Craig Meets Heavyweights Every Week

He calls his brother-in-law on the phone and asks the same thing every time: “You working hard?”

Yes, champion boxer Michael Nunn reassures champion football player Roger Craig, he is working hard.

By whose standards, though?

“I keep preaching hard work to Michael, because you can’t get by on just natural ability,” Craig says. “Not in professional sports, not anymore.”

Craig’s personal notion of what constitutes hard work would kill some men. Mornings, the San Francisco 49er running back goes running, anywhere from four to eight miles through hilly horse trails. He does seven-minute miles uphill and six-minute miles downhill. Or else he goes to 49er camp and runs hundreds of hundred-yard dashes over the course of any given week, on his own, before and after practice.

After games, Craig drags his bruised, beaten body--”I look like I’ve been locked in a cage with a tiger,” he says--to a chiropractor, a massage therapist and an herbalist, not necessarily in that order. The chiropractor pops his spine into place. The masseuse kneads his muscles and walks back and forth on the calves of his legs. The herbalist smears his bruises with home-grown oils until the burning sensation makes the football player howl with pain.

Craig thinks it’s worth it.

“My pain tolerance is so high,” he says, “I feel I can conquer anything.”

Could be, could be. At the Superdome this afternoon, Craig will take handoffs and catch passes from Joe Montana as the 49ers attempt to conquer the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXIV. Watch for him. He’ll be the one with his head down, hurtling into tacklers, cannonballing straight ahead, knees driving into somebody’s sternum, afraid of nothing.

As tough as Nunn is, the middleweight can’t get over the way his sister’s husband takes punishment from the likes of Lawrence Taylor one week and Mike Singletary the next and keeps coming back for more. Nunn knows how much time he has between fights, and wonders what it must be like to live Craig’s life, having bruisers coming at you from all directions, in all shapes and sizes, before you’ve even completely healed from the week before.

As Joan Ryan wrote in the San Francisco Examiner: “Nunn never goes up against anyone heavier than himself. Craig goes forehead to forehead with men who need parade permits to cross the street.”

Both of them grew up tough, though, in the Quad City streets of Davenport, Iowa. Craig and Nunn grew up three blocks and three years apart, attended the same high school, the same Baptist church. Nunn is two inches taller, 65 pounds lighter. When he steps into the ring, as he did against Iran Barkley last year in Reno, Craig is at ringside, cheering him on.

The two men are proud of one another, and Nunn has always taken pride in reminding anyone who will listen that “Iowa turns out more than corn.” Iowa turns out people with tough hides and tough husks.

When Craig gets off work, for example, he feels as though he has been in a fight.

“I can sense there’s internal bleeding,” he says. “My body temperature goes higher and higher. I have to ice myself down. The rest of the night, I can’t eat, can’t sleep. I’m one big bruise. My hips hurt, my ribs hurt, my back muscles are screaming. I feel like I’ve been in a war, like somebody’s put gunshots into me.

“Sometimes, I just want to go lie somewhere and curl up and not move, not be touched, not be bothered by anybody. Just leave me there, let me roll over and die. Then I get over it and drag myself through the whole routine again, get my whole body worked over, like a car.”

He goes home to the Santa Cruz mountains to his wife, Vernessia, and his playful kids, Damesha, Rometra and little Rogdrick, who just turned 4. He goes off in his Jeep for long rides. Visits the Cupertino cafe he owns with several teammates. Eats a diet free of red meat. Keeps his body as trim and slim as when he used to do some fashion modeling for Macy’s.

Roger Craig, 29, is still as tough as they come. He has never missed an NFL game.

“Once he starts, he doesn’t stop,” cornerback Eric Wright says. “With exercise, with anything. He’s a machine.”

While Montana and Jerry Rice were taking bows before and after Super Bowl XXIII, it was all but forgotten that Craig rushed for 1,502 yards and caught 76 passes, leading the team in both statistics. In the Super Bowl, he rushed for 71 yards and caught eight passes for 101 yards. He did most of the heavy lifting on San Francisco’s game-winning, 92-yard touchdown drive.

Forgotten man?

“I don’t feel forgotten,” Craig says. “Do you feel I’m forgotten?”

Well, frankly, yes, somewhat.

He seems to weigh this possibility, hand on chin. “Hmmm, I hope not,” he finally says.

When the hard days and nights get harder, he thinks of his late father, Elijah Craig, repairing a bread company’s delivery trucks; or his mother, Ernestine, a machine operator who assembled tractor parts, laboring away to make ends meet. He also thinks of Michael Nunn, the tough kid from the neighborhood, the kid every punk in the neighborhood was eager to challenge--and later regretted challenging--in the streets.

“Sometimes, you got to go through a lot to get a lot,” Craig says. “No pain, no gain, you know.”

There is a work ethic involved here, a test of selfhood that makes a man willing to push himself as far as he can, then go one step beyond. The safest bet at the Super Bowl today will be that Roger Craig, by day’s end, will be in terrible pain, but only after he’s gained, and gained, and gained.