Harvey Dahl’s place in infamy is fluid.
This preseason, one CBSSports.com writer labeled the 6-5, 305-pound Falcons guard “the NFL’s meanest player — and some might say the league’s dirtiest.”
But this month, a Sports Illustrated poll of nearly 300 players ranked Dahl at only No. 8 among the league’s dirtiest. He even finished behind a wide receiver — Pittsburgh’s Hines Ward was deemed dirtiest of all.
So, what, is Dahl slipping? In the quest for that soiled crown, are you only as good as your last personal foul? (And Dahl has had only two of those this season, the most egregious an allegation that he kneed a defender, which, he said, the league later ruled incidental).
“There’s always room for improvement. Players will retire. He’ll move up the list,” smiled his fellow provocateur on the right side of the line, Tyson Clabo.
Dahl was mildly disappointed by that No. 8 finish in the SI.com poll — “Yeah a little bit. But at least I was in the top 10.”
The two-dimensional, cartoon view of Dahl is that of a brute who has had to literally fight his way into the league, and who stays there by whatever means necessary.
And that is fine, as far as it goes.
Dirty? He’ll demur. “I’m not dirty, I don’t think. I think the whole O-line plays hard, plays physical, that’s the reputation we get. We’re just finishing plays.”
Mean? There’s an adjective he can get his arms around (if no ref is looking). “Between the snap and the whistle, anything goes. That’s the way this game should be played.”
The 28-year-old is not building a career based upon his people skills. Nobody wants a politician shielding Matt Ryan or plowing the road for Michael Turner. A man should know his place in this world and embrace it.
“Basically, you’re getting paid to fight. It’s easy to get pumped up for Sundays to go out there and run into somebody because I just enjoy it, I guess,” Dahl said.
“The rest of the time I’m not on the field I’m in reality. But the game is to play hard and try to knock people into the dirt. To me it’s the most fun game in the world.”
Dad’s a cowboy
So, we can all agree that if there was a World’s Toughest Guy Named Harvey title, Dahl would be a top contender among all the sanctioning bodies.
But the good stuff all lives beneath the stereotype.
For instance, Dahl may not even be the toughest guy in his family.
Asked about the comparative grit of his father, Harvey quickly answers, “Yeah, absolutely, he is [tougher].”
Ah, shucks, says Joe Dahl, a real cowboy with a real cowboy name that would have done Zane Grey proud. “No, I don’t think so. I think he’s been tougher about as long as I’ve known him.”
No disputing that Harvey comes from hardy stock. His great-grandparents ranched in Utah. His grandparents did the same in the Nevada. And Joe Dahl is 65 now and still runs a couple hundred head of cattle – although he is slowly getting out of the beef business – and trains horses, mostly for polo.
Joe did a little rodeoing to keep beans on the table, bull-riding into his 30s. He has broken horses, and a few times they have broken him. A thoroughly modern cowboy, he also flew a small airplane to spot cattle on the huge tracts of Nevada scrub he leased. Three years ago, he crashed, winding up in intensive care for more than a month with a torn aorta and a long menu of broken bones. Wasn’t long before he was back on a horse.
And he is getting another plane, too. “Although my wife’s not too happy about it,” he said.
Harvey’s mother and father divorced when he was young, and he and his five sisters stayed in town (Fallon, Nev.) with their mother during the school year and visited the remote ranch during the summer.
Often, Joe said, he’d send Harvey out on his horse early morning to gather up some cattle, and the boy wouldn’t return until after dark. Not a terribly skilled cowpoke, Harvey still wouldn’t quit until the job was done, no matter if it seemed like trying to herd cats. Joe Dahl said he learned something about his son then.
On his end, Joe wasn’t much of a football fan. But he did notice one thing about his son when watching him play in high school and at Nevada-Reno. He’d concentrate on Harvey during his initial block, then follow the path of the ball. And near the end of the play, there would be Harvey again, shoveling some defender, leaving his father to wonder, “How’d he get there?”
That quality of finding someone, anyone, to block right up to the last tweet of the whistle — and maybe a half-tweet past — is what seems to get opponents’ Under Armours in a bunch. “He makes sure you know he’s around,” said Falcons offensive line coach Paul Boudreau. “If he can occupy a defender’s focus downfield, if that guy is wondering, ‘Where is (Dahl) coming from? Is he going to hit me?’ that’s part of the job.”
Naturally, no father is going to put much stock in all that dirty player business.
To Joe, his son — an undrafted, free agent lineman, who arrived in Atlanta in 2007 off the San Francisco practice squad — is just selectively nasty. On the field, you probably don’t want to cross him. Off the field, he is the same laid-back kid who on a recent visit home just shrugged it off when a liquored-up fool took a poke at him outside a sports bar.
With Dahl, the hard part is reconciling his on-field rep with an everyday personality that’s downright placid. “Sometimes it’s like you have to shake him to make sure he’s awake. But he wakes up on Sunday,” Clabo said.
A softer side?
The view of Harvey as something more than a Sunday vehicle of mayhem is seconded by Laurie Dahl, who, as a Stanford-educated attorney, can argue in his defense all day.
“Guess I got lucky,” he said.
The big lug got down on one knee and proposed to Laurie not long after he signed with the Falcons. Did it right out in the open, on the beach at Tybee Island.
The Falcons nastiest player lives in Suwanee with his brainy wife and a Jack Russell terrier named Newman. That was about as small a dog Dahl figured he could own and still keep his man card.
“I’d say he’s romantic, but not in a cheesy way,” Laurie said. “I would describe him as being really thoughtful, really intuitive.”
Dahl himself is a little reserved about revealing much of a softer side.
No, he said, he doesn’t cry at movies, not even “Field of Dreams.”
He doesn’t cook. He will grill out on occasion, as any good carnivore should.
He doesn’t clean the Dahl house. “I try not to make a mess. If don’t make mess, I don’t have to clean anything up,” he said.
He will surprise his wife with roses now and again, but, “come to think of it, it has been a while.”
In his position, there is little to gain by showing a soft center.
His is a career marked by struggle, and it likely will be to its final days. Dahl points to an assistant line coach in San Francisco who gave him a piece of advice he carries around like his driver’s license. “He told me that it’s never going to be easy, that I might as well get used to it now. I knew I’d be fighting the whole time.”
In that context, being an annual candidate for NFL’s dirtiest player doesn’t have to be a bad thing. That could even work to his advantage, if a team is in the market for a little attitude. “He’s the kind of guy you like to have on your team. A Bill Laimbeer-type,” said tight end Tony Gonzalez, invoking one of the NBA’s ultimate bad boys.
So, if you want to call him the nastiest son of a buck in football, Dahl won’t fight you much.
“It’s a cool title to have, but I don’t think it’s accurate,” he said.
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