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I.
Fifty years ago this week, a former professional football player appeared on national television and sang about feeling his feelings:
That was Rosey Grier, a former lineman for the New York Giants and Los Angeles Rams, performing “It’s Alright to Cry,” as a part of a special based on a touchy-feely record album compiled by the actress Marlo Thomas. The album was called “Free to Be…You and Me,” and it was perhaps the most distilled essence of Seventies-ness you will find anywhere. It is a cultural artifact—as the New York Times’ James Poniewozik wrote this week—that was both ahead of its time and entirely of its time, an anachronistic paean to the Me Decade that helped kick-start the long journey toward redefining gender stereotypes, while serving as a kind of proto-therapy session for sensitive Gen Xers. As a kid who caught on to “Free To Be…You and Me” later in the decade, I loved it and feared it at the same time.
In short, the 70s were weird, man.
“Through songs, skits and stories, ‘Free to Be’ told (kids) they could be, and do, anything,” Poniewozik wrote. “Girls could run races and grow up to be doctors; boys could play with dolls and grow up to push a stroller. A princess could decide not to marry a prince, or anybody. A man could cry.”
Perhaps it is no surprise that Rosey Grier, of all people, was the man at the center of this cultural moment, entirely unafraid to bare his soul to the nation. Because for decades in America, Rosey Grier was the closest thing we had to a real-life Forrest Gump, a man who was present for all of it, from big games to genre television to political assassinations to books about needlepoint. And in the 1970s, he became the embodiment of freeform post-sixties masculinity, right down to the beer commercials:
A little more than a decade ago, I spent some time with Grier in Los Angeles to profile him for my college alumni magazine and digest the twists and turns of his existence. Now seems like as good a time as ever to revisit it.
II.
Roosevelt Grier is now and always has been a man of considerable proportion, with a goatee that serves as a playful trademark and eyes that became legendary for their ability to freely shed tears. At the moment, those eyes are tracing a pair of balloons, lashed together at their base, as they drift through a parking lot outside Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles in the neighborhood known as South Central Los Angeles. “Those things,” he says, “have been bouncing around for a while.”
Even today, fast approaching 80, decades removed from the peak of his cultural ubiquity, Rosey Grier has an eminently familiar face. Those who don’t immediately recognize him react as if they’ve seen him before; those who do act as if they’ve been graced by an unexpected visit from a long-lost friend. A few minutes earlier, the owner of the barbershop next door invited him over for a free haircut, and just a moment ago, a man in a Compton Baseball T-shirt saw him sitting on a bench, waiting for his table to open at Roscoe’s, and told him, “You’re still my hero.”
Of course, he was a football player before he was anything else, at Penn State and then in the National Football League. But over the span of several decades, he became much more than that, largely because he was not afraid to drift from one place to another, from one task to another, from one medium to another. One thing Rosey Grier will tell you is that he always refused to establish any sort of path for his existence. His life, he has said, is just one long happening. “You’re always open to go with the flow,” he says. “In that way, you’re just there. You are who you are.”
This leads him to the most unexpected places and has earned him the unlikeliest of friends. This is why one could argue that he has lived one of the most interesting American lives of the past century. “Forrest Grier,” Sports Illustrated once called him in a headline, and in this Gumpian comparison, there is more than a semblance of truth: Name a cultural fulcrum of the past 50 years, and the man most of us know as Rosey, the son of a Georgia farmer, was probably at least tangentially involved.
The greatest NFL game ever played? That would be the 1958 NFL championship, and Rosey was there, playing on the defensive line for the New York Giants when Baltimore’s Alan Ameche crashed through the line to win it in overtime. The history of rock ’n’ roll? Rosey, who serenaded the women’s dorms at Penn State as part of a group called The Midnight Cavaliers, went on to sing with Chuck Berry and Gladys Knight and Curtis Mayfield. The rise and fall of the Kennedys? Rosey Grier stood a few feet from Robert Kennedy the night he was shot to death and wound up with an assassin’s gun in his pocket; he later became good friends with Jackie Kennedy. And so it went, on through the late ’60s and into the ’70s, when Rosey hosted his own television variety show, and Rosey appeared on Kojack and CHiPs, and Rosey sang a song called “It’s All Right to Cry” that became an anthem for a generation of New Age males, and Rosey campaigned with President Carter, and Rosey wrote a popular book about—of all things—needlepoint for men (he appears on the cover, sewing a likeness of himself). He hung out with Shirley MacLaine and starred in a B movie with Ray Milland and once asked a favor of Frank Sinatra; he once sang with Peaches and Herb until 5 in the morning, until the former governor of New York, slumbering above them, banged on his floor, pleading for quiet.
In the 1980s, Rosey, having found solace in Christianity, turned toward the Republican side, campaigning with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He showed up in a Bounty paper towel commercial. And in the 1990s, Rosey poked his head in the spotlight once more, counseling O.J. Simpson in prison as Simpson awaited trial. In 2008, the NFL Network flew Rosey out to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, just so he could witness the nomination of Barack Obama as well.1
He still shows up in curious corners of the American zeitgeist: making public-service announcements about prostate cancer, working at a foundation named for Michael Milken, the once-disgraced 1980s junk-bond king whom Rosey counseled, and speaking eloquently on the recent death of his Los Angeles Rams teammate Merlin Olsen. He will get on the phone and call anyone about anything he views as an injustice or inequity; recently, when an official was hurt during a football game and the television announcers neglected to update his injury status, Rosey phoned the network to complain. “I think the referee needed that respect,” he said.
For years, rather than subscribing to a rigid ideology, Rosey has declared fealty to one unifying principle, which is nothing more complex than unconditional love for others. It may open him up to accusations of naïveté, especially for someone who came of age in the midst of the civil-rights movement, who lived with racial quotas in the NFL, and who, when he developed a friendship with a white female student at Penn State, received a warning from one of his coaches to “watch your step,” but Rosey doesn’t linger on bitterness or division. For him, love has always been the simpler route.
“You have to make up a reason why you get to hate somebody,” he says. “I don’t have to make up a reason why I still love you.”
Read the rest of the story here.
Grier, in classically enigmatic fashion, endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2016 and briefly ran for governor of California as a Republican in 2017.
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I sat behind him on a plane to Europe once, and he was indeed doing needlepoint!
A masterpiece of an article about a masterpiece of a man. It's all there. Thanks, Michael. Another must-read.