20 YEARS AGO . . . : SAYERS’ BIG DAY : Before Walter Payton, a Gale Force Took Windy City by Storm in 6-Touchdown Performance Against 49ers

On a sunny afternoon in March or April, Windy City is an apt nickname for Chicago.

In a cold December rainstorm, though, it’s Mean City.

Rain was falling hard 20 years ago today when a young Chicago resident named Gale Sayers got up and went to work.

A running back for the Chicago Bears, Sayers, if offered his druthers at game time, would have chosen a fast track. But on muddy Wrigley Field, he didn’t give up. Or slow down.

In one of the more remarkable individual achievements in sports history, Sayers scored six touchdowns that day, Dec. 12, 1965, tying the National Football League record.

A six-touchdown performance in 60 minutes is comparable to four home runs in nine innings, and even rarer. Seven men have hit four home runs in nine-inning games. During the NFL’s first 66 years, only two other men besides Sayers have scored six touchdowns in one game.

Ernie Nevers of the old Chicago Cardinals did it first, rushing for six touchdowns against the 1929 Bears. Later, Dub Jones of the Cleveland Browns ran for four and caught two touchdown passes against the 1951 Bears.

Sayers rushed for four touchdowns, scored one on a long punt return and caught a pass for another on that mean Chicago day as the Bears routed the San Francisco 49ers, 61-20.

“I can still see the 49ers sloshing around in the mud,” Sayers said from his Chicago home recently. “It seemed like everyone was slipping but me.”

At the time, Sayers was a 205-pound rookie. He went on to a Hall of Fame career in seven Bear seasons, disappeared after three knee operations, and surfaced again a few years ago as a college athletic director.

Today, he is at his third college--as interim athletic director at Tennessee State--on his three days off each week from the computer service firm he and his wife run in Chicago.

“The 85-yard punt return was the most fun,” Sayers said of his six-touchdown day. “It was my last touchdown of the game, and just trying to catch a punt in that rain was an experience. Then I had to make several cuts on a bad field, and I’ve always been proud that I had enough left in the fourth quarter to run the ball in.”

Cutting is what made Sayers famous. He has been called the only running back who ever made 45-degree cuts without losing speed. But that is hard to do on a muddy track. In fact, how did Sayers do it?

“I remember cutting more on the back part of my feet,” he said. “I planted my heels instead of my toes.”

Is this a rainy-day skill that can be acquired?

“It was nothing I ever practiced,” Sayers said. “I just knew it had to be done.”

In other words, like all great running backs, Sayers ran with skill on off-tracks, and he did it on instinct.

Three of his touchdowns that day resulted from long runs. He went 50 yards on third and one, 80 on a screen pass from quarterback Rudy Bukich and 85 on the punt return. His three other touchdowns measured 7, 1 and 20 yards.

Thanks to his weaving, cutting tactics, Sayers said he was untouched on all six trips, with one small exception. “The 20-yarder was an off-tackle run to my left,” he said. ‘I was finally hit going into the end zone.”

Asked what he was thinking about 20 years ago today, Sayers said:

“I was trying to get the last half-yard out of every play. To me, football is a game of 5- and 10-yard sprints. The defensive pursuit is so good that you don’t get many 50s. Quickness is the key, and I always felt that that was my asset--seeing the hole, getting in and out of it quick . . . turning 1- and 2-yard plays into 5s and 10s.”

Merlin Olsen, a fellow Hall of Famer, knows what that means. An all-pro defensive lineman before, during, and after Sayers’ time, Olsen said:

“I never looked forward to playing him. Every time Gale got the football, he made me sick to my stomach. The first year he came out to the Pro Bowl, the same thing happened. They handed Sayers the football, and I started to feel nauseated. I had to tell myself: ‘Wait a minute, he’s on my side now.’ ”

Olsen, an NBC broadcaster today, remembers a game when Sayers cut through him at Wrigley Field for a 10-yard touchdown.

“I had my arms completely around him,” Olsen said. “Suddenly he was gone, in the other direction, I guess. I didn’t even know where he went.”

Sayers’ life before pro ball was conventional enough. He spent most of it in Wichita, where he was born, and Omaha, where he grew up. His father was a mechanic. His brother Ron, who also played football, later had a five-year career with the Chargers.

It was as a running back at the University of Kansas that Gale first drew national attention.

“My senior year, we won the Big Eight title,” he said.

That rang a bell in the Bears’ offices in Chicago, where Coach George Halas had delegated responsibility for the draft to his defensive coordinator, George Allen.

“We worked in a room with a long table and a big blackboard,” said Allen. “The night before the (1965) draft, when I wrote the top 50 names on the blackboard, Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers were the top two. When Chicago’s turns came, we took them first and second.”

Halas said later that it was the Bears’ best draft.

“It was the only time any NFL team has picked two Hall of Famers 1-2,” he said.

Sayers began his pro career as rookie of the year, scoring a record 22 touchdowns in 1965, and by 1971 he had been unanimously voted all-pro five times. He was named to five Pro Bowls, played in four, and was chosen most valuable offensive player in three. Butkus, a nine-year Bear, was in eight Pro Bowls.

“When you played the Bears, you built your game plans around Butkus and Sayers,” said Allen, who in 1966 started five years as coach of the Rams. “You never let a Hall of Famer beat you.”

Still, during Sayers’ first appearance against Allen, he swept left, ran into a stone wall of Rams keying on him, cut back and circled 60 yards for a touchdown.

“After that, we defensed him across the field,” Allen said.

Sayers used to make it a point to upset his opponents’ game-plan scheming.

“I always prepared myself for the unexpected,” he said. “Our scouts gave us the defense’s tendencies on third and three, or second and five, and they were right 60 or 70% of the time.

“But I always asked myself, ‘What if this team changes up on me? What if my offensive tackle gets beat by Deacon Jones?’ I spent a lot of the (practice) week looking for other avenues that might be open if the unexpected happened.”

At the height of his career, Sayers went down with a severe knee injury when 49er defensive back Kermit Alexander submarined under a pile of players and bumped him.

“I never saw Kermit coming,” Sayers said. “But the injury was only serious because they had to saw through muscles and nerves. If they’d had arthroscopic techniques in those days, I’d have been back on the practice field in a couple of weeks.”

When Sayers returned to football a year later, he came up with another 1,000-yard season. But, said Olsen, “He was never the same.”

In the early 1970s, two more knee injuries finished his career.

Although Sayers and his wife, Ardie, specialize in computers these days, people keep trying to make an athletic director out of him.

First Kansas and then Southern Illinois brought him into their athletic departments, and now it’s Tennessee State.

“Nothing I’ve done in computers or football compares with the thrill they gave me when they put me in the Pro Football Hall of Fame,” he said.

“I only played 68 pro games, you know. That’s only 4 1/2 years of football--the way it is now in these 16-game seasons. To make the Hall of Fame in 4 1/2 years, you have to be pretty lucky.”

Or pretty good.

His biggest NFL day?

It wasn’t the six-touchdown day, in Sayers’ opinion.

“That wasn’t even my biggest day that year,” he said. “The Bears only needed three touchdowns to win that game. The one that means the most to me is beating the (1965) Vikings, 45-39. I scored four touchdowns against them, and we needed every one.”

THE SAYERS SIX

How Gale Sayers scored his six touchdowns against San Francisco 49ers on Dec. 12, 1965.

First Quarter 80-yard pass play

Second Quarter 20-yard run

7-yard run

Third Quarter

50-yard run

1-yard run

Fourth Quarter 85-yard punt return