The death of Gale Sayers brought back a flood of memories from the days of our knowing what we saw during and after an NFL game was genuine and real; not contrived or part of some elaborate production. Or at least that’s what we led ourselves to believe.
It was the Wonder Years for many of us, those years of 1965 through 1971 when Gale Sayers was carrying the football for the Chicago Bears the way nobody had carried it before or has since, and doing so as the fulltime halfback, punt returner and kick returner, no less.
The Vietnam War was raging for reasons known only to Robert McNamara and the Pentagon, but we didn’t know that. Just as we had the NFL, we believed that it was for genuine cause and for real purpose; not contrived or part of some elaborate production. At least that’s what we let ourselves believe in the early years when Sayers was a mere rookie out of Kansas, yet set the professional football world on fire with a season the likes of which had never been seen before, or has been since.
Sayers scored 22 touchdowns his rookie season (just 14 games then) – 14 by rush, six as a receiver and two on kick returns. Yet it wasn’t that he found the end zone so often, it was the manner in which he found it that captured, then became the imagination of a nation of football fans. Gale Sayers was electric. He was stop on a dime fantastic; he was energizing as hell, running with speed, power and precision and insanity all at once.
He was big enough (6-0, 198 pounds) and strong enough to get the tough yards from scrimmage, and he was absolute grease lightning enough to turn the “18 inches of daylight” he said was all he needed to break out of a pile so quickly that in seemingly a second of time he was the only player on the screen as he finished his trot into the end zone.
On Dec. 12, 1965, against the San Francisco 49ers, Sayers accounted for 336 all-purpose yards and scored an NFL record six touchdowns. That’s in one game.
In a career cut short by dreadful knee injuries (68 games), Sayers rushed for 4,956 yards and averaged over five yards a carry, and scored 39 touchdowns on the ground – 56 total. As a returner, Sayers scored six touchdowns and averaged more than 30 yards per kickoff return, with two touchdowns and 14.5 yards per punt return.
For me, Gale Sayers and John Unitas were the true glamour of what pro football was meant to be – two strong and iron tough men, who could take any pounding, yet withstood and conquered those poundings with such style, grace and guile.
Sayers, Unitas and the Green Bay Packers were the pro football experience of the 1960s. Overcast autumn Sunday afternoons at Wrigley Field, Memorial Stadium and Lambeau Field were meant to be because of them.
The Packers of Vince Lombardi were so good and so respected by football fans everywhere (except Chicago) that when they beat your team in a tough playoff game – and the Baltimore Colts lost two brutal playoff games to the Packers – you still rooted for them the following week to keep winning and then to go on to win the championship. Which they did.
I’ve always believed that if there has ever been a perfect television series (and there is no such thing as perfect anything other than, perhaps, a cold glass of beer), that series would be “The Wonder Years,” which takes place between 1968 and 1973. Perhaps I feel that way because Kevin Arnold, the central character of the show, was the same age in the show that I was in real life during those years.
The writers and the producers did such an amazing job of capturing the essence and the authenticity of what that time stood as for all of us, even though we hadn’t yet realized it. They truly were the Wonder Years. Everything and everybody around us – our families, our friends, our schools, our neighborhoods, our nation and our world – really were coming of age all at once. Yet we knew then that at any time, it could all burst apart, just as it very easily could now. But at least then, there seemed to have been a purpose for it.
That included pro football, which was in full-stride of overtaking baseball as the nation’s most-watched sport (but never national pastime; get that straight) – the Lombardi Packers, Halas’ Monsters of the Midway, the Fearsome Foursome, the Purple People Eaters and the shiny new high-tech Dallas Cowboys and the head coach in the funny hat.
Then seemingly, like every other Great American Success Story, corporate greed and network television decided to make the pie bigger. Gamblers were no longer an unwelcome part of the landscape, they had become the landscape and sadly remain so to this day (why do you think the NFL demands injury reports?).
A World Championship Game, which included the upstart rival league AFL, was created, and after the third one – because of the third one (strange days, indeed) – professional football had been changed forever.
Has it changed for the better? Certainly, it has changed for the bigger, for the richer and for the greedier. But better? Let’s put it this way: I watch. But only between sagacious think points during our Tavern Mensa meetings.
Of course I’m getting older (trust me, it’s the most appealing option), but this isn’t some old guy screaming at the wind. I count my blessings as a sports fan to have seen the NFL when it was the NFL on television once a week rather than the 24/7/365 #NFLTheTVShow.
There’s nothing wrong with it now – it’s television. It was just better then when it was pro football.
“The Green Fields of the Mind,” by the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, is among the greatest pieces of baseball literature ever written. No such literature about football exists because the nature of the game itself makes that impossible. But let’s put it this way …
For those of us from The Wonder Years, the most beautiful sight to behold on any kind of a green football field of the mind, will forever remain Gale Sayers running the football.
Mike Burke has been writing and covering sports since 1981. Write to him at [email protected], or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @MikeBurkeMDT and listen to him, Matt Gilmore and Lydia Savramis on their “You Don’t Know Jack” podcast. Follow “You Don’t Know Jack” on Facebook as well.