Mix and Gregg were lean 250-pounders, skilled, smooth, a pleasure to look at for an afternoon. Watching them was like a clinic. They could pull out, if they had to, execute any one of the intricate set of drive blocks they had in that era, lock onto the speediest rusher. “The most perfect football player I ever coached,” Vince Lombardi said about Gregg. Mix’s coach, Sid Gillman, toned it down a bit, merely saying that Mix was the finest offensive lineman he’d ever seen. Do I just sound old, reminiscing about these greyhound tackles while having to watch, every Sunday, 330-pound jumbos with 50 pounds hanging over their belts? Just one more story.
The Jets’ defensive left end, Gerry Philbin, was a mean, hard-bitten, undersized competitor who did it on desire and a persistent hatred of his opponent. He made it a point of honor never to talk to opposing players.
“Come on, Gerry,” I said to him one day. “There must have been one time when you said something out there, I just know it.”
“OK, there was, but it was the only time,” he said. “We were playing the Chargers the year after we won the Super Bowl. I was putting on a rush, and Mix caught me just right and knocked me on my ass. As I was getting up, he said, ‘Hey, great Super Bowl, Gerry.’ I said, ‘Thanks.’ That was the only time I ever said anything. But you’ll notice that Mix did his job first before he said anything to me.”
Guard was the easiest position on the board for me, except for running back, where Jim Brown is unchallenged. Once I wrote a piece for SI in which I called Hannah the finest offensive lineman who ever lived. It was a very hard choice that I had to make between Hannah and Jim Parker and, I think if I had it to do over now, I’d choose Parker. It stirred up some controversy, which made my editors happy. A decent contingent of players who had had to line up against Hannah backed me up. The most sensible objections I heard also came from football people, some of whom said that you have to choose a tackle for that kind of designation because the pass blocking duties were much tougher. I remember Mike Brown, the Bengals’ GM, held that view, as he lobbied for Cleveland’s great tackle, Mike McCormack, as the all-time No. 1.
But maybe I’m just too seduced by the running game, by a lineman’s ability to dig down and get under his man and drive him off the TV screen over and over again, and that’s what I saw Hannah do … better than anyone I’d ever seen. And when you talk about pass blocking, in which Hannah certainly got stellar grades, who are the great pass blocking guards in history? Name them, please. A guard pass blocks in a phone booth, or at least in a fairly congested area. Now if someone were to ask me the same question I just posed, I’d hold up one finger. Jim Parker. Greatest pass blocking guard who ever lived, and to strengthen the claim, just look at what he did when he moved one position to the left and lined up at tackle. The same thing, All-Pro as a guard, All-Pro as a tackle. Forced even the guys behind the TV cameras to isolate on him, in the ’59 NFL Championship Game, when he gave an unforgettable performance against the Giants’ Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli. After a while it became an item of fascination for the network, the lesson in how a tackle controlled a rusher, hailed as the first time TV isolated on this match-up, complete with replays.
Yeah, maybe Parker was the best lineman ever. At any rate he and Hannah made my guard choices a slam dunk, which is always joyful duty for a selector. I visited Parker in Baltimore a few years before his death in 2005. He wasn’t well, and I’m afraid my questions didn’t make him feel any better. I asked him what he thought of the current standard of line play in the NFL.
“Ooooh,” he said, grabbing his stomach. “Every time l think of that, I get this pain right here. I look at those techniques and what do I see? I see no technique. I see big fat slobs just playing slob football, pushing, grabbing, and then my stomach starts hurting again. Oooh, why’d you have to ask that?”
Hall of Fame project number … what … for yours truly? Two, three, five? Dwight Stephenson, center, Miami Dolphins. Freddy Smerlas, the Bills’ nose tackle, was one of those guys of the opinion that no human being with a heartbeat could ever block him. Except for one.
“Dwight Stephenson was like no other center who ever played the game,” Freddy said. “You play against him, and it’s like you’re hit by a bolt of electricity. It’s like something just flashes through you. You never know where he’ll be coming from.”
That was exhibit one in my argument for Stephenson at the Selection Committee meeting. Argument No. 2 was something Howie Long had told me. He said that when they faced him, the Raiders’ gameplan was for him to come down hard from his defensive end spot and crash Stephenson, to foul up his blocking angles and keep him from getting to the next level and nullifying a linebacker. It was like a wham block by a motion tight end, in reverse.
“First time I’ve ever been involved with a gameplan aimed at the opposing center,” he said.
Argument No. 3 was, well, the old standby, “Greatest I’ve ever seen at the position,” which I hoped wasn’t wearing a bit thin, but what the hell, it was true. Stephenson made it down to the final six, when only a yea or nay vote was necessary, and he didn’t make it. I found out when I was driving back to my hotel and, when the news came over the radio, I got dizzy, literally, and had to pull the car over and stop. I mean, who the hell had been the assassins who had dinged him at the very end?
“They’re like murderers in a dark room, hiding behind a door with guns in their hands,” I wrote, which is the kind of analogy you draw when you’re close to a mental breakdown.
Next year I asked for a show of assassins. Who are you? One fellow actually came forward and said, “The test of a lineman is longevity,” he said, “and Stephenson’s career only lasted eight seasons.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “can he help it if Marty Lyons came up behind him and took him out at the ankle and ended his career?”
Well, something must have kicked in because that next year he made it. Thank God.
Some people have trouble choosing the greatest quarterback of all time. I don’t. As long as you understand that all time means split time. Old rules and new rules. Old rules meant a basic lack of rules when it came to protecting the passing game, which the NFL’s Competition Committee regarded as their Holy Grail after defenses such as the Steel Curtain Steelers threatened to turn it into a mere memory.
Defensive linemen could head slap their way into the backfield and take down a quarterback any way they could, as long as they did it in fairly reasonable proximity to when he delivered the ball. Pass defenders could mug the receivers all the way down the field. Bump and run cornerbacks made the bump a real serious thing, not just a funny name. The Rams had a system called the Axe Technique, which meant chopping receivers down at the line and then chopping them again when they got up. The Chiefs had a corner named Freddy “The Hammer” Williamson whose modus operandi was a karate chop designed to stun his opponent.
And in this world, which now appears primitive but seemed perfectly natural at the time, John Unitas was king. There had been many great passers in the league: Sid Luckman, Otto Graham, Sammy Baugh, Norm Van Brocklin and some QBs who showed inspirational courage. Unitas was a combination of both. Then there were the supreme intellectuals of the game, the great play callers, exercising a skill that is now lost when everything is called from the sideline or the press box. Only a handful of quarterbacks call their own game now … make that only one that I know of, Peyton Manning, and he is tightly wired to his offensive coach, Tom Moore. But in those days we talked of the great “Field Generals.” What would they be now? Field Lieutenants? Captains maybe? Dutiful followers of the chain of command.
Writers mentioned Johnny U’s genius on the field, the way he could bring his team back time and again. Teammates and opponents alike talked about his toughness, his ability to function at the highest level under the most severe punishment. The stories have become legendary. The old Colts talk about the time Doug Atkins bloodied John’s nose, and Alex Sandu
sky, the guard, scooped up some mud and stuffed it up his nose to stop the bleeding, and the ref stuck his head in the huddle and said, “Take all the time you need, Unitas,” and Johnny U told him, “Get the hell out of here so I can call the play.” The Rams’ Merlin Olsen said, “I don’t know if I could do it, stand there week after week and say, ‘Here I am, take your best shot.’”
But that was then, and this is now, and any defensive lineman so bold as to come near a quarterback’s head would first get a flag and then, probably, a hook and would watch the rest of the contest on the TV in the clubhouse. Quarterbacks are protected. So are receivers. And O-linemen. No more head slaps, no more mugging down the field, not too many bloodied quarterbacks, although it can happen in what are termed accidents.
Joe Montana arrived at the dawn of the new era and played his career as the rules evolved into what they are now. He had the ability to bring teams back, as Unitas did. He never had to call his own game, certainly not with Bill Walsh running the show, and he never really had to absorb the punishment Unitas did. He was a better athlete. I mean, Unitas never high jumped 6-9. Many of his most famous plays came at the tail end of some daring escape, most notably the touchdown pass to Dwight Clark that beat Dallas and got the 49ers into their first Super Bowl. Unitas’ precision passes to Ray Berry were a thing of beauty, and he had great touch and accuracy on his long throws; Montana might be the most accurate short passer who ever lived, especially throwing the slant or the shallow cross.
I have been asked to select one of them as the greatest ever and I can’t do it. Could Montana have played in an era in which toughness was at such a premium, such as the Unitas era? Probably. Could Unitas function in today’s game, in which everything came in from the sidelines? No. He would have been a coach’s nightmare, growling and cursing and changing up all the bench calls until the team either changed its methods to accommodate him or shipped him off to a rare bird such as Tom Moore, who would have geared the system to Johnny U’s rare ability to see things during the course of battle that the coaches missed.
“They’ve taken the game away from the quarterback,” is something he told me many times. “The quarterback just stands there waiting for something to come in from the bench, and the team stands around, and ah hell, I just couldn’t have put up with that.” He spoke with passion and anger and in that regard he was almost directly opposite to Montana, who always seemed to have an air of wonderment about him. So what’s the big deal, anyway?
The one thing they had in common, though, was the ability to raise their game to the highest level when the stakes were highest. When I asked Unitas about it, he’d just about reconstruct the situation play by play, such as the winning drive in overtime against the Giants. There was even a certain anger in that: “Oh hell, anyone could see …” etc.
Montana never seemed to know quite how he accomplished what he accomplished. Once, when I was doing a two-part series on him for the magazine and I had what I knew would be my longest one-on-one shot with him, I worked myself into a near-frenzy trying to unlock the door. (Editor’s note: This feature appears in Chapter 10.) But how does it happen? How do you manage to lift your game, and then lift it again if you have to, until you’re right at the top when you’re under the most pressure?
He shrugged, smiled. I mean, it really was a game, after all. They do say “play” football.
“I don’t know … better concentration, maybe,” he said. I felt like Macomber, the coward, in Hemingway’s story, “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” when Wilson tells him, “Doesn’t do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away.”
“He never told you, did he?” said Matt Millen, who was Montana’s teammate toward the end of his career. I said no. “He doesn’t know,” Millen said. “He just goes out there, plays, completes passes, wins. It’s just so natural to him.”
Unfortunately, I never saw Jim Brown play in college. I was in the army, stationed in Germany, during his senior year at Syracuse. Which didn’t mean that I never saw him as an athlete. In Brown’s sophomore year, I saw Syracuse play basketball in the Garden, and early in the game, the first sub who came in for the Orange was a 6-2 guard with muscles in his arms like melons. Hmmm, now that’s an unusual looking basketball player. I saw him take a charge, and the guy who tried to run him over bounced once and wound up on his backside. This was who? Oh yes, Jim Brown. Then it clicked. I said to my buddy, “Isn’t that the guy from the Manhasset on the Island, the one they said was the greatest high school lacrosse player in history?”
“Yep, that’s him,” he said.
Brown was a 220-pound, bruising fullback in college. At least that was his reputation. In the NFL he was a whole lot more, of course. He weighed 228 and ran with the grace of a jungle cat … until he smelled his prey, then he would strike quickly with explosive force. He never missed a game. He retired at 29. His running skills have been documented so many times in so many ways that there is very little to add. I covered him only once in a locker room, in 1963, when I was writing an opposing team sidebar on a Giants-Browns game in Yankee Stadium.
He was standing on a bench, talking to a small semi-circle of writers. He had run for 123 yards and two touchdowns in a place where, traditionally, he had had problems. He had his head tilted back as he answered their questions, coldly, arrogantly. He was literally looking down his nose at them. He had just come out of the shower, and water was dripping on their notes. I didn’t like the looks of this scene, so I decided to talk to the offensive linemen, Schafrath, Wooten, Hickerson. No one else came over. They were glib, funny, friendly, a pleasure to deal with. Folks, I think I’ve hit on something here.
I still remember the headline the New York World-Telegram & Sun put on my piece: “Don’t Forget Those Toughies Who Clear the Way for Jimmy.” This is really apropos of nothing, except that it set me up for covering big games for the rest of my career. You don’t need to talk to the superstars to find out what happened. Well, Brown is my walkaway choice for greatest runner ever. Any arguments?
One addendum: Give me a play to run on third and 10, and I’ll go with the throwback screen to Hugh McElhenny. The King. A crazy legs, the Barry Sanders of his day. The play would give you minus two or plus 40, but guaranteed, no one would forget it.
I’ve told the following story so many times. It became a chapter in my book, The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football, and the chapter was labeled “Strictly Personal: The Greatest Player.” The player was Marion Motley, fullback for the Browns for four AAFC years and four full seasons in the NFL. I originally wrote it in 1968, kept the honor going when I did the revised Thinking Man’s Guide 15 years later. Now, in my old age, I’ve learned to shy away from flat-out pronouncements such as that one … I mean, can I say that he was better than Jerry Rice or Reggie White or Lawrence Taylor or Jim Brown or Joe Montana or John Unitas? Well, I don’t think so. Maybe I’ve undergone a deconditioning process by reading so many lists by so many people who never saw even a handful of the players they’re trying to line up and rate, one through 10, or 25 or 100 or however many their editors tell them to rate. Nah, keep me out of that race and let me just say that Motley is my all-time No. 1 fullback and a terrific competitor. But the story of my attempt to track him down for my greatest player chapter bears repeating.
Motley first had been seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old, eyes that grew wider with each viewing. That was the Motley of the All-America Football Conference, a player not many NFL followers saw because when the Cleveland Browns were merged into the NFL Motley was 30 years old with two bad knees. He was a shadow of the old Motley, but he still was good enough to earn All-Pro honors, which might be an indication of what he had been in his old AAFC days. I’ve deliberately tried to keep from cluttering up this section with statistics, but I’ll make an exception for Motley and give you just a taste of what his rushing stats looked like in his four years in the AAFC, not receiving, althou
gh he was effective enough on the screen and swing passes to average 14.3 yards per catch from 1946-49. To put this in perspective, Gale Sayers averaged 11.7 for his career, O.J. Simpson 10.6, Jim Brown 9.5, Payton 9.2, Barry Sanders 8.2. Only three pure runners among the mob of backs in the Hall of Fame ever topped Motley’s average, and the leading pass catching backs of the current era, Marshall Faulk and LaDainian Tomlinson, average 9.0 and 7.3, respectively.
Now take a look at Motley’s eye-popping rushing figures:
Regular Season/Championship Games
YearCarriesYardsAverageCarriesYardsAverage
1946736018.213 987.5
19471468896.113 109 8.4
19481579646.114 133 9.5
19491135705.0 8 75 9.4
TOTAL4893,0246.2484158.6
An 8.6 playoff average, 6.2 for the regular season? These are statistics for a will ’o the wisp 185-pounder. But Motley weighed between 232 and 238 in this period, plus he played situation linebacker on defense and blocked for Otto Graham in pass protection. That’s the way they did it in those days, fullbacks took on the blitzers, and when they reached Motley, set four-square and big as a lineman, that was the end of the rush. Or as Weeb Ewbank, who was an assistant on the Browns in those days, put it, “Motley takes the romance out of the blitz.”
If you want to say, well, OK, that was against inferior competition, think again. The AAFC was every bit as good as the NFL. Everyone knows what happened when the champion Browns met the champion Eagles in the 1950 opener, one of the most meaningful games in league history. Browns 35, Eagles 10.
Well, I saw Motley in his AAFC glory days and sadly watched him as his skills gradually declined in the NFL and by 1968 I had him squarely in my gunsights for the greatest player chapter. The problem was getting him to sit down for an interview. He had been burned by Paul Brown, who had promised him a job on his staff and then stiffed him, burned by people outside the football community. He was gun-shy.
Dr. Z Page 14