The culture now allows grown men to cry at times that are not connected with funerals and IRS audits. I'm not sure I cried Sunday with the news of Carl Eller's election to pro football's Hall of Fame. But my glasses fogged, slowly but stubbornly.

There's a small painting of the monastery of Thyangboche in the Himalayas just above the kitchen table. I looked for something to high-five, and the painting had just the right height. The scene in the painting might have come out of Mother Goose, resembling an ancient castle in the snow. My hand touched it and I said "Way to go, Moose." Outside at 7 a.m. the snow floated through neighborhood evergreens and, because this was a moment that deserved a celebration, the falling snow obliged. It was a shower of confetti greeting Carl Eller's arrival in the Hall of Fame on a winter's day.

I remembered Carl Eller struggling in the snow on Mt. Rainier in Washington. He wanted to climb a mountain and I had experience in that kind of action. He asked me if we could be partners on the rope some day and I said, "Let's climb Rainier." He was in his last year of pro football, living and playing in Seattle, aging on the athletic calendar yet still strong as a Roman arch. But he wasn't a mountain man and he wasn't going to reach the summit. "You can get to Camp Muir a few thousand feet below the top, Moose," I said. "It's as good as a sack." He did and we high-fived in the twilight at 10,000 feet. Howling in triumph, he chugged and romped around in circles in the snow, making huge trenches in it with his Size 15 boots and 260-pound body. He was, in fact, big enough to start an avalanche. I slowed the celebration by pretending to tackle him and he scooped me up in all of my climbing gear, clamped me in a hug and shouted, "We're brothers."

We were. And I remembered another time when he'd used language like that, to his quarterback. The Vikings had come charging in from the snow and cold of their Toonerville old arena, Metropolitan Stadium, after winning the conference championship by beating the Los Angeles Rams on their way to their first Super Bowl. The dressing room was a circus of half-naked bodies hugging and dancing in the spreading delirium, their uniforms and skin caked with frozen grass and mud. Strips of adhesive tape littered the floor and disorganized voices sang wall to wall. Players thrust bottles of champagne in the air, saluting each other. Joe Kapp held one of the bottles. Joe was a longshoreman of a quarterback, a Hispanic from California. His jaw had been gashed years before by a broken beer bottle in a bar fight when he played in Canada. It still bore the prints of 46 stitches. When he threw the football his passes fluttered and lurched, and by temperament he should have been a linebacker or a night club bouncer. But the players loved him and none more than Carl Eller. Kapp and Eller had a special affinity, a kind of kinship forged by the struggles of their childhood, Kapp's on the West Coast, Eller's in the South.

And now in the midst of the dressing room uproar the powerful African-American from South Carolina spotted the roughneck Mexican-American from the shanties of California and rushed across the room to embrace him, waving his champagne. "Joe," he said, "you're my brother. You and me. We're the same."

Of all the memories I carried from the years when I wrote football, that scene is the engraving of what was right about the pro game if all of the sideshows and money glut of it were removed. This was a portrait of the athletic ideal in pro football. They DO sacrifice. Not all of them. The self-indulgence available to bigtime athletes today overwhelms some of them. But the one permanent reality for Eller and Kapp on that day wasn't the television or the frenzy or even the money but the trust they placed in each other.

A hard-knuckled, sweaty love CAN grow up among some of them, and it is never more vivid than on a frozen field when the reliance one man places in the man squatting and grunting beside him on the line of scrimmage is utter and complete.

That might now be expressed in the past tense. The money today is enormous. So is the visibility. But it might have been a comforting coincidence that a guy like Carl Eller was elected to the Hall of Fame on a weekend when the Super Bowl gave us one more glimpse of football from that older time when the brotherhood of the battle seemed more vivid than it does today.

This was a football player, Eller, with his flaws and vulnerabilities written almost as large as his strength and the random ferocities of his play. There were Sundays when he did not bring all of his strength and will to the game. In later playing years he went broke spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to nurse a drug habit. Yet with his playing career over and his personal and business life in shreds, he turned himself around, humbled himself with his admissions of wasted years and the injury he had caused those in his life, and he became a mentor and advocate of sobriety. Admitting he was headed for destruction unless he found help, he saved himself.

When we met during this time of redirection in his life, I was stunned by the change. He had gone into a fledgling business that had begun to prosper. He wore a dark business suit and the look of a man entering a new world, cleansed by a full disclosure of the old one. Sometimes we shared a speaking platform during those years. His transformation, frail at the beginning, became real and inspiring later.

We were never close friends when he played in Minnesota and shouldn't have been, given the hazards for the reader of that kind of relationship. In the best years of his football career, I can't remember a player who so resembled an absolute force of nature. His size, 6-foot-5 and 260 pounds, would not make him conspicuous today. But in those years, the 1960s and '70s, he gave the appearance of a huge, helmeted Neanderthal, menacing and relentless, an image that might have concealed his basic intelligence and instincts for the game he played.

He would knock down passes, block kicks, recover fumbles and make open-field tackles with a style of sudden violence that took on the aura of scriptural vengeance. He looked ungainly when he ran crossfield with the flow of the play, but he ran with deceptive speed. With the Vikings' defense of those years, he had graduated from the days when he was a leisurely, irresponsible boy-giant to a place of leadership. He had the equipment for it, the size, the commitment and a big, throaty baritone voice that was enough to make laggards quail. One day in December it did.

Eller's biggest admirer on the Vikings of those years was Francis Tarkenton, the brainy and saucy quarterback who preceded Eller into the Hall of Fame years ago, along with Alan Page, Bud Grant, the coach, Ron Yary and Paul Krause. In one of their playoff games the team was groping in disarray and came in at halftime full of doubt and unfocused. Eller grabbed the coaches' blackboard and flung it to the floor and cursing, vowed that if the game ended that way every man on the team was going to answer to Carl Eller.

Tarkenton confided the scene later. The players had a nickname for the beat writer in those days. "Klobey," Francis said, "I want to tell you about Eller when we came in. He made this scene. The blackboard went smash. He was bellowing. His eyes were blazing. He looked like the giant on a rampage. When he looked into our faces, roaring about getting our asses in gear or else, I wanted to disappear. I was ready to jump into my locker to get out of the way." Instead, he took a more practical route. Francis and the others got all of the requisite body parts in gear and won the game in the second half.

Prime time athletes today rarely lack for some form of adoration, of attention or boxcar salaries. Gold championship rings set some of them apart as the elite in their trade. Athletes lust for those prizes. But gold rings don't match the ultimate mark of recognition, which is the Hall of Fame of their fraternity.

So he has reached that ultimate prize, after all of the convolutions of his life, from those years of congealed blood on his face in the muck of the old stadium. There was oblivion that followed and then his discovery of another and better Carl Eller.

It was a just reward, his true summit, not the one in the snow that had evaded him.