A Day to Remember for a One-Man Gang

Sixty years ago today, a highly promoted matchup of two NFL superstars, Ernie Nevers and Red Grange, turned into “The Ernie Nevers Show.”

There is no shortage of great days by running backs in NFL history, but no one has topped what Nevers achieved when his Chicago Cardinals met Grange’s Chicago Bears at Comiskey Park.

He scored 40 points, not only still the NFL one-game record but the oldest NFL one-game record on the books.

Nevers scored 20 points in each half. Four of his touchdowns were on short runs, the other two 20 and 10 yards.

Nevers’ mark of six touchdowns that day has been tied, but the four conversion kicks he made in the Cardinals’ 40-6 win still has him atop the list.

Grange is credited by most historians for taking pro football off high school fields and putting it into major stadiums. Yet Nevers was a magnificent, 6-foot, 205-pound pioneer-era NFL athlete.

He was a one-man gang at Stanford under Pop Warner and the hero of the 1925 Rose Bowl.

He signed professional football, basketball and baseball contracts upon leaving Stanford. His first NFL team was the Duluth Eskimos, who gave him the then-amazing sum of $15,000. In his five-season career he ran, passed, returned kicks, punted, kicked conversions and kickoffs and called plays.

In the 1926 season, Nevers played in all of the Eskimos’ 29 games, 28 of them on the road. He played all but 29 minutes of a possible 1,740.

In each of his five NFL seasons, he was named the all-league fullback.

And while he played in the NFL, he was a major league pitcher with the St. Louis Browns. He was 6-12 in three seasons.

Nevers was 72 when he died in 1976.

Also on this date: In 1997, Grambling’s Eddie Robinson coached his final football game, but lost to Southern University, 30-7, ending his 56-year career at 408-165-15. . . . In 1974, James J. Braddock, who upset Max Baer to win the world heavyweight boxing championship in 1935 but who lost it in his only defense to Joe Louis, died at 74. . . . In 1956, Milt Campbell of the U.S. Navy and UCLA’s Rafer Johnson finished 1-2 at the Olympic Games decathlon in Melbourne.