Sport: A Pride of Lions

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It was football’s biggest weekend. All Saturday morning, rain fell on Columbus. But it stopped by noon, and on the stadium’s dry turf Ohio State came back in the fourth quarter to whip Michigan, 21-7. Not since Chicago, coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg, turned the trick in 1913 had a Big Ten team won seven straight conference games; the Buckeyes were Big Ten champs and Rose Bowl-bound. All evening Columbus echoed to California Here I Come!

In the Los Angeles Coliseum, 102,000 fans, largest crowd of the season, sweltered in 101° heat while U.C.L.A., the nation’s top team, ran all over the ‘ University of Southern California in the last six minutes and won the Pacific Coast championship, 34-0. Back in the East, a left-handed passer named Frank White lobbed a 39-yd. toss over the heads of the Yale secondary and Harvard won its first Big Three title since 1941 (13-9). In the Southwest, Oklahoma trounced the Nebraska Cornhuskers, 55-7, to take its seventh successive Big Seven title. And in the second oldest college rivalry in the country, dear old Rutgers walloped Columbia (45-12) for the first time since 1891.

It was a Saturday for the record books —filled with screeching runs and moaning fumbles, with sad upsets and the wild enthusiasm of undergraduate loyalties. But on Sunday, fans who wanted to see football at its best turned out to see the pros. From Green Bay, Wis. to New York’s Polo Grounds, stadiums rocked to the sound of big men butting heads for cash. In the fall of 1954, a large part of the U.S. public is learning what dedicated sportsmen have been saying for years: that Saturday’s college boys play a game, while Sunday’s pros practice a high and violent art. After half a century of trying to capture the fans’ fancy, pro football has finally made the grade.

Era of Cash & Glory. Today, more than 2,000,000 spectators cram into the country’s biggest stadiums between the end of September and the middle of December to watch the pros play ball. Last year, for the first time on record, eleven out of twelve teams in the National Football League finished the season in the black. Income: about $60,000 per club from exhibition games, about $125,000 a season per club from TV and radio, a league total of almost $6,000,000 from the turnstiles. Such popularity, says former University of Chicago President Robert M. Hutchins, may soon be siphoning paying customers away from the collegiate box office. As far as Hutchins is concerned, that would be fine. Both he and New York University’s Chancellor Henry T. Heald agree that high-pressure college football has become a high-power nuisance.

Of all the pro teams, the best (for the last three seasons) is the Detroit Lions. And the best of all the Lions, the best quarterback in the world, is Robert Lawrence Layne, a blond, bandy-legged Texan with a prairie squint in his narrow blue eyes and an unathletic paunch puffing out his ample frame (6 ft. 1 in., 195 Ibs.). Layne, a T-formation specialist, led the Lions out of the National Football League’s cellar, called the plays and fired the passes that won them the national championship in 1952 and 1953. He is currently doing his bruising best to repeat that performance. As of this week, the Lions have been defeated only once (by the San Francisco Forty Niners).

Layne himself likes to minimize his importance to the team. “You’re nuthin’ without them ten big brothers,” he drawls. But brother Bobby is more than just another quarterback. “Let me give you an example,” says Bob McClellan, sports editor of the Detroit Times. “It’s the L.A. Coliseum, fourth quarter. The Rams lead, 24-20. Remember? The Rams kick off and the Lions get the ball on their own 20-yard line. Bobby looks at the clock. There’s ten minutes to play. Does Bobby throw the ball around like crazy and try for a quick touchdown? Hell no! That would give the Rams six minutes to catch up. Bobby takes his own sweet time. He uses up more than six minutes. Then he makes his touchdown and the Lions win. That’s the kind of an old pro’s trick Layne pulls all the time. He’s dynamite when he smells that goal line.” How Rough Can It Get? The intricate play patterns that swirl into organized confusion are often tricky to follow.

From any spot in the field, the pros are capable of pulling the perfect play: that heart-warming performance when every blocker gets his man and a long pass connects or a shifty runner is shaken loose for a touchdown. The man in the stands needs a quick eye to spot the subtleties of down-and-out pass patterns (ends charging straight downfield, then suddenly cutting for the sidelines), flaring halfbacks (who sneak through the line of scrimmage to take a pass in the flat) and looping defenses (in which defensive linemen feint to one side before charging to the other).

Not only do the pros play better and more complex football than even the best college teams, they also play rougher. “We play rough and we teach rough,” says Lion Coach Buddy Parker. “And when I say rough I don’t mean poking a guy in the eye. I mean gang tackling—right close to piling on.”

If mugging goes on, it obviously goes best at the bottom of a pileup. Ball carriers who join the pros fresh from the unskilled slugfests of collegiate football learn fast how to fall with knees doubled and cleats in the air—a practice nicely calculated to scare off any unnecessary tackier. A runner who doesn’t throw his arm in front of his face the moment he is brought down is either foolhardy or unconscious.

How to Keep Your Teeth. The Lions take just about as much as they dish out. And most of them agree that Don Paul (6 ft. 1 in., 225 Ibs.), captain of the Los Angeles Rams and a rib-cracking linebacker of the old school, is the dirtiest player in the league. Pro football being what it is, Paul takes this judgment for what it is meant to be—sheer flattery. “I play the Lions’ kind of football,” says Paul. “I don’t hit with my fists, but when I hit a ball carrier and there is a split second between then and the time the whistle blows, I hit him again, hard.” As far as Paul is concerned, the difference between a good pro player and a good college player can be summed up easily: “In the pros, you know how to get that extra leverage to be able to hit hard. You know how to hit and then be able to keep your feet to hit again. On top of everything else, you’re 40 to 60 pounds heavier and 500% meaner.”

Just in case that meanness ever begins to mellow, pro players have coaches such as the Chicago Cardinals’ “Jumbo” Joe Stydahar. A mild-mannered, nervous wreck in his spare time, Joe used to be one of the nastiest customers ever to play professional ball. Once, playing tackle for the Chicago Bears, Stydahar walloped an opponent so hard that the man’s arm was ripped open. Astonished officials insisted Joe must have bitten his man; they even examined his mouth. It was a waste of time. Joe couldn’t have bitten if he wanted to. He had lost his teeth long ago, in forgotten scrimmages. Years later, when he was coaching the Rams and his team had absorbed a 49-14 shellacking from Greasy Neale’s Eagles, Joe raged through the dressing room. “No wonder you guys get kicked around,” he roared. “Every guy on this team has still got all his teeth!”

Today’s players get a little help hanging onto their molars; their big helmets often have plastic faceguards to give them some measure of protection. Still, the scars of battle are inevitable. When the Forty-Niners’ Fullback Hardy Brown was carried out of his first game with the Lions this year, his groin ripped open by a set of slashing cleats, a reporter in the press box had the last word: “Pro football is getting like atomic war. There are no winners, only survivors.”

The Making of a Quarterback. “This is a man’s game,” says Bobby Layne, one of the outstanding survivors. “You have to grow into a man to play it right. A quarterback takes about three years before he knows halfway what’s going on. You never really learn this damn thing.”

Other players would argue that Bobby has learned more than enough. He has been a football hero ever since his school days. Born in the “little bitty ol’ town” of Santa Anna, Texas (pop. 1,600), Bobby was only six years old when his father died and he was sent to Fort Worth to live with an aunt and uncle. By the time he was ready for junior high, his adopted parents moved to Dallas, where he teamed up with a boy named Doak Walker on the football field of Highland Park High School.

Bobby began his career as a guard, but before long he was calling signals from the tailback slot in Highland Park’s single wing. Day after day, when the rest of the squad had finished practice, the two boys would work at place-kicking—Bobby holding, Doak booting—until it was too dark to see the goal posts. After the football season, Bobby played basketball; one spring he pitched the local American Legion baseball team to the state championship. By the time he entered the University of Texas in 1944, he was good enough for a baseball scholarship. In four years at Texas he never lost a conference baseball game.

But Bobby was a football player at heart. As a freshman he was still playing tailback in Coach Dana X. Bible’s conservative single wing. He was just getting the hang of college football when the draft started to worry him. He and Doak joined the merchant marine, but the war was over before they ever got to sea. Bobby went back to Austin while Doak went to S.M.U. On the first Saturday after they got back, they were opponents on the football field. Walker ran 50 yds. for one touchdown; Layne pitched passes for two. (Final score: Texas 12, S.M.U. 7.)

Nightmare in Manhattan. In his junior year, Bobby and Texas were beaten only twice, by Texas Christian and Rice. As a senior, Bobby went to work for a new coach: Blair Cherry, who gave him his first lessons in the intricacies of the T. Meanwhile, Bobby had also found time to marry a pretty Texas coed, Carol Ann Krueger, but his first love was still football. Coach Cherry recalls taking Bobby and his wife to the Chicago Cardinal camp in the summer of 1947. “Bobby never forgot for a moment that the purpose of the trip was to learn about the T,” says Cherry. “On the way up, we’d all get out of the car when we stopped for gas. Bobby would get his wife around behind the car, have her bend over and serve as a center while he practiced the way he thought a T-quarterback would play. Those service-station attendants probably thought he was crazy.” Bobby and Texas lost only one game that year—to S.M.U. and Doak Walker, 14-13.

In his last year at Texas, Bobby made nearly every All-America team in the country; the pros were waiting for him with open pocketbooks. In those days the newly formed All-America Conference was fighting for its life (it eventually folded in 1949), and competitive bidding gave players a better break than they have known before or since. Bobby finally signed with the Chicago Bears for a bonus of $10,000, a salary of $18,000 and promised raises of $1,000.

For a couple of years, Bobby was booted around from team to team. The usually astute George Halas, coach and owner of the Bears, let the future star slip through his fingers and traded him to the now defunct New York Bulldogs.

“Brother, what a team,” says Layne as he looks back on those days in Manhattan. “What a nightmare! I weighed 205 Ibs. when I reported; I weighed 176 when the season was over. We won only one and tied one out of 18 games. At the end of 1949 I was ready to give up football, but I got traded to Detroit.”

Up from Snooker. When Layne joined them, the Lions, like almost every other professional team, had money troubles. Professional football had always had money troubles, and it had never become quite respectable. The fact that the first game on record (between Latrobe, Pa. and Jeannette, Pa. in August 1895) was sponsored by the Latrobe Y.M.C.A. impressed no one. Professional football, in its early days, had the social standing of snooker pool—it might be legal, but no nice person would bother with it.

Here and there, though, there were college men who developed a taste for the game. Most of the time they were paid off in black eyes and broken heads—plus whatever a teammate could pick up by passing the hat. But they played on. Princeton’s Arthur Poe and Yale’s “Pudge” Heffelfinger turned out in Pittsburgh around the turn of the century. In 1902 a young man named Connie Mack claimed the “Championship of the U.S.” for his Philadelphia Athletics after risking the good left arm of his prize pitcher, Rube Waddell, in the Athletics’ football lineup. And in the title game that year, Pittsburgh fielded another big-league pitcher: a fireball artist named Christy Mathewson.

Just after World War I, pro ranks were filled with the names of men who devoted their lives to American football: Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais, Pittsburgh’s Jock Sutherland, Carlisle’s Jim Thorpe and West Virginia Wesleyan’s Earle (“Greasy”) Neale. In 1925 Harold (“Red”) Grange, the Galloping Ghost, suddenly quit the University of Illinois and signed with the Chicago Bears. Newspapers cried havoc: a clean college kid was being “corrupted.” After a two-week exhibition tour with the Bears, his share of the gate alone came to $50,000.

Slowly the crowds kept growing. Sammy Baugh and Davey O’Brien came up out of Texas to pitch passes that would help put the league on its feet. Sid Luckman taught the Bears that a kid from the streets of Brooklyn could play with the best of them. In 1946 De Benneville (“Bert”) Bell, onetime owner and coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, became pro football commissioner (present salary: $40,000). Under gravel-voiced Bert, pro football finally came of age.

Peace & the FBI. Commissioner Bell runs the league with a firm hand, has prevented warfare between teams except on the field. Today players are scouted at almost every college in the country, and each winter, owners and coaches get together to take their pick. To avoid squabbles, the choice is made in order of the teams’ standing in the league: the cellar club picks first.

Bert Bell has kept pro football remarkably honest. He has a sharp eye cocked for any sign that gamblers are getting next to his boys. Let the odds on a game change sharply, and a team of ex-FBI agents investigates any hint that the game might be fixed.

While Bell was reviving the league as a whole, the Lions were having their troubles —mostly with the wrong kind of coaching, from Alvin (“Bo”) McMillin, a veteran of the famed “Praying Colonels” of Kentucky’s Centre College. Most Lions accused “Bo” of trying to turn them into a bunch of Boy Scouts. In two years (1948-49) they lost 18 games and won six. But with the new Quarterback Bobby Layne and new Coach Buddy Parker, the Lions began to roar with new vigor. By 1952 they took over the top spot in the league and finished the season $114,000 ahead. (Last year they made $108,000.)

How to Run a Team. A tall, stooped, scholarly gentleman, ridden with monumental superstitions, Coach Parker has learned to live with the fact that his team is not composed of unduly sober citizens. If now and then they belt the bottle (or some barroom companions), Buddy will forgive them—so long as they show up sober for practice.

Most of the time, Coach Parker is too busy to bother with such minor sins. When he is not supervising practice sessions, he is studying movies of last week’s game, spotting mistakes, scheming for new ways to confound his opponents. Day after day the team pores over minutely detailed analyses of its opponents’ tactics. Each week each player gets a mimeographed booklet containing a complete dossier on their Sunday rivals. Every man is warned about the football style he will have to cope with, and thoroughly schooled in his opponents’ idiosyncrasies (e.g., “declares himself first,” “anxious,” or “weak on man to man”).

When game time comes round and No. 22—Quarterback Layne—moves into the huddle, he is able to choose from a wide variety of plays as he tries to outguess the opposition—and he speaks a lingo that is pro football’s own creation. “Take passes,” explains Bobby. “We have all kinds of pass patterns. You throw passes off your running fakes. You have a ‘Divide,’ a ‘Swing Pass’ [in which, a back swings out to receive instead of going Up and Out], a ‘Crossover’ [in which an end or wingback cuts diagonally across the line of scrimmage to take a short, hard pass]. If I want to pass to an end, I might call for a ‘9 Bend Out’ [the numeral designating the player who will receive the pass]. For a back. I might call a ‘4 Up and Out.’ ”

Play numbers are not the only figures that interest Coach Parker. He takes continual precautions never to be caught with a hotel room, a hat check or a ticket of any sort whose digits add up to 13. As far as Buddy is concerned, even a number like 103 is forbidden.

On the Offensive. The Lions are always on the prowl for new material, and they spend at least $70,000 a year to keep assistant college coaches in each of the N.C.A.A. districts on their payroll as scouts. Even though some schools—notably the Big Ten—have declared war on the pros, reports roll in regularly to the Lion office. “We’ve got no quarrel with the colleges,” insists Commissioner Bell. “Our Saturday night and Sunday games don’t hurt their gate as much as they claim. We have their best interests at heart. They’re our farm system.”

Scouts are also busy keeping watch on the rest of the league—to learn the opposition’s tactics. Coach Parker never quite gets over the suspicion that enemy agents are everywhere. Once, when a railroad switch engine idled back and forth on a track that passed the Lions’ practice field, Parker looked up to see the engineer and fireman watching the workout. He promptly halted practice. “For all I know, George Halas could be sitting in the cab of that locomotive,” he explained.

Chances are that a scouting report on the Lions would not give the opposition much peace of mind. It would only remind them that when Bobby Layne drops back to pass, he is perfectly capable of changing his mind and running with the drive of a fullback. When he does fire the ball, he can pick his target from such amiable giants as Notre Dame’s Leon Hart (6 ft. 5 in., 250 Ibs.) and Michigan State’s Dome Dibble (6 ft. 2 in., 195 Ibs.). Going downfield along with the two ends will be such tough backs as Indiana’s Bob Hoernschemeyer (6 ft., 195 Ibs.), Wisconsin’s Jug Girard (5 ft. n in., 175 Ibs.) or Bobby’s old pal Doak Walker (5 ft. 10 in., 172 Ibs.). Any one of them is capable of snagging the ball despite defensive backs draped all over his anatomy.

Up forward, holding off the enemy, giving Bobby all the time in the world to call his shots, will be some of the heftiest linemen in professional football. Any of the seven monsters is as awesome as William and Mary’s Lou Creekmur (6 ft. 4 in., 250 Ibs.), a smiling assassin who drew more holding penalties than any other player during his first few years, but is now amazingly adept at that proscribed practice.

On the Defensive. Defensively, the Lions have an equally formidable lineup. Hip-deep in burly specialists, the pros have stuck to two platoons, and somewhere in the shuffle when the ball changes hands, the basic defensive line dwindles from seven to five men. There are still two ends and two tackles, but such old-fashioned operators as the guards and center have lost out to an energetic strongman known as the middle guard. On the Lions, this vital hole is plugged by Les Bingaman (6 ft. 3 in.), a mammoth gentleman who learned his manners at the University of Illinois. Weighing in at 349½ Ibs. (Coach Parker had to borrow a livestock scale from the Farm Credit Bureau before he could be sure), Bingo has the girth of a pair of operatic Amazons and a chest to match. He can move fast if he has to—for a few precious yards—but mostly he waits and the plays pile up around him. Bingo stops runners the way Pepper Martin used to field ground balls —with his stomach.

In the defensive secondary, the Lions’ opponents who are lucky enough to get that far run head on into a pair of rough-and-ready linebackers: Washington State’s LaVern Torgeson (6 ft., 215 Ibs., and a team co-captain along with Thurman McGraw) and Pitt’s Joe Schmidt (6 ft., 220 Ibs.). Normally, Torgeson and Schmidt line up with one foot between a tackle and end, then drift back as they diagnose the play. No one bothers backing up Bingaman. Says Coach Parker: “It would be a waste of manpower.”

Behind the linebackers wait the port and starboard up-backs: Colorado A. & M.’s Jim David (5 ft. 10 in., 175 Ibs.) and U.C.L.A.’s Bill Stits (6 ft., 190 Ibs.). Cat-nimble and quick of eye, these two are the backbone of the Lions’ pass defense. Tag-end men in that airtight backfield are two of the swiftest safety men in football: Colorado A. & M.’s Jack Christiansen (6 ft. i in., 185 Ibs.) and Syracuse’s Carl Karilivacz (6 ft., 185 Ibs.).

A Sporting Life. No matter how rough or tricky the game, pro players never seem to lose the happy-go-lucky attitude of men who like the way they earn their living. No matter how hard a beating he absorbs on the field, Bobby Layne, for one, has an insatiable appetite for sport. A chronic gambler, he will try anything at which he has a chance to win. He has been known to toss thousands on the tables at Las Vegas, but he much prefers to make his bets on games of skill. Anyone who takes him on at golf had better shoot in the low 70s.

When he isn’t playing, Bobby spends most of his time with his wife Carol Ann and their two children, Rob, 6, and Alan, 15 months. Since Rob started school, Carol Ann and the children have stayed home in Lubbock, Texas during the football season. But off season, Bobby Sr. is just another businessman and father. He now earns about $20,000 a year with the Lions, plus a small share of their gate receipts—which is well above the relatively low average ($7,500) for pro football players. But at 27 Bobby knows well that he has precious few more years of football ahead of him. So he has already started in the oil business with his old coach, Blair Cherry.

Under the benevolent paternalism of Commissioner Bell, every team in the league encourages its players to engage in such extracurricular activities, against the inevitable day when they will be too old and battered to butt heads for a living. The Green Bay Packers’ former great end, Don Hutson, owns the town’s finest bowling alleys; the New York Giants’ Kyle Rote peddles insurance and packaged kitchens.

Hardly any pro football player is in the game just because it pays. Most of them could make more elsewhere. And most of them stay in football because they have a feeling for the game—the sort of feeling Bobby Layne expresses when he rambles on about what playing is really like. “I kid a lot in the huddle, ’cause I don’t like the pressure to build,” he muses. “I remind the guys of the good time we’re going to have when the game’s over, that kind of thing. But one thing Rusty Russell, my old high-school coach, used to say always stuck in my book. He used to say, ‘There’s no such thing in my book as a good loser.’ It’s the kinda feeling you got to have to be a winner. It’s kinda like the New York Yankees. Those guys win about 30% of their games because they got those pinstripe suits on. It’s habit-forming, that winning or losing. The Lions have fallen into good habits.”

Soul of a Sophomore. This week in Green Bay, the Lions again tested their habit, and Layne, as usual, made all the difference. Passing for two touchdowns, and running for a third, he beat the Packers 21-17. With only four games left to go (including a Thanksgiving-day rematch with the Packers), the Lions need only one more victory to sew up their third straight Western Conference championship.

In the process of winning, the Lions demonstrated again that the roughest pro in the game still has the soul of a Sophomore. After Layne sneaked over for his third touchdown, aroused Packers who had tackled him too late tossed him back to the 5-yd. line. Layne laughed out loud at such manhandling. He was having the time of his life. “They’re a wild bunch,” says one of their opponents, “but they have an esprit de corps which most coaches in the league feel keeps them on top. It sounds sorta high-schoolish but in that play-off game for the championship last year, the Browns were ahead, 16-10, there were only a couple of minutes left to play, and the Lions had 80 yards or something to go for the winning touchdown. But in the huddle, Layne told them in that silly old Texas drawl of his, ‘Jes’ block a little bit, fellers, and ol’ Bobby’ll pass ya right to the championship.’ And he went and did it.”

Not a man in Detroit this week dares say out loud that Bobby won’t do it again.