The other day our lunch conversation turned to Hall of Fame NFL linebacker Dick Butkus, who was a legend in Chicago when I was a little boy. But my kids didn’t know who he was, so I explained: was a fearsome competitor on the gridiron, albeit a conscientious one: “When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately—unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.”
After football, he went into acting. Not only did he appear on screen as himself 41 times, he stretched out in a variety of roles where he was totally not typecast at all … well, maybe you should be the judge of that:
- Coach Mike Katowinski
- Convict Football Player
- Earl Dent
- Ed Klawicki
- Dick Kowalski
- Vic Garrett/The Annihilator
- Tank Mason
- Richard ‘Ski’ Butowski
- Crusher Kawalski
- Officer Allan Dimsky
- Derrick Haskell/Moose Maloney
- Dave ‘The Animal’
- Heavy