When Isiah Robertson played for the Rams, they were headquartered at Blair Field in Long Beach. Don Hewitt was the equipment manager, assisted by son Todd.
Helmets were precious back then, and the Hewitts were exasperated after one practice when they found themselves missing one.
Then the phone rang.
“It was the CHP,” said Todd, now the equipment manager at USC. “They said there was a guy on a motorcycle, speeding, wearing a Rams helmet on the 405.”
Todd told Don, who responded with a saying often heard around the Rams: “Effing Butch.”
Life had Robertson in the grasp for only 69 years. It could only hold him until Dec. 7, when the limousine Robertson was driving skidded out of its lane, and got hit by a truck that pushed it into another car.
It happened in Mabank, Tex., near Dallas, just after Robertson had spoken at a high school football banquet. He wasn’t far from the ranch called House of Isaiah, a place where he helped young addicts get clean.
Shock and grief reverberated among those who knew him. Laughter soon followed. Urban Meyer, the retiring Ohio State coach, has a term for those players who come and go without making a difference. He calls them “sheep.” Robertson was a hyena, attacking life at high volume, laugh track included.
“We came in together,” said Jack Youngblood, the Hall of Famer who played at Florida when Robertson played at Southern. “I hadn’t been outside of Florida. He hadn’t been outside of Louisiana. You bring a guy like that into L.A. at that time, it’s going to be interesting. Yeah, he had his moments, but he was great.”
Robertson was fiendishly talented, a 6-foot-3, 225-pound linebacker who could cover and blitz and tackle, a six-time Pro Bowler who would have gobbled up today’s open-field game. He intercepted 25 passes. Only 11 active NFL players have more, and none are linebackers.
“He could have been Lawrence Taylor,” Youngblood said. “There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. And he played the game on instinct.”
At which point Youngblood laughed again, remembering Robertson’s daily buddy-movie sitcom with fellow linebacker Jack “Hacksaw” Reynolds
“Jack was a student of the game,” Hewitt said. “He had a projector at home so he could watch film. He knew where everybody was at all times.”
“Butch didn’t play that way,” said Steve Preece, a safety on those teams. “So they would go back and forth every day, arguing about where Butch was supposed to be.”
The discussions would go from huddle to field to locker room.
“Some things they’d say to each other weren’t politically correct,” Hewitt said. “It was kind of a love-hate thing. And there’d be a lot of ‘effing Butch.’’’
“But he’d intercept a pass and the quarterbacks wouldn’t believe it,” Youngblood said. “They’d say he only did it because he was in the wrong place.”
Robertson went to Southern, where he pulled off one of the great Pick Sixes in college football history. He intercepted a pass in his end zone, with zeroes on the clock, and sprinted 102 yards to beat Grambling.
In L.A., he proclaimed himself “the black Butkus” and strongly believed he was bulletproof. When he wasn’t motorcycling, he barreled around in a purple Cadillac Eldorado, driving the margins of the freeway to get to LAX before the team plane left.
Beginning in 1973, the Rams won six consecutive division titles and 76 games, and historians have shortchanged their defenses. In 1975, they gave up 135 points in 14 games.
In L.A., he hung with movie stars, was a presenter at the Emmy Awards, and, as Youngblood notes, would have probably been in the Twitter Hall of Fame had such a thing existed.
He played eight years in L.A. and four in Buffalo, joining Knox. By the end, his experimentation with drugs was headed to obsession.
Robertson told the Baton Rouge Advocate he was beaten senseless by drug dealers in 1986. He dragged himself through physical recovery, then overcame dependence.
The House of Isaiah features 7 a.m. wakeup calls, chores on the ranch, and structured days of meetings and prayer. Robertson named it after the prophet Isaiah, not himself.
“He would find people anywhere and talk them into coming there,” Hewitt said. “The funny thing is, he just recently quit smoking. When I’d come in the house, my wife would know I’d been with him, just from the smell. I saw him quite often. He seemed really happy.”
Sure. Butch always thought he was in the right place. For the Rams of the ’70s, he helped make it the right time.
