Over 74 years as a newspaperman, I have met all types of people involved in athletics. Two individuals have proven unique in their incredible overall impact: Lloyd "Snapper" Stein, who was the Gophers trainer for 41 years, and Fred Zamberletti, who was the trainer for the Vikings for 40 years and then stayed on as their historian before he died Sunday at age 86.
These two men were trusted and confided in explicitly by their athletes. And if a player had a problem, these were the men they went to for help.
I knew Zamberletti since his days at the University of Iowa, where he worked for seven years. He was one in a million.
Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton said that when he was 21 and drove from Athens, Ga., to Bemidji for the first Vikings training camp in 1961, the first person he met was Zamberletti.
"He became one of my best friends for life," Tarkenton said. "He was as important as anybody that has ever been in the Vikings organization.
"He treated everybody, whether you were the star of the team or the youngest rookie on the team, you were important to him. He never raised his voice. He never said a negative thing about anybody. He just was as important as any Viking in the history of this proud franchise."
Tarkenton said in those early days of the Vikings, there was a lot of pressure on every player. "He was everybody's best friend, a confidant," he said. "He was a sane voice in an insane world.
"He was in that locker room every day, in that training room every day. If you needed to get treatment at 12 o'clock at night, he was in there at 12 o'clock at night. He was as loyal as a person could ever be to all of us players, all the coaches, and he is just iconic."
