A Genuine Sports Hero

by David McGrath

What follows is the unabridged version of the 800 word feature that appeared in The Star.

I knew former Chicago Bear Christopher Zorich when he was fifteen years old and a student in my sophomore English class at Chicago Vocational High School (CVS) In particular, I remember a day in winter when the shades were drawn, and we were watching the feature film The Outsiders after having read the S.E. Hinton novel as part of our literature unit.

Three quarters of the way through the movie, the main character was devastated when his best friend died of injuries suffered while they were rescuing children from a burning building. It was an emotional moment in the film, and also, apparently, in my classroom, as someone was crying softly from a desk in the back.

Crying in public, and especially in front of inner-city teens at the age of peak peer pressure, was taboo. Several males up front turned towards the muffled sounds emanating from the rear. They were poised to scorn, to laugh derisively. But then they turned uncomfortably back towards the screen after they saw it was Zorich.

Christopher Zorich, 200 pound middle linebacker phenom of the mighty Cavaliers, CVS’ football team, held his head in his big hands. He wore his big heart on his sleeve, but the young men in the front of the classroom knew that within that sleeve was a devastating forearm shiver.

Today, nearly twenty years later, while sitting in the conference room of the Zorich Foundation, the charity he founded that’s headquartered at 900 South Wabash, I think of all that has has happened and changed since I first met the earnest, gifted kid Chicago’s southeast side, The navy blue Chicago Bears helmet that he wore for 7 of those years rests on a table by the door, its dents and scars telling the story of an undersized nose tackle who willed himself to succeed in a game played by giants, achieving stardom at CVS, at Notre Dame, and in the NFL; who earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and a law degree at Notre Dame, after emerging from a neighborhood where for most young men, prison time is common, and high school graduation the highest reasonable goal; who this past

February took the Illinois Bar exam as yet another step in his goal to make a difference in the neighborhood whence he came.

A lot had happened, a lot changed in those twenty years since he wrote sports stories for CVS’ newspaper, the Trademaster, for which I was the faculty advisor. But when the man seated across the table from me speaks about the day in 2001 when he graduated from Notre Dame law school, I realize that what’s inside of him hasn’t changed much at all.

“As I was driving home—had my car packed up and everything—I started crying,” said Zorich. “I just realized what I had done, walked away from a potential million dollar per year salary, to get my ass kicked as a rookie all over again in an environment I wasn’t trained for.”

He was referring, of course, to retiring from the NFL’s Washington Redskins in 1997, for whom he played half a season after being cut from the Bears. And now he reflected upon the quiet, dark, and emotional 90 minute drive from South Bend to his home in Chicago, when he experienced a flood of feelings about the obstacles, the anguish, and the memories.

“I just got a law degree from Notre Dame University, and that was so much harder than being a professional athlete. It was the opposite of what I was doing for most of my life. Football was a physical reaction. It was like breathing for me. Law school was mental strain.

“The first year was the hardest. I had been so wrapped up with the work of the Foundation, that I felt I was doing a disservice to the people I had been helping. I was reading about people in the poor neighborhoods being burned out of their homes, and, I remember vividly, the water pipes bursting that winter in some of the housing developments, while I was in a heated room listening to a professor who really didn’t care what was going on outside the classroom. I was feeling very guilty that I was in law school.”

The 15 year-old who had fearlessly shown his emotions in the back of my classroom, continues to defy the stereotype of the selfish, greedy, egotistical professional athlete. Since 1993, his Christopher Zorich Foundation has been active delivering groceries to almost 400 families a year, sponsoring a youth foundation and motivational visits to schools, and recognizing battered women via Mother’s Day gifts to shelters. While most charitable organizations begun by professional athletes seem to disappear when the career ends, Zorich’s Foundation continues and grows, and he says they’re in it “for the long haul.” In his mother’s name, the Foundation awards the annual Zora Zorich scholarships to two needy Notre Dame students.

And she, of course, is who was uppermost in Zorich’s mind during that post-graduation drive to Chicago—the woman who had raised him as a single parent at 82st & Burnham Avenue.

“We never had this conversation, my mother and I, but I’m driving that same night and thinking back how there were white neighborhoods where we could have moved, and it wouldn’t have been as hard for her.”

Zorich’s mother was Croatian, and his father, whom he never knew, was black. She could have kept him on the east side where he would have gone to Washington High School instead of CVS.

“She raised me in an all black environment where she was a target. But she made a decision, like, ‘you know, I think it’s important that he knows his black culture, so I’m going to live here.’

“If I could be just 1/8 th the person my mother was,” he says.

I had met his mother only briefly at the annual CVS Open House in fall of 1985, so I don’t recall much except that her son beamed when he introduced her. And whether he thought he was an eighth or a sixteenth of the human being she was, the coaches at CVS and the local sports press back then thought he was too good to be true.

His senior year, the Cavs lost in the playoffs, but Zorich was all over the field. From his middle position he’d explode through the line to the quarterback, explode right or left to be in on every tackle, often knocking down both the blocker and the runner.

CVS Head Coach John Potocki said Zorich had a hate he had gotten from the streets which he used to fuel his on-the-field mania. Today Zorich tells me his mother did not like what Potocki said, but he admits it’s true. Potocki provided wisdom and inspiration in high school, and motivation for him to dare to make it at Notre Dame, especially after another CVS teacher told him he feared he would not survive there academically. Potocki, with whom he’s still close, believed in him.

When others questioned his size, his ability, and even his SAT scores, Potocki and Defensive Coach Harry Watson helped him fight to qualify for Notre Dame by overloading him with additional classes his senior year. It’s why I seldom saw him in ‘87, when he was on a 7:15am to 4:30 pm lunch-less schedule.

Once he made it to South Bend, he harnessed the “street hate” for a ride to a national championship, the Chevrolet Defensive Player of the Year, the Vince Lombardi Trophy, and MVP of the Orange Bowl which the Irish lost 10-9 to UCLA, though, once again, Zorich’s tackling and bashing were so ubiquitous that at times during the game, it seemed it was UCLA versus Zorich. When he went home after the game to find his mother had died after watching him on television, it felt like the Zorich versus the world.

“He was unbelievable,” said CVS Defensive Coach Harry Watson, shaking his head after attending the wake. “I was agonizing over what I was going to say to this kid who just lost his mother who was his best friend. Instead, he comes up to me, to all of us there, wearing that big smile, like we’re so great to have come. He’s going all out to comfort us, to make us feel good. It was backwards.”

Potocki was, for a time, a surrogate parent, but Zorich had a support staff of friends that continues today, consisting of former CVS teammates Marlon Parks, Yasuran Slaughter, and John Meeks, and he considers Foundation Executive Director Barbara Singer to be one of his closest advisers, after his best friend and wife of two years, Camille Henderson. She is currently pursuing a PhD. in history at the University of Chicago.

I myself never saw any of the hate Potocki spoke of. In my classroom, Zorich was low key, curious, fascinated with language. We scanned American poetry on the blackboard: Poe’s “The Raven,” and Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Today he practically apologizes for not continuing as a fan of fiction, but boasts about the fortune he sends to amazon.com, and of the 2,500 nonfiction books he’s read and for which he’s running out of room. He credits CVS history teachers Tim Skrobot and Randy Powers for birthing his love of history, biography, and law.

In Room 102 of the Chappel Wing of CVS in September of 1985, he called me “sir,” and was the first one up when I asked the students to break into groups, or go to the blackboard to repair a sentence problem. Every teacher in Chicago should have been as lucky to have as the biggest, strongest student in the classroom, one who was obedient and polite and willing to please. The old fashioned values instilled by his Croatian mother, and the longing for direction from, and the deference he paid to any male authority figure, were what made him a dream player for every coach, including for Mike Ditka, who drafted him in the second round over players bigger, faster, and more highly touted. Today he still calls me “sir” or “Mr. McGrath.” And ten minutes into our conversation at his own office, he asks if I mind if he loosens his tie.

Armed with a law degree, working for the firm of Schuyler, Roche & Zwirner, P.C. in Chicago, and awaiting the results of his bar exam due sometime next April, Zorich speaks about his goals as an attorney. From any other law school graduate in today’s society, his words would be shocking.

“I can use this knowledge to help people who were in the same situation I was,” he says. “I never saw anyone carry a briefcase to work from my neighborhood, where we encourage people to ‘be like Mike,’ but not ‘be like the Bulls owner, Jerry Reinsdorf. Kids in that environment, they can shine, if they have the opportunity.”

Zorich hopes to use his law credentials to fight for social justice. As a sports celebrity and president of the Zorich Foundation, he sits on many philanthropic, community, and education related boards. Because his role on them had been mostly limited to a two minute presentation and a quick exit, he feels he wasn’t always taken seriously—more as a name or an attractive addition to a letterhead. But as an attorney, he can understand the issues, be a player on those boards and make a difference, he says.

While his lawyerly ambitions are not necessarily fueled by the “hate from the streets” which he channeled so well in football, there is a simmering desire to defy and destroy the condescension and even racism manifested in the case of professional black athletes. He cites the story of Irish teammate and former Carolina Panther Pat Terrell, who is also black, and who, like Zorich, aspired to another career as a pilot for commercial shuttle services. When passengers encountered Terrell in uniform in the smaller city air terminals, they’d invariably hand him their luggage. Terrell played along, so that he could later enjoy the looks on their faces when they saw him advance to the cockpit of the jet to fly them to their destination.

“We as a society tend not to look at sports players as anything else,” he says. “There’s that jock stereotype.”

Zorich wants to address local and national issues on which racial inequity has a bearing: dilapidated buses on Chicago’s south side; the concentration of better educational resources on the primarily white north side; the disproportionate number of black males in American prisons; the Supreme Court case involving affirmative action and the University of Michigan.

“Bush says he’s opposed to affirmative action in the Michigan case,” says Zorich. “He should be a poster child for affirmative action, considering how he got into Yale.”

Zorich hopes to use the law to further implement his Foundation’s motto of realizing value in everyone, and to fight racial stereotypes, and to ensure equal opportunities for everyone, opportunities that he wouldn’t have had if it weren’t for sports. But he cautions about black youths relying on sports or “hoop dreams,” referring to the U.S. News & World Report essay entitled “The Jordan Effect” (3/24/97), which detailed the negative effect of athletics in the black community. Zorich referenced the time and energy wasted by black youths in chasing what is for most an impossible dream in professional sports, time and energy that would be put to better use in getting an education.

“When sports is an option for kids, that’s bad,” says Zorich, “because sports aren’t guaranteed. In economically deprived areas, kids are encouraged to play sports. Sports or entertainment, that’s the stereotype. But sports should be an afterthought. The goal should be for PhD’s, not to play for the Bulls.”

A former NFL pro-bowl alternate and three time All American in college, Zorich thinks that in order to change the emphasis from sports to academics, an athlete ought to have to maintain a B average in order to remain eligible.

“Coaches get mad at me when I say that, but we know students who were given [gifted with] passing grades when they’re performing well on the field. If the mandate were B’s, you’d become more attentive to academics.”

He hopes to help change this mindset, and as an attorney to advocate for the many causes dear to his heart and to the Zorich Foundation. The scope of his variegated goals suggests an eventual evolution from law to a political career. But he realizes that in his first year on the law firm, he has a lot to learn, has to first do the “grunt work.”

Speaking of which, he swears that making it through law school was the hardest work in his life, and not just because he went from a physical pursuit that was easy and natural, to something cerebral for which he was unprepared. He also struggled with concepts of morality.

“Notre Dame is a very traditional law school,” he says. “There weren’t many students who had been doing something else, and then had come back. So their idea about the law is different from mine.”

He discovered that in class after class, more emphasis was on being successful lawyers than on using the law to serve the community. He cited a class discussion in which an instructor, who was also a priest, posed a question to the class about what they would do if asked to represent a business that wanted to relocate overseas. All the other students said yes. When Zorich responded that he would turn down such a client because of the lost jobs and hardships incurred in the community where the business was based, the professor replied: “Mr. Zorich, you’re going to be a poor attorney,” and he did not mean poor as in incompetent.

Today, the graduate sits in front of me, poised and eager to start using his law degree. Time spent at school, at study, and at work for the Foundation, left him little for exercise, so he confesses to having gained weight over the course of four years. But since graduation, he’s been running six miles every day, is back to his playing weight, and is the image of erudition in his dark, custom three piece suit. A two inch goatee seems to make his familiar smile seem more philosophical, complementing a kind of up-his-sleeve twinkle in his narrow eyes, the eyes opponents saw through the cage of his helmet in that split second before he crushed them while averaging 100 tackles a year in the NFL. Those eyes, a body like an inverted pyramid, the bowling pin forearms—this is one lawyer who will never make anyone forget he was a Chicago Bear.

And a Chicago Bear he’ll always be, as he follows their trials and tribulations with the rest of us.

“I think the Bears made one of their biggest mistakes ever in not hiring Mike Singletary,” he lamented.

“The Bears have issues with the 1985 [Super Bowl Winners] Bears, because they remind them of who they’re not. Singletary is the one guy who probably never said anything negative about them, yet they don’t hire him because they say ‘we have someone else.’

“And then the worst thing they did was give Richard Dent a call, someone who did have issues with the team, just to save face [the Bears announced that they had invited ex-defensive end Dent to apply for a coaching spot after they were criticized for rejecting Singletary]. The best middle linebacker in history had to move his family to Baltimore to coach the Ravens.

“They release James Williams, the last of the Mike Ditka era, a leader of the team, someone loyal. And Dave McGinnis, a coach, a friend of the family, they messed that up, too.”

Zorich attributes such mistakes to an “organizational problem,” partly because the Bears are not one of many corporate arms of a conglomerate, but the only thing these owners have.

“Growing up, you admired the team because of the players. There was loyalty,” he says. “These are not the Bears I grew up with.”

He doesn’t have to say that the Bears he grew up with were not the same ones who ignominiously cut him when he knew he had more football to play. But one gets the feeling that old No. 97 has decided to harness that resentment, along with any others he’s developed along the way, to tackle legal causes instead of running backs, on yet another field where few expected he could play.