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The Human Grenade

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His play won him an offer at the next level -- the Arena Football League, birthplace of former NFL MVP Kurt Warner and former Steelers quarterback Tommy Maddox. But it was his gunning at Eastern Michigan that landed Short his real break. After the Arena 2 season, a Detroit Lions scout forwarded Short's college tape to former Browns coach Sam Rutigliano.

Rutigliano was coaching for NFL Europe's Barcelona Dragons. He needed extra bodies. While most players are allocated by NFL teams, European squads pick up a few free agents for their Florida training camp. "Very rarely do they make it," says Rutigliano, now retired. Short's shot was so long that when he first arrived, his position coach told him he might get a chance -- if someone got hurt.

"I about shit myself," Short says. "I wanted to fucking punch him. It kind of bugged me, for someone to tell you something like that. It kind of lit my fire."

From then on, Short "was like a kamikaze all of training camp," recalls Arizona Cardinals receiver Sean Morey, who tried out alongside him. The two were fast friends, bonded by nonstop competition. They were fighting for their dream jobs, but after practice they found themselves skimming the bottom of the hotel pool, battling for the title of Guy Who Can Hold His Breath Longer.

Short made the team and started at defensive end -- a position he'd never played. He still suffered from collision withdrawals, but he was getting better. "He would sometimes take himself out of a play just to kick someone's ass," Morey says. But Short was starting to learn that "it's not just about putting the guy in front of him on his back."

He racked up 27 tackles in half a season in Europe before being sent home with a shoulder injury. But it was kickoffs where he shined. He only played on two, he says -- the coaches were trying to protect his shoulder -- but he believes those two plays opened the eyes of the NFL.

He was assigned to bust the wedge. "I messed him up the first time," he says. "The second time I went down . . . I knocked him out cold . . . After that, it was just a big selling point, for someone who would run down there, completely fearless, to hit a wedge."

As the 2003 season approached, Short found himself doing the dance he'd awaited since boyhood: auditioning for NFL teams. He found a match in Philadelphia. The blue-collar town has an affection for rub-some-dirt-on-it hit men. Plus, the Eagles gave him the biggest signing bonus. In the NFL, where careers are short and contracts aren't guaranteed, the biggest signing bonus has a way of buying devotion.

Short was cut that year but made the Eagles in 2004. The next three seasons, he rarely saw the field on defense, racking up only 14 tackles in 29 games. But his name spread through the league with every kickoff.

In preparing for the Eagles, special-teams coaches altered their plans to deal with Short. Opponents fretted over collisions. Morey, who played for Pittsburgh in 2005, recalls helping his coach devise a strategy to slow Short down by hitting him before he could gather speed. It hardly calmed Morey's anxiety over the prospect of going head-to-head with a guy named Full Throttle. "I didn't sleep the night before," he says.

By last season, Short was thriving in the chaos of special teams, one of the few places where fear creeps onto an NFL field. "They're not all fearless," says Rutigliano. "Not like this guy." He was among the Eagles' leading tacklers on special teams. And when Sports Illustrated polled NFL players about football's most feared players, Short ranked in the Top 10, alongside Ravens Pro Bowler Ray Lewis and Steelers madman Joey Porter. Short, the magazine wrote, "is so recklessly aggressive on kick coverage that offensive and defensive players alike stop to behold his violent collisions." He was the only special-teams player on the list.

But with recklessness comes injury. Short suffered season-ending leg injuries in 2004 and 2005. He believes he's had seven or eight concussions since high school. "It's a car wreck, really," says Bob Brookover, who covers the Eagles for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "He was always at the center of the car wreck."

The worst came last season against the Browns. To the crowd, Short was just an anonymous Eagle flying down the field. But Jesse Mucciarone, a high-school teammate, was watching every step when Short, diving to make a tackle, took a knee to the head. "It knocked him out cold," says Mucciarone. "He was laying there motionless. The first thing I thought was that he broke his neck."

"It just snapped my neck," Short recalls. "Then my helmet came off." He describes such collisions with childlike enthusiasm, but he worries about how body and mind will age. "I don't know exactly how it all happened. I tore the corner of my mouth. My nose was about broke. It was all jacked up. I was bleeding everywhere. I didn't know what was going on. I was out cold."

Trainers rushed to slap him awake. "When they came out on the field, they said I was snoring," Short says. "I was snoring!"

They lifted him onto a cart. That's when one Browns player told him he "got what he deserved," says Short. "I lost it."

He saluted the Browns and their fans with a middle finger and a barrage of "motherfuckers."

"I went nuts," he says, smiling. "I guess it was just instinct, because I didn't really remember any of it. I guess the fans went from cheering to booing, and I was flipping them off. I got booed out of the stadium."

The injuries kept mounting after that. And special-teams players, while often invaluable, are equally expendable. Short may cover kickoffs as fiercely as anyone in football, but there are a dozen guys on every team who can serviceably handle the job. With three games to go last season, just as the Eagles started their playoff push, Short was nursing an ankle sprain. He was cut. Feared or not, his release was only big enough for a blurb inside the sports section.

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