GEORGE ALLEN, the football coach, had to fill out an insurance form for his players. The instructions asked that he list all employees and addresses, broken down by sex. Allen wrote, “None. Our main problem seems to be alcohol.”
It is not always easy to know what football means. As we head into another Super Bowl Week, the week of words, here is the collected wisdom of everyone who ever had anything interesting to say about football:
“After being introduced and running through the goal posts, football is all downhill.”–Linebacker Doug Swift.
“When you are younger, you think football is a game.”–Quarterback Richard Todd.
“THE TWO WORST things in football are: 1, They think that a 30-year- old professional athlete has to be locked up in a hotel room, with a curfew, the night before a game; and 2, They’re right.”–Safety Cliff Harris.
“Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the streets.”– Author Jimmy Breslin.
“Don’t bother to read the playbook. Everybody dies in the end.”– Receiver Pete Gent.
“Running into the line, you go into a different world. All around you guys are scratching, clawing, beating on each other, feeling pain. It’s too bad more people haven’t been in there, where football is really played.”– Fullback Larry Csonka.
“MY IDEA of a good hit is when the victim wakes up on the sidelines with train whistles blowing in his head and wondering who he is and what ran over him.”–Safety Jack Tatum.
“Everyone has some fear. A man with no fear belongs in a mental institution. Or on special teams.”–Coach Walt Michaels.
“There’s nothing wrong with reading the game plan by the light of the jukebox.”–Quarterback Ken Stabler.
“Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners. Only survivors.”–Halfback Frank Gifford.
“Football is one of the last great strongholds of genuine, old- fashioned hypocrisy.”–Author Paul Gallico.
“THERE HASN’T been anything new in football in the last 50 years.”– Hall of Famer Red Grange.
“Some players now aren’t sure whether football is a vocation or avocation. You know what it is to me? It’s blood.”–Coach Sid Gillman.
“I tackle everybody and then throw them away until I come to the one with the ball.”–Defensive tackle Big Daddy Lipscomb.
“If any one of my sons would weigh a possible broken bone against the glory of being chosen to play for Harvard’s team, I would disinherit him.”– President Theodore Roosevelt.
“I knew it was time to quit football when I was chewing out an official and he walked off the penalty faster than I could keep up with him.”–Coach George Halas.
“FOOTBALL IS not a contact sport. It is a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.”–Coach Duffy Daugherty.
“I played football before they had headgear, and that’s how I lost my mind.”–Baseball manager Casey Stengel.
“Football is a game for madmen. In football, we’re all mad. I have been called a tyrant, but I have also been called the coach of the simplest system in football, and I suppose there is some truth in both of those. The perfect name for the perfect coach would be Simple Simon Legree.”–Coach Vince Lombardi.
“When you are discussing a successful coach, you are not necessarily drawing the profile of an entirely healthy person.”–Psychologist Bruce Ogilvie.
“A good coach needs a patient wife, a loyal dog and a great quarterback, but not necessarily in that order.”–Coach Bud Grant.
“IF YOU WANT to drop off the face of the Earth, become an assistant football coach.”–Quarterback Bob Griese.
“Politics and pro football are the most grotesque extremes in the theatric of a dying regime. It is no accident that the most repressive political regime in the history of this country is ruled by a football freak.”–Linebacker Dave Meggyesy.
“Throwing a pass and seeing a man catch it and seeing him in the end zone and seeing the referee throw his arms up in the air, it’s an incredible feeling. It’s like your whole body is bursting with happiness. I guess there’s only one thing in the world that compares to it.”–Quarterback Joe Namath.
“I am not an animal.”–Defensive end Deacon Jones.
“Gentlemen, you are about to play football for Yale against Harvard. Never in your lives will you do anything so important.”–Coach T.A.D. Jones. “If the Super Bowl is the ultimate game, why are they playing it again next year?”–Running back Duane Thomas.