Unless you’re old enough to have owned Redskins season tickets in 1937, you can only begin to imagine the splash Sammy Baugh made when he came into the NFL that year. Pro football at the time was still in a primitive state - three yards and a glob of mud. And then Slingin’ Sammy came along … and everything began to change.
Picture this, if you will: In his first season, as the tailback in the team’s single wing, he leads the Redskins to the NFL Championship game. Then, on a frigid day at Wrigley Field, he passes for 335 yards and three long touchdowns to defeat the mighty — and mighty ornery — Bears 28-21.
Quarterbacks just didn’t throw for 335 yards and touchdowns of 78, 55 and 35 yards back in 1937. They were much more likely to throw for 78, 55 or 35 yards — and no touchdowns. In fact, nobody had ever thrown for 335 yards in an NFL game before, and here was Baugh doing it in the title game. Imagine a rookie QB doing that today. Imagine the Falcons’ Matt Ryan throwing for, oh, 575 yards in the Super Bowl. Unfathomable. That’s what Sammy Baugh’s impact on pro football was like.
You’ve been hearing a lot of hype lately — thanks to ESPN’s documentary about the 1958 sudden death game between the Colts and the Giants — about Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry inventing the modern game. Uh-uh. Johnny U and his favorite receiver may have refined the modern game, as any number of others also did in that era, but it was invented by Baugh’s generation, by Sammy and Sid Luckman and Cecil Isbell and Bob Waterfield and Tommy Thompson and a wonderful creation known as the T formation, which opened up the offense and gave us the high-scoring, pass-throwin’ game we enjoy today.
Baugh was the first to arrive on the stage, and now, at the age of 94, he’s the last to leave, which tells you something about his constitution. I can remember, 14 years ago, seeking him out at his ranch in Rotan, Texas. There are some athletes that, as a sportswriter, you simply have to meet, and Sammy was at the top of my list. The fact that he was a virtual recluse, a homebody who hated flying - too many narrow escapes during his playing and coaching days - only made me more determined.
On a weekend the Redskins were playing Cowboys, I flew into the Dallas-Fort Worth airport early on Saturday morning and drove 250 miles to see him. Miraculously — this was before MapQuest, remember — I wound up at his door. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. I walked around to the back side of the house, fearing we’d gotten our signals crossed, and was relieved to see the faint glimmer of a television screen through a set of drapes. I knocked on the window. Sammy Baugh magically appeared.
He was 80 then and still a strong, wiry son of a gun. And tall - 6-foot-2 (and it seemed like more). He motioned me back around to the front door, shook my hand when I entered and got me and my tape recorder situated in a chair in the living room. He had been engrossed in a college game; that’s why he hadn’t heard my pounding at first.
Thus began five of the best hours of my life. Sammy sat in an adjacent chair, a big plastic cup with a handle - the kind you get from a convenience store - sitting on the table beside him. He was chewing tobacco, and the cup was his spittoon. Every now and then he’d reach over and make a deposit.
There were so many things I asked him that afternoon, questions I had written down on a long legal pad and questions that popped into my head as Sammy was talking, spitting and cussing. I forgot to mention the cussing. Sammy was one of the champion cussers. It was rare that a sentence wasn’t punctuated with a *&%$# or a )^=+!. So anything that he’s quoted as saying here, you can be sure, has been thoroughly cleansed. Or is it desalinized?
I began with one of those questions that lets the subject know you’ve done your homework: Why didn’t he grip the ball by the laces like every other quarterback?
“All that matters is how it feels in your hand,” he said, relieved perhaps that I hadn’t asked him something like why he wore No. 33. “To tell you the truth, the reason I did it was because when you’re finessing a ball, when you’ve got to get it up and let drop over a [defensive] man or something like that, I could get more feel from that first seam than I could from the laces. If I was gonna throw long all the time, I probably would have gripped the seams.”
But Sammy didn’t throw long all the time. The ’37 title game was an aberration. No, he was a master of the underneath passing game. On old game films, he looks like he’s running an embryonic West Coast offense — only out of the single wing. Bing, bing, bing — touchdown!
“I was lucky to get under Dutch Meyer at TCU,” he said. “He’s the first man I ever heard that had a short passing game. I remember our first [team] meeting. We were in the room waiting for him to come in, and up on the blackboard were three S’s, just three S’s, one up under the other. All us idiots, we got to wondering what those S’s stood for. And he came in and said, ’This is our passing attack. That first S is for short. The next one: safe. Third one: sure.’ I’d never heard of such a thing.”
Under Meyer, Baugh learned how to move the football by working the flats, throwing to his backs and — here’s a novel concept — taking what the defense gave him. Meyer allowed him plenty of freedom, too. Anytime you see a play you think might work, he told Sammy, run it. Don’t worry about what yard line you’re on.
That’s how Sammy came to throw a pass from behind his own goal line in the Sugar Bowl after his junior season — and how an LSU defender happened to bat it to the ground in the end zone, resulting in a safety (according to the rules then) and two points for the Tigers.
“I saw where I could get a man open in the flat,” he explained. “But the end came across as I threw the ball and kinda jumped a little. But we kicked a field goal and beat ’em 3-2. And after that they changed the rule. It’s just an incomplete pass now.”
Baugh brought this revolutionary thinking to the Redskins, and coach Ray Flaherty, a former Giants receiver, was smart enough to incorporate it into the offense. With Sammy hitting bull’s-eyes and Hall of Famer Cliff Battles dashing around and through defenses, the ’37 Redskins had a Troy Aikman-Emmitt Smith-type combination.
But pro football’s transformation from ground to air travel took a while. The rules were still skewed toward the defense; heck, there wasn’t even a roughing the passer penalty until Baugh’s second season. Meanies like Bears end Ed Sprinkle - one of the foremost practitioners of the forearm - would terrorize opposing passers.
“Sprinkle gave everybody trouble,” Sammy said. “You remember Harry Gilmer? We were playing the Bears in an exhibition game one year, and Harry was going to start the game. So I told him, ’Harry, this Sprinkle is a good football player, but he’s wilder than hell. He doesn’t care whether you’re looking the other way or not when he hits you. He’s going to tear your head off every chance he gets. Even on a running play.’ And I told him that about three times. ’When you hand off to the halfback, look back toward Sprinkle.’
“’I’ll remember. I’ll remember,’” he said.
“And on the very first play, he handed it to the halfback, and he never even thought about Sprinkle. And Sprinkle hit him and knocked him from here to that lamp over there. Just… blup-blup-blup-blup… he’s just rolling [on the ground] like that. He knocked the [daylights] out of him. And that’s when he thought of Sprinkle. So he jumps up, looks over at me on the bench and just waves.”
Soon enough, his spittoon having reached capacity, I was waving to Sammy, too, out of the window of my rental car.
And here I am doing it again — for the last time. Just wanted to give you a glimpse, most of you, of the greatest quarterback you never saw.
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