Category Archives: 1960s

The myth of Super Bowl distractions?

Tom Brady wasn’t in a very good place when he began his Super Bowl preparations. Deflategate — and its attendant tempest — blindsided him worse than any Terrell Suggs sack. Some people thought the Patriots cheated in their 45-7 AFC title game win over the Colts. Some of those same people thought Brady, as the quarterback, must have had something to do with it. The NFL, meanwhile, was conducting an investigation at its usual glacial pace. Oh, it was a mess.

A mess, of course, that’s still to be resolved — which may or may not have made it worse for Brady. This much we do know: He took it, “very, very personal” (as Sonny Corleone said to Michael in The Godfather). Or as Tom put it on a Boston radio show:

I personalized a lot of things and thought this was all about me and my feelings got hurt, and then I moved past it because it’s not serving me.

I think what’s serving me is to try to prepare for the game ahead, and I’ll deal with whatever happens later. I’ll have my opportunity to try to figure out what happened and figure out a theory like everyone else is trying to do. But this isn’t the time for that, and honestly I’m not interested in trying to find out right now because we have the biggest game of our season ahead.

Well, how to you like the way Brady “moved past it”? Against a Seahawks defense that’s the best in the league and possibly the finest since the 2000 Ravens (if not the 1985 Bears), he had the greatest of his six Super Bowls on Sunday night. Not only did he complete 37 of 50 passes for 328 yards and four touchdowns, each to a different receiver, he drove the Patriots to two fourth-quarter TDs, the second of which capped a rally from a 10-point deficit and won the game, 28-24.

In other words, after taking Deflategate “very, very personal,” he did to the defending champions at University of Phoenix Stadium what Michael did to Sollozzo and the police captain at Louis Restaurant. Not to get too graphic about it.

That’s how you win a record-tying four Super Bowls — by being able to compartmentalize; by taking the latest scandal, zipping it up in a bag with the rest of the semi-inflated balls and going about your business. What a talent to have, apart from the passing and vision and decision-making and all the other things that go into quarterbacking. It might be what puts Brady a little higher on the podium than other QBs, past and present.

You know what’s really strange? There have been a handful of Super Bowl quarterbacks in 49 years who have been caught in a storm, so to speak, and every one has ended up playing well in the game. Brady is just the latest — and probably the greatest. But look at some of these other guys:

● Len Dawson, Chiefs, Super Bowl 4 — Early in the week, Dawson’s name was linked to nationwide gambling probe involving a “casual acquaintance,” a Detroit restaurateur who had already been arrested. He admitted being “shocked” by the development, and the pressure on him going into the game was heavier than Buck Buchanan.

“If we lose Sunday and he throws some bad passes, you know what they’ll say don’t you?” Chiefs defensive end Jerry Mays said. “Winning or losing usually is going to fall back on 40 players, but this one would fall back on Lenny.”

The upshot: Dawson responded with an MVP performance, hitting 12 of 17 passes for 142 yards and a touchdown in a 23-7 upset of the NFL’s Vikings.

● Doug Williams, Redskins, Super Bowl 22 – Williams had to deal with a different kind of stress: He was the first black quarterback to start a Super Bowl. (You can imagine what that was like.) He was asked question after question about it in the days leading up to the game, and answered each time with great equanimity.

The upshot: Another MVP performance, one highlighted by a Super Bowl record four TD passes in the second quarter. Final score: Redskins 42, Broncos 10.

● Joe Namath, Jets, Super Bowl 3 — The loquacious Namath brought the controversy on himself by saying he would “guarantee” a victory over the NFL’s Colts. To stir things up even more more, he nearly got in a fight with Baltimore’s Lou Michaels in a Miami cocktail lounge. Here’s Michaels’ version of it (as told to The New York Times), which begins with Joe walking in and introducing himself:

I’m still resentful of the way it started out. I thought Joe was at fault. I never had the privilege of meeting Joe, but I knew who he was. I went to school with his brother at Kentucky. Joe walked up to me, and the first thing he said was, “We’re going to beat the heck out of you,” only he didn’t say heck. And he said, “And I’m going to do it.”

If you’re looking for a fight, that’s going to do it. Instead of saying, “Hello, I’m Joe Namath, how are you?” I think he was a little arrogant there. I said, “Suppose we beat you?” And he said, “I’ll sit in the middle of the field, and I’ll cry.”

I believe in that little thing called modesty. I asked him about that, and he said, “That’s not in my dictionary.” I don’t know why he came on so strong. It worked out fine. I have nothing against Joe. If I was in his shoes, I’d be a little down to earth.

The upshot: Yet another MVP performance. Namath picked apart the vaunted Colts defense, connecting on 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards as the Jets won, 16-7.

So there you have it: four quarterbacks, all under the gun — even by Super Bowl standards — and they all came away with MVP honors, Brady included. Maybe this business about avoiding distractions before big games is a bunch of hooey. It certainly didn’t do Brady, Dawson, Williams and Namath any harm, did it?

After a chaotic week in which he got caught up in a gambling investigation, the Chiefs' Len Dawson was MVP of Super Bowl IV.

After getting caught up in a gambling investigation, the Chiefs’ Len Dawson was MVP of Super Bowl IV.

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SI’s cover the week of Super Bowl III

If you want to know how far pro football has come in this country, consider what Sports Illustrated ran on its cover the week of Super Bowl III.

The issue before, after the NFL and AFL title games, SI had gone with this Colts cover — Tom Matte plunging for a touchdown against the Browns in Baltimore’s 34-0 win.

Screen Shot 2015-02-01 at 2.00.31 PM

It made sense. The NFL, after all, was the dominant league, and the Colts were a juggernaut that season. They were 17-point favorites to trample the Jets in the Super Bowl.

So what did SI put on its cover the week of the Big Game?

SI Swimsuit cover

That’s right, It wheeled out the swimsuit issue. (It wasn’t even that great a bikini.)

SI had done the same thing before the first two Super Bowls. I guess it figured its mostly male readership would be spending most of the week discussing beachwear and how the two-piece was at least a 17-point favorite over the one-piece.

Miscellaneous note: In January 1969, Elle Macpherson was 4 years old.

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Six title games in 14 seasons

What does it mean, historically, to do what the Patriots have done in the 2000s: go to six Super Bowls in 14 seasons? How rare is a run like that?

In the free agency era (1993-), of course, no other team has come close to it. You’d have to go back to the ’70s and earlier to find clubs that had better stretches than New England’s. See for yourself:

SIX NFL TITLE GAMES IN THE SHORTEST SPAN OF YEARS

Team Coach(es) Title Years Total (W-L)
1950-55 Browns Paul Brown 1950-51-52-53-54–55 6 in 6 years (3-3)
1960-67 Packers Vince Lombardi 1960-61–62–65–66–67 6 in 8 years (5-1)
1956-63 Giants Jim Lee Howell, Allie Sherman 1956-58-59-61-62-63 6 in 8 years (1-5)
1933-41 Giants Steve Owen 1933-34-35-38-39-41 6 in 9 years (2-4)
1936-45 Redskins Ray Flaherty, 2 others 1936-37-40-42-43-45 6 in 10 years (2-4)
1937-46 Bears George Halas, 2 others 1937-40–41-42-43–46 6 in 10 years (4-2)
1932-41 Bears Ralph Jones, George Halas 1932–33-34-37-40–41 6 in 10 years (4-2)
1929-39 Packers Curly Lambeau 1929–30–31–36-38-39 6 in 11 years (5-1)
1966-77 Cowboys Tom Landry 1966-67-70-71-75-77 6 in 12 years (2-4)
2001-14 Patriots Bill Belichick 2001–03–04-07-11-14 6 in 14 years (3-2)

(Note: Championship seasons are boldfaced. Also, the Packers’ 1929, ’30 and ’31 titles were based on their regular-season record. The first championship game wasn’t played until ’32.)

As you can see, the two Bears entries from the ’30s and ’40s overlap. If you combine them, Chicago went to nine title games in 15 years (1932-46). It’s the same with the two Giants entries from that period. Combine them, and the Giants played in eight championship games in 14 years.

As for the Cowboys, they didn’t go to the Super Bowl in 1966 and ’67, but they did reach the NFL championship game both seasons. That’s why I included them – because they the second-best team in pro football (with all due respect to the ’66 Chiefs and ’67 Raiders, champions of the AFL).*

At any rate, the Patriots’ accomplishment is quite a feat given the limitations of the salary cap and the comings and goings of players. Their closest competitors in recent decades are the 1986-98 Broncos (five Super Bowls in 13 years) and the 1981-94 49ers (five in 14 years).

*The 1967-78 Cowboys also went to six title games in 12 seasons.

Source: pro-football-reference.com

Bears coach George Halas after winning the 1940 title over the Redskins by the slim margin of 73-0.

Bears coach George Halas after winning the 1940 title game over the Redskins by the slim margin of 73-0.

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Stock market up, concussions down

On the day the NFL announced that concussions were down 25 percent from last season — and helmet-to-helmet or shoulder-to-helmet concussions down 50 percent from two years ago — I thought I’d share this headline from 1966 I just happened upon. It ran atop a column by Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times about Jim Taylor, the Packers’ Hall of Fame fullback.

Jim Taylor uses his head headline

Some of the highlights:

[Taylor] uses his head for a living. Which is to say he butts it into peoples’ affairs — like linebackers’. His head is like a crew-cut boulder and has been known to rearrange more internal organs than an ulcer clinic. . . .

Jim Taylor's head was a major part of his arsenal.

Jim Taylor’s head was a major part of his arsenal.

“The Goat,” they called him on the old New York Giants, where Sam Huff did more dental work on Jim Taylor than a lifetime of dentists. Once, in Yankee Stadium, when the fans swarmed onto the field, a player is supposed to have hissed at Taylor, “Quick, over here, there’s a door!” and a teammate, baffled, protested, “There’s no door over there!” and the first fellow, gazing in satisfaction after the churning, head-down Taylor, replied, “Well, there soon will be!”

(If you want to read the whole column, click here.)

At any rate, assuming the latest figures are correct, the NFL must be making progress in this area. By that I mean: fewer goats.

Source: pro-football-reference.com

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When SI’s Super Bowl prediction was only off by 52 points

Predicting the final score of the Super Bowl is an invitation to make a fool of yourself. Every year, though, media folk — and even more non-media folk — give it a shot, just for “fun.”

The greatest of all NFL title game predictions is the one John Steadman made in the Baltimore News-Post before the sudden-death classic between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants in 1958. Steadman thought long and hard about it, may even have availed himself of a palm reader, and somehow came up with 23-17 — right on the money.

(What’s overlooked about this story is that 23-17 was, at the time, a very unusual score. There had been only four 23-17 games in NFL history before the Sudden Death Game — the first, interestingly enough, being the Packers-Giants championship game in 1938.)

At the opposite end from Steadman’s is the pick Sports Illustrated’s Tex Maule made a decade later when the Colts met the New York Jets in Super Bowl III. This, too turned out to be a historic game, because the Jets, 17-point underdogs, upset the Colts, 16-7, to give the AFL its first win over the established NFL. Anyway, Maule, SI’s pro football writer, miscalculated by just a shade. He had the Colts winning, 43-0.

But, hey, don’t take my word for it. Here’s a story that ran in the Oakland Tribune the week of the game:

MIAMI — Among Super Bowl writers, it’s Baltimore Colts, 49-6, with a lot of coward’s abstentions.

There are a record 367 credentialed working pressmen here covering the [Super Bowl], but a poll finds only 49 picking the Colts and a slim six writers going for the New York Jets. . . . Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated showed his NFL affection with a 43-0 Baltimore pick.

The results of the unscientific poll were no great surprise. The Colts had suffered only one loss all season, to the Browns, and had avenged it in the NFL title game with a blowout 34-0 victory at Cleveland. The Jets, meanwhile, had gone 11-3 in a supposedly inferior league and had barely gotten past the Raiders in the championship game.

But 43-0? The scores of the first two Super Bowls had been 35-10 (Packers over Chiefs) and 33-14 (Packers over Raiders). How on earth did Maule come up with 43-0?

Well, to be blunt about it, Tex was an NFL loyalist whose attachment to the league sometimes clouded his vision. A writer like that would have a hard time functioning today. He’d be crucified on sports talk shows, burned at the stake on Twitter and have his face ripped off on Facebook. But the world was a much different place in January 1969.

Before Maule went to work for SI, you see, he’d been a publicist for not one but two NFL teams. He was an assistant with the Rams from 1949 to ’51 . . .

1951 Rams co-Texes . . . and he was the head guy for the Dallas Texans in 1952 (after which they folded and the franchise moved to Baltimore).

Maule '52 TexansBy the way, did you notice the name above Maule’s in the Rams directory? None other than Tex Schramm, who helped turn the Cowboys into “America’s Team” in the ’60s and ’70s. Frank Finch of the Los Angeles Times thought the Schramm-Maule duo was so hysterical that he’d go around telling people the Rams were the only club in the league with co-Texes.

(It was all so cozy back then. Consider: When Schramm left his sportswriting job at the Austin American in the late ’40s to work for the Rams, it was Maule who replaced him. A couple of years later, Schramm needed help in the PR department and, you guessed it, brought Maule out to L.A. Then Maule returned to Texas to take the job with the Texans, and who did Schramm fill the position with? University of San Francisco SID — and future NFL commissioner — Pete Rozelle.)

But returning to Maule . . . his love for the NFL knew few bounds. And loving the NFL meant looking down on the scrappy, rival league that had sprung up to challenge it in the ’60s. In the issue of SI that was published before the Super Bowl, Tex laid out his worldview:

In evaluations of the two teams, most experts, for unfathomable reasons, have conceded the Jets an edge at quarterback. Both [the Jets’ Joe] Namath and [the Colts’ Earl] Morrall were selected Most Valuable in their leagues, but Namath certainly can claim no clear-cut superiority over Morrall. . . .

As usual, the AFL players base part of their hopes for victory on the rather tenuous claim that since football is a game of emotion, they will outemotion the NFL. But Las Vegas bookmakers, a group not known for emotional display, figure the Colts to be 17 points better than the Jets, which is probably conservative. . . .

Because the AFL had to compete with the NFL for the best of the college seniors during the first five years of its existence a kind of natural selection worked against the new league’s acquisition of players with the self-confidence and desire to excel against the best. . . . The rest of the AFL players in those formative years came over from the NFL. They were mostly athletes who preferred to switch rather than fight for their positions in the NFL.

This situation, of course, no longer applies. With the common draft of the last two years, the AFL is getting its share of the truly competitive, gung-ho athletes and it will soon achieve parity with the NFL. But that parity has not yet been reached, and the Colts should demonstrate this with an authority that may shock Jets fans.

To summarize: In the pre-Super Bowl years, the AFL was essentially populated by gutless losers who either signed with the league out of college because they “lacked the self-confidence and desire to excel against the best” or fled the NFL because the competition was too tough. Maule couldn’t even look at the two quarterbacks — Namath, a future Hall of Famer with a cannon arm, and Morrall, a 34-year-old journeyman who was 30-32-2 as a starter going into that season — and admit, yeah, the Jets might have the advantage there.

And SI actually printed this propaganda. Amazing, huh?

SI SB3 coverYou already know how it turned out. Morrall did the “unfathomable,” throwing three interceptions and getting badly outplayed by Namath. Indeed, the Colts might have been shut out if aging, ailing Johnny Unitas hadn’t came off the bench to drive them to a fourth-quarter touchdown.

Maule’s post-game piece was more complimentary of Namath and the Jets, but you could picture him typing the words with clenched teeth. “Broadway Joe is the folk hero of the new generation,” he began. “He is long hair, a Fu Manchu mustache worth $10,000 to shave off, swinging nights in the live spots of the big city, the dream lover of the stewardi — all that spells insouciant youth in the Jet Age.”

Toward the end there was this: “So the era of John Unitas ended and the day of Broadway Joe and the mod quarterback began. John is crew cut and quiet and Joe has long hair and a big mouth, but haircuts and gab obviously have nothing to do with the efficiency of quarterbacks.”

It was as if, in Tex’s eyes, the final scoreboard read: Hippies 43, Establishment 0.

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On the brink of going back-to-back

The Seahawks are back in the Super Bowl looking to repeat. Which raises the question: How often has a team in that situation finished the job?

Answer: Of the 11 previous defending champs that returned to the Super Bowl, eight won the game — 72.7 percent. That’s pretty good odds for Seattle (even if it does have to beat the Patriots, the Team of the 2000s). The details:

DEFENDING CHAMPS THAT RETURNED TO THE SUPER BOWL THE NEXT YEAR

Team First Super Bowl Second Super Bowl
1966-67 Packers Beat Chiefs, 35-10 Beat Raiders, 33-14
1972-73 Dolphins Beat Redskins, 14-7 Beat Vikings, 24-7
1974-75 Steelers Beat Vikings, 16-6 Beat Cowboys, 21-17
1977-78 Cowboys Beat Broncos, 27-10 Lost to Steelers, 35-31
1978-79 Steelers Beat Cowboys, 35-31 Beat Rams, 31-19
1982-83 Redskins Beat Dolphins, 27-17 Lost to Raiders, 38-9
1988-89 49ers Beat Bengals, 20-16 Beat Broncos, 55-10
1992-93 Cowboys Beat Bills, 52-17 Beat Bills, 30-13
1996-97 Packers Beat Patriots, 35-21 Lost to Broncos, 31-24
1997-98 Broncos Beat Packers, 31-24 Beat Falcons, 34-19
2003-04 Patriots Beat Panthers, 32-29 Beat Eagles, 24-21
2013-14 Seahawks Beat Broncos, 43-8 Vs. Patriots, SB 49

The last time a defending champ lost the Super Bowl, in other words, the winning score came on a conceded touchdown. (The Packers offered no resistance on Terrell Davis’ 1-yard TD run so they could get the ball back with 1:45 left.)

The Packers defensive line opens wide in Super Bowl 32 to let Denver's Terrell Davis score.

The Packers defensive line opens wide in Super Bowl 32 to let Denver’s Terrell Davis score in the final two minutes.

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In the days before diplomacy

Before players became so well behaved — in terms of their public pronouncements, I mean — Super Bowl Week was a lot more entertaining. I was reminded of this the other day when I came across a story that ran after the 1968 AFL title game between the Jets and Raiders.

Joe Namath’s team rallied to win the game, 27-23 – then went off to slay the NFL champion Colts, the biggest upset in pro football history. The visiting Raiders, who thought they were the better club (and may well have been), could only go home and stew for seven months.

In the walk-up to the Super Bowl, Jets cornerback Johnny Sample was doing what he did best: mouthing off. Sample was one of the early trash talkers — not quite as quotable, perhaps, as Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, but heck, Fred was practically Oscar Wilde.

One day Johnny was holding forth about the cornerback position — and about the notebook he kept that had detailed information on every man he covered. The Raiders’ Fred Biletnikoff, a future Hall of Famer, was just “an average receiver,” he’d decided. “You can’t compare him to the great receivers.”

This was a strange statement coming from Sample. Biletnikoff, after all, had torn him up in the AFL title game, catching seven passes for 190 yards and a touchdown. (In fact, Raiders owner Al Davis told The Boston Globe’s Will McDonough, “Fred has eaten him up the last three times he has played against him, and every time he does, Sample says he’s had a cold.”)

An enterprising reporter for the Oakland Tribune called Biletnikoff to get his reaction to Sample’s remarks. Fred was in a Los Angeles hospital at the time recovering from a collarbone injury that Johnny, apparently, had something to do with.

“The way I feel about it,” he said, “[Sample] should write a new book. He was really trying to shake me up in the first quarter, slapping at me and trying to talk me out of my game.

“When I dropped one on the 1-yard line, he said, ‘That’s the way it’s going to be today.’ But after I started beating him he didn’t say much for the rest of the game. I figure the game went 25 percent his way, 75 percent my way.”

I’m saving the best for last. Sample was suggesting at the Super Bowl that he might retire after the game — and it did, indeed, turn out to be his last season. How did Biletnikoff feel about that?

“I hope he doesn’t,” Fred said. “I’d like to play 14 games a season against him. That way I’d know my family is secure for a long time.”

Anyway, that’s what happened one day before Super Bowl III. Anybody say anything interesting today?

Source: pro-football-reference.com

The Jets' Johnny Sample (24) and the Colts' Tom Matte (41) go facemask-to-facemask in Super Bowl III.

The Jets’ Johnny Sample (24) and the Colts’ Tom Matte (41) go facemask-to-facemask in Super Bowl III.

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The Patriots’ first quarterback

The Patriots’ current quarterback, Tom Brady, is one of the most recognized athletes on the planet. He’s screen-star handsome, married to a supermodel and makes so much money that he recently gave his team some of it back. (Well, sort of.)

The Patriots’ first quarterback, Ed “Butch” Songin, wasn’t nearly as famous or well-off. In fact, when he wasn’t calling signals for the 1960 Pats, he was coaching the football team at Marian High in Framingham. Here’s the headline that ran in The Boston Globe:

9-12-60 Boston Globe

NFL players having high school coaching jobs on the side wasn’t unheard of in the early years. It was a way to supplement their generally modest salaries and prepare for their next career. By 1960, though, when the AFL came along, the money had gotten better, and it was pretty rare to see a pro footballer pacing a high school sideline — rare enough for Hank Hollingsworth of the Long Beach Press-Telegram to mention it in his column when the Chargers were in Boston.

“Butch Songin, the people’s choice here, is platooning his talents,” he wrote. “The former Boston College ace is quarterbacking the Patriots and also coaching the Marian High School team here.”

(The AFL was quite a show in those days. Later in his column, Hollingsworth noted: “There’s agitation here over commissioner [Joe] Foss. Boston wanted a player decision resolved by the commish last week, and when the Patriots checked Joe’s office a secretary informed them that good ole Joe was b’ar hunting in Alaska!”)

Songin was different from most guys in the young league. He was 36 years old. He’d spent the past several seasons playing semipro ball and, before that, had helped the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats win the 1953 Grey Cup. (His NFL chances — the Browns drafted him 247th overall in 1950 — had been hurt by a knee injury suffered in a college all-star game.)

Songin football cardSongin, a local legend who grew up in Walpole, was able to pull off the “double grid duty” because the Patriots played their home games on Friday nights. Marian, on the other hand, usually teed it up on Sundays. He’d work out with the Pats in the morning, then drive to Framingham and run practice after school.

“The only let-up, if that is the word, Songin will get is when the Patriots are on the road,” the Globe reported. “Then he will be spelled at Marian by John Ferri, former U. of Mass. back and Westwood coach. Also on deck will be Roger Smith, in his third year as line coach at Marian.”

As it turned out, Songin had a better year at Marian than he did with the Patriots. His high school team went 6-2 and shared the Catholic League title. The Pats, meanwhile, lost their final four games and wound up last in the Eastern Division at 5-9 — not that their quarterback was to blame. Butch actually had a fine season, posting the second-best passer rating in the league (70.9) and throwing for 22 touchdowns.

The high point for him came in mid-November. Check out his game-by-game:

● Nov. 11 — Completes 19 of 34 passes for 234 yards, with three TDs and no interceptions (rating: 106.7) in a 38-21 win over Sammy Baugh’s New York Titans.

● Nov. 13 — Marian beats Columbus, 22-8.

● Nov. 18 — Goes 25 for 35 for 220 yards, again with three TDs and no picks (rating (116.4), in a 42-14 victory over Hank Stram’s Dallas Texans.

● Nov. 20 – Marian defeats St. Columbkille, 16-6.

How’s that for a 10-day stretch?

After the season, it came out that Songin had suffered a pinched neck nerve in the fifth game and, to stay in the lineup, “took secret treatments for the ailment” the last two months. “I’ll get another treatment,” he told The Associated Press, “rest a few days and then back to work as a probation officer in Wrentham and hockey coach at Marian High.”

Oops, almost forgot: Songin coached high school hockey, too. Indeed, he was an All-American at BC and led the Eagles to the 1948 Frozen Four.

Remember that when Super Bowl 49 is over — and Tom Brady goes off to wherever Tom Brady goes off to. Butch Songin, their first quarterback, went off to coach hockey at Marian High. But only after he’d coached their football team first.

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A hit to remember at the ’65 Pro Bowl

It’s been ages since a Pro Bowl could be called memorable. These days, “perfunctory” is the word that usually comes to mind (with “unwatchable” a close second).

The game had a bit more of an edge to it, though, in the ’50s and ’60s. The financial difference between winning and losing was more meaningful, salaries being what they were, and there was a rivalry between the conferences, Eastern and Western, that was a lot like baseball’s All-Star Game — only nastier, because this was, after all, football.

The Pro Bowl 50 years ago certainly caused a stir — the likes of which hasn’t been seen since and may never be again. In the third quarter, Browns quarterback Frank Ryan suffered a dislocated shoulder when he was slammed to the ground by Colts defensive end Gino Marchetti, and Ryan claimed it was retaliation for something that had happened in the NFL title game two weeks earlier.

The backstory: With 26 seconds left in the championship game — and Cleveland leading favored Baltimore 27-0 — Browns fans stormed the field and took down the goal posts. The officials were all for calling it a day at that point, and so were the badly beaten Colts. But Ryan wouldn’t go along. Cleveland had the ball at the Baltimore 16, and he wanted to score one more touchdown.

Naturally, this didn’t set well with Marchetti and his mates. When the Pro Bowl rolled around, Gino was still steaming about it — and was quoted in various newspapers as saying he wanted “one more shot” at Ryan.

In the second half he got it. On one play, the East’s pass protection completely broke down and the defensive line came pouring through. According to one account, “Ryan dropped back to pass, but before he could get the ball away [Rams tackle Merlin] Olsen grabbed him around the waist. Marchetti, blocked to the outside, swung in from behind and twisted Ryan to the turf with the same motion used to pop a cork out of a champagne bottle.” Here’s the best photo I’ve come across of the hit:

Marchetti Ryan tackle

Afterward, Ryan, somewhat groggy, shrugged it off as Just Football. Marchetti, meanwhile, seemed quite proud of the play. “Yes, sir, I was in on the tackle,” he said. “And I’d say it was a pretty good tackle.”

In the days that followed, though, Ryan was more talkative. “I don’t think the Colts had any reason to get upset” when he wanted to score again at the end of the title game, he said. “After all, they didn’t hold back in their 52-0 rout of the Chicago Bears earlier in the season. But no one heard the Bears complaining.

“Sure I wanted to call one [more] play. The object of the game is to score points. We’ve got a slot end named Johnny Brewer. He’s a fine player, but he hasn’t gotten much acclaim. I wanted to give him the opportunity to score in the championship game, but I guess the Colts interpreted it as an attempt to belittle or embarrass them.

“Marchetti . . . is supposed to be a good ballplayer. He didn’t get within breathing distance of me in the championship game. Maybe that had something to do with the way he felt.”

Gino chalked it up as “just one of those things,” adding: “I have never taken a cheap shot at anyone. More from The Associated Press: “Marchetti admitted that he had said before the game he would like to get a shot at Ryan because of the Browns’ 27-to-0 whipping of the Colts in the championship game. But he said this was just a natural feeling after such a defeat and was not meant to imply he wanted to deliberately rough Ryan.”

Ryan had another Pro Bowl season the next year, leading the Browns back to the title game (which they lost to the Packers). So clearly there were no lingering effects from The Hit. As for Marchetti, he retired after the ’65 Pro Bowl and never crossed paths with Ryan again (though he did unretire to play four games two years later).

Still, the Pro Bowl made for great copy for a few days in January 1965. Imagine that.Frank Ryan pops off story

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When the Super Bowl was affordable

The face value of a Super Bowl ticket runs anywhere from $800 to $1,900 these days, and prices on the secondary market reportedly range between an arm ($2,000) and a leg ($20,000).  So I thought you might be amused by what it used to cost to go to the game — from soup to nuts.

Here’s an ad that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette before Super Bowl II that offered air transportation (“via United and Eastern Air Lines”), three nights in a Miami hotel, six meals, a cocktail party, transfers and “other features” for — wait for it — the low, low price of $196 (tax included). You flew out the Friday before the game, which pitted the NFL’s Packers against the AFL’s Raiders, and returned the following Monday.

What a deal. Wonder if Wayne Travel Service is still offering it. (Or is it just the price of gas that’s dropping to nostalgic levels?)

1-1-68 Post-Gazette Super Bowl ad

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