University of North Carolina Athletics
EXTRA POINTS SPECIAL: John Bunting: On The Wings of An Eagle
April 17, 2001 | Extra Points
April 16, 2001
Part I: Introduction (March 26, 2001)
Part II: The Early Days (April 2, 2001)
Part III: The Carolina Years (April 9, 2001)
John Bunting's emotions were dark and squalid as he lumbered off the turf at Chicago's Soldier Field that September afternoon in 1975. He was distraught. Mad. Hurt. Confused. Frustrated. The Philadelphia Eagles and Bunting, their fourth-year linebacker, had just lost to the Bears in the second game of the season. The Bears rallied late to win, 15-13, with a rookie running back no one had ever heard of gaining a slew of yards on swing passes and toss sweeps on the game-winning drive. Bunting missed one sure-shot tackle on the upstart halfback.
Afterward, the newspaper guys surrounded Bunting as they did each week. He was always good for a quote--he was direct, honest and insightful. This day, Bunting's forehead was sweaty from exertion and white-hot from aggravation. It was, he would say later, one of the lowest points of his career.
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The world didn't stop spinning that afternoon, of course, no matter how devastated Bunting felt. He would go on to a fine career with the Eagles.
And Walter Payton, some would say, did indeed turn out to be the best running back in NFL history.
The second day of the 1972 National Football League draft was winding down, and reporters in the pressroom at Veterans Stadium were looking for any substantial kernels of information about the Eagles' picks that day. Charlie Gauer, one of the team's veteran scouts, wandered into the room and was approached by Ray Didinger, the team beat writer for The Philadelphia Bulletin.
"Charlie, anything in this group?" Didinger asked.
Gauer looked at the names on the draft board, guys like Larry Ratcliff, a halfback from Eastern Michigan, and Steve Bielenberg, a linebacker from Oregon State.
"Naw, bunch of stiffs," Gauer replied. "Except the linebacker from North Carolina. He can play. I scouted him. He's not perfect. He's not that big. But he's a good football player."
That comment sparked Didinger's interest. He made a mental note to keep an eye out for the newcomer from Chapel Hill--the 10th-round player--when preseason training camp opened in July in Reading, Pa. He noted with some amusement as Bunting arrived in a Carolina blue Volkswagen Squareback (cost him two grand with earnings from a college all-star game), that the kid always seemed to have ice on his knee, a film can under his arm, a Baltimore Orioles batting helmet on his head. Despite modest speed (4.9 seconds in the 40, "maybe 4.85 with a tailwind," Bunting said), the rookie always seemed to be around the football.
Didinger set up an interview and found Bunting to be articulate, driven and single-minded in his desire to be a successful player in professional football. The groundwork had been laid for a good working relationship between a player and a newspaperman. It developed into genuine friendship over time.
"John had a fierce, fierce desire to be the best," Didinger says today, relaxing in his office in Marlboro, N.J., at the headquarters of NFL Films, where he's now a producer. "He was one of the few guys you felt from the early days was going to be a great coach some day. You saw how much he loved the game.
tackle to a Washington runner during his 11-year career with the Philadelphia Eagles. |
unting started training camp as a fifth-team linebacker on coach Ed Khyat's team. He was given uniform number 95--a designation that he wasn't expected to make the squad.
"Numbers in the nineties were definitely not cool at the time," Bunting says. (As he would continue to make the team again season after season, opportunities presented themselves to change numbers. Bunting refused out of loyalty to his original number and a reminder of where he came from.)
Injuries waylaid the front-line guys that first summer, and Bunting found himself on the field frequently as a rookie--at weakside linebacker on defense and nearly every snap on special teams. His season was shortened with a separated shoulder, and his second year was curtailed by a broken left forearm that sidelined him for eight games. By 1974, Bunting was established as a starter, now playing the "Sam" linebacker against the tight end, and he played in 62 straight games before sitting with an injury in 1978.
This was not a grand era in Eagles football. It had been more than a decade since they'd won big--taking the NFL title in 1960--and Eagles fans longed for the glory days of Kuharich and Van Brocklin, Bednarik and Cross. They suffered a place kicker in 1972 who missed three extra points in one game and a punter who whiffed the ball twice in one game. No wonder they stumbled through a 2-11-1 disaster. Bunting remembers dodging tomatoes and oranges hurled from the home fans during the final quarter of the season finale. Khyat was fired after the 1973 season and replaced by Mike McCormack. Things didn't get much better under McCormack. The coach once referred to his players as "dogs" and fans responded by shouting "Alpo" from the stands and throwing dog biscuits on the field.
ut Bunting was slowly and surely building a name for himself.
"He screws up our passing game every day in practice," McCormack said in 1975. "He just frustrates our quarterbacks. Every time they look over there, there's the `Frito Bandito.' You can see why he graded out as our best linebacker last year."
unting's personality and mindset were perfect for as well for Philadelphia, an industrial colossus where ships, Stetson hats, locomotives, textiles, steel, oil refining, beer and coins were huge.
"There was nothing smooth about this guy," Didinger says. "John was about hard work and rough edges. That kind of player was really embraced in this town. He was a blue-collar kind of guy."
McCormack was fired after the 1975 season and the Eagles' brass--comprised of owner Leonard Tose and general manager Jim Murray--gambled on hiring a college coach from UCLA named Dick Vermeil. Bunting was not happy.
"What does some college coach know about pro football?" he groused.
But it didn't take Bunting long to see that he was wrong, that Vermeil was a dedicated and excellent coach. "It took one conversation," Bunting says. "He was that intense, that focused."
Vermeil said he wouldn't "have any jerks" on the team and began weeding out the malcontents and bums. He instilled the toughness and fourth-quarter vigor Bunting was accustomed to under his college coach, Bill Dooley at North Carolina. Bunting marveled over Vermeil's energy and attention to detail. The coach often spent four nights a week sleeping on his office couch at Veterans Stadium. The Eagles improved from 4-10 in Vermeil's first season to 5-9, 9-7 and 11-5 in 1979.
Quarterback Ron Jaworski was the leader on offense, and middle linebacker Bill Bergey was a perennial all-pro on a defense molded by coordinator Marion Campbell. They received reams of press and national media attention during the Eagles' rise, but they and other knowledgeable football people knew exactly where the heartbeat of the team resided--inside John Bunting.
"John Bunting as a player knew more about our defense than Marion Campbell, who was a defensive genius," Bergey says. "More than once Marion was challenged by John, not in a threatening way, but in a, `Why don't we do this ...' kind of way. Marion would always do it his way, because he didn't want to be shown up by a player. But afterward, you'd see them over to the side talking about it. Marion wanted to know what John thought."
Adds Jaworski: "He used every single ounce of talent in his body. He lasted so long because he was smart, heady, intelligent, whatever word you'd like to use. He was not a glamorous player. He was a steady player--very, very steady."
unting was always the perfectionist. Campbell graded him at 95 percent during one stretch of games, Bunting termed the performances "adequate." He had a near-perfect record calling audibles. He'd sit long into the night watching film and scribbling notes on yellow legal pads, reminders to himself like these one year prior to facing the St. Louis Cardinals and QB Jim Hart:
Hart long and hard cadence on third and one and fourth and one to draw offsides.
Have a deeper rush lane.
Toss, be ready to flatten curl.
Shoot for being inside third receiver on 30 cover-3 zone.
"John's a total student of the game," Campbell said. "He's intense, intelligent, probably the smartest player I have coached."
Several games and individual plays stood out over the decade. He intercepted a pass from Pittsburgh's Terry Bradshaw in 1979 and returned it to the two yard-line, helping in a 17-14 win. He smashed Dallas runner Tony Dorsett on a 1979 screen pass, causing a fumble and breaking a couple of Dorsett's ribs.
Most of his accomplishments, though, were outside the spotlight. Bergey remembers one in particular.
his playing days and the word "intensity" comes to mind. |
The Eagles became a close-knit team during the Vermeil era, and the camaraderie, dedication and talent coalesced during the 1980 season. By that time, there were less than a dozen pre-Vermeil Eagles remaining.
"John is who we are and where we came from, all rolled into one," GM Murray said.
"You've heard me talk about winning with character?" Vermeil said. "John is the definition of the word."
The Eagles went 12-4 in 1980, won the NFC East and throttled Minnesota 31-16 in the first round of the playoffs. Next up were the big, bad Dallas Cowboys, "America's Team" and the target of Vermeil's rebuilding effort that began five years earlier. The NFC Championship game was set for Veterans Stadium on a brutally cold Sunday in January--16 degrees, minus-17 wind-chill factor--and the city braced for its biggest football game in 20 years. Vermeil's team was healthy and strategically prepared, he took the Eagles to Tampa for the week to practice. The wily coach added a psychological wrinkle as well, insisting as the home team that Dallas wear its navy blue jerseys (the Cowboys were a paltry 10-10 wearing the blue shirts over the years).
unting set the tempo for the game, nailing Ron Springs for a seven-yard loss on the game's second snap. The Eagles went on to win 20-7, limiting Dorsett to 41 measly yards and the Cowboys' offense to 202 yards total.
"It was the famous Dallas double-screen," Bunting remembers. "Danny White always dropped back a little too fast on that one. It wasn't really hard to read and figure out."
"That was the best pure defensive play I saw in 13 years," Bergey says. "John was dropping back, into his hook zone. He saw something that triggered his mind. He darted across the line, and just as the ball got there he absolutely undressed Springs. I went crazy. We went on and absolutely kicked the hell out of them."
Adds Didinger: "The crowd was already super juiced. They went berserk on that play. Right then, you knew the Eagles would win the game. That was such an emotional lift."
The Eagles advanced to New Orleans and Super Bowl XV. Their opponent was the Oakland Raiders, a team they'd beaten 10-7 in November. The Eagles came out flat that night--some believe Vermeil overworked them during game week--and were demolished 27-10 by Jim Plunkett and the Raiders.
unting took the loss hard, sitting for an extended time in the shower room after the game.
"I didn't want to leave the shower," he says. "I was in tears. Roynell Young was our rookie left corner. He said, `Hey, J.B., no problem, man. We'll be back next year.'"
unting shook his head. "Roynell, this is my ninth year. You have no idea how hard it is to get here."
He never made it back. Two years later, Bunting was released by the Eagles. He got a measure of recompense, though, by ending his career in winning the USFL championship game with the Philadelphia Stars in July, 1984.
"I thought of the Super Bowl," he said of the Stars' win, "and I felt relieved, finished, fulfilled. No more risks to take. At halftime, I'd taken an injection in the Achilles, and I was tired of that kind of pain. I sat there and cried."
While thriving on the field, John Bunting was living a full and active life off of it. Philadelphia was the perfect sports town for an over-achieving, tough-as-screws linebacker. The fern bars of Dallas just wouldn't have done. He loved the working-class neighborhoods that surrounded Veterans Stadium and sought out the haunts with local color. He and Ren? lived with children Kim and Brooks in the south New Jersey suburbs, within shouting distance of teammates like Ron Jaworski. They played hard and partied hard--often through the night after victories and staging a 7 a.m. barbecue at the home of a player. Though Bunting embraced the times with longish hair and a beard, he parented with a traditional bent and used an iron fist when trends and fads diverted the kids' attention. No designer jeans in the Bunting household back when Jordache and Gloria Vanderbilt were de rigueur for the fashionable adolescent.
"I didn't like it at the time, but Dad really taught us the meaning of money and steered us from being materialistic," says Kim, today married and a school teacher in the Philadelphia area. "Some of my friends spoil their kids rotten with things. Dad was very old-fashioned. I'm glad now he taught us those lessons."
Bunting also loathed skateboards and the accompanying punk culture. Brooks laughs today remembering the skirmish he and his dad had over a skateboard. "He said I had two options," Brooks says. "Either I get rid of it or he'd sledgehammer it."
(Several years later, Bunting would have his coaching staff from Glassboro State doubled over when he spoke to a summer football camp. Bunting pulled his shorts down to his knees and turned his cap backward. "Oh God, where's he going with this?" one of them wondered. Then they figured Bunting was spoofing the appearance of skateboarders. "Get out of skateboarding before the cult sucks you win," Bunting told the kids. "The football field's a better place.")
unting also believed in giving back to the community and the world at large some of the largesse he'd received in life. He was always driving to this hospital or that one, some near and some far, to visit kids. He chaired bike-a-thons and walk-a-thons to raise funds for the Spina Bifida Association of America. He was active in a team-sponsored program for leukemia victims. "I've learned more about courage from kids with leukemia than I've ever learned on the football field," he said.
He spoke at Little League banquets for free. The NFL teamed with the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1973 to form the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, and Bunting was the only white player on the Eagles' roster to volunteer, he helped find jobs for dozens of underprivileged teenagers through the program.
"We can't take all the time," Bunting said. "We have to give something back."
Once, in downplaying to the media his role in ministering to a high school football player with a broken neck, Bunting said simply, "If I'm lucky, maybe I can pick a kid's spirits up for a while."
following big win in 1980 Super Bowl season. |
At all times during his run with the Eagles, Bunting displayed an Orioles team photo in his locker and a "If God's Not A Tar Heel ..." bumper sticker above it. Every March, he and brother Jim and maybe another friend or two would go to the ACC Tournament and buy tickets in the parking lots and hotel lobbies.
"He wore his heart on his sleeve for Carolina as long as I knew him," Didinger says. "It was a very important part of his life."
While Philadelphia offered Bunting some of the finest hours of his life, it also dished out doses of hardship.
He suffered a horrendous knee injury during the 1978 season that would have ended the careers of lesser men. In an October game in Foxboro, Mass., Bunting was trailing a play and running toward a pileup. He planted his right foot on the Astroturf, but his knee kept on going. He had surgery to remove cartilage and repair ligaments. Then followed a long and arduous rehabilitation period of several months. Ice was his constant companion. He set his alarm every two hours during the night so he could ice the knee. Jaworski remembers them taking their kids to the movies and Bunting sitting by the aisle, his knee wrapped in ice. Didinger recalls watching Bunting alone in the summer heat in Veterans Stadium, running sprints on the turf while Brooks rode alongside on his Big Wheel.
"His T-shirt turned from gray to black," Didinger says. "Unless you saw it, you can't appreciate the price he paid to get back on the field."
unting's marriage to his high-school sweetheart and the mother of his two children came apart and ended in divorce in the early-1980s. "We were babies when we got married, only 19," Ren? told The Philadelphia Bulletin in a late-1970s story on players' wives. "I shudder to think of it now. We were so young. What do you know of life when you're so young?"
And then there was the players' strike of 1982.
Bunting had brains and was a natural leader, so it was only appropriate that his teammates would elect him their representative to the NFL Players Association. As Bunting learned the financial and legal sides of the business during his six years as players' rep, he grew to see that the owners had the better end of the deal (this being long before the megabucks contracts of today). He cited to the media and fans that the average NFL team made a profit of $12 million per year in 1981, that average NFL salaries were one-third of what pro baseball and basketball players made, that the average career lasted 4.2 years, that only 40 percent of NFL players had college degrees.
It was not asking too much, Bunting and the NFLPA believed, for the players to get 55 percent of the gross revenues, to be split among themselves according to a battery of qualifications. They also wanted severance pay.
"We wanted to be payed based on performance," he says. "It was a really great idea. A great idea. If you perform, you make a lot of money. If you don't perform, you don't make much. But the owners refused to show us their books. They didn't want us to know how much they made."
That's what the players struck for in late September, 1982. The strike lasted eight weeks and cost the players seven paychecks. They never got their percentage of gross. The major concession was a good severance package and reimbursement of much of their back pay lost in the strike.
The ordeal took its toll on Bunting. He believed in the players' rights, but it killed him to take football away from coaches he liked and respected like Dick Vermeil and Marion Campbell. At times he sat at night and wondered, "Am I a good guy or a bad guy?"
"It was a thankless job," says Frank LeMaster, a fellow linebacker during those years. "John put his neck on the line for the players. John was a great leader and a great general during that period. He kept the team really informed. He was a hands-on players' rep."
The strike finally ended when management and players came to terms in late November. The Eagles' first game back was a lackluster 18-14 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals at Veterans Stadium. After the game, the fans lustily booed the Eagles and, particularly, their rep, John Bunting. He feared for his family's safety and found his brother and asked him to look after Kim and Brooks as they left the stadium and returned to their car.
In the locker room, owner Leonard Tose lashed out at his players. Tose took the strike personally and, coupled with mounting gambling losses and the erosion of his personal fortune, was quite bitter.
"Do us all a favor," he growled at the team, "and go back on strike."
Ray Didinger said he could sense when the reporters were allowed in the locker room that something was wrong, something amiss beyond simply losing a football game. No one would talk about it, though. Word eventually leaked out.
"The Eagles as they were ended that day," Didinger says.
Vermeil retired in late January and Bunting was released days later, the common belief being that the release was recompense for his strike activities. Bunting believed then as now that Campbell, the new head coach, was under pressure from Tose to ax him.
"More than half the player reps around the league got fired that winter," Bunting says. "Marion and I were tight, really tight. But I think he sensed I had a pretty strong grip on that team and he wanted that grip."
unting cleaned out his locker in Veterans Stadium on March 7, 1983, and peeled his Tar Heel bumper sticker off the top of his locker.
"That hurt," he said. "It's been up there a long time."
unting wasn't sure if any football remained in his future. His children were 13 and eight, and he was intent on staying in the Philadelphia area to be close to them. The debut of the United States Football League and the Philadelphia Stars in the spring of 1983 provided the perfect opportunity. He signed two one-year contracts to play for head coach Jim Mora and handle some off-season coaching responsibilities. The Stars lost in the league's first ever championship game in 1983, then returned to the finals in 1984 and won the title, defeating the Arizona Wranglers 23-3 in Tampa.
It was time to move on to something else--maybe broadcasting, maybe coaching.
"I'd like to be remembered as a guy who loved to battle and win," Bunting said upon his retirement.
In the stands that humid, hot night in Florida was Jim Collier, Bunting's first high school coach. He noted it appropriate that it was July 15, Bunting's 34th birthday. This was the same Jim Collier who had told his wife after three days of practice back at Springbrook High in the fall of 1965 that he had a future professional ballplayer on his hands.
"How did I know?" muses Collier. "Sometimes, your head is your best guide. Others, it's your heart. Sometimes, it's just that feeling you have in your guts.
"This time, it was all three."
Several hundred high school coaches are seated in the Dean Smith Center one Friday morning in late March, 2001, for the annual Carolina Coaches Clinic. The speaker this morning is Jim Hanifan, the former St. Louis Cardinals head coach and later the architect of the famous "Hogs" offensive line of the Washington Redskins championship teams of the 1980s.
Before John Bunting introduces Hanifan, he pauses to recognize a couple of football dignitaries in the audience. One of them is Jackie Smith, the 6-4 tight end of 1970s vintage with the St. Louis Cardinals. Smith and Bunting were enemies on the playing field but through it all became good friends.
Smith stands and waves to the crowd, acknowledging Bunting's welcome. Then he points to a small scar about three-quarters of an inch wide on his chin.
"I have this today, thanks to John Bunting," Smith says. "I caught a pass one day, turned around and he cold-cocked me. Rammed me with a forearm and broke my facemask."
Smith feigns anger.
"He didn't even say he was sorry."
Bunting might not have apologized back then, but he paid proper tribute 25 years later.
"The best running back I ever faced? O.J. Simpson," Bunting tells the coaches.
"The best football player I ever faced? Roger Staubach.
"And the toughest competitor? Jackie Smith."
The experiences and memories go on and on for John Bunting. So what if he grabbed air instead of Walter Payton one day, long ago?
Lee Pace, editor and publisher for 11 years of Extra Points, a newsletter devoted to the careful study of Tar Heel football, has interviewed dozens of family members, former teammates, players and coaches who have touched and been touched by Bunting for this exclusive series of articles. From his youth in Silver Spring, Md., to his days as a Tar Heel from 1968-71, from his days as a Philadelphia Eagle to his start in the coaching business at Rowan University, you'll relive the influences and special moments that have shaped Bunting's life over the next several installments of "The Bunting Era Dawns For Carolina."
NEXT WEEK -- This series on John Bunting will be suspended for one week so that Lee Pace's Spring Practice Edition of "Extra Points" can be displayed in this space. Look for Part V of the Bunting series, "A Coach Is Born," on TarHeelBlue.com on April 30.
Part I: Introduction (March 26, 2001)
Part II: The Early Days (April 2, 2001)
Part III: The Carolina Years (April 9, 2001)
Thanks to the following businesses and individuals who have helped fund this series on John Bunting:
UNC Dept. of Athletics
The Educational Foundation Inc.
Gayle Bomar, IJL Wachovia
John Anderson, General Shale Brick
Paul Miller, Quixtar
John Cowell, The Home Team
