To Absent Friends - Sam Huff

 

Somewhere in the 1959-1960 time frame, I was being indoctrinated into becoming a "sports fan" by my Dad, two older brothers, and my grandfather (something for which I will always be grateful to them), so it was time to start watching football, baseball, and basketball on television.  When it came to football, of course, it was the Steelers, Pitt Panthers, and probably Notre Dame, but even at such a young age, I quickly became familiar with one name, the name of a player from the New York Giants - middle linebacker Sam Huff.

Middle linebacker is arguably one for the more glamorous defensive positions in all of football.  You know the names....Butkus, Nitschke, Lambert, Lewis, Erlacher....but the first of the great and glamorous middle linebackers was Sam Huff.  There were reasons for that. First and foremost, Huff was good, really good.  He played in New York at a time when the Giants "owned" Manhattan and the NYC television market,   a  time when the marriage between the NFL and the television networks were in the first blushes of a powerful and lucrative marriage that is still going strong almost seventy years later.  Huff was a dominant player in the 1958 NFL title game between the Giants and the Colts that went into overtime.  It has been dubbed the "greatest game ever played", and if it wasn't actually that, it certainly can claim to being the most important game ever played as it announced the dominance that Pro Football was to have on both the American sporting public and network television.

In 1960, it was Huff whom CBS chose to have mic'd for a game that became a television documentary, "The Violent World of Sam Huff", narrated by Walter Cronkite, no less.  It was seminal moment in how the public came to see just what a brutal and remarkable game that pro football was.

Midway through his career, the Giants traded Huff to the Washington Redskins, where he played with distinction and finished his career as a player-coach under Vince Lombardi.  Huff went on to a career in radio and television as an announcer for the Redskins Radio Network, where he become a respected, revered, and beloved football guy in the Washington area.  Listening to stories told on Monday by Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon on both the Kornheiser Podcast and PTI about Huff gave you a real feel for just what Huff meant to that Washington Football Team fan base.  The Washington Post also printed an "Appreciation" for Huff by sportswriter Leonard Shapiro on Monday.  You can read it here.  It is worth your time.

As was said in "Hamilton"...Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? How many people under the age of fifty even knew who Sam Huff was when they heard the news of his death last week?   It's too bad, but that is why we need history lessons, kids.