Some Whiskey Doesn’t Mellow With the Years

The Washington Redskins called him Whiskey.

When he called his signals, his face became a bright magenta, the cords in his neck stood out and the plays were spat out in the laryngitic husk of a guy who had either taken too many straight rights to the Adam’s apple or his collar was too tight or he had sucked in too much smoke-filled air in all-night card games.

The last pass Billy Kilmer ever threw was for a touchdown. It bounced off two enemy helmets and came down in the surprised arms of tight end Jean Fugett. It was a typical Kilmer pass. It fluttered through the air like a balloon dropped from a great height with the air coming out of it.

But it was also for a touchdown.

There, you had Billy Kilmer’s career in a nutshell. He never worried about the how. Just the how many.

He didn’t have a career, he had a party. He never missed a drink or a receiver in his life.

Don’t look for Whiskey in a lot of the Redskin passing landmarks. You might look for him in the first Super Bowl the ‘Skins ever got in, though. You will also see a statistic noting that he threw 103 touchdown passes for Washington in a seven-year career.

Whiskey aged well. But what we are seeing down here at the annual meeting of the old quarterbacks’ club is a new Whiskey rebellion. Kilmer is furious at what has happened to his beloved game of football. As he played it.

The first thing he is upset about is the new “in the grasp” rule on plays where the quarterback seems successfully corralled by one or more defensive types and incapable of further mobility and the referee stops the play half completed.

Kilmer spent his entire career “in the grasp.” Whiskey was just faster than a parked truck in mid-career. He hardly ever completed a pass without one or more defensive linemen or linebackers draped all over him. Whiskey found it helped him to concentrate.

It was also reassuring if a linebacker or a cornerback was busy trying to unscrew his left arm--or his head--for Whiskey knew that fellow was accounted for and not in the pass pattern. Somebody was open somewhere. He just had to find him and launch one of his shot ducks at him.

Nobody did this any better than Kilmer. The passes might have had a, “To whom it may concern,” look about them, but they found their way, so to speak, to the right mailbox.

Whiskey thinks the new rule is rankly discriminatory.

“It’s all right for scramblers like (John) Elway or one of those guys that run all over the place like (Fran) Tarkenton used to,” Kilmer says. “But guys like me would only hear the whistle all day.”

Kilmer thinks the game is over-officiated, anyway.

“What have they got--seven guys now?” he says. “They don’t do any better job than five used to. Does the public come to see zebras? Are they stars? Or just cops? They have a meeting after every play. You’d think it was a peace treaty.”

Football has become a courtroom drama in the view of Bill. His face gets red, his eyes get big and he waves his cannon-sized cigar through billows of smoke as he thinks about it.

“They’ve taken the game away from the players!” he says. “The players are incidental today. They’re robots! Numbers. The coaches don’t say, ‘What was Jones doing on that last play?’ They say ‘What is that No. 39 doing out there?’

“The coaches send the plays in, and the officials rule on them. That’s a game? That’s a debate!

“You think George (Allen) ever sent in a play for me? I’d send it right out.

“George said, ‘You’re out there. You know what’s going on, who’s getting open, who’s beating his man.’ You can’t see those things from the press box. You can’t see them from the sidelines. You can’t feel the game from there. You can’t plot a football game, you have to play it.”

Kilmer is not the only member in good standing of the old quarterbacks’ club who thinks that way. Vito (Babe) Parilli, the 13-year veteran whom Bart Starr, no less, once credited with teaching him the pro game, believes that the fault lies with the new trick defenses--the “nickel” with five defensive backs or the “seven-card stud” with seven of them.

“They made the game cerebral,” he says. “It’s hard to run the game from the line of scrimmage.”

Kilmer is not having any.

“How can a guy 60 rows up call a game?” he wants to know. “The biggest thing is, when you get in the huddle, you say to your end, ‘Can you get your guy?’ If he says, ‘I got him, I can handle him,’ you know what to do. You got a guard who can’t pull, you don’t call a play where he has to. You know what’s going on.

“What is it this way? I’ll tell you! It lets the quarterback off the hook. It lets the guys off the hook. I’m off the spot. If they send in the play and it doesn’t work, hey, it’s not my fault. It’s not the team’s fault. The team just says, ‘Well, those dummies sent the play in. Don’t blame us!’

“You go in the locker room and it’s like the quarterback feels he didn’t do it. His attitude is, ‘We lost--but don’t look at me. I only did what they told me.’

“I played till I was 39 because George, he let us play football. They can’t play football now. It’s a chess game. You got 20 coaches and 7 officials throwing flags right and left.

“And now they got that ‘in the grasp’ rule. It’s not doing any good! They had, what, 12 quarterbacks injured last year? They had fewer injuries before that rule!

“If a guy slams a quarterback to the ground and tears his leg off, give him 15 yards and kick him out of the league! That’ll stop them. But let the guys play the game!”

For Whiskey, that’s the only way to keep the game bonded, 100-proof and aged in the wood. Today’s game he regards as a lot of moonshine. Or bull shine.