Ode to a running back

Raise a glass this day to the most fortuitous knee injury in football history, because without it Buford T. Justice wouldn't have gotten his sheriff's car all boogered up.

Excuse me. I suppose I should explain.

See, an old Florida State running back died yesterday. His name was Burt Reynolds.

He was an athlete before he was the Bandit, driving Buford T. crazy in that black Trans-Am. He toted the mail for the Seminoles before he did it for the Mean Machine. And he did again as Billy Clyde Puckett in the worst adaptation ever of an iconic football novel, for which its director (Michael Ritchie) should have been sentenced to shooting used car ads in Pee Stain, Mississippi, for the rest of eternity.

But let's not talk about what that idiot did to "Semi-Tough."

Let's talk instead about Reynolds, who made the jump from athlete to actor after blowing out his knee at FSU, and (unlike so many others) made it stick. I don't know how you measure these things, but surely he's way up there in that poll. Arnold Schwarzenegger, yeah. Duane "The Rock" Johnson, sure. But Burt Reynolds?

He was the Bandit, by God. And, as Paul Crewe, he got to hit Ray Nitschke in the nuts with a football and live to tell about it. Ah-nold and the Rock never did that.

So here's to him, and here's to the glorious intersection between sports and Hollywood. There have been a lot of gruesome car crashes at that intersection -- Jim Brown's film career never worked out, and let's not even talk about O.J. -- but Burt Reynolds was the king, or one of them. And he never really lost his jones for football; he was a major donor to the FSU program over the years and for a time was part-owner of the Tampa Bay Bandits of the old USFL. So here's to him.

I'm sorry, what was that?

Gee, Buford T. I don't know. I think he went thataway.

(Pointing in the opposite direction he actually went).