Before they were coaches, Bill Cowher once broke Jeff Fisher's leg

This offseason, Shutdown Corner will travel down memory lane with a series of stories presenting some interesting and sometimes forgotten stories from the NFL's past. Join us as we relive some of the greatest and craziest moments in the sport's history.

The story has become apocryphal at this point, a joke between two successful NFL coaches, or, really, a chance for Bill Cowher to razz his coaching contemporary a bit.

But from Jeff Fisher’s perspective, it’s important to put the right context in the story of what happened after he suffered a broken leg in a 1983 game: “I played the next year.”

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See, Cowher has enjoyed telling people over the years — always in good fun, both agree — that back when two of the NFL’s 20 winningest head coaches were players, his oft-forgotten tackle on Fisher on a punt return in a semi-meaningless game more than 30 years ago was the reason Fisher got into coaching.

“To this day, I tell him: ‘Heck, had I not been a part of that tackle, you wouldn’t be where you were today,” Cowher told Shutdown Corner over the phone, laughing as he tells it.

Cowher was indeed one of three Philadelphia Eagles players to converge on the leg of Fisher, a punt returner for the Chicago Bears that late October day, and yes, Fisher's leg broke in fairly gruesome fashion on that wet Veterans Field.

And, lo, perhaps not in the way Cowher tells it, but the moment served as a career-changing one for Fisher. A moment similar to one Cowher himself faced a year later.

Both players were try-hard, overachieving special teamers a few years into their NFL careers, and also close to the ends of them. Cowher was an undrafted free agent in 1979 who had to scrap his way onto the Eagles’ roster after a stay with the Cleveland Browns; Fisher, a seventh-rounder in 1981, was the least-known member of a USC secondary that featured future NFL standouts Ronnie Lott, Joey Browner and Dennis Smith. Fisher was a punt returner and fringe member of an emerging Bears defense.

“One thing Jeff and I had in common, we played on a lot of fourth downs,” Cowher said. “We were both special-teams players pretty much.”

Added Fisher: “I was a pretty mediocre player.”

But Fisher was thrust into the starting lineup that 1983 season in place of Bears All Pro free safety Gary Fencik, who suffered a groin injury and missed several games. That meant the Bears wanted to limit the punt-return duties of Fisher, who handled them that season along with Dennis McKinnon and Willie Gault, while Fisher started in the secondary.

On his first and only return try of the game, and his 13th of the season, Fisher went back to his own 15-yard line. It was late in the third quarter with the Bears clinging to a 7-3 lead in a defensive slugfest with a combined 132 passing yards in the game to that point. Eagles punter Tom Skaldany mishit his kick, and the ball line-drived its way from the Philadelphia 46-yard line to the Chicago 22, skidding on the notoriously bad Veterans turf.

“It was a short punt and I kind of ran up to field it,” Fisher said. “I kind of got spun around.”

Fisher reached the 30-yard line before the posse arrived. Cowher was the first of three Eagles to converge on him in the messy crash.

“I was making a tackle on him, and a few guys all came in in a big, big pileup,” Cowher said. “I heard him yell and scream and trying to get people off.”

Fisher admits to the screaming and yelling — hey, you would too. But his response serves as a cheeky volley of Cowher’s initial serve when he starts telling the story.

“Then I see Bill Cowher come in and I got hit by him. Low … hard … heavy,” Fisher said, placing extra emphasis on the final three words for effect. “I had this pile of people on me, and I am trying to get them all off. I said, ‘Get off, it’s broken.’ I just knew. Other guys were like, ‘No it’s not,’ but I knew it was.”

“I realized then he probably broke his leg,” Cowher said. “I knew it wasn’t good.”

Fisher’s season was done as a player. But after he rehabbed for a few weeks, he rejoined the team in another capacity — as Bears defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan’s unofficial assistant during games.

"He was a kid interested in the total game," Ryan told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. "He really impressed me."

Coaching staffs were far smaller back then, so Ryan was happy to have the extra set of hands on deck as the Bears had fallen to 3-7 and had allowed more than 31 points three times in losses. While the other defensive coaches were up in the booth on game days, Fisher stood next to Ryan on the sidelines and helped him with personnel, learning how to call a game defensively and helping plant a seed for coaching down the road. “Almost like a grad assistant kind of deal,” Cowher said of his coaching rival and friend.

But here’s where Cowher was wrong about the story: Fisher returned in 1984 and played with the Bears the entire season, all the way through the NFC championship game loss to the San Francisco 49ers. He even returned to camp the next summer but suffered an ankle injury and was done for the season — the one where the Bears crushed almost everyone in their path en route to winning Super Bowl XX.

So actually, Fisher’s playing career actually outlasted that of Cowher. In the fourth game of 1984, Cowher suffered a knee injury that ended his season. It would be the last time he’d play in the NFL.

“How about that?” Fisher said with a playful jab.

Marty Schottenheimer took over as Cleveland Browns head coach midway through that same season, replacing Sam Rutigliano, and was brought back the following season. Schottenheimer had coached the gritty Cowher for two years in Cleveland as defensive coordinator and offered him his first coaching job with the Browns before Cowher had officially retired as a player: a special-teams assistant position, which was close to his roots.

It was a tough call, one the competitor in Cowher wrestled with as he considered how long he might want to keep playing.

“I went right from playing to coaching,” he said. “I was offered the job and I thought about it for a month or two while I was rehabbing in Philadelphia. Having never coached before, it certainly was a challenge. But obviously, it’s been the best career move I’ve ever made.”

Fisher felt the same. He reprised his injured player-coach role in 1985 and followed Ryan to the Philadelphia Eagles, where he’d been named head coach. Ryan offered Fisher a job as a defensive backs coach, and two years later he was Ryan’s defensive coordinator at age 30.

Cowher followed a similar ascent. A year after Fisher, Cowher became the Kansas City Chiefs’ defensive coordinator at 32, running one of the best units in the NFL for three seasons. In 1992, he replaced Chuck Noll as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers at age 35.

Fisher spent time on the staffs of the Los Angeles Rams, 49ers and Houston Oilers before taking over as the Oilers' interim head coach midway through the 1994 season — also at 35. The next year, he was named full-time head coach and two seasons later the team relocated to Tennessee to become the Titans. In the span of a decade, Cowher and Fisher had gone from bit players to head coaches in the NFL.

“I think for both of us, our careers certainly flourished more as coaches than as players,” Cowher deadpanned.

Cowher’s Steelers beat the Oilers in overtime in 1994, and two weeks later Jack Pardee was fired, replaced by Fisher. Over the following 12 seasons, Cowher’s and Fisher’s teams met 18 times and were division rivals for half that time in the old AFC Central until 2002. Fisher’s teams held a 11-7 head-to-head edge in those games (despite losing four of the first five) and won the only playoff game between the two — a 34-31 overtime classic at The Coliseum in Nashville following the 2002 season.

When the teams met at Heinz Field, right before a key defensive play, the Steelers’ video board would show the hit Cowher laid on Fisher all those years earlier, and the crowd ate it up. Fisher also was able to have fun with it, though, when the teams played.

“We had some great, great battles between the two teams. And anytime we played them I told our guys — you know, just joking around — ‘If you happen to go out of bounds on their sideline, hey, make sure you hit the guy low … hard … heavy,’” Fisher said, echoing a certain tackle of yore.

For a long time, their careers were near parallels. Cowher became the third-youngest coach to win 90 regular-season games at age 44; Fisher was fourth at 46. By 2006, Cowher and Fisher joined an exclusive fraternity of (at the time) 12 coaches to notch 200 games with a single team. That was the same year Cowher left coaching, after having won the Super Bowl the season prior. Fisher reached the big game in 1999 with the Titans but lost to the Rams in Super Bowl XXXIV.

They’ve been connected since, including both rumored to be strong candidates for the Dallas Cowboys’ head coaching job in 2012 to replace Bill Parcells. But Cowher has remained in his TV analyst’s role while Fisher has followed the Rams as head coach from St. Louis back to L.A. Although Cowher has occasionally been critical of Fisher’s teams, such as calling out Titans players stomping on the Steelers’ Terrible Towel after a 2008 game, but they maintain a healthy measure of respect for each other.

“We’ve always had a good relationship,” Fisher said.

Added Cowher: “It was never a rivalry like some said. It was just good competition between two guys who had a lot of passion for the game.”

And a healthy sense of humor, too.

“Yeah, we’ve never lost that,” Fisher said. “I fully expect to hear about the tackle anytime I see him nowadays. It’s part of the deal.”

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm