NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime

4 Moving to Center Stage

4 Moving to Center Stage The year 1959 was a major turning point for professional football in general , and the National Football League in particular. The NFL went through its first setback in the new struggle with its players, a challenge from a new league, and a change of commissioner. The ramifications of these developments over the next decade were earthshaking for the NFL in both a positive and a negative sense. On the field 1959 was a memorable year. Vince Lombardi became the head coach of the Green Bay Packers, coming from the New York Giants, where as offensive coordinator he had developed a reputation as a motivator and innovator . He changed offensive line play and blocking techniques and significantly altered offensive play in general. Lombardi turned the losing Packer franchise into the dominant team of the sixties. He took the 1-10-1 team of 1958 and turned them into a 7-5 team in 1959 and then never looked back. National media attention given to professional football increased in 1959. Thomas Morgan wrote “The Wham in Pro Football” for Esquire and attempted to explain the growing popularity of the professional game. Drawing on an essay by Dan Wakefield in Dissent, Morgan wrote knowingly about male rituals that bring glory to everyday life and the appeal of “controlled violence” in an “enervated society.” American society was going through another of its periodic crises over male identity and the blurring of gender roles. Men needed to find a way to be men, and Morgan saw professional football as a male domain, comparing it to an “outdoor, stag poker game.” It was “harder, faster, meaner and more acute” than the college game. It combined speed with a “brutal rhythm” and style. Football brought pleasure in “sanctioned savagery” to the boredom and dullness in the workaday world. Cold-war concerns over the softness and poor physical conditioning among Americans, as Crepeau_text.indd 55 7/1/14 11:29 AM T h e R o z e ll e Era 56 well as the moral corruption and self-indulgence prevalent in the expanding consumer culture, found corresponding expression in the political culture of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and the Kennedy family’s “cult of touch football.” These concerns found another antidote in the constructed culture of pro football embodied in the person of New York Giants star Sam Huff, who appeared on the cover of Time on November 30, 1959. Huff was on his way to being named Defensive MVP in the NFL for the 1959 season. The title of the Time cover story laid it all up front: “A Man’s Game.” Laced with testosterone-tainted prose, the wordsmiths at Time wrote of “battle-tried” men who seemed “larger than life,” embodying “sheer brute strength.” The new emphasis on defense “epitomizes the raw strength and subtle scheming that lies at the heart of football.” Brain and brawn must come together. The key figure bringing them together was the middle linebacker for the Giants, Sam Huff. According to Time professional football was no longer the rowdy game of the factory towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio. It now had an air of gentility. There was no swearing in the Giants locker room, and in Cleveland Paul Brown demanded impeccable conduct from his players. Even the bookmakers saw the change and were convinced of the pro game’s integrity. As for Sam Huff, although he could do his job with “brute force alone,” he studied and prepared so that he knew where the ball would be at all times, and he would be there too. “You play as rough and vicious as you can,” said Huff, because if “you hit a guy, you hurt him instead of him hurting you.” There was a code that prohibited any “deliberate attempt to maim.” Yet, even when played cleanly, “football is a game of awesome violence.” The next season, CBS television took football fans on a thirty-minute excursion inside “The Violent World of Sam Huff.” Huff was wired for sound during practice and an exhibition game. The result was a CBS documentary filled with bone-crunching tackles, complete with a soundtrack of violence as “grunts, groans and hard hits could be heard in millions of living rooms.” The Time cover story of the previous November came to life. The hits were real and savored by the camera and the narrator, Walter Cronkite, who although not yet the voice of God, was moving toward...