Chris Hanburger’s wife hands him the hotel room phone. Congratulations, he is told. What an honor to share with so many great players and thousands of people.
“Thanks, but I pretty much like being alone,” the old linebacker says.
He says he has a cellphone, but Hanburger left it at home in South Carolina.
“Didn’t want to be bothered.”
Asked by one of the event planners in Canton, Ohio, how long his speech would take Saturday night, Hanburger said he didn’t know, that he planned to “wing it.” “Then the guy said, ‘Send me a little outline. We got to plan for commercial breaks.’ Can you believe it?”
The Reluctant Hall of Famer sighs through the phone, a day before he has to share a stage with Deion Sanders, who in Hanburger’s NFL some 40 years ago might have been clotheslined for dancing on the field.
Neon Deion and the Humble Hangman — perfect, no? Mr. Star Power and Mr. Wallflower — one night only.
Someone in the NFL has a sense of irony. Or humor. Or something.
“I just don’t like this,” Hanburger says. “I’m totally baffled by what the heck is going on.”
You want to remind him no player in the history of the Washington Redskins — not John Riggins, not recent franchise inductees Darrell Green, Art Monk or Russ Grimm — went to more Pro Bowls than the 210-pound linebacker, outsized for even his era, on George Allen’s only Super Bowl team.
You want to tell him not many players can say they starred for two of the game’s greatest coaches, Allen and Vince Lombardi.
You finally settle on Sonny Jurgensen’s assessment of his former teammate: “One of the smartest players ever — he just had so much intelligence with how he played the game.”
“That was a nice compliment,” Hanburger begins, “but evidently Sonny hadn’t met many players.”
He pauses and adds, “Heck, I just fooled a lot of people and tried to avoid contact.”
It’s no use. Private, beyond introverted (“Drives my wife crazy, but I don’t like to go out and eat; I don’t like to get on a bus”), much more comfortable at age 69 “cuttin’ trees, fixin’ my neighbor’s mower or helpin’ another with car repair” than the klieg lights of Canton, Hanburger can’t understand all the fuss now — because he never made one then.
“That’s basically who I am, who I always was,” he says. “I’ve never watched these enshrinement speeches. Seen some of the clips from some of them, but that’s it. Truthfully, I’ll be glad when this is all over.”
His disdain for attention definitely overshadowed his intelligence as a player. Hanburger not only memorized 125 different audibles long before coordinators talked to players through their helmets on the field — John Hannah, the Hall of Fame offensive lineman, once called him “the smartest player in the league” — he also had an uncanny knack for self-preservation.
“I remember a game where Sam [Huff] is laid out on the field after hittin’ some guy so damn hard,” Sonny recalled. “And finally Chris walks up to him and says something like, ‘That’s why I don’t stick my head in there, so I don’t end up like you on the ground.’ ”
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