The Redskins Blog

Sunday, February 7: Russ Grimm's Future Turned Out Better Than He Expected

As the 1988 NFL season got ready to kick off, the Redskins were riding high in D.C. Coming off a Super Bowl win, they were the toast of the town, and part of being the toast of D.C. in the eighties was a lengthy profile in Washingtonian Magazine. For the Super Bowl XXII champions, what this meant was a dozen of the players providing first-person accounts of what it was like to play in the NFL, each essay accompanied by a revealing portrait of the subject.

Russ Grimm, who was elected yesterday for enshrinement to the Hall of Fame, was one of those dozen players.

At this point in his career, Grimm had played in three Super Bowls and won two. He was an integral part of one of the greatest offensive lines in NFL history (which also happened to be one of the most famous), in a town that had learned to adore offensive lineman.

The Russ Grimm of 1988 had no way of knowing it, of course, but he also had one more Super Bowl ring coming to him as a player, another as a coach on the 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers staff, and would coach in still another with the Arizona Cardinals. Plus that whole Hall of Fame thing from yesterday.

So what did Russ Grimm elect to talk about? It wouldn’t come as a surprise to Donnie Warren or any of his other teammates: Grimm talked about pain: Read more »