Sayers’ Game, Not His Fame, Was Fleeting

Sandy Koufax only won 165 games in his baseball career. Dizzy Dean only won 150.

Should they be in the Hall of Fame?

Well, let me put it this way: Should the Mona Lisa be in the Louvre? Michelangelo in the Vatican?

Could they pitch? Could Shakespeare write?

They had careers of such incandescent brilliance, skills of such surpassing superiority, they are ornaments to the Hall of Fame. If they aren’t in it, it ain’t a Hall of Fame.

But they get in the game on short money and, sometimes, the purists hold to alternate views.

It superimposes the question of what is true virtuousity or fame. Is it longevity? Durability? Mozart only lived to be 35 years old. Shouldn’t his music count? Alexander only made 24. How come we call him The Great?

A friend of mine once mused that he couldn’t quite get a handle on some of baseball’s legends. Were they extraordinary men doing extraordinary things or were they ordinary men doing an ordinary thing over and over again? Were they just complicated 9-to-5 guys?

If a man gets 300 hits in a season, is he of lesser fame than a man who gets 190-200 hits a season over 20 seasons?

Some candles burn too brightly to last long. Take Gale Sayers . . . Gale Sayers may have been the only person in the United States who was surprised when he went into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on the first bounce.

Gale Sayers had only played 4 1/2 seasons in the National Football League. But no one who ever saw him could ever forget him. Bill Cosby, no less, put it best when he said Gale Sayers was the only player he ever saw who split himself in two and left the tackler with the half that didn’t have the ball.

The players called him “Magic.” Not the press or his fans, but the guys who had to catch him. George Halas called him “the greatest I have ever seen on a football field” and George Halas had seen Grange and Thorpe and Bronko Nagurski, for all of that.

His numbers were inconceivable for that time. His rookie year, 1965, he rolled up 867 yards rushing, 507 yards receiving, 660 yards returning kickoffs, 238 yards returning punts, and he turned off the lights and locked the doors. He scored 22 touchdowns. He scored 6 in one game, rolling up 336 yards in a 61-20 rout of the San Francisco 49ers.

If he had retired right then, he would have been a candidate for the Hall of Fame, but Sayers continued to terrorize NFL gridirons for seasons to come. He was to return a half-dozen kickoffs for touchdowns, the longest 103 yards and the shortest 90. His kickoff return average was 30.56.

A lot of people were shocked when Sayers got hurt when he got tackled by San Francisco’s Kermit Alexander in 1968. Not that he got hurt, that he got tackled. People didn’t think Gale Sayers could be tackled. Run out of bounds, perhaps. Slip and fall down, probably. But, stay in the grasp of a tackler? Not Sayers.

He had 20 100-yard games rushing. He did this in the days before 80% of the league went to artificial surfaces. “If Gale Sayers had carpets to run on, they’d have had to outlaw him,” the late Carroll Rosenbloom used to say.

Gale Sayers is in the Hall of Fame, but he’s not in football. You may have noticed the other day where Sayers’ team, the Chicago Bears, retired Walter Payton’s uniform (also Walter Payton) with the promise of a lifetime job for Walter.

Payton may not have been as good as Sayers--but he was as good longer. Gale Sayers accepted jobs as athletic director (at his alma mater Kansas and at Southern Illinois University) with a view to learning the business so he could move into an NFL front office. But calls to all 28 NFL franchises resulted in polite turndowns.

Sayers, now a computer-supply business owner in Chicago and Phoenix, is touring the hustings in the intent of drumming up interest in the Old Spice/NFL Rookie of the Year contest. Sayers was chosen because his marks still stamp him as the Rookie-for-all-years.

The competition is unique in that the winner (chosen by fan ballots) gets $25,000 donated to his favorite charity. Candidates are picked before the season, which has resulted in a Gale Sayers-type candidate, Bo Jackson, currently residing in sixth place because, when the balloting started, Bo was a baseball player.

It gives Gale Sayers a chance to get back in the game he loved--a game in which his own highest salary was $60,000. He signed with the Bears for a $25,000 salary despite the bidding war that was going on between the American Football League and the NFL in that era. Sayers wanted to play the Palace, not the art houses. I mean, Caruso sings in the Met and Gale Sayers runs in Wrigley Field.

The name Gale Sayers still draws a crowd and attention to the Old Spice/Rookie contest wherever he goes. Does he resent the fact No. 34 has been retired by the Bears and not No. 40? “Absolutely not,” he says. “They just hang it up some place. You remember the man, not the number.”

Does he still feel surprised at making the Hall of Fame unanimously his first year of eligibility? “Well, I’ll tell you,” admits Sayers, “you get honors for the big numbers. But I can remember games like the one where I gained only 33 yards and the headlines would say, ‘Giants Stop Sayers.’

“I had carried the ball 10 times, but on 8 of those carries it was third-and-three or third-and-two and I made a first down on all 8 of those carries and we won the game, 13-10. Those are Hall of Fame games.”

Every game Gale Sayers played was a Hall of Fame game. Meteors don’t last long. But they light the world while they’re here.