Tough or not, we all have to face this music

Last week's stories about Wally Hilgenberg and Ernie Holmes shook me up.

It took awhile to figure out why. It has something to do with the current NFL playoffs.

Wasn't it just a few years ago that the players in these games were named Hilgenberg and Holmes?

Today, as the Packers play the Giants and the Patriots play the Chargers, Holmes is dead and Hilgenberg is in a wheelchair.

Odd how a few years can turn into a few decades, invincibility into vulnerability and supermen into mere men?

Hilgenberg and Holmes were two of the NFL's toughest players. It was fitting they played for tough-named teams like the Vikings and the Steelers.

Folks, football is a tough game. One of the network news shows ran a piece recently about whether the technology of football helmets could apply to military helmets.

Not the other way around. Not war games applied to football games. Football applied to war.

The Hilgenberg and Holmes news confirmed again that when football runs its course, football players become ants on Earth along with the rest of us.

How hard must that be for them? How hard is the passage of time on the tough? Is it a matter of the tougher they are, the harder they fall?

Hilgenberg suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, just as many friends and relatives of yours and mine have suffered.

My only up-close-and-personal encounter with Hilgenberg came after a Bears game at Minnesota back in the 1970s. He steadied himself against a locker-room table, grimacing periodically from the aches of the game.

As painful as it was, Hilgenberg stuck around for every last question from a couple of reporters he didn't know.

Finally it was time for him to ask something: For permission, if we were done with him, to go get his battered body treated.

Man, I thought, how tough is this guy?

Now, at 65, he reads headlines like, "Former Vikings linebacker Hilgenberg at peace during the winter of his life."

How hard must that peace come for someone who ran out of the tunnel and into the Super Bowl?

"I don't know how people could deal with something like this without faith," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune quoted Wally Hilgenberg as saying.

Speaking of faith, former Steelers defensive tackle Ernie Holmes was an ordained minister when he died Thursday night in a Texas car crash.

Holmes, 59, reportedly did what no mortal should do. He failed to buckle his seat belt, fell asleep at the wheel and was ejected from the vehicle.

Seat belt? Pro football players don't need no stinkin' seat belts … do they?

Obviously they do just as we do. Even somebody as tough as Holmes does.

He was described this way by former teammate J.T. Thomas in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Ernie would often be pulled from practices because he was busting guys' heads open. … That's the kind of intensity he had."

Ah, but nothing is forever unless it turns out that way … and it never does.

At or near the end -- not the final whistle but later -- Hilgenberg is in a wheelchair and Holmes is dead.

The same types of things that get all of us got them.

I'll try not to think about that while marveling at the supermen in today's games.

mimrem@dailyherald.com