by Rich Cohen
The new alignment was called the T-formation because that’s what it looks like from above: first the center, then the quarterback, then two halfbacks and a fullback in a line behind—the arms of the T. Halas played it at the University of Illinois and used it with the Bears, but those were antique versions. In the 1930s, working with Ralph Jones, he rebuilt the T around the forward pass. The scheme was centered on the quarterback, who was raised onto a kind of pedestal. He would be the master of the new offense, the first among equals. Instead of plunging into the line, he would take the ball from center and drop back, positioning himself amid a circle of guards, who would keep rushing defenders at bay. This is the pocket. It’s like a diving bell, a bubble of air in a violent sea. It was revolutionary: after all, the object of the game is to push the ball forward, advance it down the field. But here was Halas deploying an offense in which the first move was backward! Five or eight yards the wrong way, the quarterback setting himself in a collapsing pocket from where, in the midst of the action, he’s supposed to operate like an eye in the sky, make a decision, execute.
Before the snap, the quarterback looks downfield and “reads” the defense, identifying the coverage. Who’s being double-teamed? Who’s been left uncovered? He then shouts out coded instructions, adjusting his players to exploit the mismatches or gaps. If the quarterback spots a weakness in the defense, he is also free to change the play entirely: this is called an audible. Halas was taking advantage of a loophole in the rules, which seemed to picture the offense in static formation prior to the snap. Every man had to be “set” for three seconds. To catch the defense out of position, the quarterback could therefore move a man as long as he was in his stance three seconds before the play. “Thus was born the modern T-formation with man-in-motion,” Halas wrote. “It broke the game wide open. Football became a game of brains. Instead of knocking men down, Coach Jones tried to entice the defense into doing something helpful for us.”
With the modern T-formation, the Chicago Bears elevated the quarterback to a position of supreme importance and invented the NFL offense as we still know it today.
The Bears tried to install the modern T in 1935 and again in 1936, but failed. It was too complicated for the quarterback. What a task! He had three seconds to decide, maybe five. After that, the walls cave in. Three hundred plays, each with its contingencies, but how many would he remember after he’d been concussed? In the past, the quarterback had been just another player; Halas made him paramount. “Physically, he’d have to possess a ballet dancer’s footwork in designed pivots, step-overs and spins and the ability to throw with accuracy and precision from a drop-back set or on the run, and he had to be able to withstand punishment from onrushing linemen. Since the rules at the time forbade a coach from shuttling in plays, the quarterback … also had to be a ‘field general.’” Looking over the playbook, Halas turned to his assistant, Clark Shaughnessy, and said, Jesus Christ, Clark, the quarterback has to be a coach on the field.
* * *
Clark Shaughnessy came into George Halas’s office carrying a tin of film.
“Coach, I’ve got something to show you.”
Shaughnessy was brilliant, a tactician. Tall and angular, a football academic, he’d coached under Stagg at the University of Chicago and would later take over at Stanford. He sat with Halas in the Bears’ screening room watching black-and-white footage of college boys racing around in the gloom. It was not the game that interested the coaches. It was number 42, the Columbia halfback. He seemed to be involved in every play, every point. The great players, the naturals … you just can’t stop seeing them.
“What’s his name?”
“Sid Luckman.”
He played halfback at Columbia, punted, returned kicks. On most plays, he ran, but what got Halas’s attention were the occasions when he lingered in the backfield, hung back, then let the pigskin fly. He was a hybrid, a big kid with the body of a running back—a shade over six feet, he played at two hundred pounds—who had the eyes, the arm, and the sense to find the open man deep downfield, drop a ball over his shoulder on a dead run. Luckman’s ball, a tight spiral, was famously easy to catch. Halas was most impressed by his accuracy, how each throw threaded its way through the outstretched hands of defensive backs. And the way he moved! The way he looked! Dark and handsome, the tough, brooding kind of handsome, the don’t-fuck-with-me kind, with a fighter’s worn features; he’d break his nose a dozen times before it was over. And the poise, the grace under pressure. Here was a kid who’d had a mediocore Columbia team competing with Fordham, Navy, Pitt. Now and then, you see something in larval form and know what it will become. In Sid Luckman, Halas recognized the modern quarterback before that position existed.
It was not just Luckman’s athletic skills, it was his background. In a game populated by coal-town toughs, Sid was an oddity: an overeducated Brooklyn kid who excelled in math. It was grades that got him into Columbia, a school that did not offer sports scholarships. And he was a Jew. Halas was the least prejudiced man I’ve ever studied—his only question was, “Can he help the Bears?”—but he was enough a product of his time to believe something like the following: when it comes to running this new, hypercomplicated offense, you could do worse than get yourself an Ivy league–educated Jew who’s built like a bruiser. Or, to resort to the West Side vernacular, “You’d need a Jew to run this fucking thing.”
Halas went to see Luckman in person: because there’s the film, then there’s the stadium, with its weather and the sound of the hits. This was at Baker Field in upper Manhattan in 1938. Columbia was hosting Syracuse. Halas took Luke Johnsos along; who better to judge than the eye in the sky? Tickets had been left at the front gate by Grantland Rice. Sid did everything that afternoon: returned kicks, made tackles, completed passes. “They played in the mud and his pants didn’t even get dirty,” Halas wrote. “He ran backwards faster than he ran forward. Just think of what he could do if we gave him protection.” It snowed in the fourth quarter, big flakes. Luckman was stepped on, the cleats of a Syracuse player driven into his face, blood in the snow. Columbia won 13–12. Luckman changed into street clothes and was heading to the hospital to have his nose fixed when his coach, Lou Little (aka Luigi Piccolo), took him aside and said George Halas of the Bears had been at the game. “He wanted to get a look at you.”
* * *
Luckman was used to strangers coming to get a look—older men lingering outside the fence, taking notes as he played. He’d been a legend in New York, the talk of those fathers who paid too much attention to the neighborhood games.
He dated his interest in the sport to his eleventh birthday, when his father gave him a football. Even this object of fun was presented as a tool for advancement. “Dad said owning a football in our hurly-burly neighborhood was like owning real estate,” Luckman wrote. “It set a boy apart, because not many could afford a football with a star’s name stamped on it.” Luckman went everywhere with the ball. He was the kid you see throwing passes to himself under the streetlight. He became a standout on the vacant lots, the player who can’t be brought down. When his mother complained about the game’s violence—even when he was All-Pro, she refused to watch—his father admonished her, saying, “If a squirt isn’t knocked around now and again, Ethel, how’ll he ever grow into a tough fellow?”
Sid’s hero was Benny Friedman, the top quarterback of the time. His father took him to the Polo Grounds to watch Friedman play for the Giants. They waited outside the locker room. Benny came out in a suit, hair wet from the shower. Sid’s father waved. “Hey Benny, Mr. Friedman, I have a prospective pro for you.” Benny got down on a knee. Sid asked the best way to throw. Benny went to the locker room and returned with a football. He put his fingers on the laces, then had Sid place his own fingers on top. Sid wanted to know the secret. How do you get the ball to really fly? Benny couldn’t tell him. Even the wizard does not understand the magic behind his most astounding trick.
Luckman became a star at Erasmus
Hall, a storied high school in Flatbush, Brooklyn. His victories were chronicled in the newspapers: Erasmus 26, Lincoln 6; Erasmus 27, New Utrecht 0. In many games, he scored every point. He was heavily recruited by colleges but turned down several scholarships to play for Lou Little at Columbia, an inspirational coach who told parents, “I’m out to make men first, then football players.” At Columbia, Sid Luckman is remembered for a few defining afternoons: the defeat of a powerful Army team at West Point; the game against Yale, in which Sid completed ten of seventeen passes, two of them for over 50 yards, and ran for another 103. At twenty, he already looked the way he will always look in the minds of a certain generation of fans: big and rugged but not pretty, eyes carrying that mischievous twinkle.
The Bears traded up in the draft to get Luckman, but when Halas called with the news, Sid told him he wasn’t interested in playing pro football. The NFL was still somewhat disreputable, a league of hooligans and thugs.
“Well, what the hell do you plan to do?” asked Halas.
“I’m going into the trucking business.”
“The trucking business? Since when does a fine prospect for pro ball take up trucking?”
Thus began what Halas called Operation Luckman, the all-out campaign to secure the services of the player he believed capable of running the modern T. There were phone calls, discussions, drop-bys. One evening, Luckman got a surprise visit from Benny Friedman. He said his biggest regret was not being young enough to play for Halas. “Have you taken a look at what he plans to do out there? This modern T-formation? It’s the coming thing! The ideal system for a quarterback! You don’t have to run, or buck the line, or make fancy dives!”
Halas visited a few days later, sharp blue eyes taking in the Luckmans’ Brooklyn apartment. The moon sat low on the river. The foghorns moaned. By the end of the night, Sid had agreed to play for the Bears, having been enticed by what Halas claimed to be the largest bonus in team history. “Five thousand dollars. No one since Jesus Christ got so much.” Not true—Bronko Nagurski got the same, and the great Red Grange made a lot more. But it was big money for Halas—a billion manhole covers.
* * *
Luckman went to his first practice at the end of the summer. He stood to the side in his pads, the bonus baby getting a look at the offense that had blanked every previous passer’s brain. “My first glimpse showed a quarterback crouching behind center, and three mates five yards back of him, crosswise, like the crossing of a letter T, but ready to shift into any number of alignments,” Luckman wrote later. “On a signal, the men seemed to run in different directions, and the quarterback would take the ball, and fake it to two or three men and fade back for a pass. The whole system was based on split-second timing. When it worked, there was no better system. When it failed, you saw a mob of puzzled athletes running harum-scarum.”
By the 1980s, the modern T had evolved into the typical formation of my youth, with Walter Payton set up behind the fullback, who, on many plays, ran clearance for Sweetness the way a secret service agent is supposed to run clearance for the president when things get hairy.
A typical alignment: Here are an offense and defense arranged in generic formations, circa 1985. The offense looks as the Bears’ did in the 1980s, with fullback Matt Suhey and running back Walter Payton, quarterback Jim McMahon, wide receivers Willie Gault and Dennis McKinnon, and Emery Moorehead at tight end. Guards and tackles are arrayed on the offensive line, protecting the QB on passing plays and opening holes or clearing paths on the run. The defense is arranged in a loose “4-3,” a popular formation probably pioneered by Tom Landry when he coached for the New York Giants in the 1950s. On defense, the big men on the line, defensive ends and defensive tackles, rush the passer; the middle of the field, the secondary, is patrolled by the linebackers, with a middle linebacker serving as a field commander. The cornerbacks cover the wide receivers. Downfield, they are helped by the last line of defense, the safeties, here a strong safety and a free safety.
Luckman struggled that first season. There were too many plays, too many variables. He spent his nights poring over the playbook, but the drills were never like the games. He would take the snap, turn the wrong way, run into his own man; trip over a pulling guard; get tangled in his own feet; miss a read and get plastered by his own tackle; confuse a signal and send a receiver to the wrong spot, resulting in an interception that, to a fan, would look like nothing more complicated than an errant throw.
One afternoon, the backfield coach Carl Brumbaugh said, “Sid, do you realize the job expected of a Bear quarterback?”
“Realize it?” Luckman answered. “I’m worried sick over it.”
“I sat in my room trying to unravel the potpourri of plays, which were given such names as crack-back, running-swing-switch, cross buck, and so forth,” Luckman wrote. “In Chicago, the quarterback handled the ball on almost every play. The responsibility of his position frightened the newcomer. He might never run a yard forward but he was the key man, flipping, faking, spinning.”
No matter how hard Luckman tried, there was always something he missed. What’s more, he had to master the position while also playing defense. Like most quarterbacks, he played safety on the other side. This meant no sitting with a coach and a clipboard, trying to figure out what went wrong—it was right back out there, where at least you could vent your spleen by taking off a few heads.
He was also having trouble adjusting to the culture of the game—the East Coaster, the Ivy Leaguer, the Jew. He never mentioned his situation, but it’s implied in the part of his autobiography where he goes to Coach Shaughnessy for advice: I’m the quarterback. I’m supposed to lead. But how can I lead when they won’t accept me? Shaughnessy thought a moment, then said, “About the players, and your squabbles, time will tell. You’ll find it worthwhile to get along with them, because they’re a good bunch. Oh, a few natural prejudices are bound to show. They may be pros, but they’re still boys at heart with the ordinary tendencies of boys. I think when they get to know you, they’ll feel different. Yes, I’m almost sure of it.”
By midseason, Luckman was depressed. He couldn’t sleep. “Make use of those extra hours,” Shaughnessy told him. “Go through the playbook instead of counting sheep!” On some nights, Sid played an entire game in his imagination, then woke up and did it all over again for real. Halas never gave up on the rookie but did let him return to the single wing. It would restore his confidence until he mastered the T.
In Chicago, they’re still waiting for the next Sid Luckman. Here he is in 1942, shortly before World War II upended everything.
In other words, Sid Luckman failed before he succeeded, proving what I always tell my piano-lesson-avoiding son: You’ve got to be bad before you can be good at anything.
* * *
Then, one afternoon, it clicked. What had been fuzzy became clear. What had been chaos became order. It was the fall of 1940, the Bears were playing Green Bay. They had returned to the T. Crouching under center, Luckman looked up and suddenly the defense opened like a book. There are the answers, all of them, right there! You can read them! He shouts a few coded words. His players shift. He takes the snap. Everything slows, he knows where to turn, when to look. Receiver one is covered? Okay, what about number two? There he is, open. I’ll throw him the ball. Oh, look, he’s got it. And he’s running. We’ve scored a touchdown.
The team got better and better. At times, they seemed unstoppable. The other boys loved Sid now, this kid racking up unheard-of numbers. Three hundred yards in the air. Four touchdown passes, five, six. The 1940 roster boasted several stars: George Wilson, George McAfee, Bill Osmanksi. It’s considered one of the best clubs in history, the equivalent of the 1927 Yankees or the 1976–77 Montreal Canadiens. There’ve been only a few teams worth remembering by fans in other cities. This is when the Bears became known as the Monsters of the Midway, a nickname lifted from the University of Chicago Maroons, who played on what had been the Midway of the 1893 World’s Fair and excelled in
the Big Ten till the university president ended the football program. Halas took the name, as he took everything else he thought would help his team.
After finishing 8 and 3, the Bears faced the Washington Redskins in the NFL Championship. The Skins were favored by 10. Whereas Chicago was led by an untested Ivy Leaguer, the Redskins had Slinging Sammy Baugh, a lanky Texan once considered the best quarterback ever. If a writer wanted to praise Luckman, he’d call him “Halas’s answer to Sammy Baugh.”
George Preston Marshall, the owner of the Redskins, needled Halas all that week. At issue was a game the teams had played earlier in the season. The Bears were down 17–14 with less than a minute. They had the ball near the Redskins’ goal but no time-outs. Halas told George McAfee to fake an injury to stop the clock. The refs saw through the ruse and penalized Chicago, assuring a Redskins victory. Halas, who insisted the injury had been real, bitched about it to anyone who would listen. “I probably used all the words I had used on the Chicago streets and in ballparks and training camps and maybe even made up a few new ones,” he said. Marshall called Halas and his team “a bunch of crybabies.” He sent Halas a telegram when the Bears clinched their spot in the championship: “Congratulations. I hope I have the pleasure of beating your ears off next Sunday and every year to come. Justice is triumphant.”
In the locker room, Halas gave a speech organized around the hideousness of being called a crybaby: Are we just gonna take it? Are we gonna let that cocksucker get away with that bullshit? Or are we gonna go out and show that pop-off artist who the real crybabies are?
As the team ran onto the field, Halas held Luckman back, put his arm around him. He told Sid the first three plays to call: How they react, that’s going to show us everything we need to know. He squeezed Sid’s shoulder, said he was proud of him, and wished him luck. The relationship between these two men was the coach/player relationship in platonic form. Years later, shortly before he died, Halas wrote Luckman a letter. They were both old men, with their glory days a million years behind; the letter ended, “My devoted friend, you have a spot in my heart that NO ONE else can claim. I love you with all my heart.”