End Zone

"To tell you the truth, I never recovered from it," Dobler says of the cruciate tear. "I played three more years, but I would pull and drag the leg."

Since 1978, Dobler has had eight surgeries on that leg — three knee replacements and five procedures between the cruciate and the cartilage to clean out the knee.

Almost three decades later, Dobler is sitting on a table as Dr. Randall Madison removes 71 staples. Dobler sprawls on the examination table. His bare knees are a mangled mess of lumps and white-and-purple scars. With the staples, Dobler's knee looks like it has a zipper.

Dobler boasts about his battle wounds to a nurse and two medical assistants. He tells anyone who will listen about footage of the knee-replacement surgery appearing on The New York Times' Web site.

"You should have heard the doctor cussing on the film," Dobler says. "The noise of him pounding that thing out. Do you have a metal shed? If you pound the metal shed with a baseball bat, that's what it sounded like. I think he was taking full swings at it."

Dobler's face scrunches up and his voice goes in a high-pitched wail as he imitates the doctor. "Dobler, this should only have taken an hour and a half. I've been down here five hours. I've got three surgeries backed up that I'm going to have to reschedule.'"

Dobler's attention returns to Madison.

"Look at the technique he uses," Dobler commands the medical assistants, nurses and others crammed in the room.

"I haven't made him bleed or cry. Have you noticed that?" Madison asks the onlookers, before turning back to Dobler. "Got any good jokes for me?"

Dobler proceeds to tell a rambling joke about a man and a woman in bed: The man runs his fingers all over the woman's body. The woman gets turned on and repositions herself, only to have the man roll over. The woman demands to know why he stopped. "That's OK, honey," Dobler says. "I found the remote."

The nurses crack up. Dobler has another one. A man gets rear-ended by a midget. The midget gets out of the car and says, "I'm not happy."

"Then which one are you?" the man asks.

Madison asks Dobler about the status of the retirees' lawsuit against the NFL, and they joke around a bit more before Dobler gets serious. "There's a lot of people worse off than me," he says.

Madison asks about Dobler's wife, Joy, who was paralyzed in 2001. (It was the Fourth of July. Dobler was grilling out. Joy was climbing into the backyard hammock when it flipped, and Joy landed on her head. She lost feeling in her arms and legs and remains a quadriplegic.)

Dobler kicks everyone out of the room so he can put on his pants. And then he's clanking down the hallway with his walker.

Later, in his Overland Park office, Dobler says he's probably due for a couple of new hips. To manage the pain, Dobler pops hydrocodone and Valium.

He rips into a couple of fan letters seeking autographs. He gets 10 to 15 every week. Dobler signs a handful of cards and stuffs them into the self-addressed stamped envelopes. "You owned Merlin Olsen," one letter says, as if the writer thinks that stroking Dobler's ego will help his chances of getting an autograph. But Dobler's ego is still strong, even if his body isn't.

Back in January, Dobler appeared on HBO's Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel to talk about the retired players' disability fight. Near the end of the 17-minute segment, Dobler hinted at committing suicide.

"I don't really know," Dobler responded to Jon Frankel's question about his future. "I don't think it's really good. But you just take it, I guess. Find some way to handle it. If you can't handle it, make the choice to check out."

"You're serious?" Frankel asks.

"Yeah, if you have something that's not going to get better and you know that your quality of life is going to get worse and you're going to be a burden to people around you, you know, they shoot horses don't they?"

Eight months later, Dobler doesn't back away from that stance.

"To survive and keep after it as long as I have is an attribute that I probably achieved from football, by never giving up," Dobler says. "But it is depressing. But that's the cards you're dealt. That's the cards you gotta play, and the only way to get out of the game is to get out of the game."

But not yet, he says.

"I'm still fighting the wolves."