Super Bowl XXVII : THE OLD DAYS : NFL Title Meant Something Then : There Was No Fancy Name Before 1966 Merger With AFL, but There Were Some Fancy Players and Some Great Games

It might be hard to believe, considering all the hoopla surrounding that game coming up in the Rose Bowl Sunday, but there was life in professional football long before the Super Bowl and its Roman numerals, its bloated television contracts and its weeklong parties.

There was a postseason game called the National Football League Championship and it was more hard-nosed football than hype. It matched the winners of the Eastern Division and the Western Division. No wild cards, no first-round games, simply two champions meeting for bragging rights.

It wasn’t played under plastic domes or on neutral fields in sunny climes. It was played in the home stadium of one of the teams--which could mean snow in Philadelphia or Detroit, frozen turf and sub-zero weather in New York or Green Bay. Or in the case of Los Angeles, a rainstorm as drenching as the one here a week ago.

It wasn’t played one day from February, either. It wrapped up the professional football season before New Year’s Day, when teams won the championship in the year they played their season.

And, like baseball, it was a lily-white game until after World War II when the first black athletes were accepted in 1946. UCLA’s Kenny Washington and Woody Strode of the Rams and Nevada’s Marion Motley of the Browns were the first.

The NFL playoffs started in 1933 when the Chicago Bears defeated the New York Giants, 23-21, at Chicago’s Wrigley Field on Dec. 17. Red Grange played in that game. So did Bronko Nagurski and Mel Hein. The winners collected $210 each, the losers $140.

It remained in that East vs. West pattern for 33 years, until a bidding war for players by the NFL and the fledgling American Football League caused an agreement in 1966 that led to the first Super Bowl.

For many years, as one Super Bowl after another failed to live up to expectations and wound up as either a blowout or a bore, old-timers hark back to the excitement of the earlier NFL championship games.

The first mentioned is usually the 1958 game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants that has been often called “the greatest game ever played.” It was the first overtime game in NFL history and ended when the Colts’ Alan Ameche bulled over from the one-yard-line after more than eight minutes of sudden-death play.

The lead had changed hands three times before Johnny Unitas drove the Colts 86 yards for the tying touchdown with seven seconds remaining. Only 1:56 remained with the Giants leading, 17-10, when Unitas got the ball for the final drive. Unitas passed for 349 yards that day, of which 178 went to Raymond Berry.

It was a big game for future television commentators, too. Frank Gifford scored a touchdown and Pat Summerall kicked a field goal for the Giants.

Long-suffering Ram fans might remember, too, that Los Angeles played in the championship game four times between 1949 and 1955. That was long before Al Davis and the Raiders.

The 1949 game was played on a Coliseum field as muddy as San Francisco’s Candlestick Park was two weeks ago for the 49ers and the Washington Redskins. It had rained all night and day and nearly throughout the game.

One nationally prominent sportswriter arrived at the press gate, soaking wet, only to discover that he had left his credentials on the bureau back home in Pasadena. A gate attendant said: “Oh, come on in, I’d let my ex-wife in without a ticket on a day like this.” Only 27,980 showed up, the smallest playoff crowd since 1941, when the game was played two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The Rams, a pass-oriented team with Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin, gained a total of 119 yards, 21 rushing. The Philadelphia Eagles’ Steve Van Buren, a water-buffalo type of back, ran for 196 yards himself as Philadelphia won, 14-0.

It rained so long and so hard that Dan Reeves, the Rams’ owner, asked Commissioner Bert Bell for a postponement, but Bell refused. His reason: radio commitments.

The 1950 and 1951 games, which the Rams and Cleveland Browns split, rate near the top of the list for thrills and excitement. In 1950, Cleveland was in its first year as a member of the NFL after dominating the All-America Football Conference for four years.

The Browns, Coach Paul Brown in particular, were dedicated to erasing the slight of four years earlier when AAC owners approached Bell about joining the NFL . . . and the commissioner told them to “come back when they got a football.” Waterfield set the tone on the first play from scrimmage at Cleveland in 1950 when he teamed with Glenn Davis, Mr. Outside from West Point, on an 82-yard scoring play. Three plays later, Otto Graham returned the favor with a 32-yard scoring strike to Dub Jones.

Starting the final quarter, the Rams led, 28-20. The eight-point margin came about because Lou Groza had missed an extra point. Even after Graham threw nine consecutive completed passes to bring the score to 28-27, Los Angeles looked safe. Only two minutes remained and the Rams had the ball, but after they failed to get a first down, Graham brought the Browns down far enough for Groza to kick the winning field goal with 28 seconds on the clock.

It was the Rams’ turn in 1951 at the Coliseum. The Browns were heavy favorites, but Van Brocklin took over from Waterfield with the score 17-17 midway through the fourth quarter and threw a deep pass to Tom Fears that went for 73-yard touchdown and a 24-17 victory.

All the games weren’t that close, however. Like the Super Bowl, the NFL playoffs had routs and forgettable games.

The worst of all was in 1940 when the George Halas-coached Chicago Bears wiped out Slingin’ Sammy Baugh and the Washington Redskins, 73-0. The Bears gained 382 yards rushing, the Redskins 22.

Only three weeks earlier, in a regular-season game, the Redskins had beaten the Bears, 7-3.

The next year was nearly as bad, the Bears routing the Giants, 37-9.

The heroes of that early pre-Super Bowl era were as super as today’s, but it wasn’t as easy for them to become household names--there was no television.

Long before there was a Joe Montana or a Terry Bradshaw or even a Joe Namath, there were the likes of Baugh, Unitas, Graham, Sid Luckman and the Rams’ pair of Waterfield and Van Brocklin.

As for receivers, Don Hutson, Wayne Millner and Dante Lavelli were hauling in spectacular touchdown passes before Lynn Swann, Jerry Rice and Michael Irvin were born.

The only way to see what made Baugh, Hutson, Grange, Nagurski and the others so great was to catch them at the local theaters in snippets of the Movietone News before “Gone With the Wind” or other cinema classics of the 1930s and ‘40s.

Before the Rams came west from Cleveland in 1946, the only opportunity to see NFL players in person was after the season ended, when the champions usually came to Los Angeles for exhibition games in the old Gilmore Stadium at Beverly and Fairfax or Wrigley Field at 42nd and Avalon.

Former Ram linebacker Les Richter, who played in a 38-14 losing cause against Cleveland in 1955, said: “I have no qualms or feelings that we missed out, because in our day it was the biggest thing we had going in the NFL. I think what Pete Rozelle did with his magical ways in creating the Super Bowl is a great compliment to sports, but the significance of the championship was as great back when we played as it is today. Only the magnitude of its greatness is more exposed.”