He’s Got Strong Arm, Gets Strong Backing

The thing about the Ram quarterback is, he may be the only guy in the country with a Southern accent whose name is Dieter.

If you asked 10 people who or what a Dieter Brock is, the guesses would range from a German general who served under Rommel to a six-day bicycle rider from Belgium to an East German defector.

Let’s face it: NFL quarterbacks come from Monongahela, Pa., and they’re named Joe or John or Dan, not Dieter.

But, one man who doesn’t care what name his quarterback goes by and thinks he’s the second coming of Slingin’ Sammy Baugh anyway is Ram Coach John Robinson.

Slingin’ Dieter Brock, to hear John Robinson tell it, is the greatest magician with a football this side of Johnny Unitas. Not ordinarily given to rhapsodizing, Robinson manages to sound like Keats describing an urn when his thoughts get around to Brock.

After listening to him, veteran journalists have been known to check their records to see if they’re talking about the same Dieter Brock he is.

Robinson acts as if he found Brock in the bulrushes. It’s for sure he found him. Brock was what the collegians call a walk-on. He just showed up one day with a football and a note from his mother, so to say.

If he’s as good as Robinson says he is, it’s just another triumph for the wisdom of the NFL scouting systems. These guys would put Man o’ War on a milk wagon.

You may remember, John Unitas cost the Baltimore Colts 87 cents, the price of a phone call, after every club scout had passed on him and driven him to working on a steam shovel in Pittsburgh.

Nobody wanted Bart Starr, either, and Bobby Layne kicked around in the old All-American Football Conference for years before Detroit gambled on him.

Twenty-eight NFL clubs passed on Dieter Brock when he came walking out of collegiate football 12 years ago. But that’s nothing. The college he enrolled in, Auburn, passed on him, too.

They gave the football to a guy named Pat Sullivan, doubtless because he just sounded more like a football player than a guy named Dieter. Pat Sullivan wound up with the Heisman. Dieter wound up playing for Jacksonville State.

Pat Sullivan has long since disappeared, but Brock wound up playing football for 11 years in Canada, where he hung up some records that would have put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated if he had done it someplace where there were no moose.

Brock had thrown for 210 touchdowns, had completed about seven miles’ worth of passes in his northwoods career. The trouble is, Canadian football is a passer’s paradise where the end zones are roughly the size of Rhode Island and the defenders are faced with a zone roughly the size of the Bermuda Triangle to protect.

So, Brock’s stats, impressive by U.S. standards, were nothing to get drunk over when you consider that 300-yard games, the province of only Dan Marino or Dan Fouts in this country, are commonplace in Canada, where the quarterbacks throw the ball 50 times a game on average.

With that kind of saturation bombing, even Brock’s 32-touchdown seasons seemed, so to speak, par for the courses.

So, when he came back to the States, he had, you might say, to go door to door with his hat and a football in hand and offer demonstrations of his skill, like a salesman dumping dirt on a carpet and sweeping it up with his Magic-Glo cleaner.

Only five American teams were even willing to give him an audition. After all, he not only wasn’t named Joe, but he wasn’t even from Pittsburgh. They insisted on a tryout, an ultimate indignity for a man who had been the toast of Winnipeg.

It was a little like insisting that Crosby do a chorus or two of “Melancholy Baby” before being considered for a club job, or making John Wayne ride a horse through a wash before he got the part.

The responses to his auditions in Cleveland, Green Bay and Buffalo were of the don’t-call-us variety, but at L.A., Robinson acted like a guy getting his first look at the Mona Lisa. He dashed to a phone to set the machinery in motion to deal off his regular quarterback, Vince Ferragamo, and began to talk of Dieter Brock in the hushed tones you reserve for Popes.

To the rest of the league, Brock looked less like the second coming of Sammy Baugh than the second coming of Ron Jaworski. He threw it too hard. Or, he threw it too far. Or he threw it not far enough. He seemed to miss the wide-open spaces. Zone defenses looked as unreadable as James Joyce.

If this bothered the NFL Establishment, commentators such as Joe Namath or long-suffering Ram fans, it was of no moment at all to Dieter’s great good friend, John Robinson. To John, Dieter looked like one of the immortals.

Was he too short? Well, Robinson pointed out, the program said he was 6 foot 1. What is that, Mickey Rooney? Was he too old? Well, a quarterback’s best years were 34 to 38. Look it up. So Brock was coming onto his prime. Was he too inexperienced? Hey, this guy put in 11 years in Canada, and a football is a football, isn’t it?

But, suddenly, it’s four games into the season and Dieter Brock is one of only two undefeated quarterbacks in the league, and neither of them is named Joe or Dan.

If you’ve got to have only one fan, it’s nice if he is also the coach. But, if Dieter continues to confound the smart money, look for the rest of the NFL to shortly launch a desperate search for a guy named Manfried or Wolfgang, and never mind hanging around Aliquippa anymore.