey had been used to being a multiple-purpose player. “In high school, I played offense, defense, on special teams, kickoffs, punts. I was seldom off the field.”

He did so many things, none of them stood out. Scouts had the glasses on flashier teammates and to this day, McConkey seethes at what he calls “pretty boy football.”

“I chose the Naval Academy because they played big-time football and it was my only chance,” he said.

But when his class graduated, Ens. McConkey made no effort to weigh anchor or jump ship. He headed for Pensacola and a cockpit, not an NFL camp. No one intervened to get him shore duty near a football team.

Ens. McConkey reported for duty with a salute, not a football. He made no attempt to go over the side but he bears no ill will to those who did.

“I think Napoleon McCallum has handled it with dignity and very well,” he says. “I think Eddie Myers is getting a raw deal after six summers with the Atlanta Falcons,” he adds simply, and drops it.

On the Giants, McConkey is kind of the task force’s destroyer escort. He returns punts and kickoffs, and catches passes. He is the second-leading punt returner in New York Giant history. Only the late, great Emlen Tunnell had more yards and more catches.

“McConkey could catch a punt in a rock slide,” a Cowboy coach once said of him.

He caught 32 passes for 279 yards and a touchdown this season. He caught a touchdown pass in the playoff game against San Francisco and tied a record by returning seven punts.

He’s still having an identity crisis. The Giants cut him this fall but after he had gone to Green Bay and played four games, they realized they had made a mistake and reclaimed him.

To the press gathered for Super Sunday XXI, Lt. McConkey still has to win his wings. They have pointed to the Giants’ wide receiver corps as the soft underbelly of the otherwise rock-ribbed brute force.

It’s a charge that turns Lt. McConkey into Capt. Blood. In his best “Now hear this!” voice from the bridge he bellows the contradiction:

“We have guys who will go over the middle to catch the ball. We don’t have those glamour wideouts who run these pretty-boy routes down the sidelines on camera. We get our hair mussed, our helmets cracked. We don’t play pretty-boy football. We play to win. We don’t care how it looks.”

John Paul Jones couldn’t have said it any better. The crew of the S.S. Ugly, Lt. McConkey commanding, has not yet begun to fight either. The Good Ship Lollipop, a.k.a., the Denver Broncos, had better brace for a boarding party.

One thing’s for sure. Lt. McConkey guarantees it won’t be pretty.