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Darrell Green and Art Monk: Head of the Class

By JC • on August 3, 2008

You would be hard pressed to find better stories of professionalism and talent for the Washington Redskins beyond Darrell Green and Art Monk. They are record setters, and community institutions.

And for now, they are the last representations of the great Redskins’ teams of the 80’s and 90’s.

You can blame it on free agency, the evolution of sports celebrity, and the de-evolution of society in general, but the Redskins and the Washington metro-area will never see a couple of guys who combined class and ability like Darrell Green and Art Monk. Ever.

Will there be nice guys to come through Washington? Absolutely. If you had to come up with some classic good guys currently on the squad, you’d likely pick Jason Campbell, Chris Cooley and London Fletcher. But today, are they Hall of Fame caliber players? Not quite.

If you had to pick someone on the Redskins with the numbers and talent that make legends out of mortal men, Jason Taylor would be a likely choice, as would Clinton Portis. And while they are nice guys in their own right, I wouldn’t exactly call them staples in Washington-area community service. Mostly because Taylor just got here, and Portis just isn’t mature enough.

It’s not like Washington is a team of record for the casual football fan, but having lived in the area all of my life, I can’t think of a player or players that have made themselves a larger part of the community’s profile and progress than Green and Monk. Not just with their consistently high-level of play, but through philanthropy and just showing up around town.

I can’t count how many times as a child I’d seen Darrell Green doing a signing somewhere, or how many times I’d seen Art Monk in the mall or at some random store like Radio Shack. As a fan, it means a lot for the athletes you root for to show their faces in more places than Love night club.

The rest of the world may look at Darrell Green and Art Monk’s induction into the Hall of Fame as two great players and two great guys getting to the pinnacle of their professional careers. But if they knew like we here in the Baltimore-Washington area know, then the rest of the world would realize just how much their careers symbolized what can be right with sports.

And how much we miss that kind of right being around.

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