No Fun League
By 
The “Ickey Shuffle” also landed on the radar of NFL game officials, who began hitting the Bengals with taunting penalties every time Woods did it. Putting the kibosh on “overly demonstrative acts by players” had been a point of emphasis for the league since 1984, when it altered its rule on taunting to include celebratory behavior such as the sack dances of Jets pass rusher Mark Gastineau and the group high-fives by Washington’s “Fun Bunch.”
Coach [Sam] Wyche asked me to do the shuffle on the sidelines so as not to be penalized,” Woods said in December 1988.
For his part, Wyche declared around that time that the penalties were “crap.”
“This is a game for emotion and for the fans,” said Wyche, who coached Cincinnati from 1984 to 1991. “That’s a bonehead rule, and the NFL ought to take it out. The officials told me, after they blew the whistle, they wish they’d take it out. It was the only thing we agreed on all day.”
Even the team’s 80-year-old owner, NFL legend Paul Brown, was inspired to mimic Woods’s moves. “It’s ridiculous, but people laugh when they see it,” said Brown, who acknowledged he favored a more stoic response to scoring touchdowns. “I told him, ‘I think it’s all right to do your little dance.’ I don’t care much for it, but my wife likes it.”
Not every member of the Bengals, though, was as supportive of Woods, who led the team that season with 1,066 rushing yards. Fellow running back James Brooks complained before the Super Bowl that “the ‘Ickey Shuffle’ has kind of pushed me into the background.”
“I will never get a gimmick if that’s what it takes to get more attention,” added Brooks, an eighth-year veteran at the time who made four Pro Bowls while with the Bengals. “That’s not my style. Ickey can stand on his head or walk on his hands, but I won’t do it. What he does means nothing to me.”
Tom Rathman, a fullback for Cincinnati’s Super Bowl opponent, the San Francisco 49ers, derided Woods as “a showman” and declared, “I’m into football, not gimmicks.”
Shut up Rathman. Could you be any whiter?
At the March 1991 NFL owners’ meetings, the league firmly closed that loophole when its competition committee announced it was “unanimously opposed to any prolonged, excessive or premeditated celebration by individual players or groups of players.” In a list of acts it deemed unacceptably “contrived exhibitionism,” the committee included “unrestrained dances, wild flailing of arms and legs, simulated dice games, ‘high-five’ circles in the end zone [and] imitations of gun-fighters.” Players who committed these acts on the field would incur 15-yard penalties, and sideline demonstrations could be subject to fines.
“They now use the word ‘celebratory,’ but that’s new for hot-dogging,” committee member and New York Giants general manager George Young said. “And ever since you had the TV camera, you’ve had a noticeable increase. We’ve also had guys hurt themselves, people getting pulled groins and hamstrings with these silly high-fives. … None of this is meant to eliminate the fun, but we are trying to make it more professional.
“I’m not a dinosaur,” Young continued, “but what kind of message do we send to kids?”
Oh give me a fucking break. That football is fun? That you can have a personality? What’s more, with this league still run by billionaire white supremacists, the point of emphasis in refereeing this year was reducing “taunting,” which has been defined as acts such as looking at someone. The disconnect between these billionaires and what people actually want to watch continues to baffle.
Also, it was great to see Ickey just show up in front of the camera during the Bengals postgame celebration. Glad the Bengals are embracing their all-time most iconic player, despite what one might want to say about the quality of Anthony Munoz and Boomer Esiason. If you think of a Bengals player of the past, it’s probably Ickey.