Within the very first moments of the brand new year, millions of us told ourselves the same old lie. This is the year, we resolved, when we really will stick to that diet we’ve been talking about.
We tell this to ourselves right up to the moment somebody offers us a slice of apple pie or a dish of chocolate chip ice cream. We ask ourselves, how much could it hurt?
I offer no solutions. I have no calorie counts on hand nor do I know how to get past the immortal insight of Oscar Wilde who said, “I can resist everything except temptation.”
But as we enter 2022, I offer a tale from some old friends of yours and mine who knew more about losing weight (and, in all honesty, about putting it back on) than almost anybody.
I give you the late Baltimore Colts linemen Art Donovan and Jim Parker.
These two were not only immortal football players but Hall of Fame eaters as well. Donovan once boasted that he could eat 23 hot dogs.
“In one sitting?” I asked.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Hell, more than that. Kosher dogs, I could eat 15 of ‘em.”
“The kosher dogs had more meat in them?”
“Oh, yeah. The other dogs, it was like eating peanuts.”
The problem was, both Donovan and Parker had clauses in their playing contracts stipulating they each had to keep their weight below 270. So they each went to extremes to keep from getting fined.
Their methods are merely reported here, but not recommended.
Each Friday was weigh-in day during the season. And so, 3 in the morning each Friday, defensive end Don Joyce would pick up Donovan and they’d go to a steam room at Calvert and Saratoga and sit there, Donovan claimed, until 10:30 in the morning.
Then, Donovan said, in a story that practically became a mantra, “We’d shower and dress and go to the weigh-in. I’d step on the scale and it’d say 275. I’d take off my sweatshirt and drop two pounds. My pants would be another pound-and-a-half. I’d get down to 270½ by dropping my underwear.
“That was still too much. So I’d take out my false teeth. Hey, I got onto that scale just the way I came into the world, no clothes, no teeth, no nothing.”
Donovan and Parker shared one weight loss technique: rubber suits. Donovan would get into one and then slip into a whirlpool bath. Parker’s method was even more lunatic.
On hot summer afternoons when the Colts still held training camp out in Westminster, Parker would put on his rubber suit, get into his car and turn the heat all the way up, and drive around for a while.
“I could lose eight or 10 pounds an hour that way,” he said.
“That wouldn’t work anymore,” a friend of Parker’s said. “When Jim locks himself in the car now, he locks food in with him.”
The two Hall of Famers were lucky they didn’t kill themselves with such drastic methods.
The last time I saw Parker, he was standing in his old package goods store, at Liberty Heights Avenue and Garrison Boulevard. His son, David, was now monitoring his dad’s diet.
The last time I saw Donovan, he walked across his kitchen and opened the vertical door to a freezer. Inside, top to bottom, were kosher hot dogs. A maven, right to the end.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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