Former Detroit Lions safety Bennie Blades doesn't know whether he could play in today's NFL. He'd rip their heads off, he says. Oct. 20, 2018.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida — The old heads inside the annex of the recreation center at Carter Park stopped their game of dominoes the minute Bennie Blades walked through the door.
A little bigger now than when he played his nine seasons with the Detroit Lions, Blades still cuts an imposing figure wherever he goes.
“That’s the enforcer,” one of the center’s regulars, a 70-something-year-old man with a Bluetooth in his left ear, said as Blades made his way to a small kitchen in the back, packed with bags of hamburger and hot dog buns and boxes of chips and Capri Suns for the Kids Festival later that day.