Sport: The Arm

Most football players take at least one bruising season to earn a reputation. Purdue’s Leonard (“The Arm”) Dawson took just three-quarters of an hour spread across two autumn afternoons. Last month, while the Boilermakers beat Missouri 31-0, the 19th-year-old sophomore spent 23 minutes on the field, threw passes that scored four out of five of his team’s touchdowns. Fortnight ago, Dawson took just 22 minutes to upset powerful Notre Dame by tossing four touchdown passes, intercepting one Irish attempt, and kicking three out of four conversions. Final, score: Dawson 27, Notre Dame 14. Last week, while Duke bottled up Boilermaker pass receivers and held Purdue in check (13-13), it was Dawson who kicked the game-tying extra point.

Pretty Prize. Len Dawson is the first to admit that no man really wins ball games all by himself. (Proof of Purdue’s powerful line is the fact that Len had to “eat the ball” only once the first 29 times he dropped back to pass.) But even as a high-school student in Alliance, Ohio, Len had a well-developed knack of winning all the athletic honors in sight. He was captain of the football, basketball and baseball teams; as a senior quarterback, he completed 100 out of 200 passes for a school record of 1,615 yards.

As a high-school junior, Len latched on to another nonacademic prize: pretty Jacqueline Puzder, a tiny, blue-eyed sophomore who had just moved to town from Cleveland. In the early fall of 1953, shortly after Len entered Purdue, Jackie visited the college campus to watch a football game, came home secretly married. She stayed home long enough to finish high school, but she got to Purdue often. Two weeks before her graduation, she gave birth to a baby girl, Lisa Anne.

Pure T. Len’s choice of Purdue was a deliberate move on the part of a dedicated football player. Ardent alumni from other universities wooed him, and finally the choice narrowed down to Ohio State and Purdue. “I decided against Ohio State,” says Dawson, “because they had the split-T working, and I wasn’t anxious to get involved in that.”

What Len got involved in at Purdue was a pure T formation, an “academic scholarship” (which pays his tuition as long as his grades stay respectable) and a $70-a-month paycheck, for which he turns in some manual labor on the college grounds every now and then—mostly then. Along with most other married couples on the campus, Len and Jackie live in the ramshackle remnants of a wartime housing project that has already served a generation of veterans. The hard lines of dreary shacks, linked to each other by lengths of clothesline, are softened by trim lawns and swarms of children. At 6:30 every morning, Lisa Anne doubles as an alarm clock, Jackie gets breakfast, and Len rushes to get ready for classes. Afternoons he spends on the practice field; evenings, he tries to find energy to study.

The Arm is dedicated to his job. Always first on the practice field and last to leave, he never stops polishing his passes. “He’s slim (6 ft., 177 lbs.) but well-proportioned,” says Coach Stuart Holcomb, “ideal for a T-quarterback. He’s the most unusual boy I’ve ever seen. He can throw anything: fast, slow, long, short, lobs, bullets, dump passes; take your choice.”

Against Duke, Dawson had little opportunity to choose. Alert Blue Devil defenders covered his targets. But while Duke was busy guarding the air lanes, Fullback Bill Murakowski had room to score on the ground. Just having The Arm cocked, ready to throw, kept Duke’s linebackers honest—and kept Purdue in the game.