Isiah Robertson was sobbing silently, Ken Meyer was whispering consoling words into James Harris’s ear and Fred Dryer was calling the officials “donkeys.” The Los Angeles Rams were frustrated and they were angry.
But none felt the sudden pain that Ken Geddes, a Ram linebacker, felt when he received a telephone call after the 14‐10 loss to the Minnesota Vikings in the 1974 NFC Championship.
“A friend of his family called and said his dad died this morning,” a Rams’ executive said as Geddes cried uncontrollably in the shower, a pair of teammates holding him around his broad, soap-covered shoulders.
As the news spread around the locker room, the players’ voices became softer and their feelings turned, at least, for the moment, from the outcome of the game that ended their season instead of extending it to the Super Bowl.
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Geddes grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., the fourth of 17 kids. Before he was a teen, he worked after school at a door manufacturer and a soda bottler. He picked blackberries and sweet potatoes. He helped his mom do other people’s laundry. “It was something that we did,” Geddes says. “I never thought about being poor.”
In seventh grade, he quit going to school every day. A math teacher suggested Boys Town, the Nebraska school mythologized in the film, with Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan, saying: “There isn’t any such thing in the world as a bad boy.” Geddes had seen the movie. He wanted to go.
At 13, he boarded a bus, alone. He arrived, west of Omaha, to discover Catholics were real. He’d never seen one — and figured the movie had made that part up. Once settled, Geddes flourished. He played on the basketball and football teams — state champions, both — and joined the student government, working his way up to commissioner. As a senior he ran for mayor of Boys Town, losing by one vote.
He went on to college, at Nebraska, where he played nose guard and linebacker, and earned a degree in education.
Geddes played eight years in the NFL; his biggest contract was $250,000, spread over three years. He worked the offseasons — in Seattle, as an assistant manager at Jack in the Box. He also secured a real estate license. He planned for life after football, determined not to lose all he’d gained. “I knew what it was like, not to have,” he says.
A foremost proponent of education, Geddes’ daughter is an assistant principal at a Seattle-area high school, and his son teaches math in Middle School. When Geddes himself retired as a middle school counselor in 2011, his school dedicated a bench to him, inscribed with his trademark greeting: “Good morning! Make it a great day or not, the choice is yours!”
Jim Everett Table Toss 