Jim Tyrer: HOF Seniors selector's insight

Note: Fellow Senior Blue Chjp Committee selector Ron Borges will present the unique case of offensive tackle Jim Tyrer to the committee during the next cutdown meeting. He recently sent a letter to Senior Selectors outlining Tyrer’s case. Borges agreed to post the letter to inform everybody about the unusual details that impact Tyrer’s consideration — emphasizing that his play on the field, the HOFame’s only accepted criteria — is as good as it gets. The Hall of Football addressed Tyrer’s candidacy previously, but Borges has pursued the offensive tackle’s induction since 2016 and before. — Frank Cooney

🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈

No player not presently in the Hall of Fame has a stronger résumé than former Kansas City Chiefs left tackle Jim Tyrer. Certainly none of the original 61 senior nominees this year did.

This is not meant to disparage the other senior candidates, who in my opinion are all Hall of Fame worthy. It is simply a fact beyond debate.

According to Hall of Fame defensive end Elvin Bethea, “Jim Tyrer was the best blocker I ever faced. I used to try to run as fast as I could upfield to get around him but it rarely worked. He was the preeminent left tackle in all of football. All other blockers I faced in the NFL were mediocre compared to him. He would just swamp me each game to where I would be lucky to beat him even once in a game."

Despite this opinion from one of the finest defensive linemen in the game’s history, Tyrer has only once been debated, despite being a nine-time Pro Bowl selection, six-time All-Pro and the first team left tackle on the American Football League’s All-Time team. He was also a winner, the Chiefs winning three AFL championships with Tyrer anchoring their line, twice reaching the Super Bowl and winning Super Bowl IV over the Vikings on a day when Kansas City’s running game ran roughshod over Minnesota’s defense.

Fellow Hall of Fame voters John Turney and Frank Cooney devised a point system to rank the 61 senior nominees this year, assigning points for being named a consensus first-team All-Pro, a first-team All-Pro on any single recognized list, first-team All-Conference, second-team All-Pro or All-Conference, Pro Bowl selection, MVP or Defensive Player of the Year and All-Decade.

Tyrer’s 74 points not only topped the list of those 61 other senior nominees but was 22 points higher than the next closest player. It also nearly doubled the next highest senior candidates this year (Maxie Baughan and Al Wistert with 42). The third-place points-getter, Lester Hayes, had less than half Tyrer’s total (36).

So what has kept Jim Tyrer out of Canton these past 44 years? Certainly not his skills because Bethea’s assessment of him is widely held among those who faced him for the 13 years he played for the Chiefs (1961-73) and started 178 of 180 games. So why is it that someone who was a finalist in his first year of eligibility in 1981 never again was discussed?

I think you all know why.

The elephant in the room is that on Sept. 15, 1980, then 41-year-old Jim Tyrer shot and killed his wife in their bedroom and then turned the gun on himself.

Tyrer was entering his sixth year of retirement, and they had not been easy ones. Although initially a successful traveling salesman after football, he tired of life on the road and began a series of business endeavors. All failed, leading to significant financial problems and what is now believed, a battle with depression.

The day before his death he had taken his then 10-year-old son to watch the Chiefs lose, 17-16, to the Seattle Seahawks at Arrowhead Stadium. Someone who saw him that day later lamented that “Instead of watching the game Jim seemed to be staring at it.’’

Three days before the murder-suicide Tyrer told Dr. Douglas Paone he suffered from headaches that often left him unable to think. When Dr. Paone asked if he felt depressed Tyrer said, “No. It’s worse than that.”

Early on the morning of Sept. 15, Tyrer awoke and murdered his wife and then turned a .38 caliber pistol on himself in their bedroom. Three of their four children were in the home at the time. One, then 17-year-old Bradley, hid under his bed for an hour fearing a home invasion after hearing the shots. Everyone in Kansas City and throughout football was shocked.

No one knew much then about depression and nothing about CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The latter is the debilitating, degenerative brain disease found in nearly 91 per cent of the over 400 retired football players who in recent years have had their brains examined by Boston University’s Concussion Legacy Foundation.

CTE is a disease that leads to depression, anger, impaired judgment and volatile, irrational behavior. It is widely believed to be caused by the kind of repeated blows to the head that were a staple of the existence of Tyrer and the men who plied his violent trade.

In those days offensive linemen could not legally hold as they can today. Instead, they were told to lead with their head, becoming human battering rams. To combat that, defensive linemen were allowed to head slap, crashing their forearms into the side of a lineman’s helmet while often driving their fists up into their jaw and facemask, snapping their necks back violently. It was a savage business that Jim Tyrer engaged in and few did it better or more violently than he.

CTE caused Junior Seau to commit suicide. It caused Dave Duerson to commit suicide. It led to the death of a homeless Mike Webster and so many others, as we now know. For Jim Tyrer, it’s far too late to examine his brain but one can certainly theorize he suffered the same fate.

Dr. Paone now lives in Naples, FL. He says he has been haunted for over 40 years by Jim Tyrer’s death. It was Tyrer’s wife, Martha, who convinced her husband to see Dr. Paone on the Friday before her death. A follow-up visit was scheduled for the next week.

As the three walked down the hall of his office, Tyrer’s wife grabbed the doctor’s hand, he recalls, and said, “There’s something terribly wrong with Jim.”

Dr Paone says that got his attention because of the forcefulness of her words and he convinced Tyrer to see a psychiatrist the following Monday afternoon. Monday afternoon was too late.

Paone now says, “His symptoms check all the (CTE) boxes. The clinical presentation. Mental status. History of head trauma. Headaches. Lethargy. Irrational decision making.

“You couldn’t ever pick a person that had a better presentation of the disease. As an internist, I have to make diagnosis without slides and without scans. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, water runs off its back and its name is Daffy, it’s not a zebra. He had CTE. No doubt in my mind.”

The one person Tyrer apparently confided in before his death was his pastor, who later told a documentary filmmaker I spoke with named Kevin  Patrick Allen that Tyrer told him not long before his death that he could not think straight because of the pain in his head.

I also spoke with Chris Nowinski, the CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation and one of the leaders who battled the NFL for years to prove the connection between the sport and brain injuries that we now take for granted. He told me, “If you take into account the position Jim played, the number of years he played it and his erratic actions late in life I would say his odds of having CTE are north of 95%.

“It was actually football that changed his brain. It was football that changed his behavior and played a role in what happened.”

We all now know what Dr. Paone, Martha Tyrer and Jim Tyrer did not know in 1980. We all know what CTE is, what causes it and how it has devastated the lives of many retired players.

Jim’s four children never believed the actions that morning in 1980 were who their father was. The four of them went on to be raised by their grandparents, whose first child had been murdered by their father. They not only insist their grandparents never said a bad word about Jim, who they had known since he was a teenager, but told a story that when their grandfather died their grandmother said the ashes of Jim and their first-born child, Martha, should be buried with him because they were family. His daughter Tina, who is now a nurse, went to the funeral home, opened the casket and put the ashes inside. Along with it she put a thank you note to her grandfather for raising them to love their Dad.

I spoke with one of his sons, Brad Tyrer, last week. He told me shortly after his father’s death he found a psychological questionnaire his father had filled out for a potential job dated Sept. 14. It was in his father’s handwriting. He said he found it so disturbing he couldn’t finish reading it but concluded, “That was not my Dad.

“My Dad’s legacy is inaccurate. The thing my family has struggled with all these years is we knew long before we heard of CTE the man in that bedroom was not our Dad. He was a guy who never cussed, never raised his voice, never argued with our Mom. We have always held him in high regard. The four of us went to family counseling once after it happened. We never went back because we had no anger toward our Dad.”

Despite the tragic and violent circumstances of his death, Tyrer was a Hall of Fame finalist in 1981, only months after the murder-suicide. He was never discussed again despite the fact his Hall of Fame coach, Hank Stram, said of him, “If you could pick a prototype offensive tackle out of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, Jim Tyrer would be it.’’

Another of Tyrer’s long-time rivals, himself a player worthy of Hall of Fame consideration, felt strongly that Tyrer belonged in the Hall of Fame.

“It is a travesty that Jim Tyrer has yet to be inducted into Canton," ex-Broncos’ pass rusher and All-AFL selection Rich Jackson once said. "He was one of the first big offensive linemen with quick feet to play pro football. Besides having good feet, he was crafty and smart. Tyrer was the top offensive lineman I ever faced, and that included the AFL and NFL."

Does such a player belong in Canton? Indeed so. Does such a man whose life ended in violent tragedy belong? That is the difficult call we must make but the Hall itself has already answered that question for us.

The Hall’s by-laws specifically say the only factors to be considered for Hall of Fame induction are what happens on the football field. Unlike baseball there is no morality clause. If the Hall’s voters had simply followed those rules Jim Tyrer would have long ago been inducted. Considering the times and the lack of knowledge about CTE in the 1980s and beyond one can understand why that didn’t happen then.

But it should happen now. Why?

Because Jim Tyrer’s play on the field earned it.

In life, monstrous things happen, but it is not always monsters who do them. The pastor who Jim Tyrer confided in said in his eulogy, “We should be careful not to judge a life by its concluding events.”

Those words seem prophetic today.

So what are we to do? We now know the ravages of concussions and CTE and their debilitating effect on many ex-football players so it is a hard question we need to ask ourselves.

According to the Hall’s by-laws, which exclude off-field matters by fiat, the induction of Jim Tyrer is long overdue. According to his resume alone, there is nothing to debate.

But then there were gunshots, and a family forever injured in a way nothing could change. Where does that leave Jim Tyrer?

That’s something each of you will have to decide for yourself. But his family hopes it will leave him with a bust in Canton at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Football is not affiliated with the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Opinions expressed are those of the Hall of Football (HallofFootball.substack.com)