Baghdad Lesson: Football Is Only a Game

You have heard that football is war. Even some of the vernacular is the same. There are marches into enemy territory, blitzes, sweeps, bombs. Quarterbacks are often called “field generals.”

One of today’s marquee players is nicknamed “Rocket.”

NFL players and coaches frequently talk about “going to war” on Sundays in games that will be won or lost “in the trenches.”

Guard Steve Wisniewski of the Raiders knows better. Wisniewski is one of the meanest, toughest up-and-coming talents in the game. He made the all-rookie team in 1989 and was named to the Pro Bowl last season after making the difficult switch from right to left guard.

Wisniewski, 6 feet 4 and 280 pounds, never backs down from the necessary confrontations of his profession. Monday, he was involved in two practice-field scrapes.

Yet, for all his brute strength and brawn, Wisniewski knows that football is not war. War is war.

He discovered as much last January when he raced home each day from Raider practice to catch the latest developments in the Persian Gulf, where his older brother, Vince, was flying bombing missions over Iraq. While Steve was preparing for the AFC championship game against the Buffalo Bills, Vince was maneuvering his F-16 around antiaircraft fire and dodging surface-to-air missiles.

While Steve was chasing defenders in practice, Vince was tracking Scud missile trails to launch sites.

“It brings into perspective how (football) really isn’t war,” Wisniewski said during a break between two-a-day practices this week.

“I give my brother all the credit in the world. Like I wrote to him in a letter, we just play a game of X’s and O’s. As for my life’s importance, it doesn’t really rank up there. Their game that they train for is life and death. Whether we’re for or against the war, they don’t decide that. They just go when called and stand up for what our country stands for.”

Vince Wisniewski, an Air Force major, survived the war unscathed after completing an estimated 40 sorties. He came home in March for the birth of his second child, Matthew Vincent, named in honor of a wingman in the squadron.

“I believe Vince’s wingman bailed him out of a bad situation, and that enabled him to come home in one piece,” Steve Wisniewski said.

The war seemed almost a surreal time for Steve. The Raiders were marching toward the championship game as tension mounted in the Middle East. He knew the only thing keeping him from being overseas was his football talent. Like his older brother, Wisniewski had planned to enter military service after high school. Steve’s size precluded his flying F-16s, but he would have been doing something, somewhere.

Steve, though, was a football hero. Penn State snatched the talented lineman from Westfield High in Houston and made him a star. Four years later, the Raiders drafted Wisniewski with the 29th overall selection in 1989.

The Persian Gulf War broke out four days before the Raiders’ AFC title game against Buffalo.

“That was a crazy time,” Wisniewski said. “There was a lot going one. I tried to stay focused on our game, one day at a time.”

It wasn’t easy. It helped knowing that Vince is as proud of Steve as Steve is of Vince.

In honor of his brother’s squadron, the Raiders wore stickers--”33rd Tactical Fighter Wing”--on the backs of their helmets during the AFC title game. Some of the stickers were mailed overseas to Vince’s squadron, which was excited about the game.

Vince later told Steve that the gesture was greatly appreciated. “From what I understand, there was just a huge lift of emotion for them,” Steve said.

Emotion was the operative word that week when Wisniewski huddled around the television set that delivered the war to his living room.

“That’s the kind of age we’re in right now,” Wisniewski said of the technology. “During the war, they’re getting a football game over there as we are watching the reports of every mission.”

Vince Wisniewski is proud of his kid brother, the Raider, but Steve wonders whether the public’s perception of his celebrity is not skewed.

In his family, Steve still garners most of the headlines, and he earns more money in a year than Vince probably will make in 10.

“I feel they don’t get all the credit they deserve from the public,” Wisniewski said of servicemen and women. “People don’t understand what kind of tough job they have. He’s a major in the Air Force and now has his master’s degree and is flying an F-16. But as far as salaries go, he could make triple if he was in the outside world. They have to make a lot of sacrifices to want to live that life and do that job for us. Maybe in that way I feel guilty. I’m playing a game. And my salary is much higher.”

Of late, Vince Wisniewski has been able to savor victory.

Because he was an expectant father, Vince was among the first to be sent home after the cease-fire. He received a hero’s welcome upon arrival at Ft. Sumter, S.C.

“They made quite a scene at the airport when he returned,” Steve said. “All the news crews were there. They got the whole family reaction--the All-American scene, his little girl running up into his arms.”

Vince and Steve were reunited a few weeks later back home in Houston.

“When we did get that word that he was on the transport coming home, we just kind of relaxed,” Steve said.

The war over and Vince safely home, Steve had to explain the Raiders’ 51-3 loss to Buffalo in the title game. Someone hadn’t held up his end of the deal.

Steve explained that it was just one of those days, the kind Vince couldn’t have afforded in the skies above Baghdad.