Tag Archives: Redskins

R. C. Owens’ one-of-a-kind field goal block, revisited

History, as we all know, is a living thing. More information — better information — comes along, and the record gets revised. Earlier this week I published a post (and photo) about the Colts’ R. C. Owens blocking a field goal try in 1962 in a unique way: He stood back by the goal posts, jumped as high as he could and re-jected a kick attempted by the Redskins.

The newspaper accounts said it was an NFL first, and in all my research I’ve never come across another play like it. (I do remember seeing — on TV — a 1970 game between the Chiefs and Raiders in which Morris Stroud, the Chiefs’ 6-10 tight end, played “goalie” in the closing seconds and nearly blocked a 48-yarder by George Blanda (a boot that left the bitter rivals in a 17-17 deadlock). The Associated Press reported: “The ball barely made it over the crossbar and above the hands of . . . Stroud, who was stationed at the goal line.”

Reader/Facebook buddy/fellow blogger Jack Finarelli brought up another candidate in a comment: Erich Barnes, a six-time Pro Bowl cornerback with the Bears, Giants and Browns from 1958 to ’71. Wrote Jack: “I think I remember [him] doing this also in a game about 1961 or 1962. As I recall, it was considered a ‘blocked field goal’ and was open for recovery.”

So I did a little investigating. Turns out Barnes did do something like that — in 1969, when he was playing for Cleveland. (He may have done it as a Giant, too, but my search of The New York Times archive turned up nothing. It did, though, produce a photo of him blocking a field goal in the conventional fashion against the Rams in ’61.)

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Here’s the link to the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s story on The Game in Question. The relevant passage is as follows:

The Eagles got on the board in the second quarter after a freak play. Erich Barnes, who also was injured late in the game and may have a cracked rib, leaped high to deflect Sam Baker’s field goal bid.

Erich was playing right in front of the goal posts. He touched the ball and it bounced back in the playing field, where it was recovered by [Philadelphia’s] Tim Rossovich.

So the Eagles had a first down on the Cleveland 2-yard line. They took it into the end zone on two smashes by Tom Woodeshick.

Maybe that’s why Barnes’ play has been forgotten: because, unlike Owens’, it didn’t prevent the opponent from scoring. In fact, it cost the Browns four points — the difference between a field goal and a touchdown.

There’s also uncertainty about whether Baker’s boot would have gone through the uprights. According to United Press International, he “was short on a 44-yard field goal attempt, and Barnes, leaping high at the goal post in a bid to deflect the ball, batted it back on the playing field.”

Which is why it was a live ball — and why the Eagles were able retain possession. Had the kick gone into the end zone, as it (presumably) did in Owens’ case, it would have been ruled a touchback.

What we don’t know — because we don’t have the game film handy — is what UPI meant by “short.” It could have just meant the ball would have barely made it over to the crossbar. Or . . . it could have meant Barnes’ block was superfluous.

I’d like to think this blog can do this kind of stuff often — that is, try to get the facts as straight as we can. The truth, after all, is in the details.

Sources: newspaperarchive.com, The New York Times archive, Cleveland Plain Dealer archive, pro-football-reference.com.

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Thoughts on the Logan Mankins trade

For me, there are two surprises in the following chart. The first is that only eight rookie tight ends in NFL history have had 50 or more receptions. The second is that every one of them went in the first 40 picks of the draft except for Tim Wright, the guy the Patriots just acquired from the Bucs for six-time Pro Bowl guard Logan Mankins. Wright, who played his college ball at Rutgers, was passed over by all 32 teams a year ago.

ROOKIE TIGHT ENDS WHO HAVE CAUGHT 50 OR MORE PASSES

Year  Tight End, Team Rec Yds Avg TD Round-Pick
1988  Keith Jackson, Eagles 81 869 10.7 6 1-13
2002  Jeremy Shockey, Giants 74 894 12.1 2 1-14
1961  Mike Ditka, Bears 56 1,076 19.2 12 1-5
2008  John Carlson, Seahawks 55 627 11.4 5 2-38
1973  Charle Young, Eagles 55 854 15.5 6 1-6
1998  Cam Cleeland, Saints 54 684 12.7 6 2-40
2013  Tim Wright, Bucs 54 571 10.6 5 Undrafted
2010  Jermaine Gresham, Bengals 52 471 9.1 4 1-21

That’s right, no Rob Gronkowski (42 receptions). No Jimmy Graham (31). No Tony Gonzalez (33). No Kellen Winslow Sr. or Jr. (30 combined in their first season). No Shannon Sharpe (7). Maybe this Wright kid is better than we think. (Of course, before today, when the deal was announced, how often did he even cross our minds?)

At the every least, Wright provides low-cost Gronk Insurance in the event the all-world tight end is slow coming back from knee surgery. When No. 87 was out of the lineup last year, the Patriots’ supercharged offense seemed more like a stick shift. Wright also creates significant cap space in case the Pats want to hang onto Darrelle Revis, whose 2015 option is a gargantuan $20 million. Mankins, after all, had the Pats’ second-highest cap number after Tom Brady; Wright, meanwhile, like most undrafted free agents, subsists on gruel.

Still, trading a guard with Mankins’ resumé . . . how often has that happened? Well, I dug up one similar example back in the ’70s. (Which isn’t to say there might not be others.) I also found a couple of guards who were dealt after being voted to five Pro Bowls — and two more who were sent packing after being voted to three. The particulars, chronologically:

Walt Sweeney, Chargers to Redskins (January 1974) — A nine-time Pro Bowler in San Diego (1964-72), Sweeney joined George Allen’s Over the Hill Gang at the age of 33. He started for two seasons in Washington before calling it a career. The Chargers received fourth-, fifth- and sixth-round picks spread over three drafts.

Ed White, Vikings to Chargers (July 1978) — White had made three Pro Bowls in Minnesota and would make another in San Diego. Though already 31, he ended up playing eight more seasons (which Mankins might try to do just out of spite). The Vikes, in return, got Rickey Young, who caught 88 passes in his first year with them, a record for running backs (since broken).

Joe DeLamielleure, Bills to Browns (September 1980) — Hall of Famer DeLamielleure, then 29, had been selected for five Pro Bowls in Buffalo and added a sixth in Cleveland. The Bills came away with second- and third-round picks.

R.C. Thielemann, Falcons to Redskins (August 1985) — Atlanta needed a wideout. Washington wasn’t sold on its right guard. So the 30-year-old Thielemann, a three-time Pro Bowler with the Falcons, was swapped Charlie Brown, who was coming off an injury-marred season after tying for the NFC lead in receptions in ’83. R.C. was just a spoke in the wheel with the Redskins, but he did start on their ’87 championship team.

Kent Hill, Los Angeles Rams to Houston Oilers (September 1986) — This was the trade, two games into the season, that enabled L.A. to obtain the rights to unsigned QB Jim Everett, the third pick in the ’86 draft (who had no desire to sit behind Canton-bound Warren Moon). Hill, part of a mega-package that included DE William Fuller and two No. 1s, was 29 and had gone to five Pro Bowls. He played that year and one more in Houston and then retired.

As for Everett, he didn’t win the Super Bowl in Los Angeles, but after moving to the Saints he did leave us with this memorable clip:

Anyway, yeah, this Mankins trade is extremely rare. I wouldn’t want to be the team that comes out on the short end of it.

Sources: pro-football-reference.com, NFL.com

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A matched set of 1,300-yard receivers

When they kick off Sunday against the Texans at NRG Stadium, the Redskins will be able to line up not one but two wideouts who had 1,300 receiving yards last season — Pierre Garcon (1,346) and Eagles exile DeSean Jackson (1,332). This is the second year in a row we’ve had this situation. In 2013 it was the Broncos with Demaryius Thomas (1,434 in ’12) and Wes Welker (1,354 for the Patriots).

Talk about conspicuous consumption. Usually when a team adds a receiver coming off a 1,300-yard season — think Jeff Graham going from the Bears to the Jets in ’96 or Muhsin Muhammad leaving Carolina for Chicago in ’05 — it’s because it needs one. The Broncos and Redskins are the first clubs in NFL history to sign/trade for a 1,300-yard receiver when they already had one.1

A 1,300-yard receiving season is no small thing. The Seahawks, for instance, have never had a 1,300-yard guy. We’re talking 38 years and counting. (Steve Largent topped out at 1,287.) Neither have the Ravens, though they only go back to ’96. The Jets — Joe Namath’s team — have had one (Don Maynard with 1,434 in ’67). Even with the 16-game schedule, 1,300 yards are a lot.

I’ve turned up just eight teams that have had a pair of 1,300-yard receivers in the same year. In one case, one of the receivers was a tight end. The list:

Year  Team (Record) Receivers, Yards Result
1984  Dolphins (14-2) Mark Clayton 1,389, Mark Duper 1,306 Lost Super Bowl
1995  Lions (10-6) Herman Moore 1,686, Brett Perriman 1,488 Wild Card
2000  Rams (10-6) Torry Holt 1,635, Isaac Bruce 1,471 Wild Card
2000  Broncos (11-5) Rod Smith 1,602, Ed McCaffrey 1,317 Wild Card
2002  Steelers (10-5-1) Hines Ward 1,329, Plaxico Burress 1,325 Won Division
2005  Cardinals (5-11) Larry Fitzgerald 1,409, Anquan Boldin 1,402 Missed Playoffs
2006  Colts (12-4) Marvin Harrison 1,366, Reggie Wayne 1,310 Won Super Bowl
2011  Patriots (13-3) Wes Welker 1,569, Rob Gronkowski (TE) 1,327 Lost Super Bowl

Note that seven of the eight clubs made the playoffs, three reached the Super Bowl and one took home the Lombardi Trophy. You can understand, then, why there are such high expectations in Washington — as there were in Denver a year ago (when the Broncos won the AFC title).

The question, of course, is: Will Jackson’s presence take yards away from Garcon — or vice versa? Welker’s total, after all, dropped to 778 in his first season with the Broncos (while Thomas’ stayed steady at 1,430). But that might not be the best comparison because: (a.) Wes missed three games with a concussion, and (b.) Peyton Manning had another capable wideout, Eric Decker (1,288 yards in ’13), to throw to. The Redskins have no third option like Decker, so most of the passes should be headed toward Garcon or Jackson.

1 The closest anyone came before this was the Packers in 1981. With James Lofton coming off a 1,226-yard year, they acquired John Jefferson (1,340 in ’80) in a deal with the Chargers.

Source: pro-football-reference.com

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Tony Gonzalez’s exit

Well, it looks like Tony Gonzalez really is retired, so I guess it’s safe to run this post. I wanted to add his 2013 performance to my list of Best Final Seasons in NFL history, but there was always the chance the Patriots or some other tight end-needy contender would talk him into playing another year.

Gonzalez wanted badly last season to close out his career the way Ray Lewis, Michael Strahan and Jerome Bettis had in recent years — by winning the Super Bowl. (In his case, his first.) Alas, the Falcons were one of the league’s biggest flops, going 4-12 after reaching the NFC title game the season before, and Tony’s typically sterling efforts (83 catches, 859 yards, 8 touchdowns and his 14th Pro Bowl) went for naught.

Still, at least he retired at or near the top of his game. The same can’t be said for Lewis, Strahan and Bettis, despite their fairytale endings. Ray missed 10 games in 2012 with a torn triceps and failed to make the Pro Bowl. Strahan ranked third on the Giants in ’07 with nine sacks (to Osi Umenyiora’s 13 and Justin Tuck’s 10). And Bettis rushed for a career-low 368 yards in ’05 (though his nine rushing touchdowns were tops on the team).

Other players have hung ’em up after having much better seasons — and a handful have even done it while winning a ring (or whatever bauble owners handed out in those days). The lineup of Fabulous Finishers:

BEST FINAL SEASONS IN NFL HISTORY

● 2013 – Tony Gonzalez, TE, Falcons (age: 37): I’ve already hit you with his numbers. You’ll appreciate them even more when I tell you he had 80 receptions (or better) at ages 31, 32, 33, 35 and 36, too. No other tight end has been older than 30 when he caught that many balls.

● 2006 – Tiki Barber, RB, Giants (age: 31): Had 1,662 rushing yards, 2,127 yards from scrimmage and made the Pro Bowl with an 8-8 club that somehow stumbled into a playoff berth. Contemplated making a comeback several years later, after his TV career went south, but couldn’t find a taker.

● 1999 – Kevin Greene, LB, Panthers (37): Racked up the last 12 of his 160 sacks (No. 3 all time) for 8-8 Carolina.

● 1998 – John Elway*, QB, Broncos (38): Posted a passer rating of 93, earned a Pro Bowl berth, won the Super Bowl and was voted the game’s MVP (after throwing for 336 yards). Endings don’t get any sweeter than that.

● 1998 – Barry Sanders*, RB, Lions (30): Hard to believe the NFL lost two Hall ofFamers – who were still playing at a high level – to retirement in the same year. Sanders’ ’98 numbers (coming on the heels of his 2,053-yard rushing season): 343 carries, 1,491 yards, 4 touchdowns. Alas, Detroit went 5-11 in his Pro Bowl swan song.

● 1996 – Keith Jackson, TE, Packers (31): Caught a career-high 10 TD passes and played in the last of his five Pro Bowls as Green Bay won its first championship since the Lombardi years.

● 1983 – Ken Riley, CB, Bengals (36): Exited after a season in which had eight interceptions (second in the league), ran back two for scores (one a game-winner) and was elected to his first Pro Bowl. The Bengals weren’t nearly as good as he was, finishing 7-9.

● 1979 – Roger Staubach*, QB, Cowboys (37): Won his fourth NFL passing crown (rating: 92.3) and appeared in his sixth Pro Bowl for division champion Dallas.

● 1965 – Jim Brown*, RB, Browns (29): Before going off to make movies (e.g. “The Dirty Dozen”), Brown had a typically terrific season, leading the league in rushing (1,544), rushing touchdowns (17) and yards from scrimmage (1,872). His final game, though, with the title at stake, was less satisfying: a muddy 23-12 loss to the Packers.

● 1960 – Norm Van Brocklin*, QB, Eagles (34): The Dutchman was the NFL MVP, tossing 24 TD passes (and, on the side, averaging 43.1 yards a punt) in quarterbacking the franchise to its last championship. Retired to become coach of the expansion Vikings, making him the last player to call it quits and step directly into a head-coaching job.

● 1955 – Otto Graham*, QB, Browns (34): Led the league with a 94 passer rating and went to the Pro Bowl as Cleveland won its second straight title (and seventh in a decade, counting its time in the All-America Conference).

● 1955 – Pete Pihos*, E, Eagles (32): Was still a Pro Bowler – and catching more passes (62) for more yards (864) than anybody in the NFL – when he decided he’d had enough. Philly’s 4-7-1 record undoubtedly made it easier.

● 1950 – Spec Sanders, S, New York Yanks (32): Picked off a league-best 13 passes in his one NFL season (after coming over from the All-America Conference). Only one player in history has had more: the Rams’ Night Train Lane (14 in ’52).

● 1945 – Don Hutson*, WR, Packers (32): Capped an incredible career with 47 receptions, tops in the league, for 834 yards and 9 TDs. (And the season, mind you, was just 10 games. His stats would project to 75-1,334-14 over a 16-game schedule.) Green Bay had won the championship the year before, but finished third in the West in ’45 with a 6-4 mark.

● 1937 – Cliff Battles*, RB, Redskins (27): Took his second NFL rushing crown with 874 yards, helping the Redskins, in their first season in Washington, win their first title. A contract dispute with owner George Preston Marshall caused him to retire and turn to college coaching.

* Hall of Famer

Another familiar name that should be on this list is Reggie White. The legendary defensive end initially retired after the 1998 season, when he had 16 sacks for the Packers and was the league’s defensive player of the year. But he reconsidered two seasons later and gave it one last go with a 7-9 Panthers team, adding 5 ½ (needless) sacks to his resumé. All it did was delay his entry into the Hall of Fame.

Source: pro-football-reference.com

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A word about the Statue of Liberty play

Just so we’re on the same page, there’s only one way to run a true Statue of Liberty play: the way the Redskins ran it in a 21-7 win over the Bears in 1943. Sammy Baugh took the shotgun snap, drew his passing arm back, and wingback Wilbur Moore circled behind him, grabbed the ball and ran 20 yards around left end for a touchdown.

I mention this because, over the years, the term “Statue of Liberty play” seems to have lost its meaning. The play Boise State, for example, ran to beat Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl wasn’t a classic SOLP. It was a pump fake . . . followed by a behind-the-back handoff . . . with the quarterback’s non-throwing hand. Much different choreography. More like a fancy draw, really, because the runner was already in the backfield, not flanked to the right.

Hope I’ve made my point. If not, don’t worry, I’ll make it again. And hey, if you think I’m being a hardass about this, you should see Lady Liberty. She’s even more upset about it.

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The most dangerous player who ever buckled a chinstrap

There’ll never be another player like Hardy Brown, the linebacker-anesthesiologist for the 49ers in the ’50s. Compared to Hardy, Jack “They Call Me Assassin” Tatum sold Girl Scout cookies.

If you need further proof of the man’s menace, read this fabulous piece by Bob O’Donnell (taken from our 1990 book, The Pro Football Chronicle). To get you started, here’s a visual: Brown — aiming high, as always — about to reduce Browns quarterback Otto Graham to cracker crumbs.


“To me, Hardy Brown was the most unique player ever. Think of it this way: What Hardy Brown was all about in football wasn’t physical. Hardy was a psychic occurrence.”

— former Giants lineman Tex Coulter


Bob’s preface:

I saw my first Hardy Brown hit while watching films of the 1951 Browns-49ers game at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. A San Francisco defensive back intercepted a pass by Otto Graham and was weaving his way upfield when a sudden movement at the bottom of the screen caught my eye. It was like the flash a fisherman might see in a stream before his line grows taut. I reversed the film and watched again.

As a Browns receiver turned to pursue the play, he was struck so violently in the face that his helmet popped up on his head and his back hit the ground before his feet. Standing over him was Hardy Brown. You could almost hear him chuckling.

There isn’t much left of Hardy Brown. He’s been institutionalized in northern California with dementia, the result of years of hard drinking. He also has emphysema, and the arthritis in his right shoulder is so bad he can’t lift his arm to scratch his head.

Let’s start with The Shoulder. That’s where the legend begins. Hardy Brown played linebacker in the NFL at 6 feet, 190 pounds, and hit harder than any player before or since. His right shoulder was his weapon. He usually aimed it at an opponent’s head, and the results often were concussions and facial fractures – noses, cheeks, jaws . . . you name it, Brown broke it.

“It was early in the game,” former Eagles running back Toy Ledbetter recalls of his 1953 run-in with Brown, “and I was carrying on a sweep to the right. I knew about Brown because I’d been at Oklahoma State when he was at Tulsa. I usually kept my eye on him, but this time I cut inside a block and never saw him. He caught me with the shoulder and the next thing I knew I was on the ground looking for my head.”

The hit broke Ledbetter’s cheek. Dr. Tom Dow, Eagles team physician, said it was the worst facial fracture he’d seen. In Brown’s 10 pro seasons, spent in four different leagues, he laid low dozens in the same brutal fashion. Backs, ends, linemen, it didn’t matter. Brown was an indiscriminate maimer.

And what a mystery. No one could figure out how he hit with the force he did. In 1951, Bears coach George Halas had officials check Brown’s shoulder pads before a game. They found nothing. Nor could anyone figure Brown’s fury. He lived for the big hits. Relished them. They were his one marketable skill. Away from the game, he was reserved but friendly. On the field, he was a killer.

“I came out of the huddle at the beginning of the game and figured I’d say hello,” says ex-Giants lineman Tex Coulter, who grew up with Brown in a Fort Worth, Texas, orphanage. “I came up to the line and looked across at his linebacker spot, and his eyes looked like they belonged to some cave animal. They were fiery, unfocused. You don’t know if he could see anything or everything. I kept my mouth shut.”

Y.A. Tittle claims in his book, I Pass, that Brown knocked out 21 opponents as a 49er in ’51 – including, in the preseason, the Washington Redskins’ entire starting backfield. That might be an exaggeration; who kept an accurate count of such things? But Brown inspired exaggeration. Ex-players speak of him the way fight people speak of Sonny Liston.

“To me, Hardy Brown was the most unique player ever,” Coulter says. “Think of it this way: What Hardy Brown was all about in football wasn’t physical. Hardy was a psychic occurrence.”

Coulter knows Brown as well as anyone. They are about the same age and arrived at the Masonic Home orphanage at about the same time in 1929. Coulter is working on a book about their lives. To understand Hardy Brown, he says, you have to understand his past. That isn’t easy.

Hardy Brown’s father was murdered. Shot dead in a neighbor’s home in rural Kirkland, Texas, Nov. 7, 1928. Two men pumped four bullets into him. Hardy was in the room when it happened. He was four. Four months later, Brown was present again when a family friend murdered one of his father’s killers at point-blank range.

After the second incident, Brown’s mother sent her four youngest children to the Masonic Home in Fort Worth. Hardy was five. He claimed it was 12 years before he heard from his mother again, and then only to get her permission to enlist in the Marines.

The Masonic Home orphanage sits on over 200 acres of land southeast of downtown Fort Worth. It has its own dairy farm and school, with grades one through 12. In the ’30s, there was a matron for every 12 to 15 children. Discipline was rigid. Those who didn’t do their chores or got caught slipping off to Sycamore Creek after hours could expect to be cuffed.

Football was the great escape. It was rough, wild and (almost) without rules. Unless you were a sissy boy, you played. That was the last thing Hardy Brown was.

“Football gave us self-worth,” Coulter says. “We were orphans, but you couldn’t call us orphans. When the newspapers came out and wrote stories, they’d refer to us as ragtag kids, and that made us angry. That was pity from above, and we hated it. Football was a way to alleviate that.”

The Shoulder was born at the Masonic Home. It was the brainchild of Hardy’s older brother Jeff. Jeff reasoned correctly that human beings, like fence posts, were easier to knock down if you hit them high. So when an opponent approached, he’d crouch slightly and then spring into the player’s chin with his shoulder. In no time, everyone at the home was using “the humper,” as it came to be called.

“The city boys were frightened as hell of us,” Coulter says. “I don’t blame ’em, the way Hardy Brown was and I was, too, to some extent. The goddamn guys would be bleeding all over the place. You know, in high school ball, you just aren’t used to that. We speared, we leg-whipped, we used the humper, and I’m almost positive the man who invented the crackback block was our coach, Rusty Russell. We did all them things and didn’t think anything of it. We thought we were good, clean, rough boys.

Brown got out of the Masonic Home in 1941, enrolled at SMU and then went into the Marines, where he became the problem of the Japanese. He saw action in the Pacific as a paratrooper and, according to his sister Cathlyn, was on his way to Iwo Jima when a call came from West Point, of all places. It seems Army had pulled Coulter out of the enlisted ranks to play on its football team, and Coulter had put the coaches on to his Masonic Home teammate.

But Brown washed out of the Academy’s prep school after failing the math requirement (though a night of drunken revelry at a nearby girl’s school didn’t help). None too disappointed, he landed at Tulsa University in the fall of 1945. For the next three years, he terrorized the Missouri Valley Conference as a blocking back and linebacker.

New Orleans Saints president Jim Finks was Brown’s roommate at Tulsa and says he may have been at his destructive peak during those years.

“We’d put Brown at fullback if we wanted him to block one defensive end and put him at halfback if we wanted him to block the other,” Finks says. “There were many games when he literally knocked out both defensive ends. I think it was a game against Baylor that he put out the two ends on consecutive plays.

“He broke my nose and gave me four stitches at a goddamned practice!”

Brown got poor Toy Ledbetter in college, too. It came on a kickoff return, and Finks says it’s the hardest hit he’s ever seen. “Ledbetter lay there quivering,” he says. “Snot came out of his nose. He was bloody. He was down five minutes before they finally carried him off.”

Off the field, Brown occasionally got wild when he was drinking. He and his future wife, Betty, woke up Finks one night and shot up the dorm room with a .22 rifle. But for the most part, Finks says, Brown was “intelligent, warm and shy,” nothing like his on-field persona.

It took Brown a while to find permanent employment in pro ball. He broke in with the All-America Conference’s Brooklyn Dodgers in ’48 and went to the Chicago Rockets the next year. When the AAC folded, he wound up with the Washington Redskins, who waived him eight games into the ’50 season. Small, slow linebackers weren’t in demand.

But the word on Brown was getting around. He’d begun to leave a trail of bodies. Harry Buffington, head of the National scouting combine, was a guard for Brooklyn in ’48 and says one AAC team assigned a player to shadow Brown on the field and act as a “protector” for the other players. Tittle was with the Colts in ’50 and says running back Rip Collins told him before a game with Washington that he didn’t want to run pass routes in Brown’s area.

It was the Colts who signed Brown after the Redskins waived him, and in his first game with them he broke Giants running back Joe Scott’s nose with The Shoulder. The hit infuriated the Giants, and they tried to take their revenge.

Teams went after Brown as a matter of routine. He was a menace and could influence a game if he put a star player out. In a notorious incident in 1954, Lions defensive tackle Gil Mains jumped feet first into Brown on a kickoff return and opened a 20-stitch cut on his thigh. Brown was sewn up and returned to the game.

“I remember Hardy came up to me before a kickoff once and said, ‘How about an onsides kick?’” says CBS broadcaster Pat Summerall, a teammate of Brown’s in ’56. “It was a close game with the Giants, and I told him I couldn’t do that on my own without hearing from the coaches. He said he thought it would be a good idea. . . . Anyway, I kicked off as far as I could kick it, and here comes the whole Giant team after Hardy. They never even looked at the ball.”

The Colts went belly up after the 1950 season, and Brown found a home in San Francisco. He was the 49ers’ starting left linebacker for five seasons. It’s difficult even to estimate how many players he KO’d with The Shoulder. One a game? That’s probably too many. But you just don’t know, because newspapers didn’t devote much space to defensive play.

Game stories on a 49ers-Cardinals exhibition in ’51, for instance, state that as many as six Chicago players were put out of the game, three with broken noses. The San Francisco Chronicle added the line: “Against the Cards, Hardy Brown . . . played as vicious a line backing game as the 49ers ever had.” How many of those broken noses were Hardy’s doing is anyone’s guess.

Brown may have been most dangerous on special teams, where it was easier to freelance and there was a field full of targets. Lions linebacker Carl Brettschneider said one of Brown’s favorite tactics on punts was to line up behind an official so the opposing center couldn’t see him, then catch him with The Shoulder as soon as he raised his head after the snap.

“He broke more jaws than any guy going,” Brettschneider said.

Brown loved to talk about those bone-rattling blows. He apparently didn’t lose any sleep over the injuries he caused, either. He also missed a lot of tackles because he aimed for the head.

“I don’t think he ever went out to hurt anyone,” Coulter says. “I think Hardy was shaped a certain way. One thing about a hard hitter is that you don’t realize what it feels like to be hit. When you’re doing the hitting, when you stick someone with that shoulder, it’s a beautiful feeling. By God, it gives you a sense of power that reaches right to the back of your head. I think Hardy enjoyed that feeling.”

Age and size caught up to Brown in ’56. The 49ers waived him in training camp. He played briefly with Hamilton in the CFL and then signed with the Cardinals. At the end of the ’56 season, the Cards released him.

In 1960, Toy Ledbetter had stopped by the locker room of the newly formed Denver Broncos to visit two former Eagles teammates when he heard a high-pitched cackle behind him. Ledbetter turned to see, of all people, his old nemesis Hardy Brown sitting in front of a locker.

“How’s the cheekbone, Toy Boy?” Brown said.

Ledbetter laughed and shook hands with Brown. “No hard feelings,” Ledbetter told him.

“You asshole.”

After being released by the Broncos, Brown fell on hard times. He and his wife, Betty, broke up for a while. He held a number of construction jobs in the Southwest. And he continued to drink heavily. In 1986 he had to be institutionalized.

Family members say Brown never lost his desire to play football. At some point after he retired, he became involved with a semipro team.

The story is some young punk was giving him lip one day, and Brown decked him. Put him in the hospital.

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Joe Theismann beating Jim Taylor in “The Superstars” tennis finals, 1979

Tennis doesn’t get any better than this, folks. I’m talking about tennis, of course, between a 29-year-old active NFL quarterback and a 43-year-old retired NFL fullback. Kudos to Packers Hall of Famer Jim Taylor for upsetting high-jumper Dwight Stones in the semis and reaching the finals of the 1979 “Superstars” against the Redskins’ Joe Theismann, who junked his way to . . . well, you’ll find out.

Speaking of junk, sports programming didn’t get much trashier in those days than “The Superstars,” an ABC production in which (mostly) athletes from a wide variety of sports competed in 10 events for money and vanity. (I say “(mostly) athletes” because actor Robert Duvall placed sixth in 1976 — and first in bowling. Who knew Tom Hagen was the Dick Weber of the Corleone household?)

Frank Gifford provides the tennis play-by-play in this clip and, being Frank, tries to breathe life into a match that, as anyone can see, was dead on arrival. What a pro. FYI: Theismann finished third in the standings that year and fourth the next before “retiring” from the “Superstars” grind to devote his full attention to winning the Super Bowl (though he did take part, victoriously, in a “Superteams” competition in 1983 with some other Redskins).

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Those Allen boys!

A reader sent me this several years ago. He thought it was hilarious — and so do I. It’s a 1972 column written by Bill Brill, sports editor of The Roanoke Times, about the challenges faced by an old-school football coach at Langley High in affluent McLean, Va. The funniest stuff is about two of Redskins coach George Allen’s sons, Bruce (the team’s current president and general manager) and Greg, both of whom played for Langley.

They don’t write columns like this anymore. It’s amazing they wrote them even then. The headline says it all:

Rich Kids’ Coach

Langley’s ‘Bear Bryant’ vs. the Spoiled Brats


 “Mrs. Allen called recently and wanted to know when practice started. I told her Aug. 14. Then she wanted to know when Bruce should be there. I told her Aug. 14.”

— Langley coach Red Stickney


Times change rapidly in football, whether college or high school.

Ravis (Red) Stickney is a throwback to the old days, although he played fullback and linebacker for Bear Bryant at Alabama in 1960.

Red Stickney just looks like a football coach. The broad shoulders, the wide head, the short hair.

He even looks like a Bear Bryant type. The old Bear Bryant type. When Red played for the Bear, football was the reason for being in college. Classes were just something that got in the way of most athletes.

Stickney coaches high school football at Langley in Fairfax County. For an old country boy with Bear Bryant tendencies, it has been a revelation.

Langley is a rich man’s school. “Even our blacks are rich,” says Stickney. “The new cars in the school parking lot belong to the kids. The old cars belong to the coaches.”

One of Stickney’s players is Jim Rehnquist. His father is the Supreme Court jurist. There also is a senator’s son and a couple of kids named Allen. Their father coaches the Redskins.

The Allen boys are an enigma. “They are good kids,” says Red, “but they sure are spoiled.”

Whatever the Allen boys want, the Allen boys get. “Greg used to show up for practice in that new Grand Prix his father gave him.”

The Allens do not always make it to practice, or to school, for that matter.

“Mrs. Allen called recently and wanted to know when practice started. I told her Aug. 14. Then she wanted to know when Bruce should be there. I told her Aug. 14.

“So she says that’s the only time the family can take a vacation, and they wanted Bruce to go with them for a couple of weeks. I told her, ‘Mrs. Allen, Bruce plays quarterback. That’s a pretty important position. He’ll have to be there Aug. 14.’

“I even offered to let Bruce live with me those two weeks.”

Bruce, the youngest of the Allen boys, is the best athlete, says Stickney. The oldest Allen, George Jr., will be a sophomore quarterback for Virginia this fall.

The other son, Greg, was Stickney’s kicker last year and a sometimes flanker. “He’s a good kicker,” says Red. “All of the Allens can kick. They go over to Redskin Park and work out with the kickers all the time.

“Greg kicked five field goals for me and didn’t miss an extra point. But he doesn’t like contact.

“We played one game last year and this 140-pound halfback ran back a kickoff against us for a touchdown. Greg just ran alongside of him. He didn’t try to make the tackle.

“He came out of the game and I wanted to kill him. I was so mad I was throwing things. He just looked at me and said, ‘Coach, I told you I didn’t like contact.'”

Stickney coached previously at Potomac High in Oxon Hill, Md. He came to Langley two years ago and inherited a situation where the school had gone 4-46 the previous five years.

“If I coached at Langley the way I did at Potomac, I would have been fired in a week. I used to work their tails off at Potomac, but you can’t do that with these kids.

“You have to have a reason for everything you do. They’re good kids and they play hard, but their favorite word is ‘Why?’ I told the squad one day we’d work some more after practice. They asked why. I said, ‘Because you haven’t got it right,’ but they wanted to know why work after practice.” . . .

For an Alabama player of the hard-nose days, it has been a real experience for Red Stickney. “I didn’t understand them when I got there, and maybe I don’t understand them now or we wouldn’t have been 5-5 last year.

“But I’m learning. It’s tough, though, when you have to go to the Supreme Court when you make a rule.”

From The Roanoke Times, July 20, 1972

Postscript: You get the feeling Stickney wasn’t long for Langley. Sure enough, he left after that season to take the job at Woodbridge (Va.) High. Two years later, he guided the team to a 12-0 record before dropping the Group AAA final to Bethel on a last-minute touchdown. (His big star was running back Russell Davis, a Parade All-American who went on to play for Michigan and the Steelers.)

When Red died in 2004 at 68, David Fawcett of VirginiaPreps.com wrote that the ’74 club “put [Prince William County] on the map for high school football.” It was “the first county team to play for a state championship” and “arguably the most talented prep team ever fielded in county history,” one that included “eight Division I players.”

As for Bruce Allen, the Redskins’ first day of training camp this year in Richmond was July 24. Their president/GM was reportedly in attendance.

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Ode to training camp

In the summer of 2000, his first full year as the Redskins’ owner, Dan Snyder broke with tradition and relocated training camp from Frostburg, Md., to the team’s facility in Ashburn, Va. My angst drove me to whip up this nostalgic piece on preseasons past:


For coaches [in the NFL’s early years], training camp was get-tough time. In 1939, Hall of Famer Ernie Nevers came back to coach the Cardinals and decided to send the players a message by burning their gym shorts and sweat suits — usually worn for about half the preseason practices.

“Shorts,” he said disgustedly. “I’ve never seen anybody play in them. This is football, not tennis. We’ll wear pads today, tomorrow and every day throughout the season.”


In the good old days of the ’40s and ’50s, the train would leave Union Station in mid-July, just as Washington was beginning to wilt. The “Redskins Special” it was called. On board were owner George Preston Marshall and his retinue — team officials, support staff, coaches, players — not to mention wife Corinne Griffith, the former silent screen star, and her miniature French poodle, Demitasse.

The Redskins were headed west to training camp — Los Angeles usually. And to make sure the team’s adventures got proper newspaper coverage, Marshall invited all the scribes along, free of charge.

En route to the coast, a trip that took four days and three nights, the train stopped and picked up more players in Chicago, Kansas City, Amarillo (Texas), and Albuquerque (N.M.). Everybody ate, slept and carried on in private cars assigned to the club.

At night, Marshall, who loved trains as much as he hated planes — and knew all kinds of arcane facts about them — would hold court in his pajamas. “He’d ask, for example, if anyone knew what the standard gauge was for most railroads in the country,” Lee Hutson wrote in More Than a Game,

knowing full well that no one did know, and knowing but dismissing the fact that no one cared. He’d then say that it is 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches, adding, as a tease, that it was that width because that was the distance between the wheels of a Roman chariot. Now who could resist asking what the Roman chariot has to do with the American railroad?

The question would of course be asked, and Marshall would look around the room with his expression of I’m-glad-you-asked-that-question, and he’d continue. When the Romans occupied the British Isles a couple of thousand years ago, they brought along their chariots, and the chariot wheels were indeed set 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches apart. After a time, the wheels wore ruts in the roads, and any Briton who wanted a ride with a minimum number of neck-breaking jolts per mile was wise to build his wagon or cart with wheels that coincided with the ruts. When, centuries later, the British built the first railroads, they laid the rails along the paths of existing roads, and the ruts were a convenient place to lay the track. And since the earliest American steam locomotives were manufactured in England, the wheels were set apart the same distance as those on the ancient Roman chariots.

For 21 years, beginning in 1941, the Redskins trained in California. It was Marshall’s kind of place. The weather was idyllic — and he and Corinne could hobnob with Hollywood types while coach Ray Flaherty and his successors were flogging the team into shape.

In 1946, the Rams relocated from Cleveland to L.A., and every summer the two clubs would play a charity game at the Coliseum. It quickly became a very big deal; in ’50 and ’51 they drew more than 90,000.

After five weeks in California, the Redskins would pile back on the train and travel around the country, completing their exhibition schedule. One year, 1952 to be exact, the team left Washington for the West Coast on July 5 and didn’t return for their home opener until October. (The first two regular-season games were on the road.)

That’s a lot of togetherness. You really had to like your teammates to play pro football back then.

*  *  *

Fast forward to the present. It’s Monday afternoon at Redskins Park, and Steve Baldacci, the team president, is giving reporters a tour of what he and Dan Snyder hope will be the training camp of the future. The Redskins have broken their contract with Frostburg State and decided to hold camp at their practice facility in Ashburn, Va.

Instead of staying in a college dorm, the players will be lodged in a nearby hotel. Instead of being put through their paces in the cooler climes of Western Maryland, they’ll be sweating it out in Northern Virginia.

Why are Snyder and Baldacci bucking tradition? To market the team better and make it more accessible to the fans, they say. To which others reply, “And to fatten their wallets.” It costs fans $10 to park and, in an unprecedented move, $10 to watch practice (children 12 and under will get in free) — and that’s before they set foot in the refreshment and merchandise tents. If the club can fill the bleachers every day — there’s seating for about 6,500 — camp could be very profitable indeed.

But don’t forget, Baldacci says, included in the price of admission is the NFL Experience, an interactive theme park in which fans can attempt a field goal, run a down-and-out and get timed in the 40-yard dash. “Generally,” he says, “it costs $15 when it goes on tour. Here it’s free once you pay $10 [to get in].

Snyder spokesman Carl Swanson gently corrects him. “You meant to say it costs $15 at the Super Bowl and $10 when it travels.”

Baldacci has a habit of playing fast and loose with the facts. He continues to insist, for example, that the Redskins are not the first team to charge for training camp workouts, despite evidence to the contrary.

A little later in the tour, he comes out with this gem: “Most people had to drive 3, 3 1/2 hours to Frostburg. They paid $40 or $50 for gas and they probably stayed overnight.”

For the record, it takes about 2 1/2 hours to drive to Frostburg from Montgomery County. (From personal experience, you can get up and back on a tank of gas — about $20.) Most people didn’t stay overnight. It was a day trip for them.

There’s no question this Redskins camp will attract more fans than ever before. (The crowds at Frostburg and Carlisle, Pa., were small except for scrimmages.) But at what price? Will Darrell Green develop carpal tunnel syndrome from signing so many autographs? Will some players find it too easy to get into off-field trouble? Will the practices in the afternoon heat wear the team down?

There’s some precedent for that. In 1938, the year after they won their first title, the Redskins also held their training camp in Northern Virginia. It was an absolute disaster.

“It was so hot,” Hall of Famer Wayne Millner once recalled, “I used to buy a cake of ice at night, put it in a bowl and set up an electric fan behind it to blow cool air toward my bed. There was no air conditioning, and we just didn’t get much sleep. A major factor in a good training camp is rest so that players will be at a physical peak for the contact work. We always seemed to be dragging.

“That’s when Mr. Marshall decided he’d go to a cooler climate and picked a small teachers’ college in Cheney, Wash., for our training site in 1939.”

*  *  *

It’s hard to pin down exactly when this tradition began, this tradition of going away to training camp. A recent book on the early days of the NFL, When Football Was Football, credits the Chicago Cardinals with holding the first out-of-town camp — in Coldwater, Mich., in 1929.

But that can’t be right. The New York Giants trained at Lake Ariel in the Poconos in ’26, and the Rock Island (Ill.) Independents might have blazed the trail even earlier. According to their coach, the legendary Jimmy Conzelman, “before the 1922 season we went out of town to a place resembling today’s training camp.”

Whatever the correct answer, it wasn’t until the ’30s that out-of-town camps became commonplace. Their benefits were obvious: a minimum of distractions, an opportunity for the players to bond, more accommodating weather. Many teams trained in Wisconsin in those years. At one point, half the clubs in the league were up there — the Bears in Delafield, the Cardinals in Waukesha, the Giants in Superior, the Steelers in Two Rivers and the Packers at home in Green Bay.

Superior was pretty far from civilization — “a two-day train trip,” ex-Giant Jack Doolan says. “If you were cut up there, you were really cut.”

During the 1938 preseason, the Packers and Steelers (then the Pirates) got together and played a doubleheader, the only one in NFL history. Coaches Curly Lambeau and Johnny Blood wanted to get a good look at their squads before making final cuts, so they subjected their teams to two 40-minute games one Friday night in Green Bay. The opener ended in a 7-7 tie; the Pack took the nightcap 17-0.

Yup, the training camps in that era could be pretty rugged. You see, the players didn’t have the minicamps and summer schools and offseason conditioning programs they do today. Camp was where they reacquainted their bodies with fitness.

“We didn’t have any [organized] preseason training,” an NFL player from the ’20s once told me. “You got yourself in shape. I lived right below Easton [Pa.]. I would run in the evening, maybe jog three or four miles along the Delaware [River], then I would swim back.”

For coaches, training camp was get-tough time. In 1939, Hall of Famer Ernie Nevers came back to coach the Cardinals and decided to send the players a message by burning their gym shorts and sweat suits — usually worn for about half the preseason practices.

“Shorts,” he said disgustedly. “I’ve never seen anybody play in them. This is football, not tennis. We’ll wear pads today, tomorrow and every day throughout the season.”

It didn’t help much. The Cards finished dead last with a 1-10 record.

Nobody was more of a slave driver than Jock Sutherland. His 1946 training camp with the Steelers is infamous for its brutality.

“Let’s get rid of the loafers first,” he instructed his staff. “Work them hard. The ones we don’t want will quit early, and we won’t have to waste time with them.” Often, the team scrimmaged twice a day. It was the only way, Sutherland was convinced, “to find out who’s and what’s what.”

Bob Drum of the Pittsburgh Press, a former college player, worked out with the team one day. “There will be only two kinds of men on the Pittsburgh Steeler roster this fall,” he wrote, “those who are in shape and those who are dead.”

(Sutherland’s hard-boiled approach worked better than Nevers’, though. The Steelers stayed in contention in the Eastern Division until the next-to-last week.)

Another effective conditioning device in the early days was the “fat man’s table.” If a player was carrying too much weight in camp, he was banished to the low-calorie corner of the dining hall, there to dine on greens instead of red meat. The Lions started such a table in 1949, much to the amusement of the Chicago Tribune.

“Four of the Lions are currently eating their excess poundage off there,” the paper reported. “They are tackles Russ Thomas (268), George Hekkers (258) and William Sims (265) and guard Les Bingaman, the ex-Illini (262).

“Mrs. Karen R. Lurting, a former Army nurse, is in charge of the groceries for the special table, and when any of the fat men complain of imminent starvation, she has a ready answer.

‘“The table is served about 4,000 calories a day per man,’ she says, ‘and that’s what we served combat troops during the war.’”

(George Somers, a 300-pounder with the Eagles, had a great line about fat man’s tables. “It’s not that I mind taking off the weight,” he said. “But I don’t like this business of eating only three times a day.”)

Bingaman was one of the biggest men ever to play pro football. He weighed 349 1/2 pounds by the end of his career in 1954. His last Lions coach, Buddy Parker, did him no favors by allowing players to monitor their own weight.

“In training camp, the coaches always had an honor system,” former Lion Vince Banonis says. “You weighed yourself in every morning and you weighed out after practice — twice a day. Les had himself down for 289 or whatever. But one day the honor system was no longer and George Wilson, the assistant coach, was at the scales. Les stepped aboard and the thing hit 300, which was as far as it would go. So they took him downtown to the granary and weighed him there . . . and he was 349. That was the end of the honor system.”

When the Cardinals trained in Waukesha in the ’40s, they didn’t need a fat man’s table. The field they practiced on at Carroll College was “like an oven,” ex-tackle Chet Bulger says. “The college was built out of limestone, you see, and they put the field down there where the limestone had been taken out. We got cooked on that stone. . . . There was one lone tree beside the practice field, and everyone used it for support and to throw up on during practice.”

*  *  *

Training camp back then wasn’t all drudgery, though. At Cranbrook School in suburban Detroit, where the Lions once trained, Bill Fisk used to fish for trout with teammate Bob Winslow. “It was a beautiful setup,” he says. “Nice park, nice practice field, out in the country. I’m a fisherman, so after practice or early in the morning before practice, Bob and I would go out there and fish a little bit in the pond. The fishing was great. We’d catch trout and give ’em away.”

Another fish story, this one from ex-Eagle Jack Ferrante: “Steve Van Buren had a little boat at our training camp at Saranac Lake [N.Y.], and some of us used to go fishing. One time the boat got out of control, and Alex Wojciechowicz went flying; he wound up with a big gash on his face. So we kept him away from [coach] Greasy [Neale], and on the first play from scrimmage the next day Wojie pretends like he got hit, you know? And coach never knew what happened.”

The Eagles were the first team to own their own preseason training facility. Owner Lex Thompson bought a lodge in the Adirondacks in 1946, not far from Lake Placid, and turned it into a place — dubbed the “Eagles’ Nest” — for the club to train.

Everybody slept in bunk beds in the same room — except for Van Buren and Wojie, the two stars, who had their own quarters. The team worked out at a high school about a quarter of a mile away.

Speaking of those bunk beds, the Eagles had a player in the late ’40s named Art Mergenthal, a guard out of Notre Dame, and one night at about 1 o’clock he had a nightmare. . . .

“He’d had a bad war experience,” former Eagle Al Wistert says. “And he started bouncing in his upper bunk, bouncing between the bunk and the ceiling, and screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘They’ve got me surrounded. They’ve got me surrounded. They’re gonna kill me.’

“All this comes out of the black of night. And Art Macioszczyk [pronounced Ma-CHOSS-chuck], who was sleeping below him, jumped out of bed and started running between the bunks down to the end of the dormitory. Only he forgot the hallway wasn’t straight; there was a little right turn you had to make, and he ran smack into the wall and almost put a hole in it. He fell backward, jumped up and kept on running.”

The Saranac Lake area was dotted with tuberculosis sanitariums — thousands of people went there for the cure — and ex-Eagle Vic Sears remembers that “a bunch of girls from the TB sanitariums were always lined up on the field, watching us practice. . . . I just loved it. You could go to a movie downtown or go out and swim in the lake or something. It was a wonderful atmosphere. I’m going to take a ride up there sometime just to see the old place.”

It’s doubtful any of the current Redskins will feel nostalgic in their old age about training at Redskins Park. There’s no lake, so there won’t be any fish stories. And there’s no college campus, so there won’t be any dorm stories. There certainly won’t be any scenes like the one the Chicago Daily News described in 1942:

Delafield, Wis., Aug. 14 – No baby, not even a scion of royalty, ever had two more formidable guardians than has Jane Manske Jr., infant daughter of ‘Eggs’ Manske, former end for Northwestern and the Bears and now Lt. [JG] Edgar Manske, United States Navy.

Jane Jr. and her mother, the former Jane Fauntz, swimming and diving star, are summering here on the shores of Lake Nagawicka, where Mrs. Manske is swimming instructor and counselor at a girls’ camp. And if Mrs. Manske wants to leave her daughter for awhile at noon or in the early evening, when the Bears are away from their football drills, she doesn’t have to worry about the nursemaid problem. She merely turns Jane Jr. over to Joe Stydahar and Clyde “Bulldog” Turner.

It is a sight indeed to see first Joe and then Bulldog pushing the baby carriage around the St. John’s Military campus. And when they pause to chat with the other players, Jane Jr. coos happily at Danny Fortmann or Lee Artoe or George Wilson or some other 200-pound ex-teammate of her daddy.

The Redskins are convinced this training camp is the future, an idea whose time has come, and that may well be. Me, I’m kinda partial to the past.


 

PRIESTS, POOCHES AND ATOMIC BOMBS

Memories of training camp from the NFL’s early days:

● Training camp confinement can make anyone go a little goofy. When the Giants trained at Blue Hills Country Club in Pearl River, N.Y., in the ’30s, John Vesser says, “Johnny Dell Isola would get up in the morning and run all through the place stark naked. Johnny was like that, you see. That was his way of opening every day.”

● Rick Casares, an all-pro fullback for the Bears in the ’50s, had a training camp ritual of his own. Every morning he would walk his Yorkshire Terrier past owner-coach George Halas’ dorm room so the pooch could do his business in front of Papa Bear’s door. “I think he trained the dog,” Hall of Famer Stan Jones says, “. . . because there often was a little pile there.”

● Pat Summerall on his first training camp with the Cardinals in 1953: “We were working out at the University of Chicago before the season started. I noticed that the deserted stands looked strange, because they were covered in tar paper, and I realized: That’s where they had begun the research for the development of the atomic bomb. And I thought: This can’t be a very good start.”

● Chris Burford on the Dallas Texans’ training camp in Roswell, N.M., in 1962: “It was about 110 [degrees] in the daytime and 85 at night, with no such thing as air conditioning. The mosquitoes were so big that six or seven would come down and take off with one of our guys. It was too hot to sleep with a sheet, but you had to have one just to keep the mosquitoes off.”

● Ray Mathews on the Lions’ 1941 training camp: “That was the year [future Supreme Court Justice] Whizzer White was studying for the bar. And every night, boy, you’d hear that typewriter going. He always wore a green visor. He wore glasses, of course, but he also wore that green visor. Midnight, 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock in the morning, pounding away on the typewriter. But, boy, when he crossed that white line out there, he was a Jekyll and Hyde. He was mean — and tough. The toughest individual I can think of.”

● Don Kindt on attending nine Bears training camps at St. Joseph’s (Ind.) College in the ’40s and ’50s: “I spent so much time there I thought I was going to be ordained.”

From The Washington Times, July 21, 2000

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R. C. Owens’ one-of-a-kind field-goal block

A couple of years ago, when R. C. Owens died, newspapers mentioned the unusual way he’d once blocked a field goal try for the Colts. From his New York Times obituary:

In 1962, the 6-foot-3 Owens wowed fans by standing under the goal post at the goal line (goal posts have since been moved to the back of the end zone) and leaping to block a long, line-drive field-goal attempt by the Washington Redskins. The tactic was legislated out of existence.

Unfortunately, none of Owens’ obits featured a photo of his amazing play, perhaps because papers couldn’t find one. I ran into the same problem 25 years ago when I was digging up art for my first book, The Pro Football Chronicle. Nobody had kept the negative — or something.

Too bad. As you can see, R. C. really got up there. He was already on his way down (along with the ball) when this was snapped. Don’t ask me where it came from.

(For more, see: “R. C. Owens’ one-of-a-kind block, revisited.”)

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