Dick Daugherty: Watching the Game Change

Featured book excerpt
Football in America: Game of the Century
By Bob Oates

As football evolved toward an ever more sophisticated sport, it also evolved into a much longer workday for the players. From its power base in the 1920s and ’30s, football began to move in the 1940s into a game that was both a mental and physical challenge. The T Formation was taking over, and the forward pass was getting to be a familiar play, but the daily intensity and focus of the modern football lifestyle was not yet. As of the mid-1950s, the laid-back day-to-day routine of the average NFL player was basically unchanged from Red Grange’s time.

But change was coming. In Los Angeles, the landmark year was 1955, when scholarly Sid Gillman took charge of the Rams and won the division as a rookie NFL coach. Under Gillman, who in his coaching outlook was a scientist like fellow Ohioan Paul Brown, the game became a different way of life for Los Angeles’ players, as I learned by visiting with them. The most articulate of these players was All-Pro linebacker Dick Daugherty, who also had been my most reliable source on the 1949-51 team, when in three consecutive years the Rams played in the NFL championship game, the Super Bowl of that distant age. By 1959, Gillman’s last year in Los Angeles, Daugherty alone of that team’s active personnel wore the black-and-gold 1951 watch, the only trophy of the only world championship the Rams won in forty-nine years in Los Angeles. The attrition of but eight years had wiped out all thirty-four of Daugherty’s teammates. Looking back one day, he said, "It would have been amusing to bring in the 1951 team for one week at the end of the ’50s. They’d have thought somebody invented a new game."

Making a comment that could have been made by any NFL predecessor in the 1920s or ’30s, Daugherty said, "When I first came up (in 1950), a football career was fun seven days a week. There were two hours of practice a day and parties every night, except Saturday."

By 1960, "It was only fun on Sunday afternoons," he said. "The rest of the time, football players were businessmen – on the job at 9 o’clock, home at 5:30 or 6."

How did the Rams get ready to win the NFL championship in 1951 with only two hours of practice a day?

"We didn’t spend much time on movies," Daugherty said. "Instead of exchanging movies with the other teams, we sent scouts to every game, and all we had to do was look over the scouting report. It didn’t take long. Suppose I was going up against (guard) Ray Bray of the Bears. The report on Bray would give me this information: ‘Been in the league seven years, one of the toughest guys in the league, will knock your hat off and step on your face.’ I could digest a report like that by noon on Tuesday and take the rest of the week off."

What kind of scouting reports did Gillman ask for?

"We got the reports on a movie screen. If we were playing the Bears, for instance, we had the movies of three different Bear games, and we ran them back and forth, over and over. The Bears still had guys who would step on your face, but now we could see exactly how they went about it."

Why did it take a week to get through a horror movie?

"Everything took longer by then. The whole bit was more complicated than in the old days, when a football practice was a lark. In my rookie year, it required practically no mental effort. In a typical week in 1951, we spent half our time running through every offensive play we had. We spent the rest of the time polishing up the only two defenses we had. We could have done that in our sleep. In fact, I often did."

How would you describe the difference in the years after you began exchanging movies?

"We began making an original approach to each new game. We concentrated on just a small percentage of the plays we were capable of operating, and we varied them specifically to fit the other team’s weaknesses. Preparing for a football game became a full-time thinking job, and the biggest change was on defense. We had more than two hundred defenses under Gillman, compared to the two we had in 1951."

Quarterback Bob Waterfield won two championships for the Rams (one in Cleveland in 1945 before the team moved to Los Angeles, the second in 1951). How do you suppose he would have done against two hundred defenses?

"Bob was a quarterback who would have thought of something. I remember the day in Chicago when one of their best players, George Connor, was giving us some trouble. We had some great players on our team, too, including Tom Fears at one end and Dan Towler at fullback, but we couldn’t move the Bears with the plays we’d been practicing every blasted morning for five months. So Waterfield improvised in the huddle. He turned to Fears and said, ‘Listen, Fears, if Connor goes out wide with you this time, I’ll send Towler through the hole he leaves. If Connor stays in the line, I’ll throw you a quick one. Be ready for anything.’ Connor went with Fears, and Towler went for a touchdown. Now, that’s exactly the way we did things after Gillman came in – except we didn’t improvise in the huddle. We prepared special plays like that all week."

What else was different in your early years?

"The year I came up, the coaches’ idea of mental preparation was a memory test. Before every game in 1951, when we won the NFL title, we had to memorize the names and numbers of all the players on the other side. If you missed one number, it was an automatic fine."

That was Jumbo Joe Stydahar’s first year as the Rams’ head coach, and I remember there were a lot of fines.

"I think Tom Fears still holds the club’s all-time practice-field record. Tom had one argument with Stydahar that went on for fifteen minutes. And every time Tom shouted something at him, Jumbo raised the price. Jumbo won the argument by rounding out the fine at an even one thousand dollars."

What was the original crime?

"Tom had been one minute late for practice."