Younger Remembered for Legacy With Rams

The Los Angeles Rams said goodbye Monday to Tank Younger.

It has been a while, of course, since they were the Los Angeles Rams. And it has been even longer since Younger was in the first wave of great Ram running backs. But his was a wave that submerged most NFL opponents half a century ago and immersed them all once.

The once was in 1951, when Younger, who died at 73 last week, was a first-team Associated Press linebacker--a member of the recognized all-pro team of that time--on the only Los Angeles Ram team that ever won the NFL championship game, the Super Bowl of those times.

One title in 49 Ram years in Southern California.

And Younger was part of it.

A running back who stood 6 feet 2 and weighed 228 pounds, Paul “Tank” Younger not only doubled as a linebacker on the team that beat Paul Brown, Otto Graham and the old Cleveland Browns in the last game of 1951, 24-17, he was one of the nation’s three best linebackers.

So his friends held a memorial service for him Monday at First AME Church in Los Angeles, and Younger would have appreciated that. But he wouldn’t have fretted much if they hadn’t.

He was an athlete who always looked ahead, not back.

In his day as one of the NFL’s finest two-way players--a distinction he shared here with the late Tom Harmon, who came to Los Angeles as an All-American running back from Michigan and remained to become the club’s leading defensive back--Younger was always more interested in working for the Rams someday than playing for them. And he was to have a distinguished front-office career.

But he will be remembered longest as the man who played right halfback for an NFL champion in the Rams’ mid-century “Bull Elephant” backfield, which lit up pro football in the last years of three-man backfields.

Fullback Dan Towler, who was also a Bull Elephant and one of the best running backs the Rams had before Eric Dickerson, also died this year.

The third Bull was left halfback Dick Hoerner, who, like Towler, weighed 220 pounds.

On a team featuring Bob Waterfield, Norm Van Brocklin, Elroy Hirsch and Tom Fears, the biggest back was the 228-pound Younger.

As NFL runners in the 1950s, Towler, Younger and Hoerner were larger than most defensive linemen, prompting the nickname Bull Elephants”--a label introduced by the late Times writer Frank Finch. Younger was perhaps the most renowned.

Nationally, Younger is often recalled as the first of the NFL’s good big running backs, a pioneer in the era of heavy ballcarriers that peaked last year in New York, where the Giants’ Heisman Trophy back, Ron Dayne, at 250 pounds, ran like a light-footed tailback.

In the 1940s, Younger came to the attention of football fans everywhere as the big man who led the nation in ground gaining with 1,207 yards for Grambling the year he averaged 9.8.

The Rams promptly put him on defense.

That was in 1949, Younger’s rookie season, when he accompanied L.A. into the NFL’s championship game for the first of four times in the club’s seven-year run, 1949-55. Three were consecutive seasons, 1949 through ’51.

Younger and his championship-era teammates got there first under Coach Clark Shaughnessy, and last under Coach Sid Gillman, but had the most success with their 1950 and ’51 coaches, Joe Stydahar and Hamp Pool.

Shaughnessy, who preferred speed to size, developed the 1949 winners with so-called pony backs--comparatively small-sized ball carriers such as V.T. “Vitamin” Smith, Tommy Kalmanir and Heisman Trophy winner Glenn Davis.

In 1950, the elephants were called that to distinguish them from the ponies.

The Rams in those years trained each July and August in Redlands, where the temperature was often 100 or more as they worked out--twice a day--minus water breaks.

Even then, there were annual numbers of tragic U.S. football fatalities such as those that anguished the country this summer, but the Rams lived through 20 years of Redlands heat, which probably shortened the playing days of many--possibly Younger’s.

As he said in 1957, when he ended a nine-year career that was good enough to put him in the Hall of Fame, but hasn’t, yet, “Old Rams never retire from football. We retire from Redlands.”