#22

 

GALE SAYERS

There are many sportswriters who would not include Gale Sayers on a list of the 165 greatest players in pro-football history, let alone the top 65. Forgive me for being blunt, but those people are simply ignorant.

Sayers’s career was short (shorter even than Earl Campbell’s). Sayers began in the NFL in 1965 and was done by the end of the 1971 season. Knee injuries ripped his career apart. However, he was a comet that flew over the NFL with remarkable running skills that would have made him the best at his position in many eras. Perhaps Jim Brown had more overall talent and perhaps Barry Sanders was more elusive. However, if you put all three of them in the same training camp and had to give the job to one of them, Sayers may very well have won that competition.

The Chicago Bears’ George Halas drafted Sayers in 1965 and knew that he had something special when he watched his college films from Kansas. Halas had been basically the driving force behind the NFL when it came into existence 45 years earlier. His barnstorming tour with Red Grange in 1925 gave pro football the credibility it was lacking and helped start the NFL on its way toward becoming the most successful sports league ever. Halas looked at Sayers and compared him to Grange.

The comparison couldn’t have been more correct. Grange was explosively fast in his heyday, quick as a hiccup, and simply exploded into the secondary any time he could find daylight. Four decades after the Galloping Ghost’s Bears debut, Sayers established himself as a superstar as a rookie by scoring six touchdowns in one game on a rainy afternoon against the San Francisco 49ers on December 12, 1965. He had 336 all-purpose yards in the 61–20 rout. NFL Films used that game to get the inside story on Sayers and they captured the running back’s essence on the field when he explained what he needed to be successful. “Just give me 18 inches of daylight,” Sayers said without a hint of a smile. “That’s all I need.”

Sayers’s six-touchdown performance—tying a mark set by Ernie Nevers of the Chicago Cardinals against Halas’s Bears in 1929—was remarkable because it came on a field that was in miserable condition because of the rain. Most of the players were slipping and sliding and that made tackling Sayers a major issue. But for some reason, Sayers seemed comfortable on the muddy field. Sayers had TD runs of 21, 7, 50, and 1 yards. He also scored on an 80-yard reception on a screen pass and on an 85-yard punt return. “I never thought about what the weather was like or what the field was like,” Sayers said. “I just thought about doing my job. I wanted to run with the ball and score if possible. On that day every time I looked up there was a lane to the end zone.”

The Bears had a mediocre offensive line in those days yet Sayers still scored a league-leading 22 total touchdowns as a rookie despite being the center of attention every time he stepped onto the football field. The extra attention didn’t bother Sayers at all. “I don’t care how many of the defensive players are trying to key on me,” Sayers explained. “They can only put 11 men on the field and they can all look at me. They have to tackle me and that’s the issue.”

Sayers’s ability to start, get to full speed, stop, and cut in a heartbeat was thrilling to Halas. “Gale detects daylight,” Halas said. “The average back, when he sees a hole, will try to bull his way through. But Gale, if the hole is even partly clogged, instinctively takes off in the right direction. And he does it so swiftly and surely that the defense is usually frozen.”

Like Barry Sanders, Sayers could not always explain his methods. But he could explain his game plan. “If they think they know where I am going, that’s fine,” Sayers explained. “But when they get to the spot they think I’m going to be, I will not be there at that moment.”

Sayers suffered the first of two devastating knee injuries in a 1968 game against the San Francisco 49ers when defensive back Kermit Alexander hit him in the right knee and tore ligaments. If the injury had happened a couple of generations later, Sayers would have had arthroscopic surgery and returned in nearly the same condition he was in before the damage had been done. Instead, Sayers didn’t return until 1969 and the injury had left him more of power back than the unique talent who could run like the wind and find the opening in the defense.

Sayers didn’t give up or complain that the injury had robbed him of his unique talent, though. Instead, he ran for 1,032 yards and eight touchdowns as he bowled tacklers over and created shocking force when he hit them.

Sayers was in the process of making his transition from speed back to power back and he was doing a good job at it. Then he tore ligaments in his left knee in a 1970 preseason game and that was basically it for his career. He worked to rehab but he could no longer bring it the way he had before the injury.

As a result, Sayers had to retire after the 1971 season having amassed 4,956 career rushing yards, an average of 5.0 yards per carry and 39 rushing touchdowns. He added nine more scores as a receiver, six as a kickoff returner, and two as a punt returner. He even threw a touchdown pass when the Bears asked him to throw the option pass. There wasn’t a thing Sayers was incapable of doing on the football field and he knows that injuries kept him from doing more. “I would have played for many more years had I had that opportunity,” Sayers said. “I think my numbers would have been much more memorable had I been able to continue to run the way I could have when I first came up.”

There’s little doubt that Sayers’s assessment was right on.