<i> Two</i> Rams Put On Rushing Show
Ho-hum.
Another victory for vanilla ice cream. Another score for white bread, creamed tuna on toast, layer cake.
The Rams did everything but revive the Flying Wedge to win a playoff football game Saturday. Their attack would have wowed ‘em in 1928. They completed six passes, thus tying the old Pudge Heffelfinger teams at Yale in nought-nought.
It was more than enough. The Dallas Cowboys didn’t show up. The game was played without them. Obviously, somebody sent out a call to Central Casting and suited up a bunch of guys from Hollywood and Vine. These weren’t the Dallas Cowboys, these were the drugstore cowboys. Midnight cowboys. All hat and no cattle.
This wasn’t America’s Team. This wasn’t even Bridgeport’s team. The last time a bunch of cowboys looked this bad was at Little Big Horn.
This was an adult western. You know how the Dallas Cowboys used to be. The fastest guns in the game. The guys right out of the pages of Zane Grey. These guys were right out of the pages of Louisa May Alcott.
The Dallas Cowboys used to be the desperadoes of the game. The gunfighters of the league. The guys who said, “If you want to say that, smile,” or, “I wouldn’t reach if I were you, son.” They used to evoke images of Davy Crockett, Sam Bowie, the Alamo, Fort Apache, John Wayne, High Noon.
This bunch couldn’t even circle the wagons. Custer would have left them in the fort.
The Rams weren’t exactly a juggernaut. Eric Dickerson was a juggernaut. He gained more ground faster, and with less effort, than Stalin at the peace treaties.
Apart from him, the game was a drag. The Rams are the death of the party. Ever notice how they darken a room when they enter it?
Their quarterback had more incomplete passes than the 5th Fleet on its last shore leave. He filled the air with passes. Unfortunately, that’s all he filled.
The Rams are a funny team. You can’t be sure they’re leveling. Like, the last game they played, they lost to the Raiders, and the coach said later that he wasn’t putting the A game out there for the opposition to make notes on.
Makes you wonder. The game Saturday, then, kind of reminded you of the old Joe Palmer story about the horse trainer named Jack who once suspiciously finished second with a better horse, and there was grumbling among his pals, the books. One day, a lady who Palmer reported may have been his wife opened fire on him in a saloon, putting him into mad flight amid a shower of poorly aimed but sincerely meant .45 slugs. And one of the bookies lounging by the bar watched this tableau and, as the fugitive went through the swinging doors, drawled: “How about it, Jack? Are you trying this time?”
The question could almost be put to the Rams Saturday. They didn’t exactly win the game--they inherited it. “It was a defense-oriented contest,” admitted their coach, John Robinson, after the fact.
They gave the ball to Eric Dickerson 34 times, which is a good thing to do. As another ex-USC coach once said of his great running back, “If you got a cannon, you fire it.” The Rams ran the ball 41 times, which means that someone else got the ball only 7 times between 2 players. Dickerson got 248 yards rushing, 5 more than the Cowboys’ total yardage and all but 68 of his own team’s total.
But if Eric Dickerson put the game out of Dallas’ reach, a sunny cheerful giant named Gary Jeter kept it there.
Gary Jeter spent almost as much time in the Dallas backfield as Danny White. He had three sacks, which is a good season for some defensive ends, and he was personally responsible for 25 yards lost by Dallas. That means he gained over a third as many yards as the non-Dickerson Ram runners.
It was an incredible performance for a guy who couldn’t tie his shoes without screaming a year ago. Gary Jeter went through life then like a guy with a bayonet sticking out of his back.
It was a catastrophic turn of events for an athlete who had been so good in college--one of the legendary tacklers in USC history--that he not only played in three Rose Bowl games but also got drafted by the New York Giants in the first round ahead of some Heisman-candidate types.
A year ago, Jeter thought he would never play football again. It was nip-and-tuck whether he would even make a good crossing guard for a while. A herniated disk had been diagnosed, nothing a scalpel could cure. When he asked if he could play football again, the medics didn’t rule it out. Of course he could, if he could learn to handle the crutches, they told him. They weren’t too sure at the time if he could ever pick up the morning paper again.
“I thought I better start thinking about an alternate career,” he admitted after the game Saturday. “I called up 10 or 12 people who’d said they’d give me a job, and I found out a lot of people don’t mean what they say.”
Gary Michael Jeter may not be in the job market just yet. His job on the Rams calls for him to rush the passer, not take on the bone-jarring run situations. He is in the great tradition of Ram pass-rushers, the bread-and-butter play of any defense. (“We will never get defeated by the run--we have to break up the pass,” the great Deacon Jones once explained.)
Jeter is not the troglodytic, head-slapping (since outlawed) growling type of pass rusher. Jeter tries to be invisible. The guy with the ball has the impression he has just been brought down by his shadow. This shadow knows, all right.
If the Rams are to go to the Super Bowl, they have to give the ball to Dickerson, and the quarterback to Jeter. His mere presence Saturday forced Dallas to keep one back at home, which meant one receiver not in the end zone.
It might be only vanilla, but sometimes that can be Super, too.