Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  No, certainly not. There are nuances at each position, power tackle and speed tackle, rush linebacker and strongside LB and coverage LB, and … “Oh God, there he goes again.”

  “Look … for the last time. It’s for the layout. To fill a certain space, OK? Write the nuances in your memoirs someday.”

  Which is what I’m doing now. And why I have destroyed those meaningless 11 and 11s. OK, not destroyed … I don’t destroy anything … but shoved deeply into a drawer. And without further preamble, here, then, is my all-time All-Pro, nuanced team. One note — I have seen every player on this list in the flesh except for Hutson, I think. My father swears that we saw him play in the Polo Grounds. If so, I don’t remember it. What I DO remember, though, is the two solid days I spent in the Packers’ film room looking at Hutson footage.

  OFFENSE

  WR — DEEP: Lance Alworth, Chargers, Cowboys, 1962-72 Don Hutson, Packers, 1935-45

  POSSESSION: Raymond Berry, Colts, 1955-67

  COMBINATION: Jerry Rice, 49ers, Raiders, Seahawks, 1985-2004

  TE — Dave Casper, Raiders, Oilers, Vikings, 1974-84

  T — POWER: Art Shell, Raiders, 1968-82

  SPEED: Forrest Gregg, Packers, 1956-71 Ron Mix, Chargers, Raiders, 1960-71

  G — John Hannah, Patriots, 1973-85 Jim Parker, Colts, 1956-67

  C — Dwight Stephenson, Dolphins, 1980-87

  QB — OLD RULES: John Unitas, Colts, Chargers, 1956-73

  NEW RULES: Joe Montana, 49ers, Chiefs, 1979-94

  RB — Jim Brown, Browns, 1957-65

  THIRD DOWN: Hugh McElhenny, 49ers, Vikings, Giants, Lions, 1952-64

  FB — Marion Motley, Browns, Steelers, 1946-55

  SHORT YARDAGE: Earl Campbell, Oilers, Saints, 1978-85

  DEFENSE

  E — POWER: Reggie White, Eagles, Packers, 1985-98

  RUSH: Deacon Jones, Rams, Chargers, Redskins, 1961-74 Rich Jackson, Raiders, Broncos, Browns, 1966-72

  T — POWER: Merlin Olsen, Rams, 1962-76

  SPEED: Joe Greene, Steelers, 1969-81

  COMBINATION: Bob Lilly, Cowboys, 1961-74

  OLB — STRONGSIDE: Dave Wilcox, 49ers, 1964-74

  COVERAGE: Jack Ham, Steelers, 1971-82

  RUSH: Lawrence Taylor, Giants, 1981-91

  COMBINATION: Ted Hendricks, Colts, Packers, Raiders, 1969-83

  MLB — Dick Butkus, Bears, 1965-73

  CB — Jimmy Johnson, 49ers, 1961-76 Deion Sanders, Falcons, 49ers, Cowboys, Redskins, Ravens, 1989-2000, 2004-5

  SS — Ken Houston, Oilers, Redskins, 1967-80

  FS — KILLER STYLE: Cliff Harris, Cowboys, 1970-79

  RANGE STYLE: Willie Wood, Packers, 1960-71

  COMBINATION: Larry Wilson, Cardinals, 1960-72 Brian Dawkins, Eagles, 1996-2006

  SPECIALISTS

  K — Adam Vinatieri, Patriots, Colts, 1996-2006

  P — Tommy Davis, 49ers, 1959-69

  KR — Gale Sayers, Bears, 1965-67

  PR — Deion Sanders

  WEDGE BUSTER — Henry Schmidt, 49ers, Chargers, Bills, Jets, 1959-66

  * * *

  If this were England, Al Treml would have been knighted. I had been searching for Hutson footage for weeks, but all I’d come up with were highlight reels. Highlight films are OK for casual entertainment, but not for anything serious. What I wanted was raw game footage, every play, every move. This was for an SI piece I eventually did on the search for Hutson and Bronko Nagurski … what were they really like? I found my Nagurski footage at the Hall of Fame’s film library. Two games, complete, and I was lucky to see them because, as far as I know, that’s the only stuff on Nagurski that exists. Treml, the Packers’ film director, was the keeper of the Hutson archive, though, and he said, “Come on out here. You can watch all the Hutson footage you want.” God bless him. I spent two full days studying film, not exactly knowing what I would find. Hutson was a freak, with numbers like Babe Ruth’s home-run totals that destroyed everything that existed until then.

  I saw Hutson in his early years, the 1930s, when he played left end on defense and would occasionally have to rush the passer. What kind of a rush did he put on? Nothing that would terrify anybody. On sweeps and traps, he gave ground and did what he had to do without trying to unzip anybody. Later in his career, they moved him to defensive right halfback.

  His helmet rode high on his head and he seemed a little awkward at times, an Ichabod Crane, until he was in full flight. Then he was a gazelle. He usually played the short side in the single wing and, when he lined up tight, he was a pass blocker, often having to face up to a defensive tackle, or an end, if he was coming.

  “OK, T.O., on this play you’ve got to square up against Julius Peppers. Think you can handle it?”

  I watched Hutson take down one of those big guys with the strangest looking block I’d ever seen. He threw a head fake, turned his back, flipped one leg in the air and made contact with his butt and back, a sort of reverse, reverse-body block. My God, I thought. What playbook did that come from? But his guy dropped. I saw him go back into coverage and break up a pass and I saw him intercept one, and then on the sixth play of the first reel that I watched, there it was. The play that was worth the trip.

  The Packers were playing the Giants. Clarke Hinkle, scrambling, threw an option pass, sidearm, with two defenders in his face. Hutson was running a down and in. The ball was wide of the mark and high. He went up, the Giants’ Tuffy Leemans went up with him. Hutson did a scissors kick in the air and kept going up … up … and stayed up, like Michael Jordan. He reached and, with his body fully extended, he snatched the ball away from Leemans, came down running and glided in for the score, a 62-yard touchdown. It was over in an instant, smooth, quick, decisive. Eleven years of that. Ninety-nine touchdowns.

  Two plays later Hutson ran a deep sideline route. Tailback Cecil Isbell’s pass was behind him. The defensive back was screening him off. With his momentum carrying him the other way, Hutson reached back, reached, reached — his arms seemed five feet long — reached past the defender, made his catch, kept his balance and scored. I ran the play back, frame by frame. It was an impossible catch. I’d only seen one other like it, Lynn Swann’s against the Cowboys in the ’76 Super Bowl, when his momentum was taking him out of bounds, and he corkscrewed his body and reached back to grab the ball inbounds.

  I watched Hutson outjump two or three defenders, Randy Moss-style, on goal line fade patterns, I saw him catch deep passes so smoothly you couldn’t believed it had happened. I watched him toward the end of his career when they ganged him with two or three defenders and played aggressively and sometimes chopped him down at the line. And still he led the league every year.

  How did he rate, all time? Well, I watched that footage in the summer of 1989. Jerry Rice had been in the league for four years, and you knew he was great and would get greater, but no one could predict that he’d wipe everything off the books. Hutson wasn’t a technician like Raymond Berry, the finest possession receiver I ever saw. He was more like Lance Alworth, the same explosive speed, the same hunger for the ball downfield, a monster at the point of the catch. And then the smooth glide as he raced for the end zone. I didn’t have the heart to rate him above Alworth. As a young writer covering the AFL and rooting hard for its teams, I had seen Bambi simply tear up that league. No, in 1989 my two greatest receivers — Berry and Alworth — became three. Four now, of course, with Rice filling out the set.

  Berry had done it for me with one play in the days when he and John Unitas were hot in the late 1950s. Of course, we always read about his meticulous attention to detail and how he would walk the field before the games and note every irregularity and the many hours he and Johnny U worked together. But one play put a picture in my mind that I never forgot.

  It was in 1959, the year of my first newspaper job, on The Sacramento Bee. We used to go up to
San Francisco on Sunday and sit in the end zone and take our shirts off and drink beer and yell our heads off for the Niners. Right under where I was sitting, the Colts had a second and goal on the 49ers’ seven­-yard line, and some sort of instinct told me to hold my binoculars steady on Berry and not to look at anything else on the field. In the next 2.5 seconds or so, I saw a tableau that still is so vivid in my memory … the perfect coordination of passer and receiver.

  Berry ran straight at Abe Woodson, the right corner, and launched himself at Abe’s knees in a head and shoulder block. Abe, figuring some sweep was on the way … there must have been some play-action simulating a sweep … fought to get Berry off him. Then, in an instant, Berry turned and hooked to the inside, and Unitas’ ball was right there as he hooked. Touchdown. Six points. And the 49er fans gave poor Abe a tremendous booing. What the hell was he doing, a yard off Berry anyway? Perfection. Couldn’t do it any better. He and Johnny U put together 13 years of that.

  One story about Berry I have to tell. I’ve always loved it as kind of a capsule of how football people see the world, except that I never could find a place where it fit. When he was coaching the Patriots in the 1980s, some friends treated him to tickets to a Boston Pops concert to celebrate the team’s Super Bowl season. Afterward they asked him how he’d liked it.

  “You know the greatest thing about it?” he said. “All those musicians playing their instruments, and everyone just leaves them alone. There’s no one coming along whacking them in the head, trying to mess them up, trying to mess up their timing.”

  Two of the prettiest sights in the game were Alworth running the deep post, and Rice winning the shallow cross, splitting the field like someone cutting a piece of pie, turning a five-yarder into plus-50. Bill Walsh called it “athletic arrogance.” Rice called it confidence in a quarterback who would always put the ball exactly where it had to be, in front of him.

  “I was blessed by having two Hall of Famers, Joe Montana and Steve Young, throwing me the ball,” he said. “The whole idea when you’re running any route but, especially the short crossing pattern, is to know that you’re not going to have to break stride or reach behind you for the ball. If I’m watching a game and I see something like that, I have to turn away. You see a guy hitching up or turning back for the ball and you know something terrible’s going to happen with those DBs cruising back there like sharks. I was lucky. Joe was a quarterback who’d never hang you out to dry, maybe the best who ever lived, leading you on the short cross. Steve came pretty close to that level.”

  It’s too bad, at least for football voyeurs such as myself, that Rice chose to drag his career out forever because there are young fans who will always remember him as he was toward the end, who never will have seen him in his prime. But what the heck, he certainly earned the right to play it any way he wanted to. Especially after such a rough beginning. Coming out of college, his speed was suspect. The scouts clocked him in the 4.6 range, and even in 1985 that was a little slow for a potential first-round choice.

  “The trouble with scouts,” Bill Walsh said, “is that they don’t time people in game situations.”

  And then, in his first year with the 49ers, he started dropping the ball. Now people really got worried. So did Rice. And then, in the space of a year, he just cured it. Worked through it. The thing I’ll always remember about him is the smoothness with which he did things, the incredible ease. Year after year.

  And the thing I’ll always remember about Alworth was my feeling that somehow a child had become trapped inside him. I remember telling him something that Jets receiver George Sauer once told me after I’d seen him catch five square outs on a single drive and I asked him what was to keep him from catching 20 of those six and seven-yard outs, as long as the cornerback was playing off him.

  “You couldn’t take it physically,” he said. “Your ribs wouldn’t hold up.”

  “Oh man,” Alworth said when I told him what Sauer had said. “I wish they’d throw me 20 passes a game.”

  “He always wanted the ball,” his coach, Sid Gillman, said. “He never got it enough.”

  “He first showed up in our office in June, looking for an apartment,” said Al LoCasale, who worked in the Chargers front office in the early 1960s. “He had a skinhead haircut. He looked 15 years old. I heard my secretary, Barbara, tell him from the next room, ‘We’re not giving you the money because we’re not getting the paper.’ She thought he was the newspaper boy.”

  I have learned one thing in my two decades as a Hall of Fame selector. Don’t talk too much, otherwise what you say becomes meaningless, just more waves washing on the beach. That’s especially true when you’re isolating someone, for emphasis reasons, as the “best I’ve ever seen at the position.” You can use that one, maybe once a year, for one player. Any more than that and you become a parody of yourself. So who have been my “best I’ve ever seen” guys at the Selection Committee meetings? J.J. Johnson, the cornerback; Dwight Stephenson, the center; John Hannah, the guard; were a few who made it. Cliff Harris, the safetyman; Tommy Davis, the punter; Richie “Tombstone” Jackson, the defensive end, were some who didn’t, and I’ve just about given up on the last two. In 2002 my “best I’ve ever seen” was Dave Casper, the tight end.

  Yes, indeed, John Mackey had been terrific, dynamic, an explosive force, but he had already been enshrined. I didn’t have to worry about him. In making my argument for Casper, I mentioned that he never dropped the ball. Mackey had had occasional bobbles. Casper had been a tackle at Notre Dame. You think those guys know how to block? No tight end ever had those credentials as a blocker. And Casper came up in the era of the down-the-field chuck before the rules were loosened to protect the receivers. How many times had I seen him absolutely mugged on his patterns? And to combat the argument that he wasn’t really that much of a downfield threat, I pointed to his 13.8 yards-per-catch average, better than the keynote tight ends of ’02, Tony Gonzalez and Shannon Sharpe, better than that of Kellen Winslow, who’d been recognized as a serious figure running the deep seam routes, and to jump eras, better than Antonio Gates, the current king of the TEs. Well, Casper made it, I’m happy to report. Wish I were so lucky with some of my other guys.

  He was an unusual person, given to outlandish statements, usually delivered with an, “I’m only telling you what everybody already knows,” kind of indifference. I was talking to him in the locker room once, shortly after he had gone from the Raiders to the Oilers. This was after an exhibition game against the Jets. He was tying his tie and was about to leave, when a kid from the student paper at Hofstra University, where the Jets had their camp, asked him, “What do you think of Ken Stabler?” who’d been his QB on both clubs.

  “The Snake?” he said, putting a final knot on his tie. “I don’t think he’s ever studied a gameplan in his life. He probably just throws it away as soon as he gets it. I’m not even sure that winning or losing means much to him; he’s more interested in the game he can play against the defense, how badly he can sting ’em.”

  The kid was writing all this down like mad, and all of a sudden it dawned on me, “Holy hell? I’ve never heard this kind of stuff from a Raider or former Raider in my life.” And I whipped out my notebook and began scribbling away. Innocent question from a young reporter, dynamic answer. That was Casper.

  They have compartmentalized the offensive tackle position. Form two lines, please. Toe dancers on the left side, hogs on the right. Trying to get a left tackle to get down and do some serious drive blocking … why, that’s like trying to hitch a racehorse to a plow. Quick feet are what’s needed, quick feet … God, I’m tired of hearing that phrase. It’s like they’re describing kickers, or Thai boxers. So you will see high on the first round of the draft, dance masters, such as the Jets’ D’Brickashaw Ferguson, whose flying feet will keep him in step with the right side speed rushers, many of whom are really linebackers with a hand on the ground but on running plays
might wind up being driven four yards into his own backfield. Oh sure, there are exceptions, such as Baltimore’s gigantic LT, Jonathan Ogden, whose drive blocking is better than his pass protection, but they are exceptions.

  And on the right side, well, you’ll find players with more girth, except in the wallet department because bangers don’t get paid as well as dancers do. You’ll find sturdy people, but they’ll be lower draft choices, or perhaps failed left tackles or guards that just morphed over from their regular spot. Honest citizens who can block for the run but might need a bit of help if they’re lined up against speed rushers.

  Thus, one of the toughest positions for me to fill on my annual All-Pro roster is offensive tackle. Usually, I wind up with the players with the fewest negative grades, not the real studs. But I’m tilted the wrong way, I’ve been told by scouts, because I’m instinctively drawn to people who can knock an opponent off the line, whereas it isn’t really the checkmate that’s desired in this ultimate NFL chess match. It’s a whole series of drawn games, ties, pass rushers who are nullified.

  So my eyes wander nostalgically toward the past, where my No. 1 tackle is Art Shell, the Raiders’ Big Brahma, oversized at 300 pounds in an era of 260-pound linemen, dynamic coming off the line, impregnable as a pass blocker.

  “Came at me like a freight train first time I faced him in practice,” Howie Long said. “Busted my cheek open, gave me a scar I still have.”

  And here’s the odd thing: Shell played the left side. OK, you could say that he blocked for a left hander, Kenny Stabler, for most of his career, but he was the LT before Stabler was around. He’s my power tackle. And the two speed tackles on my all-time team … and believe me, I tried to break the tie and I couldn’t … both played the right side, Ron Mix and Forrest Gregg. But that’s the way it was in those days. The best tackle played the right side because the best defensive end was lined up left — Gino Marchetti, Willie Davis, Deacon Jones, Tombstone Jackson, etc. Best against the run, best against the pass … they had no designated weakside rushers in those days. So why was Shell on the left side? Because the Raiders always were a left-handed running team. It was part of Al Davis’ philosophy.