Largent's toughest teammate

Happy Birthday to my man Greg Gaines (b. 1958), a Seahawk from 1981-88, and a key component of the dominant defensive and special teams units of the Chuck Knox era.

Gaines tackles Marcus Allen

At the University of Tennessee, his teammates called him "Bullet" for the furious velocity with which he rammed his helmet into opposing ball carriers. (Spearing was legal back then.)

However, by NFL standards, Gaines was too slow to play defensive back, but too small to play linebacker.

Seattle made him a right outside linebacker. He lifted intensely and took steroids for two years to pack extra muscle onto his slight frame. (The NFL did not screen for steroid use at the time.)

...and the photographer knew fear

Steve Largent confirmed his former teammate's badassitude: "I would say pound for pound, there was nobody tougher than Greg Gaines in my football career, and that's high school, college and the pros.... I just never met a guy that was that crazy, really, just that tough and that mean. He'd be playing and he'd have broken bones, pulled muscles and everything else, and you had to drag him off the field."

There were fewer rules to protect players back then, and most teams played on AstroTurf--fake plastic grass laid atop a slab of concrete. Imagine tackling and getting tackled in an asphalt parking lot, hundreds of times. (If you're old enough to have played on AstroTurf, the residual pain won't let you forget.)

Unfortunately, Gaines depended on alcohol, amphetamines and prescription painkillers during his career, and those addictions continued in retirement amid more than 40 surgeries to repair the damage football did to him. The substance abuse nearly killed him more than once, but he is now in recovery.