Psycho Is Gone

Some think he may have been the toughest football player who ever put on the pads.

The men who played with him wouldn’t argue.

“Oh, he was something,” Len Dawson said of his former teammate on the Texans-Chiefs LB Sherrill Headrick. “There were so many times you thought there was no way he was going to be able to overcome an injury, but there he was, the next play, back on the field.”

After a long fight with cancer, Headrick passed away on Wednesday at the age of 71.

As a linebacker over eight years with the Texans-Chiefs and a single season with the expansion Cincinnati Bengals, nothing seemed to be able to stop Headrick. He played with a broken neck, infected gums, hemorrhoids, and a fractured thumb. Sprains and strains were nothing to the Texas native. The only way he came off the field is if there was a bone sticking out.

That happened several times. Once, he had trainer Wayne Rudy tape the finger to a tongue depressor and he missed only a play. Another time, he popped the bone back into place and went back on the field.

That’s how he earned the nickname “Psycho.”

But for those that didn’t see him play, don’t think he was all craziness. He played in 108 games for the Texans-Chiefs and had 14 interceptions and three career TDs. He earned multiple berths in the AFL All-Star Game. San Diego coach Sid Gillman once called him “the best middle linebacker in football.”

Headrick played in the 1962 AFL Championship Game and the game that would become known as Super Bowl I.

In the book Great Teams, Great Years: The Kansas City Chiefs, author Dick Connor wrote of Headrick:

“He was the most unlikely linebacker candidate in either league. His shoulders slumped from a long neck and his belly protruded. Yet he was blessed with a rare gift. He seemed instinctively to know where a play would develop, and he was totally fearless and impervious to pain. His nickname was Psycho and eventually the Texans even named a defense for him.

“Headrick had been a fullback and guard at TCU but not a scholar. He had flunked out prior to his senior season and then had gone to Canada. At 24, weighing possibly as much as 210 pounds, he came out of Canadian ball, where he was a defensive back. “If I hadn’t gotten this job,” he said of the Texans. “I don’t know what I’d have done. Nothing, probably. I’d have been a bum.’

“The Texans began to build their defense around this improbable hero, who remained with them until Cincinnati picked him in the expansion draft. Through it all there was one habit he never lost. He never went onto the playing field without first throwing up in the locker room.”

About 15 months ago, Headrick sat down in his home in River Oaks, Texas and wrote a letter to his old classmates at Fort Worth’s North Side High School. He wanted them to know he had cancer and that it had spread throughout his body. No treatment was going to help. Medication would only delay death and it gave him almost another year and a half longer.

The way he played the game cost Headrick a great deal, beginning as soon as he retired after the 1968 season. Last year he told a Dallas newspaper that he played until his body “just quit.” The writer wrote: “The pain in his back got so bad that, after he retired from football, he spent most of the next year in a hospital bed. He went to work for a friend in the restaurant business. They wheeled the bed into an office, where Headrick made calls on his back. He’s not sure how many surgeries he’s had. Eighteen or 19. He can still drive, still walk, but not far or for long.

“When he was inducted into the Chiefs Hall of Fame in 1993, he all but had to crawl up the steps. ‘I’ve got metal knees, metal hips, metal shoulders,’ he said. ‘I’ve had carpal tunnel in my hands, a broken neck and disks removed in my back.
‘I’m not much of a specimen anymore’.”
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