DIFFERENCE OF DISTANCE : Despite Jerry Rice’s Big Season in ‘87, Crazylegs Hirsch, Now 64, Remains the King of the Successful Long Pass

Elroy (Crazylegs) Hirsch, the All-American halfback who became a Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Rams, was a national celebrity going into his first Pro Bowl game 36 years ago.

He had just caught 17 regular-season touchdown passes to tie Don Hutson’s 1942 National Football League record--a record that was to last for more than 40 years until Mark Clayton and Jerry Rice broke it in the 1980s.

So after he was named to the 1951 Pro Bowl, Hirsch, exuberant, wasn’t listening closely when the players were informed that the NFL had a tight budget for expenses. At the hotel that first morning, he went down to the main dining room and spent $2.60, including tip, for ham and eggs.

“On the way to practice, I told them what I’d done,” Hirsch recalled the other day. “They said, that’s all right, don’t worry about it, we’ll just take 60 cents out of your pay. You get two bucks for breakfast, including tip.”

In those days, Pro Bowl players were paid $700, but only if they won. Losers got $500.

“We couldn’t read the future,” Hirsch said, noting that the Pro Bowl, as played annually in Hawaii in recent years, is worth $10,000 to each winning player and $5,000 to losers.

“We didn’t think we were under-compensated. Where else could you make $700 an hour in the 1950s? But the players have spent more for Honolulu taxis this week than they gave us for meal money.”

The former record-holder said he will be watching Rice, the San Francisco 49ers’ All-Pro receiver, in today’s game.

“(Rice) is one of the best we’ve ever had in football,” Hirsch said. “He has fine speed and hands, and he fights for the ball.

“What does he make, $750,000 a year? That’s $730,000 more than I ever made. He should be better than me.”

The Rams actually paid Hirsch $20,000 only once. Oddly enough, that was in his first year here, the 1949 season, after they won him in a bidding war with the old All-America Football Conference.

In Hirsch’s second year, on orders from owner Dan Reeves, the Rams cut his salary to $12,000--but not for playing poorly. They just wanted the money themselves.

“The All-America Conference folded at the end of 1949,” Hirsch said. “The NFL could get by with anything they wanted to in 1950--and they wanted to cut me a lot, just about half.

“(In 1949) the Rams won the championship of the old Western Division (in an era) when there were only two divisions in the NFL. We won the championship of half the league, I mean, and we played Philadelphia in the NFL title game that year--what they call the Super Bowl now.

“I thought I’d earned a raise, not a cut.”

When he couldn’t find Reeves, Hirsch took his case to the club’s young general manager, Tex Schramm.

“I’d heard that Schramm didn’t like football players,” Hirsch said. “So all I said was, ‘D’ya think this is fair?’

“Schramm looked me up and down, and said, ‘You’ve got two choices--America or Canada.’ ”

Hirsch never played Canadian football. At 64, he is still an athletic department executive at the University of Wisconsin, and he still looks like a boy playing an older man in a school play. The butch haircut is now white.

It was a brown cut in the 1950s, when he got his NFL records in Los Angeles--the records that Rice topped this season.

In an achievement that wasn’t generally recognized or even understood at the time, Hirsch caught touchdown passes in 11 consecutive games in 1950-51. And in a 12-game season, he caught 17 touchdown passes in 1950.

Hutson scored on 17 passes in 11 games. And in 1984, Clayton scored on 18 in a 16-game season.

In strike-shortened 1987, Rice, in only 12 games, caught 22 touchdown passes--15 from Joe Montana, 7 from Steve Young--surely the No. 1 accomplishment by a pass receiver in the NFL’s first 68 seasons.

Or maybe Rice’s consecutive-game scoring streak is No. 1. It can go on next season after reaching an NFL-record 13 games this season.

“Rice has the size, speed, ability and determination to set records that will last forever,” Hirsch said.

Sid Gillman, one of Hirsch’s Ram coaches three decades ago, puts a slightly different spin on the same facts.

“If Jerry Rice had played in 1942, he’d have caught about as many touchdowns as Hutson caught,” Gillman said. “By the same token, if Hutson and Hirsch were playing today, they’d accomplish at least as much as Rice.

“Very often it’s easier to break a record than set one. (In 1951) Hirsch had no idea he was setting a consecutive-game record. They didn’t keep that statistic in those days. He’d have gone more than 11 games if they had--his coaches would have made sure of it. No pass receiver was ever more tenacious or had better hands.”

And, said NFL executive Bill Granholm, no other receiver has ever matched Hirsch in the ability to make the overhead or over-the-shoulder catch.

“That was Elroy’s trademark, the reason for his success,” said Granholm, who knew Hirsch in the old days in Wisconsin as well as in Los Angeles. “He would run down the field with his chin high in the air--with his head all the way back. Under a long pass, he didn’t look left or right as they do today--he looked up and back at the ball as it came to him over his head.

“Then he’d adjust his pace and his position on the field to the flight of the ball, and take it over his head or over a shoulder--where no defensive back could interfere. In other words, he put his head between the ball and the defensive back. That’s how he caught so many bombs.”

There is an enormous difference between Rice and Hirsch in average-yards-per-touchdown pass. Whereas Rice this season averaged 26.8 on 22 touchdown catches, Hirsch in 1951 averaged 51.2 yards on 17 touchdown catches.

Thus, Hirsch--though the record is gone--remains the greatest long-distance receiving threat of all time.

With his top 10 catches of 1951, he scored touchdowns on pass plays that measured 47, 48, 51, 53, 70, 72, 76, 79, 81 and 91 yards.

By contrast, many of Rice’s scoring catches have measured from 4 to 17 yards. Not bad--but not the same.

It was in Hirsch’s first two years, 1949-50, that the Rams became the first modern passing team.

At his home in Madison, Wis., Hirsch said it’s harder to get 80-yard touchdowns today. “But there could be more of them with better techniques. The key is to never run your pattern at top speed,” he said.

“That’s so if they overthrow you, you can run faster and get it. Always save something for the ball.

“I ran most routes at seven-eighths speed. The defensive back doesn’t know your top speed, and when the play starts he’s either backing up or running sideways.

“Even if he’s faster than you, he has to turn eventually to run with you, and you get him on the turn--especially if, just then, you shift into high gear.”

His Hall of Fame career in Los Angeles lasted for nine years after a college career that was divided between Wisconsin and Michigan by World War II. One of three children of a Wausau, Wis., iron worker, Crazylegs lettered in all four major sports at Michigan. He and his wife, Ruth, are the parents of a son and daughter.

Football writers covering his college games called him Crazylegs because, as Gillman said, “Elroy’s goofy gams went out in every direction when he ran.”

Hirsch was the 1960-69 general manager of the Rams, succeeding Pete Rozelle, who moved from Los Angeles to New York as NFL commissioner. In 1969, Hirsch returned to Wisconsin as athletic director. Now an adviser in the athletic department, he said he will seek a half-time appointment when he turns 65 in June. He said his letter of employment, known elsewhere as a contract, covers the next five years.

As an athlete, Hirsch’s best sport may have been basketball. He led the Big Ten Conference in rebounds one year. But he enjoyed football more because, “There’s more (physical) contact in football.”

Rozelle recalled Hirsch’s competitive nature. In the early 1950s, when Rozelle was the public relations director of the Rams, they lost a big game in Detroit one day when Hirsch dropped a pass.

Or as Rozelle recalls, he didn’t exactly drop it, he lost it in the sun.

“What I’ll never forget is Elroy in the dressing room,” Rozelle said. “You couldn’t console him. He sat there crying like a baby until it was nearly time to get on the bus.”

In Rozelle’s view, Hirsch’s road to 17 touchdown catches in 1951 was smoothed by two passers, Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin, and by another star receiver, Tom Fears, who also required double coverage.

“All four are in the Hall of Fame,” Rozelle said.

So that’s one way of looking at it.

“But it was harder for Hirsch to get 17 touchdowns in 1951 than it was for Rice to get 22 in 1987,” Rozelle said. “That’s because the defensive backs could bump you all over the field in 1951--and also because the 1951 hashmarks were so close to the sideline.”

Hirsch sees it about the same way.

“If you were split left (in 1951) and your team was on the left hashmark, you couldn’t run a sideline route,” Hirsch said.

“The sideline gave the defense an extra defensive back. The sideline took either Fears or me out of the offense almost every play.

“With the hashmarks in the middle now, Rice has the whole field to run around in.”

Even worse were the bumps in the 1951 bump-and-run defenses.

“They used big linebackers to bump you and defensive backs to run with you,” Hirsch said. “The toughest thing was getting away from the linebackers. A linebacker like Chuck Bednarik was like your Siamese twin. He bumped you at the snap, bumped you 10 yards down the field, and he was still bumping you a lot of times as you went for the ball.

“But it’s tough today, too, with triple coverage on a guy like Rice. You play the game in your era. In Don Hutson’s era, they had a big fat football to handle. It’s a wonder to me how Hutson caught (17) touchdowns with that ball.”

As for the two alternating Ram passers in the 1950s, Hirsch said: “There were never two better quarterbacks than Waterfield and Van Brocklin. If one guy was cold, the other was always hot.

“The thing that made us such a high-scoring team was that we had Tom Fears at the other end. Tom caught 84 passes one season for a record that lasted for years. He caught 18 in one game for an NFL record that’s still in the book.

“The (1951) Rams also had the best group of running backs in the league. We had a good, balanced team. Our coaches thought that’s why we played in three NFL (championship) games in consecutive years, and won it in 1951. And I never argue with a coach.”

Hirsch’s first Ram coach in 1949 was Clark Shaughnessy.

“Shaughnessy was the most creative coach in football history,” Hirsch said. “He was the coach who invented today’s three-end offense, with two wide receivers and a tight end.

“(In 1949) I was still playing halfback, but when Shaughnessy put me out as a flanker, Fears and I were the NFL’s first two wide receivers. The first tight end was Bob Shaw, who came to the Rams from Ohio State and stood 6 feet 4 inches and weighed 225.

“Shaughnessy was born in the 19th Century, when the horse was king. So some of his terminology was out of the horse-and-buggy age. His halfbacks, left and right, were gee and haw. I was gee. But he had the freshest approach to football I’d known.”

Shaughnessy had the bad fortune to work for one of football’s most perverse teams. The Rams joyously rehired him after his disappointing 6-5-1 first season in 1948--then fired him in 1949 after an 8-2-2 season, which brought Los Angeles its first appearance in an NFL title game.

A year later, with Joe Stydahar coaching and Hamp Pool as offensive coordinator, Hirsch got a rude introduction to modern football, phase two.

“They made me a tight end (in 1950),” he said. “I was football’s second tight end. Played it the whole year.”

That was the year that Glenn Davis replaced Hirsch as the Rams’ left halfback-wide receiver and caught a touchdown bomb on Christmas Eve in Cleveland when they lost the NFL title game to Paul Brown’s first NFL team, 30-28.

Hirsch was back at wide receiver in 1951 when the Rams won their only NFL championship, outscoring the Browns, 24-17. The winning touchdown came, of course, on a long pass--Van Brocklin to Fears, 73 yards.

Rice catches that kind occasionally now. Others caught two in the most recent Super Bowl game. But on an average football Sunday in this era, the long pass is a rarity.

Will it ever come back? Is Hirsch the last to average 50 yards on a series of long touchdowns?

It isn’t likely to happen again, Hirsch believes.

“You can’t bomb these defenses today very often,” he said. “In general, we were covered man-for-man (in the 1950s). Zone defenses take away the long pass. You can’t throw over the deep zone. It’s too deep.”

Hirsch also made these points:

--Modern defensive football is based on offensive tendencies. “The defensive coordinators will take away the bomb or anything else you do too often,” he said.

--Possession of the ball is more important now than it used to be. “You can’t maintain possession with long passes.”

--Cornerbacks are faster than they were in the ‘50s. They’re often the fastest players on a 1980s team. “They also get more help (from linebackers and safeties) than they used to.”

--Finally, “There’s more at stake now,” Hirsch said. “The salaries of the coaches and players are so large that they’re set for life with a few winning seasons. They hate to gamble with their future, and a long pass is always something of a gamble.”

At 25, Rice may well continue his scoring binge today, and he’s odds-on to extend it next year. But, Hirsch said, “He won’t do it with bombs.”

‘You can’t bomb these defenses today very often. In general, we were covered man-for-man (in the 1950s). Zone defenses take away the long pass. You can’t throw over the deep zone. It’s too deep.’--ELROY HIRSCH