Inching Back to Check Again Hes Disappeared and
OTL: The Redemption of Billy Cannon
AP Photo
Baton Cannon in December 1959.
"I'm going to play with my horses," Dr. Billy Cannon says.
Even in his 72nd twelvemonth, people can't help looking at him. They see but the broadest strokes: the LSU football hero who fell unimaginably far. Almost no 1 is immune to see deeper. He doesn't similar to be inspected -- in one case he saw me taking notes in a hotel foyer and barked, "Put that damn book upwardly" -- because his life then becomes the property of the observer.
Of course, what he likes hasn't mattered for a long time now. For the past one-half century, he has existed mostly through the eyes of others, the narrative of his life in their command. They stare, they whisper, they indicate. They wonder what to brand of his hard exterior, or the gruff responses he gives to strangers, or the fact that he has spent much of the past two decades in virtual seclusion. For years, the few people he allowed to come close were left with more questions than answers. Does he know who he is? Does he know what he means? Are his days filled with regret? Strangers yearn to know him, withal he seems unknowable, to the men who played with him, maybe fifty-fifty to himself. He gave me more time than he's ever given a writer before, and for every moment I thought I understood him, in that location were two more that made me sure I didn't know what he thought about anything. His own higher coach says he didn't really similar the younger, more arrogant version of this old man inching down the hill.
Still, people keep trying, like the guy earlier today, at the party before the annual prison rodeo. He spotted the dentist across the warden'southward front end k, began the slow but inevitable dance over, until, finally, they stood merely feet apart.
"Are you Billy Cannon?" he asked.
"I'm what's left of him," the dentist said.
Birth of a fable
Recently, I invited the electric current LSU running dorsum to lookout man The Punt Return. No other description is needed, and Charles Scott walks into the Tigers' team coming together room, ready for the video of Billy Cannon's 1959 Halloween run. I ask him if he's e'er seen it before.
"Come up on now," he says.
Of course. He'south ane of a billion to hear or encounter and marvel at this run in the fifty years since Cannon took that Ole Miss kick 89 yards to win the game and lock up the Heisman Trophy. The audio notwithstanding plays on Louisiana radio, the video on television set. Fans paint murals of the play on the sides of RVs. One time, in the hall of a New York hotel, I heard SEC basketball announcer Joe Dean, Jr., do the radio play-by-play verbatim. "The matter became a religious state of affairs," says Paul Dietzel, Cannon'south college coach.
Billy Cannon's famous 1959 punt return, courtesy LSU athletics.
The black and white flickers, and Scott sees the familiar beginning: the ball bouncing at the sixteen, Cannon ignoring his coach'south dominion about catching balls that close to the end zone and fielding it at the eleven, turning upfield. At the 20, he meets the outset group of tacklers. He runs through them, legs pumping.
"Wow," Scott says softly.
Cannon breaks the 2nd tackle, then the third, then the fourth, 5th, sixth. Scott tin can't believe how pocket-sized a crack Cannon needs. The 2 running backs met once, a year or so ago.
"I brought a picture of me," Cannon told him then. "If you don't appreciate it, your daddy will."
"Oh, I appreciate it," Scott said. "Trust me."
Scott saw through the erstwhile torso and white, thinning pilus. He saw what a lion Cannon must have been, recognized the things that don't ever leave a star.
"He has swag," Scott says at present.
On the screen in the LSU meeting room, Cannon breaks free, as he always does, running alone downwardly the sideline. Scott is like generations of Tigers who've seen The Punt Return and dreamed of becoming legends themselves, as well immature to realize what something like that costs. "When yous look at a play like that Halloween run," Scott says, "y'all become a flick of yourself doing something that people remember forever."
One time, Cannon was like Scott: immature and stiff, invincible, sure he could handle existence a hero on Saturday dark. After reaching the terminate zone 50 years ago, he limped toward the sideline, no doubt thinking the hardest part of running that punt back was finished. The radio journalist said, "Mind to the cheer for Billy Cannon as he comes off the field. Cracking All-American." The crowd'southward roar volition make the hair stand up up on your arm.
Tardily in the quaternary quarter, Cannon led a goal-line stand and made the game-saving tackle. Exhausted, he lay downwards in the tunnel, unable to make it to the locker room. Finally, he sprawled out on a training table, property an ice pack to his bruised face up. He gave credit to his blockers, changed into street clothes and left for a double-date with his quarterback, Warren Rabb. They pulled up to a blue-collar joint on the tough side of Billy Rouge, near where Cannon grew up the son of a janitor, in the shadow of the refineries.
When they walked through the door, the identify buzzed with excitement. The conqueror had arrived. People came to the table all night, in awe. Cannon seemed uncomfortable with the attending, Rabb would think, and didn't really want to talk about the run. His life was changing in that room, at that table, and in that location was nothing he could practice to stop it. Folks imagined anyone capable of heroics must be a hero, and he was treated that fashion. Eating dinner, with people pushing and crowding only to touch him, did he realize they didn't love him as much every bit they loved his run? Did he realize he was kickoff a new journeying, one that would take the rest of his life to complete?
AP Photo
Cannon slips by Mississippi defenders on his fashion to the famous 89-yard punt render for a touchdown on Oct. 31, 1959.
Black-and-white memories
The men who played with Billy Cannon are onetime now, still answering questions about The Punt Return. They effort their best to tell fascinating stories about those years, but a mutual thread emerges: These aren't stories of things they did with Billy, they're stories of things they watched Billy practise.
Mostly, they watched him perform mythic feats of strength. Once, in a track meet, he ran the 100-yard nuance in 9.4 seconds and threw the shot 54 anxiety. He knocked a defender common cold with a forearm. He took a outset back at Texas Tech as a sophomore, and when he reached the end zone, only nine seconds had run off the clock. The play stunned opposing players and mascot alike. "That damn black horse," teammate Scooter Purvis says, "he was even looking at Cannon."
Cannon married as a freshman and lived in married student housing. His teammates saw him in practise and in meetings, merely few felt as if they e'er saw inside. Looking back, they realize they didn't actually know him at all. Even and then, he was a mystery. Dietzel describes him equally "aristocratic" and "not one of the guys."
They were higher boys. He was a man. In high school, they all heard, he got arrested for going downtown and beating up local gay men for fun. They heard whispers he worked for and ran with local union leaders and suspected mafia bosses. He didn't seem to be controlled by the mundane human being emotions and fears that consumed their lives. Before a game, the story goes, a shaky teammate asked Billy if he was nervous. Cannon, who made money by selling off an unabridged section of Tiger Stadium seats, looked up and saw his area full. He smiled. No, he said, he wasn't nervous a bit. There are dozens of stories like that, and who knows now whether they are true. But they all accept the same centre: Rules did non apply when you could run the ball like Billy Cannon. He had picture-star looks; l years later, two coeds saw his framed college-aged picture, with that F-You jaw and unknowable eyes, and one gushed, "What a stud!"
Later on college, he signed with both the AFL and the NFL, prompting a lawsuit. He played 11 years in the pros, with Houston, Oakland and Kansas City, then came abode to become an orthodontist. Every kid in Louisiana wanted to have their teeth fixed by Billy Cannon. The cash rolled in. But not everything was magical: He publicly criticized Charles McClendon, the LSU coach, and people imagined him arrogant, though their baseline of comparison was the icon they had constructed in the first identify; Billy was judged against a person he never claimed to be. Regardless, the boy who grew up poor plant himself welcome in all the individual clubs, with more coin than he'd ever imagined, married to his loftier school sweetheart, Dot, with v salubrious, well-adjusted kids. In 1983, he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. Everything seemed so easy.
Maybe, his closest friends would think in years to come, too easy.
George Silk/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
The All-American football player seemed to have it all -- success on the field, accolades, a beautiful young family.
An epic autumn from grace
On July 9, 1983, subsequently a lengthy surveillance, the U.Southward. Clandestine Service knocked on Dr. Billy Cannon'south door, and suddenly zippo seemed as well easy anymore.
AP Photo
Cannon, 46 at the fourth dimension, enters the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, on Mon, Sept. 12, 1983, to begin serving a five-year sentence for counterfeiting. He had pleaded guilty to charges he masterminded a scheme to print and distribute $6 meg in apocryphal bills.
The dark news spread all over the state. Cannon, hero of Halloween night, favorite of children all over Louisiana, had been arrested for counterfeiting. He and a gang of friends turned amateurish crooks manufactured more than $6 one thousand thousand in $100 bills. They'd passed several hundred g into circulation, and Cannon buried the rest of the simulated money in Igloo coolers. It was the seventh largest counterfeiting scheme in U.South. history. Prosecutors called Cannon the ringleader.
He immediately confessed.
A unlike Billy Cannon emerged in the months that followed. People read stories of investments turned sour and of backdrop auctioned by the sheriff. They tuned into the news to run across him walking through a phalanx of cameramen, his lawyer pushing the aggressive ones bated. Over and over, people asked why. Over and over, he declined to respond. He stared straight ahead, giving abroad nothing, more of a mystery than ever.
Finally, Cannon stood earlier the gauge to exist sentenced. He got five years.
Cannon left the courthouse via a back door, took off his suit jacket and, wearing a brusque-sleeve dress shirt, climbed into the backseat of a waiting car. Simply cameras witnessed his exit, none of the usual fans or kids pleading for autographs. Stories ran about fathers not telling their sons the news. The state felt betrayed. Cannon had broken faith with the people, and they broke faith with him in return. A stadium of fans one time stood to see him run down the sideline, but people remember merely a single member of the LSU family, longtime sports data director Paul Manasseh, showing up in the courtroom to support him.
The world couldn't run from Billy Cannon fast enough. The Higher Football Hall of Fame rescinded its honor. Time Magazine called him "A Bogus Hero." His greatest moment -- The Punt Render -- became the source of his humiliation. They showed information technology over and over again, not in celebration, but to set his downfall. Something strange began happening: The fans who loved him because of The Punt Render found they could keep to idolize the moment while rejecting the human being. They didn't demand Baton Cannon. They just needed the run.
The feds took him to a minimum-security facility in Texas, and the "CBS Evening News" broadcast his walk from a two-tone Ford van into the prison. He wore jeans and carried something small under his left arm. The news cutting from the prison to The Punt Return, and the reporter's closing words sounded like a eulogy: "LSU faithful say they volition ready not on this alone walk just on those joyous autumn runs when they think of him. This, they say, is the existent Baton Cannon. The one they want to agree in their memory."
Why?
Teammates chosen each other, trying to figure out why. They'd never understood the nighttime places that birthed his success, and at present they did not understand his failure. Did he owe the wrong people money? Did his race horses get him in problem? Was he desperate? Did he feel higher up the police? Did he just not think it through? Cannon never has offered an explanation, except to call himself and his fellow co-conspirators the dumbest criminals ever, which only adds to his mystery. People wondered if he had an undiagnosed mental illness. What else made sense?
AP Photograph
Nothing was easy anymore for Cannon afterwards the fall.
They all worried almost his time to come. What would happen to him? Would he become so guarded, retreat so far into himself, that he could never come out?
Two and a half years later, his sentence halved thank you to good behavior, he returned dwelling. Only virtually everything he'd worked for was gone. Other dentists stopped referring patients. Some folks in Baton Rouge were gleeful that Cannon had been knocked off his pedestal; toasts were raised to his demise. Cannon, friends believe, imagined that everyone was looking at him with disgust. Somewhere along the line, adoration for The Punt Return had been conflated with adoration of a man, and at present information technology was confusing to everyone. Cannon seemed to feel people no longer loved him. Maybe they had never loved him to begin with. The run kept playing on radio and television, simply people acted equally if he wasn't the human being who did it. He turned inward. "He almost went into a crush," Purvis says. "Information technology injure him so, then, then deeply that he avoided the public every bit much as he could."
Years passed. Lawsuits piled up. Cannon owed everyone coin, it seemed, and almost none was coming in. He couldn't restart his life. He spent his days in his office, a reminder of what he'd been, alone, few patients, no staff, no working X-ray machine, out-of-date magazines, rust on the toilet. Almost a decade after he'd gotten out of jail, a Sporting News article, headlined "An Utter Disaster," signaled how far he'd fallen. Friends were quoted saying hurtful things about him. He felt betrayed.
One of those quoted, Paul Manasseh, came by to visit. He discovered Cannon by himself, reading the commodity. Cannon found the offending quote -- "It's a very depressing place. Baton sits in that office all day long, all by himself. He had to get an answering machine because of bill collectors. He never picks up the phone until he knows who it is." -- then, according to a friend of Cannon's, asked if Manasseh really said that.
Manasseh best-selling he had.
Cannon just stared at him.
Manasseh asked whether it meant their friendship was over.
Cannon just stared.
Manasseh -- the i LSU person who'd shown upwards at Cannon's sentencing -- left. The door closed backside him.
They would never speak again.
Downward on the subcontract
The Louisiana State Penitentiary rises out of the fields at the end of the highway, tucked into a bend in the Mississippi River. Information technology's been 14 years since Cannon sat in his dental function, alone, stewing over the expose, and now he walks through the forepart gate at Republic of angola and anybody says hi. When he enters the primary edifice, inmates pepper him with questions near The Punt Render. It lives on even backside prison walls.
"I saw y'all on Boob tube when y'all made that runback and scored that touchdown," one captive says.
"My moving picture is turning xanthous," Cannon jokes.
"I said, 'Look at former Baton Cannon,'" the convict says. "He can run that thing."
So how did he become hither?
In 1995, nearly out of options, Cannon managed to go himself hired at Republic of angola. Warden Bulge Cain wasn't expecting much. The dental program was in slaughterhouse, with dentists seldom coming to work and prisoners unable to get appointments. Cain figured it couldn't go any worse and that Cannon had something to evidence. Worst-case scenario? They had their own Heisman Trophy winner.
Cannon got right to information technology, firing dentists who wouldn't work, hiring others who would. First every bit a contractor, then as a total-time employee, he scheduled all inmates for appointments, forcing them to decline if they didn't want treatment. Cain saw all the complaints disappear. When Baton talked about his work at the prison house, you lot could hear the pride in his voice. The standard celebrity-days stories and aw-shucks i-liners disappeared when he discussed the ins and outs of treatment. He began to audio less like a former fable and more similar a hardworking dentist.
"The human cares," Cain says. "The inmates love him, and considering they dearest him, he cares more and won't dare allow 'em downward."
Cain figured if Cannon could practise that, he might be able to gear up an fifty-fifty bigger problem: the prison's entire medical arrangement. Lawsuits from prisoners plagued Cain -- the disorganized units couldn't work together so he couldn't provide adequate treatment to the prisoners.
"I put him over the whole hospital," Cain says. "Look, he's a leader of men. He got that whole thing organized like a team. Here nosotros go. We got all legal and fixed up, and he went back to the dental role."
The legend of The Punt Return connected to abound exterior Angola, merely inside, Cannon found peace, a place to go on the lives of the man and the icon split up. "He was reclusive," Cain says. "Information technology just made sense. Don't do interviews. Don't talk to anybody. Stay out of sight, out of mind."
The homo the prisoners call "Legend" bristles at any proposition that he'south ever non known who he is or that he's had to change, simply people close to him say something wonderful happened out here at the cease of the road. For the get-go time since his abort, Baton Cannon was a success.
"Once he got that chore at Angola," Purvis says, "he began to feed off that. When he saw he could get ahold of something and start giving, start coming back, kickoff edifice dorsum, I think that was the beginning of the resurrection."
Stepping out of the shadows
Cannon is eating in a Baton Rouge sports bar, just anxiety from where his Heisman Trophy is on display, when The Punt Return comes on idiot box. He watches, amused, as patrons finish eating and cheer each cleaved tackle equally if seeing information technology for the outset time, never realizing the human being who actually broke those tackles is only a table away. He can protest all he wants, merely there no way anymore to deny the truth he didn't understand 50 years ago in that restaurant out on Airline Highway: At that place are two of him. Mostly, they are strangers, but the man and the icon have a responsibility to each other. The icon tin can't stay safely at Angola forever; he needs to accept babe steps back into the globe. The two Baton Cannons, it seems, are kickoff to sympathize each other at long last.
"Where do you purchase experience?" he says. "Y'all have to live information technology."
AP Photograph/Jacob Harris
Cannon with the Heisman Trophy on Dec. 8, 1959.
Just a few years ago, Cannon voluntarily appeared in public, at a banquet for the LSU and Southern Academy football coaches. It was the offset time he'd been out with Cain, and the warden saw how the reception surprised Billy. The most powerful people in Louisiana packed the room. Instead of funny looks or whispers, Cannon found auspicious people who loved him. They probably had e'er loved him, everywhere except within his own head.
Certainly, the disgrace lasted longer in Cannon's imagination than information technology did for the folks who wanted their hero back. They didn't demand to empathise him; they just needed to see him, for him to see them, so they could recollect. "People in Louisiana were very anxious to forgive Billy Cannon," Dietzel says, "because information technology didn't lucifer up with this wonderful thing he did."
Cannon came out gradually. He appeared at events where he knew he'd be received well, and each successful appearance led to another. It was about as though he was desperate to make upwardly for all that lost time. He spoke at charity functions. He signed autographs. He even gave an interview or 2. As the 50th anniversary of the 1958 national title approached, his phone rang constantly. Billy Cannon found himself maxim yes. He seemed to be enjoying his fame instead of needing to hibernate from it. The people effectually Cannon noticed. They saw the rough edges of his gruffness rounded off, his smile quicker to appear, a man growing comfortable with his life -- with all his life. Nobody understood why this was happening. Cannon's openness is as mysterious equally his exile. Ultimately, the whys don't actually matter. There are things people desire to see in their heroes and, finally, every bit an old human, Cannon seems willing to give them what they want. He does then with a smile and a convincing story. It makes them happy and, surprisingly, at to the lowest degree to those effectually Cannon, makes him happy, as well.
"I actually like him," says Dietzel. "I similar him a whole lot more than I did when he was younger. He's much more friendly. He is a lot more humble than he used to be. I've been to several signings with him. He carries on a very pleasant chat with anybody who comes upward. I can't imagine the Billy Cannon of yesteryear doing that. He'due south simply become a more genuine person."
Close friend Boots Garland saw it two years agone, when members of the 1958 team got together in Natchitoches. He's spent equally much fourth dimension effectually Cannon as anyone non related to him, and he'due south able to read his moods, spot the storm clouds rolling in. Cannon signed all night, and just when he thought he was done, someone showed upwardly with an unabridged box of stuff. Garland figured an eruption was coming. He watched, amazed, as his friend smiled and signed every concluding thing. In the auto dorsum to the hotel, Garland turned to Cannon and said, "Large boy, you own't bad."
"That's when information technology dawned on me how well he'd adapted to beingness Baton Cannon," Garland says, "and the obligation he had."
The effort paid off. Once Cannon opened himself up, so many things came back to him. Twenty-five years after revoking his membership, in 2008, the College Football Hall of Fame elected him again. In late Nov, he walked onto the field at Tiger Stadium. His family had told him he was being honored at halftime for his re-consecration. They had lied.
Later on a short presentation for the Hall of Fame, the public-address homo turned everyone'southward attending to the southeast corner. A blackness drapery fell to reveal Cannon'due south No. 20, forever looking out on the field where he fabricated his run. The rumble started at the top of the upper deck, and by the time information technology reached the field, the old stadium shook. The announcer used the same words from and then many years agone -- "Billy Cannon … Great All-American" -- and the crowd got louder. The roar would make the hair stand on your arm.
At that place was poignancy in the crisp fall air, and redemption and forgiveness, too. Merely there was as well social club: This was how the story of The Punt Return was supposed to end. Cannon played his role, and the fans played theirs. Everyone felt the love in that stadium. The fans, his friends, his family unit. The people stood and screamed and clapped, and down well-nigh the end zone, Billy Cannon stared upwards at them, the mass of blurry colors and noise. He licked his lips. He swallowed difficult and blinked. "Somebody told me he had tears in his eyes," Rabb would say later on. "I tell you what. I've never seen tears in Baton Cannon'south eyes."
AP Photo/Joe Raymond
Cannon has returned as a fellow member of the College Football Hall of Fame.
A homo in full
Two weeks later, Cannon and his family flew to New York for the Hall of Fame celebration. The Southeastern Conference threw him a party in a fancy Manhattan hotel. Cannon acted blas� about recognition, but when I arrived at the ballroom early, I establish the doors locked and one guy waiting to become in -- Billy Cannon. "This own't me," he insisted, ever a contradiction.
Afterward, bouncing from party to party, he seemed to revel in his acceptance, in the reclaiming of things he'd imagined gone forever. But his daughter Bunnie Cannon, who traveled with him, said they had worried about losing him in the Atlanta airport and was happy to have gotten him to the Big Apple at all. He'd considered not coming. "He likes his family," Bunnie said. "It's peaceful. All of this, it'due south very dissimilar."
At the news conference, with a room full of New York reporters in person and more on the phone, he wiped his forehead and so his easily. He sweated. This was the part his family unit worried about. What if all anyone cared about was his conviction? What if it ruined the entire trip for him?
Instead, predictably unpredictable, Cannon brought up his past himself. "You should be happy you lot didn't have to exist elected twice," he said.
Just a few people laughed, but there was something wonderful about the silence. The joke fell flat, but only considering people didn't go it. Some didn't retrieve. Others didn't care. They weren't seeing a disgraced legend, only someone who had won the 1959 Heisman Trophy cheers to the most famous punt render in football history. The schism of the moment and the man was over.
When the news briefing was finished, Cannon noticed an Associated Press reporter lingering, the poor guy whose task it was to inquire an old man about the worst thing he'd ever washed. Now, Cannon might be a lot of things, but he's no dummy. He knows no news story near him can always run without something about the counterfeiting. Then instead of hiding from his past, he confronted it.
"The people of Louisiana are quick to beloved," Cannon told the AP guy. "They are also quick to forgive."
When the reporter asked the question, Cannon said, "I did the crime and I did the time. I haven't had a speeding ticket since."
And that was it.
"You prepare?" his wife, Dot, asked.
"I'grand ready to swallow," he said.
They walked out of the hotel together, headed to lunch, 2 generations in tow. It hadn't been easy, but Billy Cannon seemed to have emerged from his ups and downs more often than not intact.
"I haven't lost anything," he says. "My family loves me."
Information technology's all good
He uses the word "beautiful" a lot these days. He laughs even more than. A few weeks ago, he called Garland. He wanted to know the height of a goalpost and the thickness of a batten.
"Why?" Garland asked.
AP Photo/Richard Drew
Cannon in December 2008 at the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame news briefing in New York City.
It seems Cannon was trying to figure out whether he could have dunked a football over it in his prime. These are the things that take up the spare time of a Louisiana legend. He hangs out with Dot and plays with his horses and looks forward to the holidays when his home fills upwards with grandchildren. "My onetime daddy had a saying," he says. "It's non how loftier the peak or how low the valley. It'south how far across this valley we're in. Think about that quondam earlier you become to bed at night. It'south not how high or how low. It's how far across."
There is a balance now. He goes to all sorts of public events. He makes jokes well-nigh his stint in prison; at a press event not long agone, he looked at the tape recorders and croaky, "The last time I saw those, the FBI was in town." He goes to LSU games, with grandchildren in tow, and he loves it when The Punt Return is played on the video lath, not to watch himself run merely to sentry the faces of the little ones, see their optics widen with each broken tackle, equally the stories they've heard about their granddaddy get real. He enjoys that time, just he won't permit it eat him, but as there are parts of himself he will non share with the world. He'due south seen the nature of public adoration, how it'southward fickle, how it'south more near moments than men. He guards the places in his life that might solve the mystery he presents to the world. More than than a twelvemonth agone, when I asked whether I could come see his horses and his house, he snapped that he didn't desire anyone there. His horses are private. His dwelling house is private.
He knows he's an enigma to many -- "I call back I'm pretty self-aware," he says -- and he uses that to protect himself. He cultivates an image of floating above his ain legend; when he let the sports bar display his bays, he asked the guy picking it up to fib and tell reporters they plant it below an old oil-cloth in the garage, which he did, which became another affiliate in the myth. There is utility in his persona, value in the way he interacts with the globe. "I'k a little gruff with people I don't know and don't know what their ulterior motive is and don't know what the desire," he says. "Or what they want you to exercise for them. I'one thousand a little gruff and defensive. It works. Because they will keep their distance."
His antenna about people -- the thing that got him into so much trouble for much of his adult life -- is more finely tuned now.
"In that location was times correct when I got out of school when everybody was a friend and everybody was a skillful guy," he says. "After a while, yous say, they're non friends and they're really non proficient guys. Now how much did it price y'all to make that conclusion? Sometimes more than than you desire to talk about."
The Heisman winner in wintertime
That'due south his journeying. He's a 72-year-one-time man sitting in a white rocking chair outside the main gate of Angola. The sky is huge, the air hot and muggy, simply like Halloween 50 years ago. That night however hangs around him, as if dawn but just took it abroad. The legend is his life, the cleaved tackles, the Tiger Stadium roar, the adoring restaurant, all of it. Cannon even so remembers The Punt Return. He ran so fast it was a blur. Run toward your colors and away from theirs. That'southward what he kept telling himself every bit he headed toward the sideline.
The outset time he saw the replay, more than than a dozen years after the run, something seemed off. Then he realized: He remembers information technology in color.
His vision of his ain life has e'er held lilliputian in mutual with the people who clamor to know him. When presented with evidence that he'south inverse, he just smiles and insists that he'due south ever known who he is. He is human being who ran through tackles. He is a human being who survived five middle bypasses and cancer. He is a human being who made millions of dollars of imitation money and never really explained why. He is a man who spent years avoiding the public, and so, suddenly, handled it with ease. He can be surrounded by people, nonetheless remain solitary inside his ain mind. He was built-in a mystery, and he remains i.
He stands up from the rocking chair. He's similar a puff of fume when he wants to disappear, merely gone, a memory. He's headed home to his honey horses. He feels safe with them. He likes to groom them alone, to watch them work their muscles. Horses can't exist known; they can only exist watched with awe. They don't have pasts or futures. They but accept the run. They are at peace at total speed, the world around them a blur. Sometimes horses win every race and laissez passer gracefully into quondam age. Sometimes even the best horses pause down.
"I've been there, done that," he says. "I know what it is to be the equus caballus."
AP Photograph
Cannon seems to have emerged from the challenges and victories of the by 50 years with his spirit and his legacy intact.
Join the conversation about "The Redemption Of Billy Cannon."
Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. He can exist reached at wrightespn@gmail.com.
Source: http://www.espn.com/espn/eticket/story?page=091030BillyCannon
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