Sam Donnellon: Great White: Reggie's greatest season ever

The epiphany occurred, as so much about him did, with a little bit of God and a whole lot of force. This was early in 1987, during the preseason, Jeff Fisher recalled, and Reggie White was getting an earful from a veteran Detroit Lions offensive lineman who was just beaten badly in a one-on-one drill.

"Reggie just bull-rushed him and ragdolled him," said Fisher, a defensive assistant to Eagles coach Buddy Ryan back then. "And the guy got up and just started cursing him, using every foul word you could imagine. Reggie just looked at him and said, 'Jesus is coming.' And then he just got back in line."

Fisher, who later became a head coach with the Tennessee Titans and coaches the St. Louis Rams, continued the story almost solemnly, as if reading from a passage.

"And when his turn came up he stepped up again and did the same exact thing," he said of White. "I mean just ragdolled and tossed this lineman, bull-rushed him backward all over again. And then he just touched the quarterback.

"And then Reggie looked down at the guy, reached down to help him up and said, 'Jesus is here.' "

Ryan, then in his second season as the Eagles' coach, had taken the Eagles to Detroit for three days to practice against another team, and then to play a game. A good idea on paper maybe, but a disaster in execution. Known to be feisty himself, Ryan had a young team that already resembled its head coach. Fights broke out daily. "We were still learning how to win," recalled Clyde Simmons, who bookended the defensive line with White back then and is an assistant with Fisher now. "And that was the year we started to figure it out."

With characters such as Andre Waters, Seth Joyner and Jerome Brown all in the advent of their careers, the execution of those lessons could resemble, well, executions. Officially, the Eagles were 7-8 in that strike-shortened season - games 4 through 6 were played with replacement players. But in games involving the regular players, the Eagles were 7-5. As their offense caught up to their defense in the years that followed, they would win division titles and earn playoff spots. But 1987 was the first glimpse of what former Giants quarterback Phil Simms playfully referred to as "their reign of terror."

"They hit so hard," said Simms, now the lead NFL analyst for CBS Sports. "Back then, you could just take the guys to the turf and smash them, get up by putting your hand on their face. Nobody cared. And I remember they literally picked me up off the ground after both of them just crushed me. And Reggie put his arms around me, slapped me on the butt and both of them said stuff like, 'Hang in there. Just hang in there.'

"And I still don't know if they did that because they respected me, or because they just wanted to hit me again."

White, who died of cardiac arrhythmia in 2004 at age 43, was, even then, their strong-armed high priest. He already wore the nickname he is still referred to today. But "Minister of Defense" gained legitimacy in that strike-shortened season, and absorbed him in those that followed.

After recording 18 sacks over 16 games during the 1986 season, his second season as an Eagle, White was no secret weapon. But in 1987, he became an event, the discussions centering around not only on what had just happened, but what might happen next. He could toss offensive linemen in the air. He could run over them. Sometimes he did both inside of the same play. And he was so ridiculously fast that he occasionally ended practices by running pass routes with the receivers.

"I just remember being slack-jawed watching him that year," said Ray Didinger, the Hall of Fame writer who covered pro football for the Daily News back then. "Because it was kind of new to us. We were just trying to get our arms around how good the guy was. And every week you were seeing things you had never seen a defensive lineman do before."

No one had ever seen a defensive lineman toss aside a blocker, get a hold of the quarterback, get a hold of the ball, rip the ball from the quarterback, and run down the field for a touchdown.

But that's exactly what White did during the first game of the 1987 season: He ripped the ball from the hands of Washington quarterback Doug Williams - who was 6-4, 220 pounds - and was not caught, not by a running back or a tight end or wide receiver, while running for 70 yards and a touchdown.

Wade Phillips, defensive coordinator of that Eagles team, chuckled over the phone as he recalled the play. "It was one of the most amazing plays I had ever seen," said Phillips, now the Houston Texans' defensive coordinator.

But not the most amazing, he added. In fact, it wasn't even the most amazing play that year. "One team ran a draw play and it lost 16 yards," Phillips said. "I've never seen anything like it. They were handing the ball off to the running back in the backfield, and Reggie knocked the tackle into the running back. The running back bounced backward and started running backward to get away from Reggie, but Reggie ran him down. A 16-yard loss. On a draw!"

"After that season, I'm not going to say it was old hat," said Didinger, now with Comcast SportsNet. "But you just took for granted that he was great."

Of course, you couldn't really do that if your job was to block him, to coordinate offenses to operate around him, or to run those offenses. You couldn't really do that if Reggie White stood in the way of making the playoffs, which in this strike-altered season, was nearly every week.

Fisher suspects one opposing player that year retired not because of the strike, but because he was scheduled to block Reggie that week. "I don't remember a guy retiring," Simmons said. "I do remember a lot of people coming up with phantom injuries on Friday or Saturday. All of a sudden you have this mysterious groin pull . . . "

"For 15 years, I sat in a lot of meetings where we talked about a lot of great defenses," said Simms. "But when we played the Eagles, it always started with Reggie. Reggie White this, Reggie White that. Reggie, Reggie, Reggie, Reggie. Where's Reggie? Point to Reggie . . . "

"It didn't take me long to figure out that if I am game-planning against that defense, I will take my chances with everybody else," Mike Holmgren once said. Holmgren was San Francisco's offensive coordinator under Bill Walsh before taking the head-coaching job in Green Bay. "We had to double Reggie White every single snap otherwise he could single-handedly take over the game - one man who changed your offensive thinking for the entire game."

Said Didinger: "People say this only half-jokingly, 'Thank God he wasn't mean.' As big and strong as he was? If he wanted to hurt people, my goodness what he could have done."

"I can honestly say I was never worried about Reggie and whether he was going to hit me," said Simms. "But before games against that team, because Reggie was part of such a tremendous defensive front and team, I would sit there in the locker room and say to myself, 'OK man. Don't lose courage. Fight. Hang in there.' It wasn't about reading the defense or any of that. It was, 'OK, I'm the quarterback. Be tough. Don't show fear.' That's what I did every time, man . . . courage.

"There was nothing like him in my whole 15 years. Nothing even close. And I truly miss him."

So, too, does Simmons, who said White "made me into the man I am today."

Twenty five years ago. "It seems like just yesterday," said Simms. Twenty-one sacks in 12 games. There have been great defensive ends in the NFL. Gino Marchetti was considered a beast. Once, many believed Deacon Jones to be the best ever. The argument these days is not whether White is the best defensive lineman ever to play the game, but whether he or the Giants' Lawrence Taylor is the best defensive player. Ever.

Simms never had to face Taylor, of course. Didinger covered both players as the Daily News NFL writer back then. "I've never seen anybody who played the position and was as dominant as Reggie was," he said. "I never saw anybody who was that quick and that strong. I've seen quick and I've seen strong but I've never seen it all in the same package like I saw it in Reggie. And in '87, his greatness was sort of an epiphany. It was like every week you couldn't wait to see what he did and every week he did something you had never seen before."

As Didinger noted, Taylor is often called the greatest defensive player ever because of how he changed the game. Linebackers became pass rushers, sometimes even lined up as defensive ends, the way Taylor occasionally did. But no one has been able to reinvent LT.

"I don't know if Reggie changed defensive end play in the same that the way Lawrence changed linebacker play," Didinger said. "I'll tell you this though: If I was putting an all-time defense together, both would be on it. Reggie would be my left end and LT would be my rush linebacker."

Ah, but if you were starting and had the first pick? What then?

"In that case, I have to take everything into consideration," he said. "I have to take the man along with the player. And in that case, I will take Reggie. Because Reggie had a discipline and a dedication that LT didn't have. I could count on Reggie showing up at 1 o'clock every Sunday."