Wes Hopkins punished receivers for the Eagles’ great kelly green defenses. Life returned the favor.

One in an occasional series. The Eagles will wear throwback kelly green uniforms twice this season, starting with Sunday’s game against the Dolphins. These are some essential stories from the Birds’ kelly green era.

Every wide receiver in the National Football League had lived in mortal fear of Wes Hopkins. He was 6-foot-1 and 213 pounds — bigger then, more than 30 years ago, than most NFL safeties are today — and built as if his body carried bowling balls and planks of splintered plywood inside a bag of skin. Closing in to make a tackle or deliver a bone-rattling hit, he ran with his shoulders hunched, like he was hunting, moving quickly through a forest or jungle. But now he was lying in a hospital bed in Birmingham, Ala., talking over the phone to his friend and former Eagles teammate Garry Cobb, his voice trickling out in a weak whisper.

“He didn’t sound like he had a lot of strength,” Cobb said later. Cobb was right. It was summertime 2018, and Wes Hopkins was dying.

His organs were failing. He had been drinking too much for years. Gin, mostly, but any clear liquor would do. His ex-wife, Erika, had long suspected that he was suffering from early onset dementia or chronic traumatic encephalopathy … or both. He had struck his head falling down the basement steps of the house that his mother, Maggie, owned. The house that he had purchased for her while he was still with the Eagles. The house where he had been living with her. The EMTs found him at the bottom of the stairs.

Hopkins had been the nerve center of one of the fiercest defenses the NFL has ever seen, calling signals from his free safety position, helping Buddy Ryan and Bud Carson orchestrate the wild-hearted chaos for which the Eagles of the late 1980s and early 1990s are still revered. But when Hopkins died on Sept. 28, 2018, two days after his 57th birthday, few people who had known or remembered him understood how far he had fallen. The cause of his death wasn’t made public at the time, and only so many of his teammates remain.

Five starters from that defense are dead: Hopkins, Reggie White, Jerome Brown, Andre Waters, and Mike Pitts.

“Wes was as tough as they came. He and Andre, those two safeties, would hit anybody,” former Eagles defensive tackle Mike Golic said. “We were all together for a while, so we became friends as well as teammates. Sometimes people just see players as robots, playing every Sunday or Monday, when we actually build relationships with players and coaches because we spend so much time together.

“You never get used to it, absolutely not. It never ceases to stun you. You absolutely, positively, never, never, ever get used to it.”

Just 21 players have appeared in more games for the Eagles than Hopkins, who played in 137 over his decade with the franchise, intercepting 30 passes, recovering 16 fumbles, and earning a place on the NFL’s All-Pro team in 1985. But his journey to the NFL and his career with the Eagles were neither conventional nor smooth. His uncle Jim Lee had persuaded the coaches at Southern Methodist University to take a chance on him, and after walking on, Hopkins was named all-conference as a senior. The Eagles had two second-round picks in the 1983 draft and used one on him. He started for them immediately.

The irony of Hopkins’ tenure with the Eagles was that he and Ryan despised each other. Hopkins had been seeking a contract extension from the team when Ryan was hired in 1986, and the ornery, big-mouthed coach ostensibly held Hopkins’ desire for a raise against him. He nicknamed Hopkins “Wallets” and, after Hopkins suffered a hamstring injury, once said of him: “All I’ve seen him do since I got here is kill grass. I imagine carrying that big wallet around helped him pull [the hamstring] because he really hasn’t done anything here.”

Yet Hopkins would have seemed, and was, an ideal fit for the mayhem that Ryan’s “46 defense” could create. His instincts and intelligence were so advanced that he could compensate for his average speed, and in an era when defensive backs had more freedom to tangle with receivers and punish those who dared to dart between the hash marks, Hopkins soon developed a reputation.

Cobb, who spent 11 seasons in the NFL as a linebacker, including three with the Eagles, had played college ball at USC with Ronnie Lott, the 49ers’ Hall of Fame safety. He considered Hopkins to be Lott’s equal, every bit as intimidating.

“He couldn’t play now,” Cobb said. “They wouldn’t let him do that stuff. He had the whole league thinking: You come across the middle to catch the ball, man, you’d better have all your paperwork done in case you didn’t make it.”

The most infamous example of Hopkins’ style of play took place on Dec. 2, 1991, in a 13-6 Eagles victory over the Houston Oilers at the Astrodome — the “House of Pain” game in which the Eagles sacked Warren Moon four times and forced five turnovers. In the first quarter, Moon completed a pass to wideout Ernest Givins on a seam route. Wielding his right arm like a rebar, Hopkins knocked Givins out of the game with a shot to the head. The officials penalized Hopkins for unnecessary roughness, and on ABC’s Monday Night Football telecast, Frank Gifford and Dan Dierdorf were aghast at his actions.

Givins “was concentrating on the ball. He’s totally vulnerable,” said Gifford, perhaps recalling Chuck Bednarik’s vicious open-field tackle of him in 1960, when Gifford was a halfback with the Giants. “Hopkins, instead of taking a pure shot, just threw an elbow right to the head.”

“Wes Hopkins,” Dierdorf said, “has had multiple personal-foul games before and starts off with one here.”

To the day Hopkins died, he and Erika believed that Gifford and Dierdorf’s comments cost him a spot on the NFC’s Pro Bowl roster that season, which cost Hopkins a substantial bonus. Which compelled Hopkins to call Eagles owner Norman Braman, who was at his summer home in France, and insist that Braman do right by him and give him the bonus anyway. Which Braman did not.

The following June, Brown died when he crashed his Corvette in Brooksville, Fla., and Erika detected a change in Hopkins, a carelessness and callousness growing within him. The two of them had met before he joined the Eagles, and she had always regarded their relationship as a genuine partnership. After Lee, acting as Wes’ financial adviser, mismanaged several of the Hopkins’ investments, Erika worked with Harry Himes, Wes’ agent, to pay off his debts and curtail his spending.

“Jim controlled all the money,” Himes said in a phone interview. “I didn’t know when I signed Wesley that he had all these issues with limited partnerships in oil deals in Texas. Erika helped me plan it out and try to settle all these litigation cases.”

» READ MORE: Jerome Brown has been gone for 30 years, but his joy endures for this former Inquirer Eagles writer

In 1988, she had given birth to the couple’s daughter, Montana, but fatherhood did not earn Erika her husband’s fidelity. “Wes was a womanizer,” Erika, who lives just outside Dallas, said in a recent phone interview. “He enjoyed that adoration.” When she learned that one of his mistresses had been introducing herself to people as “Wes Hopkins’ wife,” Erika approached the woman at a game during the 1992 season, a confrontation that escalated into a fistfight in the Veterans Stadium bleachers.

“He had a mindset that was, ‘As long as I come home and I’m providing, I’m a good husband,’ ” Erika said. “There was part of me that wanted to wait it out and knew that eventually, especially after he retired, that it would be a different Wes when he no longer had 48 across his back, that the people who found him so intriguing would find him less so. And there was another part of me that said, ‘Your mother and father raised you with more self-respect, and nothing is worth that.’ ”

So she decided to divorce him. She had, in her mind, no choice. The betrayal had run too deep. The incident in the stands was shocking, but the circumstances that had led to it weren’t, not to those close to her and him. Erika had been the president of the Eagles’ wives club, and several of those women, and their husbands, had known about Wes’ adultery. That’s how brazen he’d been.

“He was not repentant,” she said. “It was like after Jerome died, there was this weird feeling that took over Wes: ‘Life is short, and I’m gonna do what the [expletive] I want to do.’ It was weird, and it was disappointing.”

Hopkins retired after the 1993 season. Himes spoke to teams throughout pro and college football, trying to get him a coaching job. It never happened. Hopkins was living off his NFL pension, which he could stretch only so far, and out of loyalty, he continued to allow Lee — “the domineering uncle,” as Himes described him — to guide him when it came to his finances.

“Good Lord — ‘misguided,’ I’d say,” Erika said. “Jim could sell water to the Nile River. He was a true salesman. After Wes retired, Jim said, ‘We’re going to have this modular-home business. We’re going to go to Nigeria.’ Always this pie-in-the-sky [BS] idea that Wes would invest in or give him money for. Meanwhile, Jim is living in a 5,000-square-foot mansion in Atlanta, and Wes is living with his mom. It’s just [BS], but it was all about Wes feeling like he owed Jim because Jim got him the walk-on chance at SMU.”

Friends reached out to him, suggested that he start making public appearances, trade on his name a little around Philadelphia and Dallas, where he was still an SMU Hall of Famer and hero. He never did.

“Wes was kind of quiet,” Cobb said. “He didn’t really try to do stuff publicly to be entertaining.”

He moved in with his mother with the intention of caring for her as she aged. But he would have preferred, and it likely would have been better for him, to live in north Texas — near friends, near fellow SMU alumni, near Montana, who is 34 and a middle-school history teacher and who lives less than a mile from Erika. “He was unhappy,” Erika said. “He wasn’t his best self in Alabama.”

The two had remained close, despite the divorce, and Wes would call her frequently to ask about Montana, to talk politics, to tell her about an interesting TV or streaming show he’d watched.

“He was very interested in animals and nature,” she said. “He would call me if there was a particular National Geographic program. ‘Hey, Erika, they’re doing this one on llamas.’ Weird stuff.”

He sometimes slurred his words when he spoke, so she knew he’d been drinking.

He often expressed remorse, she said, for the mistakes he had made while they were married, and it was his tendency to keep asking for forgiveness, his incessant repeating of stories about his glory days with the Eagles, that convinced her he was suffering from some form of brain disease.

Her mother had died of Alzheimer’s. She recognized the signs. Hopkins had joined more than 4,000 former players in a class-action lawsuit against the NFL, accusing the league of hiding from them information and evidence of head and brain trauma. The parties settled the suit in 2013. His brain was submitted to Boston University’s CTE Center, Erika said, but she has never received the results of any testing.

After he had collapsed down the stairs, an examination at the hospital revealed the full extent of his health problems. Erika and Montana flew to Birmingham to visit him. He was nonverbal at the time, but he could look at them, hold Montana’s hand.

“You could tell he understood everything we were saying,” Erika said. “He was always stubborn. He might not have wanted to say anything.” In time, he could talk some, could mumble into a phone if someone held it to his face, but his condition never improved in any meaningful way.

“He was very serene,” Himes said. “He didn’t say, ‘What a poor guy I am.’ He was always serene in his suffering, and you knew he was suffering. It was sad. He deserved much better.

“He died a lonely death.”

So many of his teammates and contemporaries have. So many yet will. It is the saddest part of a brutal sport. Maggie Hopkins and Jim Lee have since died, too, and Erika has her own regrets. She has remarried, but she believes that Wes would have relocated to the Dallas area if she had asked.

“It wouldn’t have been, ‘Come to be with me,’” she said. No, it would have been enough that he would have been near her and Montana. “And I feel like if that had happened,” she said, “CTE would have been CTE, but there would have been no drinking problem. Because of that, I beat myself up all the time, even now. I go, ‘If I’d only … If I’d only … If I’d only …’”