A Broken Bond : Ken Norton and Ken Norton Jr., Once as Close as a Father and Son Can Be, Haven’t Communicated in Almost a Year

The father and son still agree upon one thing. In separate interviews from different parts of the country, they even use the same words.

“A special bond,” they call it.

They say that, after leaning on each other for more than two decades, a strong connection is still there.

If only they knew where.

Ken Norton, the former heavyweight champion who lives in Orange County, still remembers how his son helped him recover from a debilitating auto accident in 1986.

“That boy would come down from school, undress me, put me on a stool in the shower and turn on the water,” Norton said.

And Ken Norton Jr., who could soon be part of a Super Bowl champion, still remembers many mornings as a child when he would wake up at the neighbor’s house.

“Whenever we were low on food, Dad would take me next door to live so I could have good meals while he went out and fought somebody to bring home more money,” Norton Jr. said.

His father’s inspiration, Norton Jr. said, has helped him reach the top of his profession as an outside linebacker and leading tackler for the Dallas Cowboys.

But when the Cowboys play the San Francisco 49ers Sunday at Candlestick Park for the NFC Championship, his father will not be there. And if the Cowboys advance to the Super Bowl on Jan.

31 in Pasadena--a one-hour drive for his father--he will not attend that game, either.

“Not going, no way. I don’t care how close it is,” Norton said during a recent conversation at a restaurant near his home.

What could be one of the most heartwarming stories of these football playoffs has turned stone cold.

One of the sports world’s most successful father-and-son acts have not spoken in nearly a year.

The estrangement, Norton said, was the result of a family argument shortly before Norton Jr. was married last spring.

“He came in town before his wedding. We had a discussion, we each said our pieces, he left and we haven’t talked since,” Norton said.

The father and son had disagreed before. But this time, arguing as two men, it was different.

“I don’t want tell you what it was about. I don’t want to add fuel to the fire,” Norton said. “It was just one of those family things. Let him tell you.”

The younger Norton, in a telephone interview, wasn’t telling.

“I really don’t want to discuss it,” he said.

The only thing certain about that argument is that Norton Jr., who lives in Dallas, has not even seen his father since then. And friends are baffled.

“To have something happen to a bond that strong . . . this just isn’t right,” said Larry Wein, Norton Jr.’s football coach at Westchester High. “Few fathers and sons were as close as those two guys.”

The father said the son did not invite him to his wedding at Lake Tahoe shortly after their argument or to the wedding party held later in Dallas.

After attending nearly all of his son’s games at Westchester and UCLA, plus many games during his son’s first four years with the Cowboys, the father has not seen one game in person this season.

He wouldn’t even drive up to watch the Cowboys play the Raiders at the Coliseum in October.

“I still watch all the games on cable TV,” he said. “I still cheer for him. I still want him to do good. He is still my son.”

But they are no longer best friends who once inspired each other to places beyond their imaginations.

Norton, who credits his son with helping him walk and talk again, has accommodated the disagreement by putting a separate phone line in his house. Now, Norton Jr. can talk to his two young sisters without stumbling upon his father’s voice.

“He called them the day before Christmas and the day after Christmas, sent them presents and everything,” Norton said. “But I didn’t come to the phone.”

Norton Jr., who used his father as an inspiration during rehabilitations from thumb and knee injuries, now uses him in other ways.

“All of my life I have been fighting to get out of Ken Norton’s shadow,” he said. “No matter what I do, a lot of people think I’m trying to live off my father’s name, and that inspires me.”

He doesn’t want to stray too far, though. He still refers to himself with the Junior added.

He is listed only as Ken Norton in the heading of his biography in the Cowboys’ media guide, and he said most of the people in the organization drop the Junior.

“I keep it because it is my name, and because I am very proud of what my Dad accomplished,” he said.

Norton’s most celebrated achievements are the punch that broke Muhammad Ali’s jaw in 1973 and his three-month reign in 1978 as the World Boxing Council heavyweight champion.

But his most enduring achievement is his son.

After struggling through most of his first four seasons as a disappointing second-round draft pick, Norton has became one of the veteran leaders of football’s top-ranked defense.

With a career-high 120 tackles, he became the first non-middle linebacker to lead the Cowboys in that category since 1988. With each week, his fury has increased.

In the last 10 games of the regular season, he had 88 tackles, a pace that would have resulted in 140 over 16 games. In the Cowboys’ playoff victory over the Philadelphia Eagles last week, he had five tackles, a fumble recovery, a forced fumble and a tackle for a loss.

With an injury to safety Bill Bates, Norton has had to stay on the field during passing situations, leading defensive coordinator Dave Wannstedt to refer to him as their 60-minute man.

Wannstedt said he wonders if any player could do more for a team than Norton. However, that feeling was not shared by Pro Bowl voters, who could not find room for one Cowboy on the NFC defense, despite their top ranking.

“That was very insulting to us,” Norton said. “We were very let down.”

Since the voting, they have responded by becoming a finger-waving, high-stepping, emotional group. They are led in this area by a man who, when he is excited, imitates his father with a clenched, pumping fist.

“I’ve always had this fear that I would become like any other player, just another face in the crowd,” Norton said. “I want to make sure people know I am there.”

His father always knew he was there, even during pregame warm-ups, when Norton was allowed to walk the sidelines amid a sea of blue and silver uniforms.

“It’s funny, I could always take one look at the field and find Kenny right away,” Norton said. “Just his mannerisms, the way he moves. I could pick him out anywhere.”

They were once that close. From the time Norton Jr. was 13 months old until he was 11, he and his father were roommates, partners, friends.

“We were all alone, just us,” Norton said.

From their modest home on Keene Avenue in Carson, Norton would awaken every morning before dawn, jog four miles while his son slept, then make him breakfast and take him to school.

Norton would then go to work on the assembly line at Ford, visit the gym after work, then return home to feed his son and put him to bed. On the weekends he would box and hope for his break while his son stayed with the neighbors.

“Everybody thought I grew up with a silver spoon. . . . It wasn’t like that at all,” said Norton, who was 11 when his father was awarded the heavyweight title. “I remember all the times he would get up early and work all day. I remember a lot of peanut-butter sandwiches.”

His father would try to compensate by riding him around the neighborhood on his motorcycle, wrestling with him in the living room and laughing with him at Jackie Gleason on TV.

“I regret not giving him what he needed,” Norton said. “I was always too tired to take him to the movies, always too broke to buy him things.”

Norton figured the best he could do was protect his child, so he never let his son watch him fight.

“I would come home and he would run his little hands over my bruises,” Norton said. “I would have to tell him that bruises are a part of Daddy’s job, but that they would go away.”

Norton also did not let his son play football until his junior year at Westchester. He relented only after a meeting with Wein.

“You could tell right away there was something special between Kenny and his dad,” Wein said. “A couple of years later at a banquet, I remember telling his dad that as impressed as I was with him as a champion, I was more impressed with him as a father.”

Several years later, when his son was leading UCLA in tackles as a future All-American linebacker, the son became the father.

On a February night in 1986, Norton Sr.’s sports car crashed off the Vermont on-ramp to the Santa Monica Freeway. He suffered a fractured skull, jaw and leg. He was facing months of therapy and a lifetime of side effects, such as sometimes-slurred speech and a limp.

“I don’t know how I would have gotten through it without Kenny,” said Norton, who also gives much credit to wife Jackie. “For a while, when my mind was not right, he was the only one who I would let do certain things for me. I can’t explain why.”

Norton Jr. would race down from his UCLA-area apartment whenever his father needed him. Sometimes, it was just to push him around the exclusive Orange County neighborhood in a wheelchair.

He also intervened during the crisis that arose as Norton fought to regain hold of his mental capacities. Once, in a fit of despair, the former boxer climbed into his van and tried to back it out of the garage, even though the door was closed.

“I wasn’t getting out of that van, and I was ready to tear down the door, when they called Kenny,” Norton recalled. “He came rushing down from college and talked me out of it.”

Said Norton Jr.: “I was just doing what I had to do. I wasn’t thinking about it. This was my father, and he needed me.”

Seven years later, Norton could probably use his son’s inspiration again.

He has sold his Lake Forest gym and is thinking about selling his home and moving to Atlanta after the recession affected some of his investments. He and a partner are starting a security alarm products business, and the future seems uncertain.

“I’m not crying, maybe just whimpering a little bit,” Norton said.

Norton Jr., who must stare down the league’s best quarterback Sunday when he faces Steve Young, could use his father’s inspiration again.

“Some of us remember when we were 1-15 and the laughingstock of the league. . . . Some of us still feel like we have to keep proving ourselves,” he said.

Yet for now, when looking for that familiar face, neither will see it.

“I know it would take a big person to call him,” Norton said. “But I don’t want to send the wrong message to the rest of my family.”

And if he calls you?

Norton placed his chin in his large right hand and stared at a wall.

“I would tell him to come home,” he said.