jrn 362 - lecture seventeen
TRANSCRIPT
JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Seventeen
JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Review
• America as nation and America as
culture changed dramatically in years
between 1958 and 1970.
• But football endured, thrived and
stood poised to rule the nation via
games viewed on the device “that we
all have been waiting for,” otherwise
known as television.
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Review
• The launch of the AFL in 1960
expanded the footprint of pro football
from the north in Boston to the
mountain state of Colorado and
forced the NFL to add teams in the
upper midwest reaches of the football
crescent and in the southwest.
• Television could not get enough
football.
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• The 1960s represent the final
transition of college and pro football
from its old-timey past to modernity.
• Walter Camp himself could not
imagine that a game he developed to
encourage manliness would
ultimately glue Americans to their
couches to watch for hours.
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• Scholar Joseph Campbell has argued
in his studies of mythology that
transition periods are marked by
chaos as the old and the new mix.
• In pro football, at least, the collision of
the old and the new led to a new
visual presentation of football’s
ecstasy and violence as myth.
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• A number of men transformed the pro
game during this period but five stand
out as key figures in this moment.
They are:
- Johnny Unitas
- Sam Huff
- Jim Brown
- Ed and Steve Sabol
- Vince Lombardi
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• At the college level, the key
personalities were not as widely
visible but nevertheless played
pivotal roles in transforming the
three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust
approach to one that exploited the
new technology of artificial turf.
• More on that group later.
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• As noted earlier, the 1958 NFL
Championship game elevated the
quarterback of the Baltimore Colts,
Johnny Unitas, to the status of icon.
• Johnny U., from the football crescent
in western Pennsylvania, personified
the grit and determination of old-
school football.
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• Unitas was drafted in the ninth round
by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1955 but
was cut.
• He played for a semi-pro team before
Weeb Ewbank of the Colts signed
him in 1956.
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• Unitas went on to lead the Colts to
championships in 1958 and 1959 and
in Super Bowl V.
• Until the late 1960s, Unitas served as
the face of the NFL and of the
conservative old guard that resisted
cultural changes sweeping the nation.
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• Unitas became the first star
quarterback of the television age,
primarily because of his flair for the
dramatic as exhibited in 1958.
• Nevertheless, Johnny U. represented
the pre-1960s NFL in terms of his
generational approach and personal
presentation: high-top cleats and
crew-cut style.
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• During his 18-year career, Unitas
threw for 40,239 yards and 290
touchdowns .
• For 52 years, he held the record of at
least one touchdown pass in 47
consecutive games until Drew Brees
of the New Orleans Saints broke it in
2012.
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• The camera focused on Unitas and
other quarterbacks because the
position was central to the game and
the action.
• But coverage also required a villain to
provide a storyline and dramatic
motivation on each play.
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• Broadly, the defense could provide
that role.
• With a two-platoon system in place,
stars could be developed and
cultivated on that side of the ball.
• And the media noticed.
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• Broadly, the defense could provide
that role.
• With a two-platoon system in place,
stars could be developed and
cultivated on that side of the ball.
• Among the first was Chuck Bednarik
of the Philadelphia Eagles.
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• On Nov. 20, 1960, Bednarik’s
awkward hit on Frank Gifford of the
New York Giants became a defining
moment for defense – and startled
fans who thought Gifford might be
fatally injured.
• Gifford suffered a concussion and
returned to play two years after the
hit as a diminished presence.
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• The middle linebacker evolved into
the villain on the defense, standing in
opposition to the quarterback within
the frame of the television and still
cameras.
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• The first linebacker to become a
national celebrity was Sam Huff of
the New York Giants, featured on a
1958 Time magazine cover piece.
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• Like Unitas, Huff emerged from the
football crescent as it dipped into
West Virginia near the border with
western Pennsylvania, coal-mining
country.
• The 6-foot-1, 230-pound linebacker
starred at West Virginia before the
Giants drafted him in 1956.
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• The October 31, 1960, CBS
broadcast of a documentary titled
The Violent World of Sam Huff
featured sounds recorded on the field
to bring the viewer close to the game
as played by Huff.
• For the first time, a defensive player
would take center stage and
illuminate play on that side of the line
of scrimmage.
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• By the mid 1960s, Huff would be
joined in the spotlight by Dick Butkus
of the Chicago Bears.
• Butkus had played at the University
of Illinois, the same school that
produced the first star of the game in
Red Grange 40 years earlier.
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• And in large measure because of the
newfound popularity of defensive
players, a linebacker from Texas –
Tommy Nobis – commanded an
expensive contract in the bidding war
between the NFL and the AFL before
the merger.
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• Huff, Butkus and other middle
linebackers such as Ray Nitschke of
the Packers would command
endorsements just as players on
offense did.
• And soon enough, other positions on
defense would share in the bounty
with colorful nicknames promoted by
teams and the media.
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• The Los Angeles Rams of the 1960s
featured the Fearsome Foursome:
Lamar Lundy, Merlin Olsen, Rosy
Grier and Deacon Jones.
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• The Minnesota Vikings promoted the
Purple People Eaters: Alan Page,
Carl Eller, Jim Marshall and Gary
Larson.
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• Those groupings, in turn, set the
stage for Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain in
the 1970s: Joe Greene, L.C.
Greenwood, Ernie Holmes and
Dwight White.
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• The Violent World of Sam Huff
provided context for television story
lines featuring linebackers against
quarterbacks.
• That meant a game between the
Cleveland Browns and New York
Giants would be transformed into a
battle between Huff and Jim Brown,
the greatest back of all-time.
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• Brown emerged as the first great
African-American star of the NFL.
• Brown was outspoken in support of
civil rights and often defended the
rights of players against owners.
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• Brown was a top Syracuse running
back drafted by Paul Brown in 1957
to star in the Cleveland backfield.
• Brown rushed for 12,312 yards until
retiring after the 1965 season. He
was named NFL MVP in his first year
and again in 1958, 1963 and 1965.
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• Like Grange, Brown also became a
film star.
• He retired in summer 1966 to pursue
his film career full-time instead of
returning to the Browns after a
dispute with owner Art Modell.
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• While Unitas, Huff and Brown were
redefining the role of star for the
television age, the NFL and its
commercial television sponsors
sought to educate viewers as to the
intricacies of the game.
• This is exactly the strategy adopted
by Camp in the 19th century.
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• The Scott Seed Company, for
example, produced a booklet to be
distributed through hardware stores
throughout the U.S.
• Its title: How to Watch Football on TV.
• Guides of all kinds were distributed in
stores frequented by suburban
families.
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• At the same time the ground was
prepared for the vast audiences to
come, a father-and-son filmmaker
team from Philadelphia developed a
company that would frame the game
in cinematic terms that gave the NFL
mythological status, complete with
classical music.
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• Ed Sabol secured the rights to film
NFL games in 1962.
• His first game: the 1962 NFL
Championship.
• In 1965, the NFL purchased Sabol’s
company and renamed it NFL Films.
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• Sabol and his son Steve, an art major
at Colorado College, understood the
game as narrative.
• Instead of textual, football was visual,
more like the movies than a novel,
Steve Sabol would later say.
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• NFL Films produced highlight reels
and programs that combined slow-
motion visual artistry with
sophisticated symphonic scores to
create a heroic version of the game
that audiences found irresistible.
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• Ed Sabol’s inspiration: a 1946 film
titled A Duel in the Sun.
• The film used close ups of horses on
the move, kicking up dust and thus
revealing the physicality of
movement.
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• Steve Sabol, an art major, said his
inspiration stemmed from the work of
Picasso.
• Sabol said Picasso would look at a
single image from multiple
perspectives, and he wanted to do
the same with football.
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• In fact, Steve Sabol said in a
published study that NFL Films
sought “to show the game the way
Hollywood portrays fiction.”
• In 1967, the full style and substance
of NFL Films emerged in a work titled
“They Call It Pro Football.”
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• They Call It Pro Football was edited
by Japanese filmmaker Yoshio Kishi.
• Kishi interpreted the footage of NFL
games in a way that changed the
highlight reel.
• He favored montages featuring what
he called the “apex of action” instead
of full plays. It worked.
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• Kishi saw two elements in play:
- Sex
- Violence
• NFL Films documented both in
copious amounts.
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• NFL Films turned the games into
cinematic spectacles.
• The booming voice of narrator John
Facenda served as the perfect oral
instrument to accompany the
soundtrack and the poetic language
as the action unfolded in slow-motion
on the screen.
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• And Steve Sabol’s texts as read by
Facenda supplemented the visuals
with writing straight out of Homer.
• Take this passage, for example,
about the Oakland Raiders:
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“The Autumn Wind is a pirate
Blustering in from sea
With a rollicking song he sweeps along
swaggering boisterously
His face is weather beaten
He wears a hooded sash …
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“With his silver hat about his head
And a bristly black moustache
He growls as he storms the country
A villain big and bold
And the trees all shake and quiver and
quake …
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“As he robs them of their gold
The Autumn wind is a Raider
Pillaging just for fun
He’ll knock you ’round and upside down
And laugh when he’s conquered and
won.”
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• Sabol also contributed the following
expressions to NFL mythology:
- “The frozen tundra” to describe
Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
- “It starts with a whistle and
ends with a gun.”
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• And NFL Films coined the expression
for the Dallas Cowboys that has
persisted for decades.
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• Ed Sabol borrowed the idea of using
microphones on players from CBS,
which first used it for the pioneering
Sam Huff documentary, and Roone
Arledge, who mic’d AFL players for
ABC.
• CBS used it in practices.
• NFL Films used it in game highlights.
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• The use of voices of coaches and
players on the field during games
brought the action closer to the fans.
• For the first time, fans could hear the
grunts of the players and listen in as
coaches barked plays and berated
officials.
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• Each week, NFL Films would send
highlight programs called This Week
in Pro Football and Game of the
Week to local television stations for
airings either on Saturdays or
Sundays, before kickoff.
• The programs served to give fans
insight into the game and its players.
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• And that distribution helped
enormously when the best team of
the period played in the smallest
market – Green Bay – with a coach
who represented a time that was
quickly giving way to new social and
cultural approaches to life.
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• Vince Lombardi represented the
personification of the Walter Camp
vision of the game: discipline,
intelligence, diligence and fidelity to
authority, in the form of the coach.
• Lombardi, in fact, embodied the
attributes of the great coaches who
shaped the game prior to the 1960s.
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• From Walter Camp, Lombardi took
the necessity of teamwork.
• From Rockne, Lombardi took the
importance of rhetorical devises to
inspire his team.
• From Brown, Lombardi took the
tactical approach for precision.
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• Lombardi thus stands as a
personality who represents the
apotheosis of the best characteristics
of coaching in the pre-modern (i.e.,
television) age of football.
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• And Lombardi added something to
the mix that was present in the locker
room but not on the field: religion.
• Lombardi summoned a passage from
the Bible to use as a metaphor to
teach his approach to offensive
football.
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• “Do you not know that those who run
in a race all run, but only one
receives the prize? Run in such a
way that you may win.” First Letter of
Paul to the Corinthians.
• And, Lombardi added, run to daylight.
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• Lombardi was born in Brooklyn in
1913, the son of immigrants from
Salerno, Italy.
• After high school, he trained to
become a priest but left after four
years.
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• Lombardi attended Fordham, where
he was one of the legendary Seven
Blocks of Granite in 1936, his senior
year.
• The coach of Fordham was Jim
Crowley, one of Grantland Rice’s
Four Horseman of Notre Dame.
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• Lombardi graduated from Fordham in
1937 and went to law school in the
evenings while working for a finance
company.
• But he loved football and became a
high school teacher and coach at St.
Cecilia High School in Englewood,
N.J.
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• He joined the coaching staff at
Fordham in 1947, and two years later
moved to the staff at West Point
under coach Red Blaik.
• There, he absorbed the two themes
that served as his coaching
scaffolding: simplicity and execution.
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• Lombardi joined the New York Giants
coaching staff in 1955 as offensive
coordinator.
• Tom Landry, who became the first
coach of the Dallas Cowboys in 1960,
was defensive coordinator.
• The team won the NFL championship
in 1956.
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• After the 1958 NFL Championship
game loss to the Colts, Lombardi
joined the Green Bay Packers as
head coach, his first top job since
coaching a high school team in New
Jersey a decade earlier.
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• The Packers were among the first pro
teams to use the pass to great effect,
under coach Curley Lambeau.
• One of the great receivers of all time,
Don Hutson, played in Green Bay.
• He played 11 seasons, setting
numerous records, including some
that still stand.
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• But by the time Lombardi arrived at
the end of the 1950s, Hutson had
long since retired.
• The Packers had become a bad
football team in the smallest city in
the NFL, a throwback to the league’s
early days when formed from the
remnants of the old Ohio League.
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• Lombardi immediately put his stamp
on the team.
• He led punishing training camps,
working the players through drills that
were designed to instill a sense of
personal toughness and fidelity to the
coach.
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• In 1960, Lombardi led the Packers to
the NFL championship game against
the Philadelphia Eagles.
• The Packers lost, and Lombardi
vowed afterward that he would never
lose another championship game, a
vow he kept throughout the 1960s.
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• Green Bay won NFL titles against the
New York Giants in 1961, 37-0, and
again in 1962, 16-7.
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• In December 1962, Lombardi landed
on the cover of Time magazine,
securing a foothold in the world of
celebrity by his presence under a
tagline “The Sport of the 1960s.”
• Lombardi would come to define the
decade from then until its twilight in
1969.
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• By 1962, it had become clear
Lombardi represented the old order
as the culture shifted from the
complacent 1950s to the turbulent
1960s in all ways but one.
• Green Bay drafted and signed
African-American players even as the
Washington Redskins maintained a
whites-only roster.
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• The playbook reflected Lombardi’s
old-school approach in all other
things.
• He took the quote from Saint Paul
quite literally – and created a plan for
his players to run to win by running to
daylight, usually by operating one
play.
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• That play is known as the Packer
sweep.
• “There’s nothing spectacular about it.
It’s just a yard gainer, ” Lombardi
states in a training film.
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• The Packers featured running backs
Paul Hornung of Notre Dame, Jim
Taylor of LSU and Donnie Anderson
of Texas over this period to move the
ball behind the steady QB Bart Starr
of Alabama.
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• In 1965, Lombardi led the Packers to
the first of an unprecedented three
straight championships.
• The Packers beat Cleveland and its
great running back Jimmy Brown
(playing in his final game) in the mud.
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• In 1966 and 1967, Lombardi met the
team coached by his former
colleague, Tom Landry, of the Dallas
Cowboys, for the NFL Championship.
• In 1966 in Dallas, Green Bay won to
earn a trip to the firs AFL-NFL
championship against Kansas City.
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• The Packers beat the Chiefs in that
first game in the Los Angeles
Memorial Coliseum.
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• The next year, Lombardi and Landry
met again, this time in Green Bay in a
game that became known as the Ice
Bowl.
• The Dec. 31, 1967, game was played
in temperatures that ranged from 13-
below-zero to 15-below-zero on what
became known as the “frozen tundra”
of Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
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• The Packers took an early 14-0 lead
but Dallas rallied late.
• The Cowboys grabbed a 17-14 lead
with 4:50 left in the game.
• Green Bay quarterback Starr then led
the Packers down the field from their
own 32 yard line.
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• Chuck Mercein, a back from Yale,
made two key runs and caught pass
in the drive that reached the Dallas
one-yard-line with 13 seconds left.
• Green Bay called a time out, and
Starr jogged to the sidelines to let
Lombardi know what he had in mind:
a quarterback sneak because the
backs could not get traction.
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• Starr pushed forward behind a block
by guard Jerry Kramer to score and
give the Packers a 21-17 victory for
their third straight NFL Championship
and a second trip to the AFL-NFL
Championship, now called the Super
Bowl.
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• More than 30 million fans watched
the game on television, cementing
the league’s popularity while bearing
witness to a myth-making event on
an epic scale.
• Just two years earlier, football had
become the most popular sport in
America, surpassing baseball.
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• Green Bay went to the Super Bowl
and defeated the Oakland Raiders to
win for the second straight year.
• It would be Lombardi’s last game as
coach of the Packers, as he decided
to leave the sidelines and focus his
energies as general manager.
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• Lombardi joined the Washington
Redskins for one season as coach in
1969.
• He died of cancer on Sept. 3, 1970,
age 57, before the start of his second
season as Washington coach.
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• Like Rockne’s, Lombardi’s funeral
was a massive public event.
• More than 1,500 people – former
players, coaches and fans – packed
St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York
for the services.
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• Lombardi was among the last of the
old-line coaches whose connections
ran back to the 1930s to have great
success in the league.
• Even George Halas of the Bears,
whose connections with the league
stretched back to its founding in
1920, called it quits, finally, in 1967.
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• Two years earlier in 1965, Amos
Alonzo Stagg, an end on the first All-
American team in 1889 and an
innovative coach who perfected the
center snap and awarded varsity
letters, died at the age of 102.
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• Over the next generation, coaches
would become less like Lombardi and
more like Paul Brown: men whose
scientific approach would lead to
continuous innovations unseen since
the development of the T-formation in
the late 1930s by Halas himself.
• Even the mud of November and
December would disappear in time.
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• And acceleration would be the key,
both on and off the field in terms of
speed, finances and celebrity power:
speed as represented by Bob Hayes,
finances as represented by TV
money and celebrity as represented
by Joe Namath and presented by
Arledge, whose innovations with AFL
coverage were widely copied.
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• Lombardi represented the last of
buzz-cut pro football in terms of his
approach to the game: rigorous and
relentless repetition of simple plays
such as the Packer sweep.
• The world, though, had changed, and
so had the NFL by the time he died in
1970.
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• Two men played pivotal roles in the
change from the Lombardi era to one
signified by celebrity and spectacle:
Namath on the field and Arledge off
it.
• A third man, a player named George
Sauer, detected something had gone
awry in both the old and the new eras
and did something about it.
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• Namath would leave Alabama and
coach Bear Bryant as a coveted
player in the 1965 draft.
• Drafted by the Jets after Alabama lost
the Orange Bowl, Namath arrived in
New York with a $427,000 salary and
swagger to match.
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• The AFL-NFL merger was driven in
part by sizeable contracts signed by
college stars such as Namath with
the Jets and Tommy Nobis with the
NFL Atlanta Falcons.
• But it was Namath who had the
wattage to illuminate the game’s
ascendancy from sports to popular
culture.
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• Ironically, Namath shared the same
geographical background as the
great Johnny Unitas.
• Both were from western
Pennsylvania, in the football
crescent, and Namath would be
coached by Weeb Ewbank, who won
the 1958 NFL Championship.
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• Namath emerged as a bona fide
celebrity a decade after that game.
• The quarterback led the Jets to an
11-3, including a game that
underscored his importance to the
NFL and of the NFL to the nation.
• It was the “best game no one saw.”
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• On Nov. 17, 1968, the Jets played
the Raiders in Oakland. It was the
West Coast game for NBC.
• The lead changed six times in the
first 59 minutes, with the Jets taking a
32-29 lead with 1:05 left on a field
goal by Jim Turner.
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• The Raiders launched a drive after
the Jets’ field goal and were moving
when NBC cut to Heidi on all affiliates
east of Denver after a commercial.
• The reaction was immediate and
massive.
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• Phone lines jammed NBC’s
switchboard, making it impossible for
executives to call the west coast to
reconnect the game feed.
• The New York Police Department
received so many calls that true
emergencies went unanswered for
awhile.
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• The Raiders, meanwhile, scored a
touchdown with 42 seconds left to
take the lead.
• The Jets fumbled the ensuing kickoff,
and the Raiders scored again to win.
• NBC ran a crawl to inform viewers of
the score but the network even blew
that.
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• According to published accounts, the
crawl occurred just when Heidi’s
paralytic cousin tried to walk, sucking
the emotion out of the scene.
• NBC issued a formal apology 90
minutes after the game.
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• That would be the last time the Jets
would lose that season.
• The Jets met the Raiders again in the
AFL championship game at Shea
Stadium in New York, and a Namath
pass to Don Maynard – who played in
the 1958 game – set up the winning
score.
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• In the NFL, meanwhile, the 13-1
Baltimore Colts met the 10-4
Cleveland Browns in the
championship game to determine
who would meet in the Super Bowl.
• Led by backup quarterback Earl
Morrall substituting for the injured
Unitas, the Colts routed the Browns
in Cleveland, 34-0.
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• That set up a Super Bowl III
showdown between the team that
defeated the Giants in 1958 against
another team from New York, this
one led by a quarterback who
reflected the emerging culture of the
period.
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• Baltimore coach Don Shula was born
in the football crescent in Ohio and
had played under Paul Brown in
Cleveland.
• In 1963, he replaced Ewbank – a
Paul Brown assistant coach at one
time - as coach of the Colts.
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• Baltimore was favored by as many as
16 points, as few gave the Jets and
the AFL much of a chance against
the establishment Colts who had
manhandled the Browns in the NFL
championship game.
• And the Colts had Johnny Unitas in
case the game turned against them.
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• Namath and Unitas were opposites
from head to toe. Namath wore white
cleats; Unitas high-top black ones.
• He also had long hair, not a crew cut.
• Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated
described Namath as “the folk hero of
a new generation.”
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• Even the helmet decals represented
the old against the new:
- The Colts’ horseshoe
emblematic of the old West.
- The Jets name and projected
movement emblematic of the
jet age.
• The NFL Films myth-making account
focused on these distinctions.
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• Namath added a sense of unbridled
confidence as well, shattering the pro
forma humility embedded in football’s
honor code.
• He not only predicted the Jets would
win; he guaranteed it.
• And he remained true to that.
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• The Jets proved to be more physical
and skilled than the experts had
reckoned when installing the Colts as
a 16-point favorite.
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• Namath threw a total of 28 times,
completing 17 for 206 yards.
• The Jets’ Matt Snell ran for a
touchdown and Jim Turner kicked
three field goals to lead New York to
the 16-7 win.
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• The counterculture had seemingly
won football.
• Namath became the most celebrated
athlete in America after that victory
that shocked the nation and gave the
AFL the credibility its teams needed
as it headed toward the full merger in
1970.
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• A year later, the Kansas City Chiefs,
showcasing a plan known as the
“offense of the 70s” for its creative
vitality, stunned the old-school-style
Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV,
giving the AFL its second straight win
against the establishment.
• That win confirmed what the Jets
accomplished.
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• Outside the game, Namath
represented the transformation of
athlete into a celebrity for the age of
color television, rock music, sex,
drugs and all the other signifiers of
the period.
• But Namath appealed to the older
generation, too, who admired his
boyish charm and sex appeal.
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• In the process, Namath redefined
masculinity as presented by NFL
players.
• He wore furs, and he served as a
spokesperson for pantyhose, for
example, and his apartment featured
shag carpeting among other hip
design elements.
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• This was the birth of the cool for the
NFL.
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• The reality of Namath, however, was
something different.
• He retained the conservative
intellectual infrastructure common to
pro football’s culture.
• After the Super Bowl, he appeared on
the Ed Sullivan Show and toured U.S.
military posts with the USO.
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• And his celebrity as an individual
would only be permitted to go so far.
• When confronted by commissioner
Pete Rozelle with allegations that
gamblers cavorted at his nightclub
Bachelor’s 3, Namath said he would
retire rather than sell it at a tearful -
unusual for a football player - news
conference.
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• Namath later agreed to sell his
interest in the club so he could play
football.
• The tears at the press conference
announcing his retirement would
soon evaporate.
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• Namath would never win another
championship after that culture-
changing victory over the Colts and
Johnny U.
• Like Grange and Jim Brown, Namath
heard Hollywood’s call and starred in
film and appeared on stage.
• He even had his own talk show.
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• Namath would retire in the mid 1970s
after a series of knee injuries and a
short-lived move to Los Angeles.
• But he had set the template for the
quarterback as celebrity, and he
single-handedly proved that a star
could carry the game into prime-time
television.
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• As Namath pushed the idea of
quarterback as modern celebrity,
Roone Arledge pushed it firmly in the
direction of entertainment as head of
ABC Sports.
• Arledge would take the epic myths
constructed by NFL Films and
transform the stories into prime-time
entertainment programming.
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• The origin story of prime-time NFL
football begins with the 1966 merger
with the AFL.
• NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle,
who engineered the pact and the
multiple anti-trust exemptions from
the U.S. Congress, wanted to extend
the NFL into prime-time.
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• With Friday and Saturday nights
blocked due to the agreement with
Congress for the exemption, the NFL
looked for another night to colonize.
• NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and
Arledge collaborated on the decision.
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• Arledge had earlier established his
football credentials with his work in
televising the early AFL games.
• He later invented one of the most
popular sport programs in television
history.
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• In Wide World of Sports, Arledge
combined a sophisticated
appreciation of technology to old-
fashioned showmanship to his
productions.
• Arledge was among the first to use
satellites for live coverage of sporting
events from Europe, for example.
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• But why pro football – a game
available on Sundays - in primetime?
• Arledge said in published interviews
that each game would be an event
unto itself as there were so few
football games anyway.
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• Arledge said that he saw the way the
lights bounced off the helmets,
creating an aura around the players,
creating a sense of both sex and
drama under the lights.
• He convinced ABC affiliates that a
single game on a single night would
draw viewers in every market
regardless of the teams involved.
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• The game would be presented not as
“coverage” but as an entertainment
spectacle in its own right.
• That gave the game a production
value that enhanced the drama and
narrative trajectory.
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• Arledge deployed techniques he
perfected in Wide World of Sports
programs and later in broadcasts of
the Olympic Games.
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• “What we set out to do was get the
audience involved emotionally,”
Arledge said in an article in Sports
Illustrated. “If they didn’t give a damn
about the game, they might still enjoy
the program.”
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• Just as the Sabols had perfected
their cinematic presentation with on-
player microphones and tight shots of
the action, Arledge sought to make
the game “up close and personal” for
the television audience only in real
time, without the benefit of the art of
film editing.
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• Arledge deployed the use of multiple
games pointed, counter intuitively,
away from the action.
• That transformed coverage toward
the spectacle of the game to widen
the audience.
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• For example, cameras focused on
cheerleaders, which helped to draw
in male viewers, and unusual
characters in the crowd.
• Each shot was short, leaving the
viewer wanting more.
• Shots of players in tight-fitting
uniforms attracted the female viewer.
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• The Monday Night Football broadcast
used nine cameras instead of the
usual five deployed for Sunday
broadcasts to keep the show moving.
• MNF also introduced handheld
cameras for sideline tight shots of
players and cheerleaders, getting the
close-ups Arledge required.
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Director Chet Forte explained his tactics
in moving the action around the game:
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• “What I wanted to do on Monday
Night Football was get away from the
conformity of CBS and the dictum
they laid down for their directors: a
wide shot to a tight shot, a wide to a
tight, over and over. I wanted to gain
impact with enormous close-ups …
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• “I wanted to see all the action
bigger…. More meaning by going
tighter. It’s a little more strain on the
cameramen, but they never
complain.”
• Arledge, meanwhile, completed the
show-biz approach with a team
guaranteed to create fireworks – and
ratings.
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• For its September 1970 debut, MNF
teamed a professional play-by-play
announcer, Keith Jackson, with the
glamorous former New York Giant
Frank Gifford and the opinionated
Howard Cosell to provide some sharp
edges to analysis instead of the usual
fare.
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• The first game in September 1970
featured Joe Namath and the Jets
against the Cleveland Browns.
• The Browns won the game, and
Monday Night Football was here to
stay
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• But Arledge worked to refine the form
over the next year to move even
closer to making the announcing
team entertainers.
• He replaced Jackson with Don
Meredith, a folksy former quarterback
for the Dallas Cowboys who played in
the famous Ice Bowl in 1967.
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• With Gifford handling play by play,
Meredith and Cosell provided a
running commentary based on the
old hayseed versus city slicker trope.
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• Monday Night Football became an
event above the game it nominally
covered with the tight shots, quick
edits and chatter in the booth,
particularly between Meredith and
Cosell.
• In the language of the day, Monday
Night Football became “a
happening.”.
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• That “game as happening” meant that
the NFL had transcended sport.
• With Monday Night Football, the NFL
merged pop culture and would come
to dominate the instrument that
lorded over American culture for
generations: television.
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• The triumph of Monday Night Football
as the focal point of pop culture
meant that it could replicate and
strengthen itself simply by being
itself.
• Celebrities such as John Lennon
showed up in the booth to be part of
the spectacle.
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• In December 1980, reality intruded in
this grand spectacle.
• Cosell at first did not want to go live
on the air with it, but he eventually
delivered the news that Lennon had
been shot and killed in New York.
• The news stunned the audience.
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• In triumph and tragedy, Monday Night
Football underscored the NFL’s
cultural role as more show than
anything else.
• Arledge’s approach influenced how
NBC and CBS covered games,
transforming bland pre-game and
post-game shows and intros into pure
entertainment.
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• But ABC’s Monday Night Football
had its critics – particularly among
traditionalists – who saw how Old
Guard/New Age had trumped the
essence of Walter Camp’s game.
• The celebrity aspect undermined
team and humility gave way to show-
boating.
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• Not since the Harvard player accused
Princeton players of assault in the
1920s had players emerged to
publicly assail the game with such
energy and vitriol.
• Former players wrote books highly
critical of the game that had provided
their livelihood for years.
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• In 1971, Bernie Parrish, a defensive
back for the Cleveland Browns, wrote
about the 1964 championship season
in the context of farce.
• He revealed stories of owners
cavorting with gamblers and the
infiltration of the game by organized
crime, among other things.
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• It was a best-seller, showing that the
country wanted to read about the
inside story of football instead of
simply consuming the positive
material coming from the television
networks and the NFL.
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• Dave Meggysey of the St. Louis
Cardinals wrote non-fiction books
and appeared on television talk
shows to discuss the game’s
brutality, racism, drug abuse and win-
at-all-costs mentality, among other
things.
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• In 1968, Meggyesy became probably
the first NFL player to use the
national anthem as a platform for a
protest. Rozelle told players they
should stand during the anthem, with
helmet under left arm, right hand on
heart, facing the flag.
• Meggyesy held his helmet down and
looked down to the ground.
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• In Out of Their League, Meggyesy
noted the violence, he noted how
players were scared, and he
documented the treatment of players
by sadistic coaches and how college
coaches exploited players and held
little respect for academics.
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• “If we can play football, the country is
not disintegrating,” said Meggyesy
about the decision to play football two
days after the Kennedy assassination
in the context of showing how the
game served as a distraction from
larger, darker issues confronting the
country.
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• In 1973, a former wide receiver for
the Dallas Cowboys named Pete
Gent fictionalized his experiences in
the NFL with North Dallas Forty.
• Gent compressed a season of
pathologies into an eight-day period
in the life of the book’s protagonist,
wide receiver Phil Elliott.
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• Elliott describes the violence in
football as reflecting “the
technomilitary complex that was
trying to be America.“
• The movie, released in 1979, starred
Nick Nolte as Elliott.
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• George Sauer emerged as one of the
more interesting former players who
openly criticized football.
• His criticism stung more than that of
others; his dad was a star at
Nebraska and the family hailed from
the heart of the football crescent in
Ohio.
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• Sauer played for the University of
Texas but sought to leave after the
1964 season and the team’s loss to
Alabama and Joe Namath in the
Orange Bowl.
• He wanted to sign with the Jets.
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• Texas’ coach Darryl Royal refused to
let Sauer leave, stating he had a year
of eligibility left and thus could not
play in the pro league.
• But Sauer won the argument and
turned pro, to join Namath in New
York.
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• Sauer teamed with Don Maynard to
give Namath a lethal combination of
receivers.
• Sauer was a more than capable wide
receiver, if not a major star,
throughout his career.
• In 1966, for example, he was team
MVP.
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• In the epic Super Bowl victory against
the Colts, Namath consistently turned
to Sauer who caught eight passes,
the most on the team.
• That isn’t surprising, given that
Namath and the introverted Sauer
were close despite the sharp
differences in personality.
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• But in 1971, at the age of 27, Sauer
retired to become a writer.
• Sauer said at the time he was
“generally dissatisfied with the game
the way it is played now.”
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• Sauer elaborated in a critique of
football in the San Francisco
Examiner.
• In it, he wrote that “I know that
several times I have found myself in
the locker room, caught up in it all
and acting like a 7-year-old. After
years of this kind of living, what else
can you be but an adolescent?”
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• Sauer added that the game “can
really touch you as a human being if
you are permitted to touch others as
human beings. But this is difficult
when you have the Vince Lombardi-
style of coach hollering at you to hate
the opponent, who really is just a guy
like you in a different color uniform.”
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• In 1983, Sauer wrote in the New York
Times that, “Football is an ambiguous
sport, depending both on grace and
violence. It both glorifies and destroys
bodies. At the time, I could not
reconcile the apparent inconsistency.
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• “I care even less about being a public
person. You stick out too much, the
world enlarges around you to
dangerous proportions, and you are
too evident to too many others. There
is a vulnerability in this and, oddly
enough, some guilt involved in
standing out.”
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• Despite these critiques, football
thrived as never before.
• Innovations in rules and tactics and
new stars kept football fresh.
• Critics gnawed around the edges, but
they never touched the game’s place
at the core of America’s dream life.