After Football
Since his career as a player, Butkus has become a well known celebrity endorser, broadcaster, and actor. He has appeared in films such as The Longest Yard (on the practice team), Gus, Cracking Up, Necessary Roughness, Any Given Sunday, Mother, Jugs & Speed, Hamburger... The Motion Picture and Johnny Dangerously, and as a regular character on TV shows such as Blue Thunder, My Two Dads, and Hang Time. In the critically acclaimed TV movie Brian's Song (1971), he portrayed himself. He made one television appearance on the first episode of the 1976 ABC hit Rich Man, Poor Man, where he played 'Al Fanducci', a World War II army soldier who gets into a street brawl with 'Tom Jordache' (played by Nick Nolte). In 1980, Butkus portrayed Brom Bones in the television movie production of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." He made two appearances each on the TV shows Coach, Growing Pains, and three on MacGyver. In an oft-rerun episode of Murder, She Wrote, Butkus appeared in a locker-room scene wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. Butkus had a cameo appearance in the second season episode "The No-Cut Contract" of the television show The Rockford Files. Butkus also appeared on an episode of Magnum, P.I. as the coach of the fictional football team, the "New Jersey Blazers". On November 22, 2010, the 9th episode of Conan aired under the title, "A Prayer for Dick Butkus".
Butkus was hired as the replacement for Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder on CBS' pregame show The NFL Today in 1988, serving as an analyst through 1989. On August 17, 2007, Butkus attended and made the first broadcast at the first Barrow Whalers game in Barrow, Alaska.
Butkus promoted the "Qwik-Cook Grill," a grill utilizing newspaper as its main fuel, on TV infomercials in the '90s. In 2006 Butkus promoted his own line of Butkus Boots. Butkus starred in a 2009 FedEx commercial entitled "I'm Sorry Dick Butkus," developed by BBDO New York. In this commercial, Butkus is brought in to help a small business go global.
Butkus' son, Matthew, was part of University of Southern California's 1990 Rose Bowl winning team as a defensive lineman, and joins his father in philanthropic activities such as the "I Play Clean" campaign. Butkus' nephew, Luke Butkus, who played at Illinois, was hired on February 19, 2007, as the Bears' offensive line coach, and in 2010 joined the Seattle Seahawks staff in a similar position. On January 2, 2012, Luke returned to his alma mater, Illinois, as its offensive line coach
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Famous quotes containing the word football:
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)