Sport: A Romp for the Rams

For years the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears shared pro football’s western spoils. This year the Cleveland Rams took the play away, won eight of their first nine games, and last week clinched the championship of the National Football League’s Western Division.

Pitchers & Catchers. The one big reason for Cleveland’s upsurge is the right arm of Bob Waterfield, who in his first year of pro football established himself as a forward passer of Baugh-Luckman caliber. Rookie Waterfield was the catch of the year for Ram Manager Charles Walsh and his new coach, brother Adam, captain and center of Notre Dame’s famed “Four Horsemen” team.

Their title-clinching game with the De troit Lions was a fair sample of how the air-minded Rams operate. The play-for-pay boys scarcely had their hair mussed when Waterfield passed to veteran end Jim Benton for 57 yards. For the rest of the afternoon Waterfield kept on pitching to Benton. When it was over, Benton had caught ten Waterfield heaves for 303 yards, a league record. Score: Cleveland 28, Detroit 21.

Like most of the Rams, 191-lb., 6 ft.

i in. Bob Waterfield is fresh out of col lege. He started being a football hero at Van Nuys (Calif.) High School, where he met a well-stacked, laughing-eyed girl named Jane Russell. At U.C.L.A. he soon became a standout — and a constant source of worry to his teammates, who feared that Howard Hughes’s actress “find” was distracting Bob’s mind from football. Jane notwithstanding (he married her in 1943), Bob was the star of the 1942 U.C.L.A.

Rose Bowl team. Last year, after a spell in the Army ended in a medical discharge, he again starred in U.C.L.A.’s backfield.

As the key man in Adam Walsh’s fast-breaking T, Quarterback Waterfield proved a rare combination of razzle-dazzle and wheelhorse reliability. In his nine Ram games he has thrown 143 passes and completed 76 for a total gain of 1,449 yards. On defense he leads the league in interceptions, with six. He has place-kicked 29 out of 31 attempted conversions. His favorite play is the “bootlegger”: Waterfield simply fakes to other backs, then pulls some fast sleight-of-hand and swings out around end, literally hiding the ball behind his back. This sandlot ruse has made four opponents look sick.

Surges & Hurdles. Bob Waterfield plays college-style football, and so do the Rams. They have romped through a hair-raising season full of fourth-quarter rallies and sporadic scoring surges. Good enough to beat the 1944 champion Green Bay Packers twice, they have every expectation of clearing their final playoff hurdle.

That hurdle will be either the Philadelphia Eagles or Washington Redskins. Both clubs have won six and lost two; both have two games, to go. Last week the Eagles, who dropped two of their first three and then started rolling, tied up the Eastern Division by throttling the Redskins, 16-0.