Bart Starr's Wife Cherry Says QB Was Hospitalized at Alabama from Brutal Hazing

Cherry Starr, wife of 82-year-old Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr, recently outlined severe hazing her husband underwent while at the University of Alabama.

"He was hospitalized at one point in traction," she told Joseph Goodman of AL.com. "That was in the days when they were initiated into the A-Club, and they had severe beatings and paddling. From all the members of the A-Club, they lined up with a big paddle with holes drilled in it, and it actually injured his back."

She added, "His back was never right after that. It was horrible. It was not a football injury. It was an injury sustained from hazing. His whole back all the way up to his rib cage looked like a piece of raw meat. The bruising went all the way up his back. It was red and black and awful looking. It was so brutal."

The Starrs hadn't disclosed the injury until now, as the former quarterback always maintained he had injured his back in a punting exercise.

"It was hell," Starr's teammate and former Alabama tight end Nick Germanos said of the beatings from the A-Club. "Lord have mercy, it was a rough initiation."

Starr possibly got the worst of it because he not only eloped before his junior year—schools would remove or reduce scholarships for players who married in those days, according to Goodman—but he also did so with an Auburn student, Cherry.

His back injuries, which would hound him for the rest of his career and most of his life, cost him a major chunk of his junior season before he was inexplicably benched for much of his senior year. They were so serious that he would later fail a medical examination with the Air Force and be discharged from the service.

It wasn't until Vince Lombardi arrived in Green Bay that Starr's professional career took off. Starr continued to have regular treatments and was given medications to help him play through the pain. In the late 1980s, doctors discovered a small fracture in one of his vertebrae, and he had surgery to address his longstanding back issues.

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