LEBANON, Pa. — Narrow evergreens tower over the split-level house, lining the long driveway. Arborvitae, they are called. There are 145 of them, and not one has a branch out of place.
When Mark Gastineau and his wife came to see this property for the first time a few years ago, he stopped at the trees that are the color of the uniform he once wore. The realtor told them to come inside and look around, but Gastineau didn’t need to go inside. All he needed to see were the trees.
“They’re the most beautiful trees in the world,” he says. “I love them.”
Gastineau was one of the most accomplished pass rushers in NFL history. But more than that, he was a star. After games ended and his teammates left, he sometimes stayed on the Shea Stadium field so he could feel the crowd’s roar in his chest. He sat on talk show couches for David Letterman, Oprah and Dick Cavett. He won the 1985 “Superstars” competition in Miami and was featured in a six-page spread for “Playgirl” magazine titled, “Mark Gastineau: Out of Uniform.”
Gastineau still is the kind of person who turns heads at the grocery store, with thick black hair slicked back into a mullet that would stick out from the back of a helmet if he still wore one. But he’s 67 now, living with the reverberations of the life he led.
Like many of yesterday’s football heroes, Gastineau has cognitive issues. Headaches come and go, and he tires more quickly than before. At one point he thought he had Parkinson’s, but he says two neurologists have ruled that out.
Gastineau survived Stage 3 colon cancer in 2019 — he wore a colostomy bag for a year — but the chemo left him with neuropathy. If offered, he’ll take a hand when getting out of a chair.
As he gazes out at his Arborvitae, what’s certain is Mark Gastineau isn’t Mark Gastineau anymore.
In his dreams, he was a rodeo cowboy, but as a child growing up on his family’s ranch in the White Mountains of Arizona, Gastineau lacked confidence. Other kids bullied him.
In 2019, Gastineau told the New York Post he had been repeatedly raped as a child, starting when he was 11, by a worker on the ranch. Terrified for his family’s safety, he explained to the Post, he had repressed the memories for more than four decades.
Gastineau repressed nothing else. Everything was a plea for acknowledgment. He was labeled an attention seeker. Really, he was an attention needer.
He performed his first sack dance at Round Valley High School in Arizona, then began a college experience that settled at East Central Oklahoma, an NAIA school. He had 27 sacks there and danced plenty.
Speed was his gift, so he worked to enhance it by running downhill in his driveway over and over in an early adaptation of overspeed training. When an NFL scout timed him in the 40-yard dash, Gastineau ran 4.6 seconds at 265 pounds. In disbelief, the scout told him to do it again. After another 4.6, the scout said his watch must have been off. He tried another, and Gastineau ran a 4.59.
Jets coaches were in charge of the North team at the 1979 Senior Bowl and needed a last-minute replacement player. New York’s Connie Carberg, the NFL’s first female scout, researched the possibilities. She phoned Gastineau to feel him out and was impressed by his determination and enthusiasm, so she recommended him.
Mark Gastineau was a pioneer of both the quarterback sack and the post-sack celebration. (Tom Berg / Getty Images)
Gastineau rushed the passer like fire on a trail of gasoline.
“Dominant is the first word that comes to your mind,” fellow Jets defensive lineman Joe Klecko says. “In his best days as a pass rusher, I don’t think there was any better.”
Weighing as much as 290 pounds, Gastineau bench-pressed 400 and squatted 600. With the hunting instincts of a big cat — and an edge from the steroids he admits to taking — Gastineau went after quarterbacks with bloodlust.
“If the quarterback got up, I didn’t do my job,” Gastineau says.
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