Author: greggdrinnan

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 1983, SPORTS

Copyright 1983/THE TIMES MIRROR COMPANY

JIM MURRAY

A Name Is Only a Name

   In the National Football League as in the American West, there have always been names to strike fear in the hearts of men. What names like Cochise or Cody or Crazy Horse meant to the early settlers, Butkus of Bubba (as in “Kill, Bubba, kill!”), Karras or Marchetti meant to football players.

  Youngblood is such a name. It denotes the left end of the Rams, a guy who paws the ground before he charges like a corrida bull or a wounded moose, a guy who shakes quarterbacks upside-down till they cough up the football. It’s a name that would turn the wagon trains around on the plains or send a chill over a frontier saloon or empty a main street at high noon.

  Youngblood was a name to keep young quarterbacks awake the night before the big game or make offensive tackles wish they had gone into sales.

  You would think its owner would be this big, scowling, antisocial hulk, a churlish cretin who was a cross between a guy who collects bad debts for the Mafia and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Youngblood would really mean Badblood.

  But the real Jack Youngblood would be a big disappointment to the Dalton Gang or the warriors of Cochise. He doesn’t seem mean enough to be Jack Youngblood. He smiles a lot. He has these dimples. He hardly ever gets mad. He looks like a collar ad, a cross between Robert Redford and John Wayne. He always looks as if he’s enjoying himself, as if it was fun peeling all these blocking backs off and throwing them over the sidelines. He laughs when he swallows up the quarterback. You’d think it was ballroom dancing instead of modified murder. Most defensive ends look as if their feet hurt or their pants were too tight. Jack Youngblood looks as if he just heard a good joke or is learning the tango.

  He’s the Rams’ Good Humor Man. He goes through life as if he is passing out popsicles. His mayhem has a kind of impersonal quality to it, like a surgeon who is not hurting you on purpose.

  He’s as durable as a diamond, as indestructible as an ingot. He has the center of gravity of a kewpie. You might knock him off the line of scrimmage but never off his feet. He has played in 171 consecutive games, two of them on a broken leg.

  He is the last of the Super Rams, the last link with the gaudy era of the Fearsome Foursome, the Secretary of Defense, the annual best team-in-the-league — on paper — Rams. When they were the Rams, not the Goats.

  “When I first came up, they had players like Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, Diron Talbert, Coy Bacon, Fred Dryer, Hacksaw Reynolds, Larry Brooks and Jack Pardee. You were lucky to get a suit,” Youngblood was recalling the other day.

  The signature of the Rams was always the pass rush. It was the best west of Pittsburgh and south of Lombardi’s Green Bay. And Youngblood kept that tradition alive through four head coaches and almost twice as many line coaches. “(Head Coach) Tommy Prothro was aloof, cerebral. He almost never had personal contact with us, Chuck Knox was macho. He wanted a show of hands of guys ready to play. He thought defense won games and offense just tried to keep from losing them. Ray Malavasi was an astute tactician who trusted people to give 100%. Naturally, they took advantage of him.”

  As to changes in the game, Youngblood remembers principally that they took the left hook and the right cross out of it. It wasn’t football, it was pugilism. The all-purpose head slap. “You practiced it in the gym on the heavy bag and the light one. You came through the line of scrimmage like Rocky Marciano. You hit everything that got in your way right in the helmet. The advantage of the head slap was, it made the guy either turn his head or close his eyes or both.”

  Youngblood recalls that when Deacon Jones got through an afternoon of knocks to the head, his opponent had a permanent ringing in his ears, as if he had spent the day in the Liberty Bell.

  When they outlawed that, the line of scrimmage resembled less Dempsey-Tunney than Veloz-Yolanda. Now the Rams are going to the three-man front or the volleyball defense. Will it neutralize the vaunted Rams pass rush, will the coaches opt for a newer, more stylish attacker? Will Jack Youngblood stop laughing?

  Jack Youngblood smiles. “I can play for them (the Rams), all right. The question is can I play for me?”

  In other words, Jack Youngblood has to meet Jack Youngblood’s standards, not the league’s.

  It’s not likely the syllables will come to mean Jack Oldblood, then. It’s likely they will still have the same effect on the league as smoke signals to a wagon train. A man who can play a Super Bowl on one leg can probably play a three-man front on crutches and the consonants in the name Y-o-u-n-g-b-l-o-o-d will still cause offensive tackles to blink their eyes or young quarterbacks to run for their lives event if he’s only got two other renegades instead of three.

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

———

THE LOS ANGELES RAMS: HOME AGAIN

A History of LA’s Team from the Voice of the City

Los Angeles Times Sports Columnist Jim Murray columns 1961-1995

 Proceeds from book sales benefit the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation journalism scholarship program.

JMMF Federal Tax ID number is #94-3331025

To purchase, please call: (800) 934-9313

ISBN: 9780182212095

———

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation? 

  The Jim Murray Memorial Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, established in 1999 to perpetuate the Jim Murray legacy, and his love for and dedication to his extraordinary career in journalism. Since 1999, JMMF has granted 104 $5,000 scholarships to outstanding journalism students. Success of the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation’s efforts depends heavily on the contributions from generous individuals, organizations, corporations, and volunteers who align themselves with the mission and values of the JMMF.

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1961, SPORTS

Copyright 1961/THE TIMES MIRROR COMPANY

JIM MURRAY

Yogi Berra, the Legend

   CINCINNATI — If you turn on your television set this weekend to watch the World Series and suddenly come upon what appears to be a large, shaggy bear in baseball uniform trying to roller-skate up an icy hill, don’t switch channels.

  This will be Lawrence Peter Berra trying to match wits with the left-infield incline in Crosley Field, a ballpark designed either by a man with the sense of humor of an urchin who puts banana peels on sidewalks or one who just hates outfielders as a class.

  The outfield in this ballpark is so steep in places the players should have oxygen and a Sherpa guide to scale it. It has produced more pratfalls than Mack Sennett in his heyday, and the sight of Yogi Berra and this incline coming together in combat should be funnier than watching Jackie Gleason and Elsa Maxwell trying to cha-cha.

  Yogi Berra, it happens, is funny just standing still. In many respects, he is the most famous baseball player the game has had since Babe Ruth.

  He is ageless — and changeless. He came upon the scene so many years ago and looked so old even when he was young there are those who think he was Columbus’ cabin boy.

  The day he leaves baseball two million fans may leave it with him. He is as much a part of the legend of America as Paul Bunyan or John Henry. He is the patron saint of three generations of American kids with catchers’ mitts in their hands, and no churchman could seriously object. Yogi Berra is a man who has remained a boy — a rich man who remembered what it was like to be poor.

  The face is sad. It has been said it is ugly but it is not, lit in the center by large, sad and curiously gentle eyes. It is the color of gray paste — a city face. It is a comforting face, the kind one trusts. “Hey, Yogi,” yell people with a chuckle who have never seen him before. A lineman outside the ballpark laughs delightedly when he looks over the fence and sees the familiar face and figure.

  It is a silhouette baseball didn’t know whether to believe or not when they first saw it. This lumpy man, a perfect 50 in measurements — 50-inch chest, middle and two 25-inch calves — with the two protruding ears, the head that seems to grow, neckless, right out of the shoulders, couldn’t possibly be an athlete. Baseball didn’t know whether to turn him over to the minor leagues or Clyde Beatty.

  Yogi, of course, turned out to be one of the most superbly skilled athletes of his time. He came to symbolize the New York Yankees, the haughtiest team in the annals of sports.

  He outlasted derision by his own simple dignity and friendliness. The bench jockeys at first hopped about the dugout on all fours, scratched themselves busily like caged primates, called out “Hey, Berra, what tree did they pull you out of?” and offered him peeled bananas. It was that kind of ridicule that made a Ty Cobb behave forever afterward on the field with insensate rage and vengeance, but Yogi ignored — and forgave. His own dignity (and his bat) at first silenced and then made ashamed his ridiculers.

  Yogi was unique. He is probably the only guy in history who wrote a book but never read one. The jokes were endless. But there was no cutting edge to them. Sometimes they even illustrated Yogi’s innate kindness to his fellow man. Like the fellow who rousted him out of bed in the early morning, “Did I wake you up, Yogi?” he chirped. “Oh no,” apologized Yogi. “I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”

  Then there was the balloon salesman in Washington who had a fistful of dirigible-sized balloons. “Want one, Yogi? For the kids.” “Oh, no,” said Yogi. “I’d never be able to get them in the suitcase.”

  People smile when his name is mentioned. Housewives who are not sure what city Yankee Stadium is in feel a glow of affection for Yogi Berra. Their kids know a cartoon character named Yogi Bear who owes his existence to Yogi Berra’s, and they laugh with and love them both.

  Yogi was a catcher who was as chatty as a Bronx housewife behind the plate. He’s lonelier now in the outfield. So he chats with the fans.

  The New York Yankees came into Cincinnati on their special train at 9 o’clock in the morning on Friday. Yogi Berra was out at the ballpark at 11:30. He was practising catching fly balls on the left-field incline, a professional to the core even after so many World Series and so many records it takes calculation machines the size of election coverage computers to list them all.

  There was a curiously sad tableau taking place in the park as Yogi arrived. High in the back of the stands as Yogi Berra, a study in perseverance, chased thrown fly balls, a lonely, frightened man stood poised, naked, on the roof’s edge threatening to jump. He didn’t. He was coaxed down. But you wonder, watching Yogi Berra, how a man could give in to despair.

  Yogi Berra thinks he’s lucky to be in baseball. I think it’s the other way around.

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

———

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation? 

  The Jim Murray Memorial Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, established in 1999 to perpetuate the Jim Murray legacy, and his love for and dedication to his extraordinary career in journalism. Since 1999, JMMF has granted 104 $5,000 scholarships to outstanding journalism students. Success of the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation’s efforts depends heavily on the contributions from generous individuals, organizations, corporations, and volunteers who align themselves with the mission and values of the JMMF.

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.