Ex-NFL star Eric Dickerson: ‘People meet me and are like, ‘You ain’t nothin’ like they make you out to be’’

Earlier this month Antonio Brown made what might be the most dramatic exit in sports history, stripping down and stalking off the field in the middle of an NFL game, as his defending champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers were rallying against the lowly New York Jets on the road.

Eric Dickerson could never.

“Hell no,” says the 61-year-old Hall of Famer. “My mother would’ve killed me. I can’t speak for another man. I can’t speak for what’s on his mind. But I’ll say this: one day, when he gets to be an older man, he’ll look back and say, Maybe I shouldn’t have done that…”

Back in the 1980s and 90s Dickerson wasn’t just thought of as the Antonio Brown of that day. He was seen as even more sinister: a supremely arrogant running back who ruined Southern Methodist’s ascendant program, played hardball with the Los Angeles Rams and otherwise sulked his way through 11 NFL seasons – all of them, by his reckoning, underpaid. Ingrate, Dickerson says, was how sportswriters most often described him. And to the ear of this proud native of Sealy, Texas – the tiny mattress-making town where he recalls whites and blacks literally living on opposite sides of the railroad track – that word sounded a bit too much like another that starts with an N. Before a 1990 game during his time with the Colts, Dickerson remembers jogging out for warmups and being greeted by a banner of a Black baby in his No 29 jersey wearing red lipstick, holding a fried chicken leg, with a watermelon on one side and a stack of money on the other. And these were Coltsfans. “I was a bad, bad guy back in the 80s,” Dickerson says. “And then people meet me and are like, You ain’t nothin’ like they make you out to be.”

After decades of being cast as the ultimate heel Dickerson