Reconciliation Nothing but a Publicity Stunt

After 18 years, Darryl Stingley was going to meet face-to-face with Jack Tatum, the man who ended his football career and put him in a wheelchair for life with a neck-high tackle.

Then Stingley, the former New England Patriots wide receiver, was told that Tuesday’s meeting with the former Raider defensive back was a publicity stunt, not a simple reconciliation.

Stingley’s agent said Tatum wanted the meeting, which was to be taped at Stingley’s Chicago home for airing by Fox-TV, to promote his new book. No thanks, Stingley said.

“I’m numb now,” he told the Boston Globe. “I have a headache. I knew nothing about a book. They told me nobody was making money off this. I’m sick.”

Jack Sands, Stingley’s agent who canceled the meeting, said, “This is one of the lowest things I have ever heard of.”

Tatum, who could not be reached for comment, wrote about the possibility of meeting Stingley in his new book, “Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum.”

“Maybe someday Darryl Stingley and I will get together and talk,” Tatum wrote.

Writing of the Aug. 12, 1978, collision which left Stingley a paraplegic, Tatum wrote, “I understand why Darryl is considered the victim. But I’ll never understand why some people look to me as the villain.”

Tatum’s first book, “They Call Me Assassin,” was published in 1980.

“Here Jack Tatum is, still getting money off me after 18 years for destroying my life,” Stingley said. “No, he didn’t destroy my life. For altering my life.”

Even before the revelation about the book, Stingley’s friends had warned him not to meet with Tatum, because “if Tatum couldn’t even once come to see me in 18 years, that he even couldn’t lift a phone once in those 18 years and call me, what could he want now?”

But Stingley had planned to go through with the meeting, which was to be shown Oct. 27 at halftime of the Miami-Dallas game.

He said he insisted that Fox put an 800 phone number on the screen through which viewers could donate to the Darryl Stingley Foundation, which helps Chicago teenagers.

“Here I was trying to find all the good that’d come out of this, and now it’s just another negative,” Stingley said. “My friends were all telling me this and they were all saying about Tatum, ‘A leopard can’t really change his spots,’ and they’re right. This leopard can’t change his spots.”