The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.
The Weight of the Game is an original work of fiction, conceived and directed by me, developed in collaboration with a writing partner. It is a unique perspective, a hypothetical discussion between legendary football personas, living and deceased. The words are invented. The themes are intentional. I hope that the humanity is real.
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| Only One Is Not at the Table 1 |
JIM BROWN: Walter. Juice. Good to be in the same room, finally — even if the circumstances are what they are.
WALTER PAYTON: Jim. You know, I used to study your film constantly. Fullerton Avenue in Chicago, late nights. You were the standard.
O.J. SIMPSON: Same. Jim, when I was at USC, I had your rushing record in my head every single carry. 12,312 yards. That number lived in me.
JIM BROWN: And you both went and made it complicated for me. Walter, you finish with 16,726. That stood for what, almost twenty years after you retired?
WALTER PAYTON: Eighteen years before Emmitt got there. But I'll tell you what, I never once thought about the record while I was playing. Every yard was about winning. The Bears needed me in '77, we went 9-5, I rushed for over 1,800 yards, won the MVP. That felt like something.
O.J. SIMPSON: That '77 season was remarkable. But talk to me about being overlooked. I run for 2,003 yards in a single season, 1973, first man ever to break 2,000, and somehow the conversation always ends up somewhere else.
JIM BROWN: It shouldn't. That was a legitimate all-time performance, Juice. Fourteen games, by the way; people forget it wasn't even sixteen games yet.
WALTER PAYTON: The yards-per-carry, too. Jim, yours might never be touched: 5.2 for a career. That's absurd for a running back who carried the ball as many times as you did.
JIM BROWN: I left at the top. That's the part people don't always understand. I was 29. Hollywood called, and I walked away clean. Nine seasons, never missed a game due to injury. I wanted to leave people wondering what could have been.
O.J. SIMPSON: (quietly) I wonder sometimes what my legacy would have looked like if I'd had that kind of discipline. Just…walked away clean.
(A pause. The air shifts.)
WALTER PAYTON: We should talk about it. There's no point pretending. We're past the point where it matters to protect anybody's image.
JIM BROWN: I'll go first, since I'm the oldest. I've had my own shadows. The domestic violence accusations over the years, multiple incidents. I know what was said. I know what some of it was. I told myself for a long time that I was a product of my era, that men weren't held to the same account. That's not an excuse. It's an explanation of how I justified it. I'm not proud of that.
O.J. SIMPSON: Mine is… different in scale. Nicole. Ron Goldman. June 12th, 1994. I know what the world decided. I know what the civil court decided. The criminal trial acquitted me, but I've lived with that verdict, both of them, for thirty years. I've had a lot of time now to sit with things that I couldn't sit with when I was alive.
WALTER PAYTON: I'm not going to judge either of you. I have my own accounting to do. My foundation and my public face: "Sweetness." But I had affairs. I struggled privately with pain medication in my final years. I had a rare liver disease, PSC, and I was on the transplant list and didn't get a liver in time. But before all that, I wasn't the husband or father I should have been. My wife, Connie, knew. My kids eventually knew. The public got a version of me that was curated.
JIM BROWN: That's the thing about being a symbol. People need you to be a certain thing. The sport makes you larger than life, and then you spend the rest of your life managing the distance between who they think you are and who you actually are.
O.J. SIMPSON: I became something nobody could have scripted. The trial of the century. The white Bronco. I spent nine years in prison in Nevada on the robbery conviction. I died in 2024 from prostate cancer. And I'll tell you, toward the end, you think about everything. Every choice. I think about my children. I think about what I took from people.
WALTER PAYTON: Do you say it? Out loud?
O.J. SIMPSON: (long pause) I think I did it. I think...yes. And I think there is no redemption that makes that okay. There's just the truth, and what you do with it, even if it's too late for anyone else to hear it.
(Silence)
JIM BROWN: We were all great football players. Genuinely great. And we were all deeply flawed men. I don't think those two things cancel each other out, in either direction.
WALTER PAYTON: The yards and the touchdowns, they happened. They're real. But so is everything else.
O.J. SIMPSON: I just hope Ron Goldman's family, and Nicole's family...I hope they found some peace. That's the only thing left I can offer. And it's nothing, really.
JIM BROWN: It's something. It's a start.
Rae Carruth approaches hesitantly. The three men look up. There's a long moment of recognition.
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| Rae Carruth released from prison in 2018. 2 |
RAE CARRUTH: I... hope it's alright. I heard you talking. I played too. Wide receiver. Panthers. First round, 1997.
WALTER PAYTON: We know who you are, Rae. Sit down.
RAE CARRUTH: (sitting, subdued) I don't expect anything from you all. I just... haven't had a real conversation about football in a long time. Nobody talks to me about football.
JIM BROWN: What were your numbers?
RAE CARRUTH: Four seasons — well, parts of four. 1997 was my best. Fourteen touchdowns receiving that year, counting the full season. Career — 143 catches, roughly 1,500 yards total. It wasn't much time. I was developing. The Panthers believed in me enough to take me 27th overall.
O.J. SIMPSON: A first-round receiver in the late '90s — that's real. That's not nothing on the field.
RAE CARRUTH: (quietly) No. It wasn't nothing. Steve Beuerlein, Kerry Collins — we had something building. And then I... I ended it. All of it. My own career, everything. I threw it away. And that's the smallest part of what I did.
WALTER PAYTON: Say the rest of it.
RAE CARRUTH: Cherica died. My son Chancellor has cerebral palsy from the oxygen deprivation when she was shot. He's in his mid-twenties now. Being cared for by Cherica's mother. And I spent eighteen years in prison and got out in 2018, and the world didn't care that I was out. Nobody was waiting. There was no comeback story. There was nothing.
JIM BROWN: There's a difference between our situations and yours, Rae. A significant one. Walter had personal failures. O.J.'s case, whatever you believe, had legal complexity that became cultural. My history involved incidents people debated. Yours had a verdict and a child with brain damage living as the proof of what happened.
RAE CARRUTH: I know that. I know the difference. I'm not here to compare.
WALTER PAYTON: Then what are you here for?
RAE CARRUTH: I guess I just wanted to sit near people who understood what it felt like to run out of a tunnel. To have seventy thousand people there because of you. Because of what your body could do. I had four years of that. And then I made choices that meant nobody would ever remember the catches. Only the crime. My son will never know me as a football player. He'll never know me as anything good.
O.J. SIMPSON: That's a weight I understand. Children knowing you only through what you cost them.
JIM BROWN: The difference is you have a son who is alive and bearing what you did in his body every single day.
RAE CARRUTH: Yes. That's the difference. Chancellor is the difference. And there's no speech I can give, no reflection I can offer, that changes what his life is. I used to dream about what my career stats could have looked like. Five, six good seasons...maybe a thousand yards receiving, a Pro Bowl. That was possible. I had the talent. Instead my Wikipedia page is a crime summary and a prison sentence.
WALTER PAYTON: The game doesn't redeem anybody. I thought "Sweetness" was me. It was just a nickname. The real accounting happens away from the field. You know that better than most.
RAE CARRUTH: I do. I just wish I'd known it before.
JIM BROWN: You had talent, Rae. That part was real.
RAE CARRUTH: (under his breath, almost inaudible) It wasn't enough to matter.
The four men, Brown, Payton, Simpson, Carruth, sit in the same weightless space. The silence after Carruth's last words still hangs. Then, from the periphery, another figure appears. Younger than the others. Moving with the residual athleticism of someone whose body was once a marvel. Lawrence Phillips stops at the edge of the group, uncertain.
JIM BROWN: Lawrence.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: (surprised to be recognized) Mr. Brown.
JIM BROWN: Don't "Mr. Brown" me. Sit down.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I wasn't sure if I belonged here.
WALTER PAYTON: Nobody here was sure of that about themselves. What year did you get here?
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: 2016. March. I was 40.
(No one asks how. They already know. Phillips died in his prison cell, presumably suicide, while serving a 31-year prison sentence for an attempted murder conviction.)
O.J. SIMPSON: I watched you at Nebraska. 1994, '95. You were something different. Something genuinely different.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: People kept saying that. Different. Special. Like it was a promise somebody made on my behalf without asking me first.
WALTER PAYTON: Sixth pick overall. 1996. St. Louis.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Yeah. Dick Vermeil cried when he drafted me. Actually cried. Said he was going to save me. (pause) I don't think I was save-able by then. I'm not sure I ever was. But I didn't know that yet, and neither did he.
JIM BROWN: Your first season — ten touchdowns. Over 1,000 yards from scrimmage.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Should have been more. Would have been more. But I couldn't stay out of my own way for more than six weeks at a time. There was always something like an incident, a fight, or a woman I put my hands on. The Rams cut me after two seasons. Then Miami. Then San Francisco. Each stop shorter than the last. By the time the NFL was done with me I'd played parts of three seasons and the league had given up. I don't blame them.
RAE CARRUTH: How many teams gave you a chance?
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Three NFL teams. Then NFL Europe. Then the Arena League. Each one a smaller stage. Like the universe was slowly turning down the volume on me. (beat) I hurt people along the way. Women, mostly. There was one incident in college with my ex-girlfriend, Kate McEwen, that Nebraska and Coach Tom Osborne decided wasn't worth losing a national championship over. They suspended me six games and brought me back. We won the title. I was named offensive MVP of the bowl game.
JIM BROWN: That decision by Osborne to reinstate you...that's on him too. Institutions protect their interests and call it second chances.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I've thought about that. It gave me cover I hadn't earned. Made me think consequences had ceilings. They don't.
WALTER PAYTON: Where did it end, Lawrence? The final accounting?
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: It ended in 2005. I drove a car into a group of teenagers after a flag football argument. Three kids hit. Then later, I strangled a woman, in an apartment. I said I didn't do it. The jury disagreed. The judge gave me thirty-one years. I was in Kern Valley State Prison and I just... I couldn't see thirty-one years. I couldn't see the end of the corridor. So I made a decision in that cell and that was that.
(Silence. Heavy and complete.)
RAE CARRUTH: (to no one in particular) We were all running backs and receivers, made successful by our speed, and the one thing none of us could outrun was ourselves.
JIM BROWN: That's either very profound or very convenient, Rae. I haven't decided which.
RAE CARRUTH: Probably both.
O.J. Simpson has been quiet for a moment, looking into the middle distance.
O.J. SIMPSON: Can I say something about someone who isn't here? Someone who should be having a version of this conversation but maybe isn't capable of it yet?
WALTER PAYTON: Go ahead.
O.J. SIMPSON: Darren Sharper. Safety. Vikings, Packers, Saints. One of the best to ever play the position. Eight Pro Bowls-caliber seasons. Interceptions like he could read minds. Won a Super Bowl with New Orleans after the 2009 season ,one of the feel-good championships in NFL history, post-Katrina, the city needed it. He was a centerpiece of that defense.
JIM BROWN: I know who he is.
O.J. SIMPSON: What he did — what came out after — it wasn't passion. It wasn't a moment. It wasn't poverty or foster care or a childhood that broke something fundamental. He drugged women. Systematically. Across multiple states. At least sixteen victims that were proven. He did it during his playing career. He did it during that Super Bowl season. While the city of New Orleans was celebrating, while he was being called a champion — he was doing that.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: (visibly disturbed) That's...that's a different category.
O.J. SIMPSON: It is. And I say that as someone who has no moral high ground. But there's a difference between a life that collapsed into violence and a man who constructed a hidden architecture of predation while maintaining a public face of excellence. The Super Bowl ring and what he was doing to women existed simultaneously. Deliberately. That takes a kind of compartmentalization that isn't about emotion or weakness. It's about deciding that certain people don't matter.
WALTER PAYTON: He got twenty years of hard, federal time.
O.J. SIMPSON: He did. And he'll carry the Hall of Fame numbers that will never get him into the Hall. That's the footnote his career became. Not the interceptions. Not the Super Bowl. The footnote is sixteen women and a federal conviction. And unlike most of us, there's no "but" available to him. No complexity to hide inside.
JIM BROWN: Some legacies don't survive contact with the truth.
(Another pause. The group sits with that. Lawrence Phillips is looking at his hands.)
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Can I ask you something, Mr. Payton? Walter?
WALTER PAYTON: Of course.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Did you ever feel like the football was the only place where things made sense? Like between those lines was the only time the noise stopped?
WALTER PAYTON: Yes. Absolutely yes. The game was the one place where what I did translated directly into something clean. You run hard, you gain yards, the crowd reacts, it's simple. The rest of life, marriage, fatherhood, who you are behind closed doors, that's all ambiguous. You can tell yourself stories. On the field the scoreboard doesn't lie.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: That's it exactly. That's what I've been trying to articulate for years. When I was running the ball I was just... a body doing what it was built to do. Everything else required me to be a person and I didn't know how to be a person. Nobody taught me. Foster care, twelve different homes before high school; you learn to survive, not to relate. Not to love anything that can leave you.
JIM BROWN: I came from a different kind of absence. My father wasn't around. My great-grandmother raised me in Georgia. But I had Manhasset High, I had mentors, and I had football coaches who saw something worth developing. You didn't have that infrastructure, Lawrence.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: No. I had Tom Osborne, who needed me healthy enough to play on Saturdays.
JIM BROWN: That's a brutal thing to say. And probably true.
WALTER PAYTON: I think about what I'd tell my younger self. Before the fame calcified into identity. I'd say...the jersey comes off. Every single Sunday night the jersey comes off and then you're just a man. And you better have something built underneath the jersey or you'll spend your whole life trying to get back inside it.
RAE CARRUTH: I was 26 when everything ended. I didn't have anything built underneath it. Just fear and bad decisions made at speed.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I was 24 when the league gave up on me. I spent the next sixteen years proving everyone right about me. That's the thing I regret most: not the opportunities I wasted, but the people who believed in something I couldn't sustain. I regret what I cost them. Vermeil especially. He was genuine.
O.J. SIMPSON: Genuine people pay the highest price for believing in the wrong ones. That's not their fault. But it's our accounting.
Jim Brown stands slowly, not to leave, but just to stand. He looks at each man in turn. Brown, who rushed for 12,312 yards in nine seasons and never missed a game. Who carried his own shadows. Who outlived most of his era and watched the game he defined become something unrecognizable. When he speaks it's without judgment but without softness either.
JIM BROWN: We were all, at our best, extraordinary. Every man in this room had gifts that the vast majority of human beings will never possess. Speed, vision, instinct, physical courage. The game asked for all of it and we gave it. That part is real and it doesn't disappear.
But the game is also the most effective hiding place ever constructed for a man who doesn't want to be known. Seventy thousand people watching and not one of them seeing you. Just the number on your back. Just the highlights. We hid in plain sight, most of us. Some of us hid things that were merely sad. Some of us hid things that were unforgivable.
(pauses)
The question I keep returning to, and I don't have an answer, is whether the gifts and the damage come from the same place. Whether whatever makes a man fearless between the lines is the same thing that makes him dangerous outside them. I don't know. But I think about it.
WALTER PAYTON: I think about it too.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: (whispering) Every day.
Rae Carruth says nothing. He doesn't need to. Chancellor's face, which he barely knows, is answer enough. The five men sit together in the particular silence of people who have run out of defenses. Not at peace. Not forgiven. But present, finally, without the jersey.
A note on authorship: The Weight of the Game was conceived, directed, and shaped by me, including the premise, the participants, the thematic architecture, the dramatic turns, and the decision to treat these men as full human beings rather than symbols. The dialogue was developed collaboratively, in the long tradition of writers who work with creative partners whose names don't always appear on the final page. I've reviewed, edited, and taken responsibility for the content. Any factual inaccuracies in statistics or public record are mine to correct. What you're reading is fiction. Please treat it as such. With that said, I hope it makes you feel something true.
1) Image from https://www.facebook.com/groups/mosportstalk/posts/2767626706924912/
2) Image from NBC News.
