Reggie Williams Fights a Football Legacy

Paul Daugherty:

You might remember Reggie Williams. He hopes you do, but he’s cynical about such things. “The forgotten linebacker,” he calls himself. He played 14 years and 206 games, 1976 through 1989, all for the Bengals. That’s more games than any Bengal but Ken Riley, who appeared in 207.
Reggie has more career tackles than any Bengals linebacker, more sacks, more interceptions, more fumbles forced and recovered. He’d like you to know this, and is somewhere between bemused and irritated that you don’t.
“I went to Paul Brown Stadium once,” he says. “Not even a picture of me.”
He started both Bengals Super Bowls, in 1982 and 1989. He is haunted by each. The outcomes left him incomplete. The second defeat caused him to leave town, so he wouldn’t have to explain why he lost. Reggie took it personally; he told Bengals fans he’d win. It was an integrity thing.
Reggie would also like you to know that he was a good citizen, one of the best, a city councilman, an enthusiastic volunteer, a football player who lived in town and became a prominent stitch in the local fabric....
It doesn’t look like a knee. It has no cap. It has no defining, oval-like shape. It has hills and valleys, and scars like train tracks. It’s a package of dinner rolls. It’s at least twice the size of a normal knee. It bulges on the sides.
In 2008, when doctors operated on Reggie’s knee eight times in five months, he took photos of the knee, splayed open and ungodly horrid, with his cell phone. He must have 50 of them.
Picture a sweet potato, fresh baked and split down the center, awaiting butter and brown sugar. That’s what the open wound looked like. The skin on each side parted from the canyon, its dark brown-ness a ready accent to the exposed orange flesh. “I can say I know the torture of having your skin ripped off,” Reggie says.
There were patches of green in the pictures, too. “Necrotic tissue,” Reggie explains. “Dead leg.”
Even now, the knee has tiny pimples. Reggie says if he opened them, bits of stitching would appear, from his first surgery, in 1979. The knee comes with its own irony, too: Turf-burn scars from his playing days are still apparent. They survived all the incisions.

The picture in the story is just plain ugly. Reggie is one of the Bengals from the Paul Brown days, as opposed to the Mike Brown days.  You know, a good citizen and not a troublemaker.