In the chaos of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen, Rosey Grier heard the shots. He had been helping Ethel Kennedy down from the stage when the sound reached him. He moved toward it, as eleven seasons of professional football had trained him to do, and found the gunman still firing, dragged in multiple directions by people trying to stop him. Grier grabbed the man’s legs, got him onto a metal food preparation table, and locked them so he could not kick.
Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson held the upper body. Writer George Plimpton had gotten the weapon away from the shooter, but Plimpton had the barrel pointed directly at his own face. Grier reached over, yanked the gun from Plimpton’s grip, and put it in his pocket. The gun was still warm.
Then Grier looked up and saw the mob coming. Bobby Kennedy lay bleeding and unconscious on the kitchen floor behind him, people kneeling around him, a Catholic delivery man pressing a black rosary into the senator’s left hand. The crowd of supporters and campaign workers had figured out who was pinned to the table, and they surged forward, grabbing at the gunman’s legs, trying to pry him free, trying to get at the man who had just taken everything from them. They were screaming and weeping, doing what every human instinct and every broken piece of grief said was the only possible response.
Rosey Grier fought them off one by one with his body, his weight, his arms. He pushed people back. He kept himself between the mob and the man on the table, the man who had just shot the candidate Grier had given the last year of his life to protect. When the police finally arrived and took the assassin into custody, the adrenaline left Grier’s body all at once.
He collapsed on the floor of that kitchen and wept, not for the man on the table, but for the man on the floor, for the rosary in his hand, for the eleventh child who would never know his father. When they asked him afterward why he had done it, he said six words: “I didn’t want to get even. ” He explained later with words that never found the audience they deserved: “Bobby was down. They couldn’t help him.
So they came to get after the shooter. They started to pummel him, and I just fought them off, because I was not going to allow them to commit a murder on this man. I didn’t want to demonstrate that a way to handle a situation like this was to get even. ” Years later he would describe that night as “a big hole in my dream,” one he could not see how to fill.
But to understand what happened in that kitchen, you need to understand the world Rosey Grier walked into. The year was 1968, the year America came apart at the seams. Martin Luther King had been shot on a Memphis balcony in April, and cities burned. President Johnson, crushed under the weight of Vietnam and a country in open revolt, announced he would not seek re-election.
Into that wreckage stepped Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of a murdered president, former attorney general, now a senator from New York running for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy spoke about healing and unity, about the possibility that a country this divided could find its way back. Millions of people, black and white, young and old, listened and felt, for the first time in years, that it might actually be true.
Rosey Grier was one of those people. He had grown up in Cuthbert, Georgia, one of eleven children, in a world where the rules were set by people who did not consider him fully human. He had fought his way to Penn State, then to the New York Giants, where he played under a young defensive coordinator named Tom Landry, who would later credit Grier as one of the foundational players of the defensive system he built his entire career around. Then came the Los Angeles Rams, where Grier joined Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, and Lamar Lundy to form a defensive line so dominant it was called the Fearsome Foursome, the most feared front four in professional football.
He stood 6 feet 5 inches and weighed 284 pounds, the kind of man who walked into a room and changed the air pressure. And yet the people who knew him best did not describe him with words like fearsome. They used words like gentle, generous, deeply and almost unexpectedly kind. When his football career ended in 1967, after an Achilles tendon finally gave out following eleven seasons of punishment, Grier did not disappear into retirement.
He found Robert Kennedy. He believed, in the way that only a man who has lived through real injustice can believe, that Kennedy was the person who could change what America was becoming. He became part of Kennedy’s inner circle, traveled with the campaign, worked as a bodyguard assigned to protect Ethel Kennedy, who was pregnant with the couple’s eleventh child. It was not a job.
It was a calling. By the night of June 4, 1968, Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary. The path to the nomination was open. In the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a crowd of ecstatic supporters waited.
Kennedy took the stage just after midnight, thanked his team and the state of California, and then looked out and made the room laugh. He said that Rosey Grier had told him he would take care of anybody who didn’t vote for him. The room laughed. Grier laughed.
Kennedy smiled and left the stage. Shortly afterward, in the narrow kitchen corridor one floor below, Sirhan Sirhan stepped forward with a rolled campaign poster hiding a . 22 caliber revolver and opened fire on the crowd surrounding Robert F. Kennedy.
Eight rounds. Three bullets struck Kennedy, one in the head, two in the back. Five other bystanders were wounded. A teenage busboy named Juan Romero, who had delivered food to Kennedy’s room the day before and had been thrilled just to shake his hand moments earlier, dropped to his knees and cradled the senator’s head on the concrete floor.
Kennedy was still holding the rosary when the ambulance arrived. He visited the hospital briefly the next day. Robert F. Kennedy died at 1:44 a.
m. on June 6, 1968, surrounded by his family. He was 42 years old. Here is what nobody saw coming.
The man who collapsed on that kitchen floor went on to become an ordained minister, a motivational speaker, an author, and a singer who recorded a tribute to the man he lost. He spent the next fifty years walking into the hardest places, prisons, poverty, broken communities, and offering the same thing he had offered in that kitchen, not revenge, not anger, but the belief that something better was possible even when everything around him said it wasn’t. Rosey Grier never made the Hall of Fame, despite eleven seasons, two Pro Bowls, three All-Pro selections, and a defensive line that changed the way the game was played. Some legacies, it turns out, are too large for any single institution to contain.
What endures is this. On the night Bobby Kennedy was shot, when every human instinct pointed one direction, one man pointed the other way. Not because it was easy, not because he wasn’t grieving, not because the anger wasn’t real, but because he understood, in the way that only people who have lived through real violence understand, that there is a moment in every catastrophe when someone has to decide what comes next, whether the next act is more of the same or something different, whether the cycle continues or whether someone finds the strength to break it. Rosey Grier broke it with his hands and his body and six words spoken in a ruined kitchen at one in the morning in Los Angeles in 1968.
He didn’t want to get even. And that, more than any tackle or any game or any defensive line he ever anchored, is what made Roosevelt Grier one of the greatest men ever to play the game.