[ARETE] Sam Huff as Symbol

[richard crepeau]

SPORT AND SOCIETY FOR ARETE

NOVEMBER 16, 2021



Sam Huff, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, died this past week. His passing was noted in several places as former players and students of the game described his greatness. As a member of the New York Giants defense in the 1950s and early 60’s, Huff was one of the first to make the position of middle linebacker the key to defensive football. He became the architype of the middle linebacker setting the stage for the rise of great defenses and defensive players in the NFL.

As a great player, Sam Huff helped to move professional football to the position of National Pastime. He was the right man in the right place at the right time, and he became an important face of the league.

The year 1959 was a turning point for professional football. It was the year when Vince Lombardi became the head coach of the Green Bay Packers and transformed that franchise into a dominant championship team. It was the year that the national media began paying increased attention to the NFL.

In 1959, Esquire published “The Wham in Pro Football,” in which Thomas Morgan wrote about the importance of male rituals of controlled violence at a time when American males were in a crisis over male identity and gender roles. It was a time when Americans worried about softness and poor physical conditioning in the Cold War world of competition with the Soviet Union. The President’s Council on Physical Fitness was formed to address these issues, and professional football addressed them as well.

Morgan believed that professional football was a game that was “harder, meaner and more acute” than the college game. It offered pleasure in the form of “sanctioned savagery” in a sometimes dull and boring world of work. It was an antidote to the corruption and self-indulgence of the consumer culture.

These fears and anxieties were brought to the attention of the wider population by a November 30, 1959 Time Magazine cover story titled “A Man’s Game.” Laced with testosterone-tainted prose, the Time story described battle-tested men who were larger than life with “sheer brute strength.” More than just raw strength these defensive players embodied the “subtle scheming” that was at the heart of professional football. Time found in Sam Huff the perfect combination of brains and brawn. He was the “quarterback” of the Giants’ defense who could “read” and “react” to the plays developing in front of him. He rushed the quarterback and disrupted the offense.

Huff told the Time reporters that “you play as rough and vicious as you can” so that if “you hit a guy, you hurt him instead of him hurting you.” “Football,” he said, “is a game of awesome violence.” He went on to say “we try to hurt everybody. We hit each other as hard as we can. This is a man's game."



The following season CBS television, the network of the NFL, produced a thirty-minute program titled, “The Violent World of Sam Huff.” With the narration by the dean of CBS news, Walter Cronkite, Huff was wired for sound and filmed at practice and in an exhibition game. The sounds of bone crunching tackles and the grunts and groans of the players were brought into the living rooms of millions in a cinema-verité style of memorable force.

The impact of this thirty minutes inside football was stronger than anyone had imagined it would be, as it sent a shot of testosterone across the nation. With the NFL as entertainment, who could now believe that the nation was going soft? It indeed, as Time reiterated, “is a Man’s Game.”



Over the next decade Professional football grew. The American Football League challenged the National Football League, and near the end of the 1960s, the AFL and NFL merged into a sports powerhouse that dominated the television networks and began its reign as the new National Pastime.



The violence of Sam Huff morphed into the graceful and balletic violence seen on replays and in the films of Ed Sabol, with their classical music sound track and slow-motion bone crunching tackles narrated by the booming and unforgettable voice of John Facenda. In these presentations of the “NFL Game of the Week,” football became a game of artistic and majestic quality, while all the while marketing violence.



All of this came rushing back this past week with the news of the death of Sam Huff, the symbolic figure of the new national pastime who was a central figure in the rise of the NFL.

On Sport and Society this is Dick Crepeau reminding you that you don’t have to be a good sport to be poor loser.



Copyright 2021 by Richard C. Crepeau



***This essay is adapted from portions of NFL Football: A History of America’s New National Pastime by Richard C. Crepeau and published in a new edition by the University of Illinois Press.

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