WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: FRANKIE ALBERT : 49ers Made Quarterback a Gold Mine : College, Pro Experience Led to Rich Retirement for Glendale Graduate

Frankie Albert loved playing football. He played four years at Stanford and seven with the San Francisco 49ers of the fledgling All-America Conference after World War II.

“There was nothing like it in the world,” he said.

Albert also hated coaching football. He realized this during his third season as coach of the 49ers.

“Guys staying up until 4 in the morning watching game films. That wasn’t for me,” he said. “And worse, we lost our privacy. My wife would go to the butcher shop on Monday and the guy would say, ‘Good morning Mrs. Albert. I lost $5 on the 49ers yesterday.’ Then he’d give her a bad piece of meat and send her home. That was no life.”

Albert, 71, began his football career at Glendale High in 1934, earning a position on the team as a 116-pound running back during his sophomore season. By his senior season he had nibbled his way up to 135 pounds. But his quick feet led his team to the CIF championship, and colleges took notice.

Albert went to Stanford, where he was shifted to quarterback and nearly became a nobody. In his first full season, Stanford stumbled to a 1-7-1 record under Coach Tiny Thornhill. Things looked bleak for Albert and his teammates, until the winter day in 1939 when Thornhill was replaced by Clark Shaughnessy.

Shaughnessy, later to become coach of the Los Angeles Rams, brought with him a bold new plan. Well, a bold old plan, actually. The T-formation, introduced by Notre Dame decades earlier but then shelved, re-emerged at Stanford and turned a horrible team into a great one.

In 1940, the first season with the new offense, Stanford, led by the quick feet and accurate passing arm of Albert, polished off a 10-0 season with a 21-13 victory over Nebraska before 90,000 in the Rose Bowl.

Albert recalled that the introduction of the complicated offense did not immediately bring great optimism at Stanford.

“We scrimmaged the freshmen before the season started and they beat us,” Albert said. “They pushed us all over the field.”

Even after a 27-0 season-opening win over San Francisco and three subsequent easy wins, great doubts remained, Albert said.

“We had been so bad just a year earlier, that the players really couldn’t believe this was happening,” he said. “Before the season Clark showed us one play out of the T-formation and said, ‘Boys, you’re going to score a half-dozen touchdowns on this play alone this season, so learn it.’

“We all sat there, half of us grinning and poking each other under the table. We thought he was nuts. The last year we hadn’t scored a half-dozen touchdowns all season, with all of our plays.

“And even after we started winning games so easily, we weren’t all convinced. We kept thinking the house could fall in at any moment.”

It did not, of course, and after Albert--who was also the team’s kicker--and the rest of the Stanford backfield tricked and fooled and befuddled Nebraska in the Rose Bowl, Cornhusker Coach Biff Jones said this about Albert:

“Tell Clark Shaughnessy I’ll buy him 120 acres of fine corn land if he’ll tell me where we can get a Frankie Albert. That kid’s got too much pass, too much kick, too much noodle for us. What a job he did out there.”

Albert finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy balloting that year and was third in the voting the following year as a senior when Stanford went 6-3.

Albert became the first player signed by the San Francisco 49ers and played as a T-formation quarterback for seven seasons. He retired in 1952 at age 32, the same year legendary NFL quarterbacks Bob Waterfield of the Rams and Sammy Baugh of the Washington Redskins retired. A young quarterback with some potential--Y.A. Tittle--had been signed by the 49ers and Albert said he had no intention of becoming a backup.

He played the following season for Calgary of the Canadian Football League, then came back to the 49ers three years later as their head coach. He lasted just three years, however, before leaving football.

Today, Albert and his wife Martha, his Glendale High sweetheart, share time between a home in Rancho Mirage and an apartment on the campus at Stanford. A daughter, Jane, became an All-American tennis player at Stanford in the mid-60s and now her daughter, Heather, is an All-American tennis player at Stanford.

Albert also became an avid tennis player after his retirement. At 71, he still plays the game frequently. With an occasional timeout for surgery.

“I’ve had surgery three times on my shoulder for torn rotator cuff muscles,” said Albert, still a trim 170 pounds. “People call it a tennis injury. Let’s be honest. It’s an old-age injury. What the hell do I keep doing this for, anyway?”

Albert’s sense of humor did not develop until after his football days. In a book by former NFL-quarterback John Brodie titled “Open Field,” the story is told of the day Bill Johnson, an assistant coach under Albert, was berating the officials during a game. When Albert was told by the referee to “keep this guy quiet, or I’m going to penalize you 15 yards,” Albert--apparently needing the 15 yards much more than he needed an assistant coach--told the referee, “What are you talking about? I never saw this man before in my life.”

The officials promptly had the stunned Johnson escorted, kicking and screaming, from the sideline and out of the stadium by police.

Albert was also a shrewd businessman. After retirement he worked as a real estate salesman in the posh coastal town of Monterey. And he had taken advantage of an offer from 49ers’ owner Tony Morabito in 1956 to purchase 5% of the franchise, a team that then had an estimated value of $600,000.

When the team was purchased for $19 million in the 1980s by current owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr., Albert gladly sold DeBartolo his shares. He had turned a $5,000 investment into a return of nearly $1 million.

As Biff Jones noted in 1941, Albert has a lot of noodle.