POWDERPUFF FOOTBALL

Miami Herald, The (FL)
Date: January 20, 1985
Author: PETER RICHMOND Herald Staff Writer

I do not watch football games the way you do. I watch them from soundproof, weatherproof press boxes, and from sidelines thick with cameras and trainers and other reporters. I watch football games thinking of nothing but what I'll write about as soon as the game is done. Every play of the game is no more--or less--than a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph. When the game ends, I stand, shoulder to shoulder with 100 other reporters and minicams in a windy runway in front of a closed door. Suddenly the door opens and I'm launched into a dressing space the size of a conch cottage to scamper between naked, bruised, sweating men garnering such quotes as, "That play had 30 yards written all over it if he doesn't drop the ball," and I write things like that down unquestioningly, as if they somehow explained something, and file them frantically on deadline, and my editors put them in the paper, and you read them.

This is my point: I watch football, I do not see football. Until a few weeks ago I never had time to take a step back to look at the game, to see how ungracefully it has aged. It was a matter of no little irony that when I finally woke up I was watching football the way the rest of the world does, at home on Sunday night, a can of Piels in hand.

It all coalesced in one play: The New Orleans Saints vs. The Dallas Cowboys. Saint possession, third quarter, second and long on the 23.

You may even remember it. Saint quarterback Richard Todd faded back, pumped twice, saw no receivers, and began scrambling. Before him, an open field of turquoise polyvinyl. This play had 30 yards written all over it. But suddenly, Todd deliberately dropped to the plastic and, like a ball bearing on a kitchen floor, skittered on his backside five yards or more, with no other players visible on the TV screen, finally sliding to a slow stop in front of two motionless Dallas defenders. Stepping up to his prone figure, they tackled him by placing a hand on his helmet (which was decorated with a mauve fleur-de-lis). The shirtsleeve crowd beneath Texas Stadium's climate-controlled demi-dome, put down their watercress sandwiches and light beer and applauded politely. I screamed.

My wife ran in, convinced the cat had finally sliced my jugular with the small pearl-handled razor it carries in its right paw. She asked what was wrong. "%*&(at)*%*," I explained. She just stared.

"Never mind," I said. It was no use. She would never understand.

"I thought I saw a ghost," I said.

In a way, I had. He was standing right there, in the corner of the room, tracking mud onto the Oriental rug. He wore the same expression he must have always worn when he squatted into a three-point stance on the line of scrimmage and stared through the rain into the eyes of the enemy.

He was staring at me.

He wore a leather helmet. A thin line of blood crusted the bridge of his nose. He wore a cotton jersey, but mud obscured the numerals. Real mud. Grass stains streaked the shoulders. Real grass. He obviously hurt but not so he'd let you see it.

No name was stitched onto his back. He had no name.

The spirit of football past jerked a bent thumb at the television screen.

"That isn't football," he rasped.

Then he shook his head.

And I shook mine.

"Tell it like it is, kid," he said, and he limped away, disappearing into the wall somewhere between the television and the dog. For a few seconds, I could hear the echo of steel-tipped cleats scraping a cement runway.

And he was gone.

And suddenly I knew what I had to do.

Remember football in the early 1960s, when it rained or snowed during every game and you couldn't read the numbers on the linemen by the end of the first quarter and the special teams were called kamikazes and the punter was also the halfback and guys with names like Sam Huff and Dick Butkus drank antifreeze to stay warm on the sidelines and coaches chain-smoked filterless cigarettes and stormed around in hats and trenchcoats and even the black players had crewcuts? This afternoon I'll be in Palo Alto (what ever happened to Canton? Dayton? Green Bay?) covering Super Bowl XIX. It will not be snowing. The scent of eucalyptus will drift over the stadium like cheap perfume.

At least once during the game a receiver (wearing white gloves, like a sommelier) will do a little indignant dance and point and hiss at an innocent defensive back, like Donald Sutherland ratting on Veronica Cartwright in the last scene of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers; at least three times, a running back weighing a seventh of a ton will charge up the middle, veer for the sidelines and prudently skitter out of bounds into the protective cradle of his teammates rather than risk an extra hit going for an extra yard; at least once, a quarterback will drop to one knee, like a genuflecting penitent, to run out the clock, while his offensive line forms a semicircle around him like a boys' choir; at least twice, a receiver will stand under a falling punt, expertly gauge the distance between himself and onrushing defenders (half a football field) and signal for a fair catch.

I can hear you already. "But Pete. They're bigger and stronger and hit harder and run faster than they ever did. There's more scoring and more spectacle."

True.

"So why don't you go out there yourself and show us how easy it is?"

No, thanks. Pay me two mil and I will.

"Right! They have to take care of themselves; they have more to lose if they're injured."

My point exactly.

Sure, the salaries are as gargantuan as the players and, yes, it makes good business sense to waltz out of bounds or swallow a fair catch if you're talking about millions of dollars of endorsement potential lost to a shortened career.

I might have bought that a month ago. But not after a night I spent in San Diego watching a college quarterback named Robbie Bosco peel himself off the grass about 20 times, to throw one more pass, to lead his team from behind to win a minor bowl game. Earlier, a leviathan had speared his left leg with a helmet, and the quarterback couldn't walk.

But he came back 15 minutes later, and went on passing and scrambling and limping, and the only time he fell was when his leg literally gave out beneath him.

He had more at stake than the professional players do. His career hadn't even started yet. The kid hadn't seen a cent. Why should college football be played harder than the pros? Why should you, on any given play, see anything less than 22 men playing the game indomitably, to the limits of their talents, or beyond? Professional football is designed to be an all-weather brawl. It is a game whose most glorious moment is remembered in a grinding, lunging quarterback sneak on fourth and goal from the one in 13 below zero weather in Green Bay in 1967.

Face it. The National Football League used to be a coal miner slapping you on the back on a slate-cold winter afternoon. Now it's a climate-controlled VCR salesman in designer jeans with a handshake like a fish filet.

That's the way it is.

And now, the proof.

"THEY'RE MAKING A FOOL OUT OF THE GAME"

We begin with a visit to the toughest man I ever met.

Art Donovan was a defensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts, a now-extinct team that decided to go indoors before it got too cold. Now Art lives in the Baltimore suburb of Ruxton, where he runs a restaurant.

I found Art sitting at a small metal table in his huge industrial kitchen. Art was always big, but he's flirting with the 300-pound plateau now. Some things haven't changed. You can still two-putt on his crewcut. While we talked, a kid who helps out around the place kept crossing the room to get Art another Schlitz from the big steel refrigerator. Not once in the next two hours would Art get up from his chair.

"The NFL turns my stomach," said Art Donovan, a man who used to hit so hard that opposing ballcarriers running a fake would shout, "I ain't got it, Artie!" when he stepped into their paths. Gospel truth.

One thing in particular bugs Art when he watches football today.

"I can't stand all this jumping around like a bunch of sissies because they're doing something they're supposed to be doing," he said. "What the hell are they getting paid for, anyway? They sack someone, they bat a pass down, 18 guys go nuts. Hey, that's their job."

"They're making a fool out of the game! The game is being ruined."

Art Donovan shook his head. It resembled an artillery shell pivoting on an axis.

"I mean, what the hell is it all about, Pete? You tell me."

No, Art, you tell me. You and the rest of the ghosts.

Let's begin with the stadiums. What's wrong with the stadiums? Ask Roger Brown. Roger Brown used to make a living rubbing quarterbacks' faces into real grass, when he played for the Detroit Lions, before they moved from Briggs Stadium to something called the Silverdome. Roger Brown was so huge that his defensive line coach used to take him to the railroad station to get him weighed. Truth. The only scales around Detroit that went over 300 pounds were for rail freight.

"I loved the mud and the blood mixed with the smell of the grass," said Roger Brown. "The mud and the blood just doesn't mix with the artificial turf, you know what I mean?" Yep.

Today, 17 of the 28 professional football stadiums have painted artificial turf. If you get your face smeared in the mud, you wash it off with turpentine.

One of the last natural-turf holdouts was Minneapolis. I always expect big things from the Vikings. They play in purple. The average of black and blue is purple. So I took a trip to Minneapolis not long ago, and visited Bloomington Stadium. I found six feet of weeds and a scoreboard dripping old numbers and letters. Seems they've moved indoors, too, to something called Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. Its dome is coated with Teflon.

I found their offices, and was heartened to see nothing but a Viking ship--none of these blinking Bud scoreboard information signs for the Vikings: "Ice Show Tix Still Available--See Snoopy and His Pals."

Maybe the Vikes hadn't totally sissified.

Then I walked out on the practice field. Squatting in the middle of it was something that looks like a giant white insect larva, the kind of thing that will turn into Rodan's eldest son. It's about 200 feet square and 50 feet high.

Turns out it's an inflatable structure, the kind young urbans play tennis in. Climate controlled.

That's where the Vikings practice. I asked the Vikings' punter, Greg Coleman, about it.

"Hey," says Greg. "It's great! It gets cold up here." Well excuse the hell out of me, Greg.

You want a practice field? Let Jack Stroud tell you about a practice field. Jack was the New York Giants' offensive captain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His arms are covered with scars, like graffiti on the Woodlawn Local that ran the length of the field before the Giants fled to their cereal bowl west of the Hudson. Jack Stroud told me a story about Tommy McDonald. Remember Tommy McDonald? It was Tommy McDonald who caught a touchdown pass in the 1960 championship game in a swirling snow, with his cut-off sleeves flapping in the freezing wind.

(It was a game between the Eagles and the Packers. The Eagles won it. On grass. The Eagles had a coach named Buck, who had an assistant named Bruno Banducci.) "In 1960, we were practicing for the Pro Bowl at a USC practice field," said Jack Stroud. "It had a cyclone fence around it with canvas on it. There were a bunch of bushes at the corner of the end zone. Some kids had dug a hole underneath it on the side so they could crawl in and watch.

"Well, Tommy McDonald is going downfield for a 50-yard pass--remember, this is practice for a Pro Bowl--and here comes the ball and he's heading straight for the fence. We're shouting, 'Look out! Look out!' But he's gonna catch it. So he dives and grabs the ball and disappears in a cloud of dust--he's fallen into the hole underneath the fence.

"A second later, he comes back up, holding the ball out. He has two cuts on his shoulder from the bottom of the cyclone fence. The fence stabbed him. Blood pouring down his arm. He had branches sticking out like he was camouflaged.

"But he's holding up the ball. Now how many receivers today would do that? In a practice for an exhibition game?" Not many, Jack. Nobody plays for the sport of it anymore.

(I should point out before I forget that 25 years after Buck and Bruno, the Eagles were coached by a man named Dick Vermeil, who quit because he couldn't take the pressure of competition. He cried at his press conference.)

Remember the old end zones? Stripes, period. They called it pay dirt. The new end zones pay better but they aren't dirt anymore. They are painted in pastels, elaborate stage settings for when someone scores a touchdown and the team falls into spontaneous spasms of rapture.

And while we're on end zones, remember New York Giant Joe Morrison slanting through the secondary toward pay dirt, catching a Y.A. Tittle rifle pass in his gut, and--whannngg!--slamming into the goalpost, wobbling into the end zone and collapsing, still vibrating, still holding the ball? Or the Redskins' Sonny Jurgensen lofting a pass to Charley Taylor on a crossing pattern and--whannnggg!--the defender would connect with the goalpost like Wily Coyote hitting the canyon wall? Jurgensen used to practice that play.

Whatever happened to running into the goalposts, anyway? I'll tell you what. They moved the goalposts back out of bounds! They padded it! They....

What's that? A man could get hurt?

Don't get humanitarian on me. I'm on a roll here.

You want statistics? Forget statistics. "The statistics don't mean anything," said Nick Pietrosante, the old Lion fullback, who had a haircut you might have wiped your boots on before coming into the living room.

"You can have a punt roll 80 yards on Astroturf. And with these domes, they've even taken the wind away. Field-goal kickers, punters, even quarterbacks--they're performing in weatherless conditions. How can you compare stats? There are a lot better players now, but there are just as many who are a lot worse." Here's a stat: Did you ever see Johnny Unitas slide on his butt?

I never did. But I called Johnny to check. This is responsible journalism.

"Nope," said the former Colt star. "Never. But today's players don't care about the game. They only care about the money."

Apparently, Johnny has grown a tad bitter. Can you blame him?

Did you ever see Y.A. Tittle fall to one knee to run out the clock? Of course not. In one game against the Colts in 1963, Y.A. took such a hit at the goal line he bruised his kidney. But he scored the touchdown. A few games later, the Bear pass rush knocked his helmet off. That's because he wasn't sliding on his butt.

When was the last time you saw a bald quarterback bleed from the head?

And whatever happened to the likes of Smokey Stover? Ask Paul Trepinski. No, I'll ask him for you.

Paul Trepinski recently retired after a decade and a half as a referee.

"I was refereeing a Dallas Texan game in the AFL when I saw Smokey come out of a pile-up with his little finger all bent into a Z," he said. "He had a compound fracture. Blood was spurting out. He ran off the field. Two plays later, he was back.

"I said, 'Paul, what'd you do with that finger?' He said, 'I taped a popsicle stick to it.' I looked. He had. You don't see that much these days."

Here's something else you don't see much of anymore. Versatility. In the old days, there was no specialization. Everybody could do everything. The punter was also the place kicker was also the free safety and maybe the fullback. A defensive tackle was also an offensive tackle and also sold tickets. George Blanda of the Chicago Bears placekicked, punted and passed! This year, for a few minutes in one game, Bear running back Walter Payton had to play quarterback--his position in college. His first pass was intercepted. For the afternoon, he completed one of four for a net gain of two yards. The next day, The Chicago Tribune called it A Game For The Ages.

What ages? Eight to 12?

At the forefront of the modern debate on the emasculation of football, of course, is the Jim Brown-Franco Harris show. Harris, the Steeler running back, was approaching Brown's record for career yards gained. Brown grew angry at comparisons between the two because he claims Harris was simply running out of bounds, to preserve his longevity. Most of the cast of characters in this article agree with Brown. But it wasn't just Franco Harris, whose career ended ignominiously this year. Most running backs today seem to regard the sidelines as protective custody.

"If someone had run out of bounds without being touched when I played, he'd have been laughed out of the league," said Alan Ameche. "You'd never do that. Absolutely never. I can't understand why it's happening, but it's happening. In our time, you put your shoulder down, and you drove into the guy. You wouldn't feel right if you didn't."

Ameche scored the most famous touchdown in NFL history. He rambled across the Giant goal line in sudden death to win the Greatest Game Ever Played. (Colts vs. Giants, December 1958.)

You know what Ameche's nickname was? The Horse. Whatever happened to the good names? Whatever happened to Weitecha, Nitschke, Modzelewski and Butkus? Pietrosante, Ditka and McIlhenny? It started going downhill with Tucker Frederickson. Now the only good name in football is a third-string Redskin quarterback named Babe Laufenberg.

You know the name of the best defensive man in the game today?

Lawrence.

"Lawrence Taylor?" said Jack Stroud. "Lawrence Taylor has never really been hit. Back in my day, we really hit."

In the old days, there were hits like The Crackback Below The Knees, loosely described as mugging a guy above the calf when he wasn't looking, a blindside tackle now ruled a clip.

"It's a perfectly legal block," Nick Pietrosante said. "We used to have a guy named Jimmy David. We called him The Hatchet. No one ever got past Jimmy David. Alive."

Tommy McDonald bemoans another rule change--the one taking the bump away from the defensive back. (This from a wide receiver, remember.) "It took all the ammo away," McDonald said. Used to be you'd break for the corner and a back would jam you. Now they might as well hold up a white flag and surrender.

"Back when I played you took your life in your hands cutting across headhunter territory. Butkus used to carry a needle and thread to sew your head back on. Now it's a piece of cake."

Now, to accompany the Quarterback Slide, we have The Quarterback Goes Down To One Knee With Time Running Out "I hate that!" says McDonald. "I absolutely detest that. I want to throw up. I call that 'Powderpuff football.' You know: 'Don't you touch me.' " Something else Tommy hates is Those Gloves.

"I can't believe these receivers are wearing gloves. They're all doing it. It's like a disease. Me, I liked to feel the leather hitting my raw hands." Tommy would occasionally look around in bewilderment if he'd been interfered with, but one thing he never did is Bounce Up And Down In Mock Fury Waving Like A Maniac If The Official Didn't Throw A Flag After An Incompletion.

"That's a lot of baloney," says Trepinski, the referee, whose name alone bestows instant credibility. "It cheapens the game. These guys have absolutely no reason to complain, and most of the time there's more reason to call it on the offensive guy."

What about Flag-happy Referees And Oscar Nominees.

"Yeah. What about roughing the kicker?" said Roger Brown. "Back when I played we blocked a whole lot of punts because you'd run into the guy. Now they pull up because they're afraid they might bump him. My God--these days the guy does an academy award and falls to his ass."

So it's true. All of the old names had confirmed it. The steel-mill rosters have been supplanted by the software set. It's a Sunbelt game for a Sunbelt society.

But why? Against my better judgment, I asked a player who hasn't retired. Just as I'd feared, he was polite and articulate.

Dolphin Nat Moore straddled both eras. He came into the league in 1974, which may sound like modern times, but is in fact the same year they moved the goalpost off the goal line.

Nat Moore says the difference now is that players won't blindly obey the slightest command anymore, just because it comes from a coach. They'll ask "Why?" And sometimes they won't comply. And, said Nat, that's a good thing.

Questioning the coach is a good thing? I called Jim Taylor, late of the Packers.

"What these guys need today," said Taylor, "is a coach to drive them and drive them and drive them and whip them and whip them and whip them. But there aren't any left."

That's more like it.

I called Mike Curtis.

Curtis, a former Colt, once tackled a fan who tried to steal a ball.

Mike and I spoke for a while. He was depressed. He talked about quarterbacks sliding, referees taking all the punch out of the defense, players whining and mewling and making a fortune.

"I don't know what the hell is going on, Pete," he said. "I really don't."

Me neither. But I don't like it. I needed the final nail for the modern game's coffin.

Whom do you call? Whose word is inviolate? A name leaped to mind. Bronco Nagurski. Here was the toughest of them all. Played fullback and defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears in the 1930s and 1940s. Great name, great football player. Could take a hit. Looked a lot like the ghost in my bedroom, come to think of it.

That was the young one. The old one lives in International Falls, Minn. He's 77. I got him on the phone.

Bronco's voice was faint.

"Well," he said, "I think the game is improving. They're better coached. Maybe there's a little too much showmanship. I don't like the idea of putting on dances, but if that's what the public wants.... A quarterback is a specialist, and you're in trouble if he gets hurt, so I don't blame them for sometimes sliding. Halfbacks are a little unwilling to get tackled, but some of those guys hit pretty hard, you know."

Bronco paused.

"Four, five of those big linemen coming down on you--I think I'd take the easy way out, too. You know, I'm a crippled man from all the bumps I took. I'm on crutches now. I wish now I'd never played the game of football."

I stammered my thanks, and hung up.

Was I all wrong? Was I completely out of the ballpark?

Were these veterans I'd talked to just victims of their own generational chauvinism?

Could it be that all the foppery on the field today represents nothing but good fun and good judgment? Was the old way not sport but savagery?

Is it possible that football has really improved?

Naaaaah.

Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald
Section: TROPIC