The Clock Runs Out This Time

When I heard the old quarterback, Bobby Layne, was at third and long in some hospital, I thought, “Well, that’s Bobby’s down. He always could handle it.”

Turns out for once he couldn’t. Bobby couldn’t check off any more. The most terrible linebacker of all, Death, got the sack. For Bobby, the pocket collapsed. He couldn’t read the blitz.

Any death is premature, but Bobby’s is more so than most. Bobby doesn’t belong to football’s leather-helmeted past. He was just here a few moments ago, engineering a fourth-quarter drive calculated to score the winning touchdown just as the clock ran out.

Bobby didn’t miss much in life. Wherever there was a drink to be drunk, a dance to be hoofed, a song to be sung, a crap shoot to fade, a horse to be bet, a card to be dealt, Bobby sat in.

I got to know Bobby Layne many years ago when I was in the magazine dodge and we put him on the cover of Time when he was almost the best thing in cleats in the National Football League.

I never saw anybody like Bobby. Before or since. I don’t know when he slept, but nobody ever caught him at it.

I remember one election night in a bistro in Detroit called Russell’s, which was closed that day because of the voting laws. I was sitting with the owner when, at a late hour, the door flew open and two Detroit Lions fell in--Bobby and a buddy, Lavern Torgeson. They had obviously not been to high Mass, but Bobby was not through yet.

Calling for a few more libations to be screened in coffee mugs, he sat till street lights began to dim, giving me an illustrated lecture on the shortcomings of the Los Angeles Rams as a football team, their problem, as I recall it, being that they were much more suited to careers as interior decorators than interior linemen. The four-letter word he used to identify them was not Rams.

The next morning, as the temperature hovered around 9 degrees, this pride of the Lions was in stocking cap and sweat suit, bawling plays in practice on the turf of Tiger Stadium. For Bobby, life was all fast Layne.

Bobby didn’t have the greatest arm in the world--although he was a college pitcher on a team that went 26-0--but he almost never threw a pass where he didn’t want it to go. Bobby called his own plays and would kick out anybody the coach sent in with one.

He was a leader. He never called time out unless somebody’s ear was bleeding or lung was showing, never just to get a play from the bench. He could score quickly if he had to, but his specialty was in using precisely as much time as he had on the clock to win and prevent the other team from retaliating.

If you had a four-point lead and five minutes on the clock, you had had it, as the Rams were to find out in the key game in 1954. The Cleveland Browns had learned that in the championship game of 1953, when they had a 16-10 lead with 3 minutes to play.

Bobby went through his whole life on audibles. He didn’t think real men went to bed before the bars closed or the chips ran out. His football teams would have gone through a forest fire for him. He made only 20 grand a year, but he was a check-grabber on the order of a champagne salesman.

He used to bark signals in this laryngitic rasp that sounded as if someone had him by the throat or his collar was too tight. Even though they were beginning to come in at the time, he disdained a face mask. The defensive end who once broke his leg with a cheap shot was run out of the game within a year--not by the commissioner, by the other players in the league. Bobby was popular on both sides of the line of scrimmage.

Bobby smelled the roses along the way. He inspired loyalty, affection, admiration. He never did a mean-spirited or unmanly thing anyone can remember. Bobby came along in a golden age of quarterbacks that included Otto Graham, Bob Waterfield, Norm Van Brocklin, Y.A. Tittle, Tobin Rote and Frankie Albert. When I did a column not long ago, incautiously suggesting that Graham might have been the best there was, Nick Kerbawy, Layne’s old general manager, sent a message through an intermediary that our friendship might have been severely strained by this shocking lapse on my part.

Bobby might have had one drink too many this time. But I doubt if he thinks so. Bobby never could stand a candle burning at only one end. Bobby’s real enemy was not blitzing linebackers, rotating cornerbacks or a charging front four, it was boredom. Whenever Bobby showed up, the party jumped.

They’ve had this quarterback reunion sponsored by American Airlines over the last few years where all the top signal-callers of the game collect for a three-day frolic cum golf. “The Crazies,” the organizer, Ken George, calls them. They give out the trophies before the competition so the festivities won’t be dampened by any dull speeches.

The reminiscences and anecdotes go far into the night. The star, as usual, the leader, was Layne.

They retell the story of the time he got picked up by the Detroit police as he was headed the wrong way on a one-way street. Bobby pleaded in court that the cops misunderstood the situation because they couldn’t understand his Southern accent. The next day, his teammates hung up a sign in the locker room: “I’m not drunk, I’m just from Texas.”

In his eight years with the Lions, they won three NFL championships and four division titles--there were only two divisions in those days. They have won none since.

For once, the clock ran out on Bobby. For once, he hit a defense he couldn’t shred. But if I know Bobby Layne, he’ll shrug--and say “Where can a guy get a drink around here?”