Tough to a fault: Bam Morris' wild story 20 years after Super Bowl XXX

It matters little that her baby boy is now a 272-pound man in his mid-40s, a mother's love is unconditional regardless of age or circumstance.

That might explain why Marie Morris, the 79-year-old matriarch of the Morris family of Cooper, Texas, was calling her youngest son Byron -- "Bam" as he's better known -- on Tuesday morning. Along with the obligatory how are you doing and how's the weather, she wanted to remind him that Super Bowl XXX -- the biggest game of Bam's career, on the biggest sports stage in America -- was about to re-air on ESPN, NFL Network or "one of those channels."

And you better believe that Bam Morris, a self-described mama's boy, followed Marie's advice. Recorded it, too.

Obviously, Morris remembers all too well how that game ends, but he can't help but wonder how things might have been different if his Pittsburgh Steelers had beaten the Dallas Cowboys that night in Arizona 20 years ago. What if he had taken a different path? What if he made better decisions?

"I think about it," Morris told The Times this week. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't."

As Morris is keenly aware, you can replay a down in football, but you can't replay a game and you certainly can't replay a life. There are no do-overs.

"All that partying that I used to do?" he says. "I wish I could go back and change. But you can't."

The partying and the legal troubles it brought effectively ended his career, but the game continues to take a physical toll, he says. Morris is holding off from getting hip and knee replacement surgeries and says he experiences neck, back, ankle and thumb pain as well as arthritis. But it's his brain he worries about.

Like every former football player, he wonders what the effects of repeated blows to his head might still do. He wonders what the effects hits to the head already have done.

"I deal with it," Morris said. "I dealt with it when I was playing football. It's the same kind of toughness. I'm not going to cry about it. I'm just going to deal with it."

For the past 20 years, Morris has served as the ultimate cautionary tale of what can go wrong for a young professional athlete but there's one thing he'd never change.

"If I could go back and play again I would," he said. "Even knowing what I know now ... it was fun."

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Up until that final, fateful interception, everything Bam Morris had experienced in his brief career had convinced him that the Steelers were somehow going to win Super Bowl XXX.

From winning the Doak Walker Award as the nation's top college running back, to being selected in the third round of the '93 draft, to a conference championship game in '94, to now, one score away from winning the Lombardi Trophy in '95, everything had been a steady ascension.

This, Morris thought to himself, was just the natural order of things.

"Just keep pounding the rock," he says.

The Steelers would come back, Morris thought, just as they had a few weeks earlier in Cincinnati when he scored three times in the final 22 minutes, erasing an 18-point, second-half deficit. Just as they had in the AFC championship against Indianapolis when he scored to retake the lead in the fourth quarter, watching giddily as Jim Harbaugh's desperation heave fell incomplete, sending Pittsburgh to its first Super Bowl in 16 years.

When Morris scored on a 1-yard run to pull the Steelers to within 20-17 of the mighty Cowboys with 6:36 remaining in Super Bowl XXX, he -- and Pittsburgh -- believed.

With him pounding the rock, man, there was no way the Steelers get stopped 3 yards short like they were a year earlier against San Diego.

Thing is, the Steelers never did run again. When the Dallas defense blitzed with 4:01 remaining, Neil O'Donnell served up his second interception to Larry Brown, effectively sealing Pittsburgh's fate.

"I still think we should have won that game," Morris said. "We made some mistakes, but there's no reason why we shouldn't have won.

"I think that's the hardest part. We should have run the rock and we didn't."

That game, and almost everything that followed, didn't go as Morris had envisioned.

No sea of confetti in Tempe, no trip to Disneyland, no flatbed ride down the Boulevard of the Allies. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a celebration. For Morris, the party never stopped.

That came 54 days later along a stretch of I-30 near Rockwall, Texas. Police pulled over Morris' swerving Mercedes, quickly unearthing five pounds of cellophane-wrapped marijuana stuffed into a gym bag in the trunk and a gram of cocaine in the ashtray.

Why Morris, one of the NFL's most promising young running backs, would risk everything remains one of the more puzzling off-field incidents in league history.

"I don't know where my mind was in '96," he says.

But Morris does have a theory that his haze may have been fueled by more than just booze and drugs. He believes that football, and the cumulative effect of the hits to the head he took, may have played a significant role in his legal troubles which only began March 11, 1996.

"I think a lot of my stuff may have been controlled if the facts would have been out," he said. "I did a lot of dumb stuff, and I always thought I was crazy. I didn't know what it was. I can think of some incidents, stuff I had done, and would ask myself after: 'Why did I do that?' And I knew it was wrong. My judgment was bad."

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The youngest of Marie and Marvin Morris' 10 children, Byron had to fight for everything he got in the small northeast Texas town of Cooper (population 2,000). Fighting, however, didn't come naturally to him. He earned the nickname "Bam" as a youngster only after an uncle urged him to stick up for himself after watching his nephew being bullied. When the uncle walked in on Bryon pummeling some neighborhood kid, he remarked that "we're going to call you ol' Bam-Bam."

The name not only stuck, it seemed to fit Morris' personae and punishing running style which he parlayed into a highly successful three-year stint at Texas Tech, where he scored 22 touchdowns as a junior and was second in the nation at 5.9 yards per carry. At 6-foot and 244-pounds, Morris was exactly the kind of bruising, big back that the Steelers had long coveted.

As a rookie in '94, Barry Foster and Morris formed the NFL's No. 1 rushing offense.

Morris accounted for 1,040 yards from scrimmage (836 rushing) and seven touchdowns.

By '95, Morris was good enough to make Foster, who just two years earlier had set the Steelers' single-season rushing record, expendable.

After the heartbreaking loss to the Chargers in the '94 AFC championship, coach Bill Cowher's marching orders in '95 were Super Bowl or bust. However, the Steelers nearly went bust in Week 1 when Rod Woodson and O'Donnell both suffered serious injury. The Hall of Fame safety didn't return from a torn ACL until late January while O'Donnell missed the first month. Yet thanks to Morris, a sixth-ranked offense and Dick LeBeau's third-ranked Blitzburgh defense, the Steelers were able to overcome a 3-4 start.

While Morris' rushing total dipped to 559 yards after being sidelined for three games and splitting carries with newcomer Erric Pegram, he still set a career-high with nine TDs in '95.

"Coach Cowher was old-style, between-the-tackles football," Morris said. "We were going to hand off the ball and you had to stop us. They don't play football like that no more, but that's why I loved Pittsburgh. You knew they were going to run the ball and throw the ball. There was going to be a mixture. The offensive line was so great with Dermontti Dawson, Justin Strzeclzyk, John Jackson and Leon Searcy. It was fun to run behind those guys. Everything just jelled for us that year."

As Pittsburgh marks the 10th anniversary of the Steelers' fifth championship, the '95 Steelers -- a team that included a memorable cast of characters like Greg Lloyd, Kevin Greene, Kordell Stewart and Morris -- get somewhat lost in the shuffle. Yet in a city that embraces Super Bowl losses like James Harrison accepts participation trophies -- thanks, but no thanks -- the '95 Steelers managed to capture Pittsburgh's heart 15 years after the Steel Curtain dynasty's end.

The Steelers won 10 of their final 12 games and Morris scored four touchdowns in three playoff games. With Cowher's Steelers on the rise again, a quirky but now familiar song played incessantly on Pittsburgh radio in the Winter of '96. "Go to Bam when we need a touchdown," the song said, "And if you get in his way, he's going to knock you around. Here We Go, Steelers! Here we go! Pittsburgh's going to win the Super Bowl!"

Being young and independently wealthy, Morris started to thoroughly enjoy the fruits of his new-found celebrity in Pittsburgh. It reminded him, he says, of his native Texas where football was king and players were royalty.

"Everywhere you go people knew you," Morris said. "It was a great time in my life.

"I would have loved to finish my career out in Pittsburgh."

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Despite his legal issues, Morris was never viewed as a locker-room cancer in Pittsburgh.

He's still as affable and conciliatory as he was then. Speaking with reporters in '96, Cowher said the troubled running back "never had any problems here and he was always a positive influence in practice."

Still, one month after his arrest, the Steelers swung a draft day trade acquiring an underachieving Jerome Bettis from the St. Louis Rams in exchange for a second-round pick in '96 and a fourth rounder in '97.

Morris' end in Pittsburgh came unceremoniously three months later, when he was released. Not that it came as a surprise to him. "It's a business and you have to treat it as such," he said.

The July 10th release came nearly two weeks after reaching a plea bargain with Texas prosecutors, which saw the cocaine possession charge dropped. Morris was sentenced to six years probation, fined $7,000 and ordered to 200 hours of community service.

Meanwhile, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue suspended Morris five games to start the '96 season but that didn't deter the Ravens, in their inaugural season in Baltimore, from signing him to a two-year, $1.8 million contract.

"After I left Pittsburgh, football was just football," Morris said. "It wasn't even fun anymore. I was just playing. After I left Pittsburgh I was depressed."

Morris had two fairly productive seasons in Baltimore but he was still chasing his demons, and they caught up to him quickly. He was suspended four games in '97 for an alcohol violation and did 120 days in jail. That same year, Morris and his then-wife were involved in an altercation with a woman but those charges were later dropped.

He played two games for the Chicago Bears in '98 but was subsequently released. He bounced to Kansas City where he played parts of two seasons but the end was near.

He retired after the '99 season but in April of 2000 was jailed on federal drug trafficking charges. He later admitted to distributing more than 220 pounds of marijuana in Kansas City. On Sept. 10, 2001, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. After serving nearly three years Morris was released on July 31, 2004.

Morris says he never had an epiphany, but he says the time he was incarcerated allowed him to get clean, right his ways and grow up.

"After football was over and you have time to think about life and have a clear mind, clear head, no drinks, no drugs, no marijuana, no pain pills, just a clear mind," he said, "You can sit and think about your life and all the stuff that I went through. I vowed that I would never put my parents and brothers and sisters through the stuff that I put them through. I just made a decision."

Looking back on his darkest days, Morris takes ultimate responsibility for his actions. He readily admits that he too easily influenced by others, hung with wrong crowd, should have avoided the trappings in his Texas hometown, but he can't help but wonder what role football played in it all.

"I think it had a lot to do with it," said Morris, whose older brother Ron was a wide receiver for the Chicago Bears for six seasons. "I'm 44. Looking back now, I never had incidents of these kind before, even in college.

"I think a lot of stuff could have been prevented if I knew some of the issues that existed. I think a lot of the bad decisions I made was because of contact sports."

Morris doesn't have to look too far for the unintended consequences contact sports can have.

He cites his cousin, Terry Norris, a three-time world champion boxer who once scored a unanimous decision over Sugar Ray Leonard in a 1991 bout at Madison Square Garden, as proof. Norris, 47, is now battling Parkinson's Disease.

And there's Strzelczyk, the right guard who blocked for Morris during his two years in Pittsburgh. Strzelczyk's death at age 36 in a 2004 police chase has been attributed to his early onset of CTE.

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These days, Morris says he's still dealing with many of the same issues, including the depression, that affected him when he played. But he adds that he's far more knowledgeable and better equipped to handle it now. For the record, Morris has had no legal trouble since his release from jail in 2004.

A divorcee, with no children, Morris considers himself a "homebody" and an occasional golfer, despite his achy body. He's 30 pounds heavier since his playing days but adds that he's working on that. His diet consists of organic foods and he tries to abstain from meat.

And, yes, he still takes advice from Marie.

"She told me, 'Babe, if you went pro as a junior, you said you would come back and finish your degree before I die and I'm almost 80,'" Bam Morris says. "I said, 'you know, you're right. I need to go back to school and finish.'"

Twenty-three years after he left Texas Tech, Morris is back in Lubbock and is just 38 hours away from receiving his degree in kinesiology, a subject which strikes close to home.

No, Bam Morris wasn't the first NFL player to run to afoul of the law and, rest assured, he won't be the last. Just this season the Steelers had two players, Le'Veon Bell and Martavis Bryant, serve suspensions related to marijuana use.

Morris' place in Steelers lore, from Super Bowl XXX to nearly five years in jail, is a complicated one. But if he can serve as an example of what not to do, he's OK with that being his legacy, too.

"I didn't have that legacy in the NFL because I fell short," Morris said. "I didn't keep my eye on the prize. I wasn't doing what I was doing in college. I got sidetracked."

To avoid another career going terribly wrong, Morris' advice to Bell, Bryant or anyone is simply this:

"You're in a position to make a lot of money," Morris says. "You're in a position to do a lot of great things for a lot of people. Playing football is a privilege. I didn't realize that until I got older.

"You have to be dedicated to your craft. You've got to learn your position. You have to work in the off-season. You have to keep your nose clean. My thing now is, because I'm older, and I tell my nephews and nieces this: If you're hanging out with somebody and they're not going in the same direction you are, you need to drop them off. Because you're going to get in trouble. And that's what I couldn't do. I could never drop them off. And that's a reason why I had to wreck."