Like Father, Like Son : How Did Milt McColl, NFL Player and Orthopedic Surgeon, Come To Mirror His Dad's Life So Precisely?

June 18, 1989|LEE GREEN | Lee Green, a Ventura writer, is a frequent contributor to this magazine.

Milt would like to play another season as well, one more shared thread in lives cut from the same cloth. "It's hard to ignore the fact that you can only play football for so long," he says, "but you can be a doctor for the rest of your life." Keep your options open, his father used to say. That maxim is now as integral to Milt's philosophy as it is to Bill's. And as the years unfold, Milt's example may well endow his own children with the same hopeful outlook, the same expansive sense of opportunity. Would he want to see his sons emulate him as closely as he emulated his father, extend the McColl tradition of MDs playing in the NFL? "I feel the same way my father did," Milt says. "If that's what they want to do, I certainly will support them, but it's up to them. All I can do is give them the pros and cons of what I've been through." In that, as so much else, he is his father's son.

Milt may have acquired the best qualities of each of his parents--or so Bill McColl was musing not long ago. By Bill's reckoning, Milt owes, at the very least, his grace, tact, considerate nature and sociability to his mother.

Satisfied with that pronouncement, Bill falls silent and so must be prompted: What does Milt owe to his father?

His face clenches in concentration as though he is hard-pressed to think of even one of Milt's virtues for which he could possibly take credit. Unacknowledged, perhaps because it is too obvious, or maybe for modesty's sake, is Milt's athletic prowess.

Suddenly, Bill McColl's face brightens. "My size," he says with a great, unbridled laugh. "Milt's got my size."