Rozner: Bears' Sayers remembered as the elite of the elite

Time does few a favor.

It is our greatest enemy, the clock relentless, stealing precious moments and memories, undefeated as it removes from us that which we hold dear.

Harshest is it to the athletes of our youth - or our parents' youth - stars forgotten and diminished as every new ESPN highlight is trumpeted as the latest and greatest.

Gale Sayers died Wednesday at the age of 77, after a long and awful battle with dementia, Sayers himself robbed of all that mattered most to him.

Many watched for the first time Wednesday his greatest runs, the impossible cuts, the lightning-fast stops and starts, the eyes in the back of his head, the electrifying and transformative style.

Sayers was not the greatest athlete in Chicago sports history. He was not the best football player. He wasn't even the best running back.

But before knee injuries stole from him his greatest gifts, Sayers was as exciting and explosive an athlete as any in this city's history, the ability to lift fans out of their seats, for pure wizardry on a very shortlist with perhaps only Michael Jordan and Denis Savard.

When Sayers had the football, whether 9 yards or 99 yards away from the end zone, no one could take their eyes off him for fear of missing something extraordinary, missing something they had never seen before and might never see again.

A rare talent indeed.

So great was Sayers, so brilliant his ability, that he was the youngest player ever enshrined in the Hall of Fame at age 34 after only 68 games played, most of those over five brilliant NFL seasons.

The "Kansas Comet" was selected fourth overall by the Bears in 1965, one spot behind Hall of Fame teammate Dick Butkus, who also suffered knee injuries that shortened a brilliant career.

"If you wish to see perfection as a running back," said George Halas as he presented Sayers for induction, "you had best get a hold of a film of Gale Sayers. He was poetry in motion. His like will never be seen again."

Halas was correct.

It was probably 20 years ago that teammate Johnny Morris stopped me in the middle of our conversation at Arlington Park as we talked about the greatest running backs of all time.

Listing one after another, who you would want for a career or a season or a game, he made it clear that for one play it was Gale Sayers and only Gale Sayers. There is no other player, Morris said, that he'd want to try to break a long one.

Not only was Sayers instant offense, but on punt or kick returns he was the greatest threat of all time. Many will say Devin Hester or Deion Sanders, but that's only because they never saw Sayers.

More than the highlights we finally saw on national shows Wednesday, most that even know the name think of Sayers from the movie "Brian's Song," a tear-jerker about his close friend Brian Piccolo, who died of cancer at 26.

It's an emotional love story about two men of different races, one an animated and entertaining Italian, the other a very shy and unassuming Black man who faced so much adversity in his life.

Sayers told me at the Super Bowl in San Diego in 1988 that he believed much of what was written, said or portrayed throughout the years was trivial compared to the life he had led.

With a smile on his face - always a smile on his face - he said life is so much bigger than that.

I sensed no bitterness - though he was entitled - not toward any one person or moment, even if his career was not all what it could have been, and hardly remembered beyond those players who played with or against him.

He mentioned Butkus and Bobby Orr, and wondered what all of them might have been able to accomplish in that era had there been arthroscopic surgery during their careers.

Though there has never been a more exciting football player, he walked through the lobby of that San Diego hotel largely unnoticed.

The horrific irony of dementia was that in the end, Sayers suffered the worst loss, memories and love evading him as did his rightful place among the elite of the elite.

But there is no denying what you see on film, and if you haven't done it, spend a few minutes on YouTube watching ballet on a football field, beauty amid the brutality, a thoroughbred galloping free from the plow horses through the slop and mud.

On the day he died, Gale Sayers was suddenly and mournfully remembered as unique, his like never to be witnessed again.

We must hope that somewhere in his soul, the man knew his legacy was secure.