Not just to mouth words that sound good or to con the public or to sell sneakers to kids. He's said the right thing because that's how he lives his life.
He believes, in fact, that it's probably why he still has a life so many years after his body was left broken on the floor of the Oakland Coliseum by the kind of hit everyone in pro football knows can happen but no one ever talks about. It's like the elephant in the corner. Everybody sees it's there. Nobody mentions it.
That's why when he got the news, Stingley knew what some people would think. More importantly, he knew what he thought. They weren't the same thing. Not even remotely.
"My mother handed me a newspaper that was folded over," Stingley recalled of the day he learned that the man who paralyzed him 25 years ago was now losing his own legs. "It was folded so I'd see the bottom of the story first. It said something about how in 1978 Jack Tatum paralyzed me with a hit during an exhibition game. When I flipped the paper over, I saw the headline. `Fund raiser for fallen Buckeye.' That's when I first learned what happened."
What happened was that Tatum, the former Oakland Raiders safety who in the late 1970s was one of the most feared men in football, had lost his left leg below the knee in April as a result of complications from diabetes and now was suffering from an arterial blockage that might cost him the lower part of his right leg. At the moment, the latter problem seems to have cleared up after his fifth surgery in six months, but for the man Tatum put in a wheelchair but never spoke to since, there was only one human thing to say.
Typical of Darryl Stingley, he didn't say it.
The human thing was to say what some of Stingley's friends and former teammates said: "What goes around comes around." The human thing was to say, "He finally got what he deserved."
What Stingley said was different because he's different. Or at least he chooses to be different.
"You can't, as a human being, feel happy about something like that happening to another human being," Stingley said from his condominium overlooking Lake Michigan in Chicago. "Maybe the natural reaction is to think he got what was coming to him but I don't accept human nature as our real nature. Human nature teaches us to hate. God teaches us to love.
