Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 7, 1994 TAG: 9402070032
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK KRIEGEL NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
DATELINE: FORT WAYNE, IND. LENGTH: Long
He rides around town in a Dodge flatbed, a refrigerated case rigged to the back board. The flatbed moves through the Midwest winter, everything coated with a sooty frost, past the Tire Barns, over roads inhabited by unretired AMC Pacers and farmers' trucks, the one belonging to a porker has a bumper sticker. "Promote Pigs," it says. "Run Over a Chicken!"
Ickey Woods will roll up on one of those ranch-style homes and knock on the door. "Sorry to bother you," he'll say. "But do you like steak?"
"What?" is the invariable reply.
"Well, I drive a route for Summit City Steaks and Seafood," Woods says. "I happen to be in the area today making deliveries and I've got a few extra cases. Now I'm trying to find someone who could use a great deal."
"How much?"
"One seventy-nine." That buys a dozen each of the New York strips, the ribeyes and the filets wrapped in bacon, 18 chopped sirloins and a bag of chicken strips. "Run you $320 in the store," he says. Sometimes people ask: "Hey, ain't you Ickey Woods, the football player?"
And sometimes they request the Shuffle, the touchdown dance that made Woods very famous, very briefly. But it seems they all get around to asking, "If you're really Ickey Woods, what're you doing selling meat?"
The knees
The Red River Inn, a Western-motif steak joint built into the Fort Wayne Marriott and featuring plastic cowboy hats on the liquor pourers and the music of heart disease, those of the achy-breaky and cheatin' varieties. Ickey Woods throws back a handful of yellow capsules.
"Diet pills," he says. "Got to get a little weight off these knees."
The knees. On Sept. 17, 1989, Thomas Everett, then of the Pittsburgh Steelers and now with the Dallas Cowboys, popped Woods' left anterior cruciate ligament with a hit. The surgeons built Woods another one, grafted with pieces of bone and tendon, the gristle butchers throw away.
"He wasn't going for the knees, just trying to make the tackle," Woods says. "Got to learn to live with that."
Ickey Woods, then in his second year of professional football, missed the rest of the season and half of the next. "I was just starting to come back good," he says.
And the next summer, Woods went down again. ". . . rookie come right down on the knee," he says. "Now I've got to go back to surgery. Back to rehab. We wasn't even supposed to be hitting. Stupid kid."
The following May, Woods got a call at home, a summons to the coaches' office.
" . . . `You guys cutting me? Tell me now then. I ain't got to come down.' "
Later that day, rookie head coach David Shula told him, "We want to go in a new direction."
All of a sudden, Ickey Woods was 25, out of football and checking the want ads. One thing led to another until a guy asked, "How'd you like to make $1,500 a week?"
"How?"
"Sellin' meat."
He started in Cincinnati, door-to-door, some of those Bengals fans asking him, "C'mon, Ickey, please, please do the Shuffle."
Woods sold a lot of steak. Then the company sent him to Fort Wayne to run the office there. "But sittin' in the office was killing me," he says. "Had to go back on the road. Can't make no money sitting in an office."
Elbert Lee Javonte, to be known as Ickey Jr., was born two weeks ago. "That makes five beautiful kids and a wonderful wife," Woods says.
And a whole lot of steak.
"I'm telling you . . . " Woods says.
"People recognize you out here?"
"Now and again," he says. "Most people, no. Here, I'm just a delivery driver who's got a great deal for them. Some people tell me, `You're not Ickey Woods.' But I've got my football card in my pocket. Then they ask, `Why you selling steak?' I tell 'em, `Why you think?' "
"And the Shuffle?" he is asked.
"They don't really know the Shuffle. A few years ago, sure. But I'd just as soon forget it. No more shuffling."
The shuffle
The Shuffle was born Sept. 24, 1988, the night before a Bengals-Cleveland Browns game. Woods was horsing around with the kids. Bobby Brown was on the sound system. Woods started to rock that big booty of his. He called over to his mom. "If I score tomorrow," he said, "I'm doing this in the end zone."
"You'd better not," she said.
"I'm a do it."
And he did.
"But it wasn't really the Shuffle yet," he says, getting up from the table to demonstrate in the Red River Inn. "Like this: just a little between the legs. The announcer said I didn't have no rhythm. Ricky Dixon, one of the defensive backs, said, `Yo, Ick, you look kind of shaky, man. You've got to put some steps to that.' So I thought about it all week. I wanted to keep it simple so it could catch on."
The following Saturday, Woods pulled Dixon aside and did the Shuffle: three hops left with an extended arm holding the ball, shift the ball, three hops right, spike the ball behind the head, twirl the index finger and shake that booty.
"How's that look, Rick?"
"That's it, baby. That's the one. Gonna catch on."
Just like Woods. He ran for 763 yards in the last seven games of the regular season. He ran for 15 touchdown Shuffles. At 5.3 yards a carry, he was the best in the league. Ickey Woods ran the Bengals all the way to the Super Bowl, by which time there were four Ickey Shuffle jingles, 12 Ickey T-shirts, even an Ickey TV ad for Oldsmobile.
Super Bowl XXII began with Ickey Woods "running through us," remembers Ray Rhodes, then the 49ers' secondary coach. "After about the third series, Ronnie Lott says, `Don't worry about Ickey. I'm a put his fire out.' "
"Good shot," Woods says, "but wasn't as good as everyone thinks."
"Didn't Shuffle that day, did you?"
"Never got the chance."
Woods says he's down to 235 pounds, with 10 or 15 of fat left to be trimmed from his flanks. He doesn't even finish the chicken-and-ribs combo. Tells the waitress to wrap it up. His nutritional mistakes are limited to chicken wings, which he eats with a requested portion of ranch dressing; the baked potato, which he dresses with the entire contents from the butter and sour cream dishes; and the sweet potato pie, which he just can't resist.
"I just want the chance to prove I can still play," he says. "I might have lost a step, but if I can just get in somebody's camp, give 'em a look, I know I'll make the team."
Just one more shot
Woods grew up in Fresno, Calif., the second of six children. "I hardly ever saw my pops. He'd be sleeping in the park. Drugs or whatever. He'd come to my games, be sleeping in the stands. Kind of embarrassing. He wasn't there for me. But that's the past. We're good now, me and him. We're tight when I go home."
Ickey Woods ran with a gang called the Godfathers, Fresno's affiliate in the confederacy of Bloods. His best friend, Andre Horn, ran the streets, too. Trouble was never far. Even after Woods and Horn went to Nevada-Las Vegas on football scholarships. One of us has got to make it, they would promise each other. And for three years it looked as if Andre, an outside linebacker, would be the one. Woods didn't play much.
Before the dawn of a summer's morning, one of too many between their junior and senior years, Andre was found with his throat slashed. He had been shot 19 times.
That senior season, Ickey Woods, bench warmer, led the nation in rushing. A year later, after the Super Bowl, he visited his friend's grave. "Just silly talking. Talking to myself. Asking why, why it had to happen to my boy."
After he leaves the Red River Inn, Ickey Woods runs a quick mile with a Dalmatian named "Taxi." Then he hits the weights. By 7 a.m. the next day, he's at the American Health Fitness Center, driving pile after iron pile with his legs. The left knee bears a scar about the size of his 6-inch braided ponytail.
Back at the house, Woods runs an elastic cable between the door jamb and a harness around his waist. He hops back and forth training his knee. And when it's over, he checks the steaks. Then he goes to the freezer, removes the ice, two bags for each knee. He wraps the bags into place with Ace bandages and reaches for the remote control. The cold begins to numb the joints as Ickey Woods turns on the TV: skinny, smiling girls doing aerobics. They don't even sweat.
"I swear I do this for my kids," he says. "My babies keep me going. I don't want my kids not to have a father they can be proud of. I just want one more shot to prove myself."
Keywords:
FOOTBALL
by CNB