Goodbye, Harry, you will be missed
Chuck Muncie died of heart failure at the age of 60 last Tuesday. He left behind memories of a man who was universally respected and admired.
It was supposed to have been like any other early summer day in the East End of Uniontown. Eager children had embarked on spirited, daylong child’s play that nobody ever dreamed could produce casualties more serious than a few skinned knees. Six year-old Harry Vance Muncie was not so lucky.
While riding his tricycle near the corner of East Main and Grant streets, he was struck by a pick-up truck. He suffered a broken leg in a couple of places, a crushed hip and a broken collarbone and rib. His hopes of endless play that summer were dashed and replaced by a cast he was forced to wear from his neck to his toes.
June 16, 1959, became a day of near tragedy, in which a small child suffered severe injuries that caused some people to wonder if he could ever walk again.
Harry “Chuck” Muncie did walk again. In fact, in just over a decade, he’d be known nationwide for his uncanny ability to run.
Muncie was so spectacularly sleek and powerful with a football in his hands that an opposing coach, University of Southern California’s John McKay, remarked that “he looks like the side of a house running down the field.”
That day in 1959, which sent shock waves through the East End, was one of a number of personal challenges Muncie would eventually overcome. When he faced those challenges, he helped those of us who knew him to root for him through his dark days and to easily cheer for him through the bright ones.
For a time, as the local legend goes, he’d engage in unsanctioned foot races across the asphalt surface of East End playground, and his sister, Marsha, was known to have outrun him.
He suffered from acute nearsightedness. So he wore corrective lenses even while setting records in the high jump at Uniontown High School and throughout his college and professional football careers. Football and eyeglasses don’t normally mix except when they enhanced the enormous fortunes of our Chuck Muncie.
To me, when I was growing up, he was one of the “little guys.” I was five years older than him, so after graduating from high school, and after I left Uniontown in the late 1960s, I was unaware of his many local athletic accomplishments.
On one visit home in the early 1970s, while I was sitting at the bar at the popular East End nightclub known as “Club Holiday,” I found myself in the shadow of an approaching giant wearing a stylish, wide-brimmed hat and a big smile. It was Chuck Muncie, who was no longer one of the “little guys.”
At 6 feet and 3 inches tall and 225 pounds to my 6 feet and 160 pounds,聽 I’d become the “little guy” who listened to the utter joy of this friendly giant as he told me he’d enrolled in college at the University of California and he was playing football.
He was on his way. And I, like many of his friends and neighbors, witnessed yet another Uniontown native gain national acclaim. We Uniontown “old heads,” I must gleefully admit, could’ve filled binders full of bragger’s rights in those days.
Muncie became an All-American at California University and the runner-up for the coveted Heisman Trophy in 1975 to Archie Griffin.
Muncie would later prove he was at least as good as Griffin during his nine-year NFL career. Griffin only managed to score seven touchdowns and rush for 2,808 yards in seven seasons, while Muncie scored 74 touchdowns, and he rushed for 6,702 yards while playing for the New Orleans Saints and the San Diego Chargers.
He joined NFL’s elite by playing in three Pro Bowls, and he was named the Pro Bowl MVP in 1979.
He was, at once, balletic and bruising. In November of 2011, the online website “Bleacher Report” ranked Muncie 88th among the “Toughest NFL Players All-Time.”
Unfortunately, with that toughness, there came a weakness. Chuck Muncie was certainly not the first superstar to have suffered the self-inflicted pitfalls of drug abuse. Fame attracts excess. It can be seductive and all too frequently — destructive. Muncie fell prey to drug abuse that eventually forced him from the NFL and landed him in federal prison in 1989.
Not long after serving his 18-month jail term, though, I learned that Chuck Muncie had overcome yet another obstacle. Football fans, who’d seen Muncie dazzle opposing defenses with uncharacteristic power and thrust, witnessed a man who tearfully accepted his past and the realization that he, alone, could triumph over his demons.
“Going to federal prison probably saved my life. Right now, I’m at peace with myself, and I like it,” he said.
He formed the Chuck Muncie Youth Foundation in the late 1990s. He performed a variety of charity work, and, along the way, freed himself from the snares that had once felled greatness in its stride.
Back in June of 2011, during one of our online “chats,” I asked him if he’d heard the good news that one of his neighbors and fellow All-Americans, the late Sandy Stephens, had been voted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Muncie: Yes I heard about his induction.
Al Owens: Chuck, you should be next, my brother.
Muncie: Hopefully, before I die.
Sadly, Muncie’s death presents another, and final, obstacle to that reality. I’m sure there are many of us who hope that he can overcome that one, too!
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net