OT: Bring back the Bootsie Play....NFL
David H.
to give another example that Shakespeare was correct....."First,....kill all
the lawyers".
By Dan Daly
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
All this yapping back and forth about Warren Sapp's blindside block on
Chad Clifton. Green Bay assistant Larry Beightol threatening to "cut [block
Sapp] every single time" when the Packers meet up with Tampa Bay again. Sapp
telling ESPN that Pack coach Mike Sherman "violated me personally" -
violated him personally? - by confronting him after the game. NFL
commissioner Paul Tagliabue promising fines and/or suspensions unless the
teams refrain from criticizing each other and from making "public comments
or threats of injury or retaliation."
Ah, for the simplicity of less civil times. Ah, for the Bootsie play.
Actually, the Bootsie was only one name for it. It was also known, depending
on the team you were playing for, as the Dead Dog, 99-Suicide, Socko,
Snakebite, The Law, 48-Undertaker and Say Goodbye to the Wife and Kids,
according to one of its practitioners. What it amounted to was this: The
offense snapped the ball - and then 10 guys knocked the snot out of the
opposing player who had strayed too far over the line.
"If they cripple you, fine," is the way Sammy Baugh looked at it.
And here's the best thing: coaches, commissioners and media types never got
involved. The players kept it all, uh, in-house.
Sometimes a team went to unusual lengths to extract its pound of flesh. One
day in the '30s, for instance, the Redskins' Erny Pinckert was giving the
Bears all kinds of trouble, repelling one blocker after another with an
elbow or knee. Problem was, Erny was a defensive back, which made it hard to
run a Bootsie on him without attracting the attention of the officials.
"So the Bear quarterback threw a short pass right into Pinckert's arms," the
Milwaukee Sentinel's R.G. Lynch reminisced years later. "That made him the
ball carrier, and the whole Bear team tackled him."
In his autobiography, "Footsteps of a Giant," Hall of Famer Em Tunnell
recalls the Giants running a Bootsie on Bears bad boy Ed Sprinkle in a
preseason game. It was an eye-opening experience for Tunnell, then a
rookie - and an eye-closing one, perhaps, for Sprinkle.
"The Giants didn't really run the play at him," he says. "They ran the whole
team at him. This was revenge, the veterans told me, because they believed
that Sprinkle had roughed up Frank Reagan in [the] 1946 [title game]. They
had waited almost two years for the play, and then whack! whack! whack!
Sprinkle taught me something about pro football, too, by taking his lumps
without a whimper."
If this were 1948, the Packers probably would have run a Bootsie on Sapp.
They certainly had ample opportunity; after Clifton got carted off, Green
Bay snapped the ball 18 more times before the game was over. But no
retribution was sought - until afterward, when Sherman pointed an accusatory
finger at the Bucs' big tackle and Beightol talked about getting even.
Which just goes to show how tame the game has gotten. Sapp ends Clifton's
season - and perhaps his career - with a brutal and needless block on an
interception return - and he walks away unscathed, except maybe for some
short-lived public relations fallout. There's no Bootsie, no Dead Dog, no
99-Suicide, no 48-Undertaker, no Say Goodbye to the Wife and Kids, no
nothing.
I'm not lobbying for a return to the "good old days," I'm really not. The
period has little romance for me. I had to laugh the other morning when I
read in another paper that "violence is an issue the NFL has been trying to
grapple with since 1995." Since 1995? Violence is an issue the NFL has been
trying to grapple with forever. It's the nature of the football beast.
You know why the back judge was added to officiating crews in 1947? As Art
Daley of the Green Bay Press-Gazette explained it, it was "to take the
murder out of professional football, particularly the brand played by the
Bears and Packers. In some circles [the back judge] is called the custodian
of No Man's Land, Spooky Hollow and Cemetery Corners - the areas opposite
one end of the line that went unwatched for 27 NFL seasons.
"Ten eyes will [now] be trained for all sorts of infractions - chief of
which in a Bear-Packer game is illegal use of the hands. This covers a lot
of ground, but mere mention of the word 'slugging' should give you the
picture. Good rough football has been a healthy rule rather than the
exception around the National [Football] League, but when key players
sustain fractured noses in the first five minutes, it ceases to be rough;
it's dirty."
And it stayed dirty well into the '50s. Fights were common - so common that
they almost seemed like part of the show. In one famous battle in 1937, the
Giants' Tarzan White supposedly took a bite out of the thumb of the Packers'
Russ Letlow. In a 1954 bout, the Colts' Don Joyce ripped the helmet off of
the Rams' Les Richter and bashed him in the head with it, leaving a
14-stitch cut.
The commissioner during most of these years, Bert Bell, didn't do much to
rein in the players. When Eagles ruffian Bucko Kilroy broke the nose and jaw
of the Steelers' Dale Dodrill with a well-placed elbow in 1951, Bell's
response was, "There are 300 big boys in this league, and somebody is bound
to get bruised. I also noticed while reviewing this game that one of the
Eagles got a busted cheek, too. I suppose that was an accident?"
Not exactly the kind of comment a lawyer like Tagliabue would make.
The proliferation of the facemask made the game safer for everybody, though,
as did rule changes that outlawed such lethal weapons as the head slap and
my own personal favorite, "the swinging elbow block." Then television came
along - and instant replay - and there was no place to hide. Even if the
officials missed some dirty deed, the cameras were sure to catch it. And the
league office was just as certain to lighten the offender's wallet.
Nowadays the Saints' Kyle Turley gets skewered for pulling off an opponent's
helmet and throwing it, never mind braining him with it. The NFL sure has
come a long way, baby.
But when I see the 303-pound Sapp plow into the unsuspecting Clifton - and
get away with it - well, a part of me wishes the players still had that
eye-for-an-eye mentality. If they did, maybe Sapp would have opted to brush
block him or bypass him entirely. One of the reasons it was such a cowardly
act in my mind is that there was virtually no chance of reprisal. The NFL
simply doesn't do donnybrooks anymore.
Sapp claimed he celebrated after the block not because he'd KO'd Clifton but
because Tampa Bay had scored a touchdown to all but wrap up the game. You
can believe him if you want. I'm just reminded of a similar hit that Chuck
Bednarik made on Frank Gifford in 1960, one that put Gifford out of football
for a year. The little dance Bednarik did over the down-and-out Giffer was
eerily reminiscent of Sapp's exultation, as was his explanation for it: that
the Eagles had recovered a fumble and were about to beat the Giants.
Bednarik was clearly proud of the tackle (though he sent a get-well card and
a basket of fruit to Gifford in the hospital). He likened it to "a truck
hitting a sports car. He was going full speed and I was going full speed,
and when I hit him I knew one of us wasn't going to get up." Of course, he
had a right to feel that way; Gifford had the ball and was running for the
sideline, trying to get out of bounds to stop the clock. Even Giants coach
Jim Lee Howell defended Bednarik, saying, "He hit Frank the way a football
player is supposed to hit people."
Kyle Clifton didn't have the ball. Kyle Clifton was 25 yards away from the
ball, essentially out of the play. He might as well have been standing on
the poop deck of the Bucs' pirate ship. But Sapp drilled him, anyway - with
such force that Clifton's pelvis was all but ripped from its moorings.
If that doesn't warrant a Bootsie play, what does?
I might even throw in a 48-Undertaker for good measure.
end of article
David H.
Pearly Soames
wrote:
>Not for commercial use. For free and open discussion purposes only....and
>to give another example that Shakespeare was correct....."First,....kill all
>the lawyers".
>
In context, he was correct. Of course, if you think that your
"disclaimer" absolves you from liability for copyright infringement,
you're wrong.
________________
"...errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers
left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles
of personality, the riddle of a soul."
Dan Szymborski
rante...@yahoo.com says...
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2002 11:05:36 -0500, "David H." <dhag...@erols.com>
> wrote:
>
> >Not for commercial use. For free and open discussion purposes only....and
> >to give another example that Shakespeare was correct....."First,....kill all
> >the lawyers".
> >
>
> In context, he was correct. Of course, if you think that your
> "disclaimer" absolves you from liability for copyright infringement,
> you're wrong.
Apparently, our esteemed Mr. Hageman doesn't believe that theft is a
crime.
If someone broke into David's house and stole his VCR and left a note
that said "It's OK, I'm not using it commercially," does anyone think
he'd approve of it?
--
Dan Szymborski
d...@baseballprimer.com
"A critic who refuses to attack what is bad is not a whole-hearted
supporter of what is good."
-Robert Schumann
david craven
"Dan Szymborski" <d...@baseballprimer.com> wrote in message
> > >Not for commercial use. For free and open discussion purposes
only....and
> > >to give another example that Shakespeare was
correct....."First,....kill all
> > >the lawyers".
>
> Apparently, our esteemed Mr. Hageman doesn't believe that theft is a
> crime.
And he also is quoting out of context. Pay close attention to whom
Shakespeare gave the line about killing all of the Lawyers. Was it the
"hero" of the piece? Was it given to a good guy? No, it was Jack Cade. He
was a bad guy who is talking about how to bring about the collapse of civil
order. And the first thing that we do to bring about the collapse of Civil
order is to kill of the Lawyers. If you have drawn up a character as evil
and then you give him things to say, generally it is not thought that this
is a positive spin on those things. For example, if Syd Thrift says "Joe
Dokes is the best player in the game", it doesn't mean that Joe Dokes is the
best player in the game. In fact, based on the general views of Thrift's
abilities, it means the opposite. In other words, Shakespeare was, in
point of fact, suggesting that Lawyers were good and important. But hey,
go ahead and keep misquoting Shakespeare, its par for the course.
david craven
"Dan Szymborski" <d...@baseballprimer.com> wrote in message
> > >Not for commercial use. For free and open discussion purposes
only....and
> > >to give another example that Shakespeare was
correct....."First,....kill all
> > >the lawyers".
>
> Apparently, our esteemed Mr. Hageman doesn't believe that theft is a
> crime.
And he also is quoting out of context. Pay close attention to whom
nob...@junk.min.net
clobbered. Never a complaint.
Alan
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David H.
news:3defdf37$2$nynaurff$mr2...@news.md.comcast.giganews.com...
> Unitas, like every other QB and player of that time, used to get
> clobbered. Never a complaint.
>
Yeah, but the combination of multi-million dollar nest-eggs and
ambulance-chasing attorneys make on-field retribution unlikely.
Can you imagine Johnny Cochran on Nightline that evening should Sapps had
been sapped?
David H.