Pompei: Bears legend Gale Sayers took the time he had on Earth and ran with it
By Dan Pompei 44m ago 1
What the life of Gale Sayers taught us is there isn’t as much time as we think.
There never was enough time for linebackers to fill the hole before Sayers was gone with the breeze.
There wasn’t enough time for Sayers to do what he could do better than anyone – run with a football.
Sayers didn’t have enough time to savor memories when dementia took the colors from his life in the last seven years.
Of course, Sayers didn’t need time the way most do. He could do more with a moment than most could with a lifetime.
Sayers passed away Wednesday at the age of 77. His legend will, however, live in perpetuity by the grace of NFL Films, and stories the old tell the young.
When someone first called him, “The Kansas Comet,” they must have known something. Comets burn brightly, but not for long. “The Kansas Comet” was a fitting nickname, but not the nickname remembered by those closest to him during his reign as football’s best runner. The Bears called him “Magic,” and he was in so many ways.
His magic was evident from the first “hut, hut.” After the Bears made the two-time All-American from Kansas the fourth overall pick in the 1965 draft, Sayers was an immediate sensation. In his first preseason game, he returned a punt 77 yards, he returned a kickoff 93 yards, and he threw a two-yard touchdown pass – with his left, non-dominant hand.
He was voted NFL rookie of the year after scoring 22 touchdowns, a league record at the time. At the end of the season, team owner George Halas gave Sayers a $10,000 bonus – unheard of for the tight-fisted visionary.
“I’ve never seen anyone with Gale’s agility,” Halas wrote in “Halas By Halas.” “No one ever caught him from behind.”
Gale Sayers could make defenders miss all over the football field. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
Sayers ran with an elegance that defied the laws of physics. He somehow could glide and slide with minimal contact to the ground, like a Jesus Lizard.
Against the Vikings in Sayers’ second season, he took back the opening kickoff 90 yards and racked up 339 all-purpose yards — still the most by a Bears player in any game. He scored four second-half touchdowns.
“Best show I’ve ever seen,” Vikings coach Norm Van Brocklin said.
Bears Hall of Famer George Connor worked as a television reporter and afterward found Sayers on the field.
“Was that game the highlight of your career?” Connor asked.
“Nope,” Sayers said, before dodging Connor as he had dodged Vikings defenders.
Sayers, always more expressive with moves than words, was correct in his curt response. The previous season Sayers had accumulated three fewer yards but scored six touchdowns in a game against the 49ers in what might have been not only his best game but the best game by anyone in the history of the league.
Hall of Famer Y.A. Tittle, a 49ers assistant at the time, was quoted by United Press International calling the performance “the most brilliant exhibition I’ve ever seen.” Halas called it “the greatest performance ever by one man on a football field.”
It was December, and the playing surface at Wrigley Field was more suited for farming pigs than playing football. No one seemed to be able to keep their footing – except Sayers.
There was a screen pass that he turned into an 80-yard touchdown. There was a punt return of 85 yards for a TD. He was given nine handoffs and scored on four of them. He caught two passes and scored on one. He averaged 12.6 yards per carry on nine rushing attempts.
Sayers almost assuredly would have had seven touchdowns if he had not been pulled from the offense in the fourth quarter because the score was so lopsided. His backup scored from two yards out. Still, Sayers nearly broke a return for another touchdown on the last play of the game.
Gale Sayers smiles on the bench after scoring six touchdowns in a 61-20 win over the San Francisco 49ers in 1965. (Paul Cannon / Associated Press)
The 49ers had come up with a special scheme to deal with him. “The Chicago Defense” called for defenders to be disciplined in their run gaps and double team Bears blockers.
“I just wonder how many Sayers would have scored if we hadn’t set our defense to stop him,” Tittle said after the 61-20 loss, according to an account in the Chicago Tribune.
There were more brilliant games by Sayers, who was named first-team all-pro in each of his first five seasons.
As much as he is remembered as a running back, he was an outstanding receiver. When Jim Dooley took over as head coach of the Bears in 1968, he considered Sayers at flanker to replace the retiring Johnny Morris, and very well might have moved him there if he had been more confident in his running backs.
What Sayers probably did best was return kicks. His 30.6 yard average per kick return remains the best in NFL history.
Sayers famously said, “Just give me 18 inches of daylight,” but the reality is the more daylight he had, the more dangerous he was. Hall of Fame cornerback Jimmy Johnson said Sayers was the most devastating open-field runner he played against.
“It was like chasing a deer in the open field,” the former 49er said. “He could go from sideline to sideline, then go back across the field. I never saw that before. He had speed, and on top of that, he had moves that he could hit without a moment’s notice. And he was totally in balance at all times.”
Everything changed on Nov. 10, 1968, one week after Sayers rushed for a career-high 205 yards.
Against the 49ers, Sayers took a pitch on a play called 49 Toss Left and planted his right leg. Safety Kermit Alexander put his shoulder into Sayers’ knee, which bent sideways. Teammates Ralph Kurek, Rudy Kuechenberg, and Mike Reilly carried Sayers off the field in one of the most somber scenes in Bears’ history. It was so funereal that Halas cried on the sidelines.
The ligaments that held together Sayers’ knee were shredded like cheese for pizza.
“The injury was only serious because they had to saw through muscles and nerves,” Sayers once said. “If they’d had arthroscopic techniques in those days, I’d have been back in a couple of weeks.”
Gale Sayers thrilled Chicago crowds at Wrigley Field in his brief, illuminating career. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
In some ways, the following season was Sayers’ most remarkable. Without the wings that had carried him, Sayers reinvented the way he ran. Grit and determination now were his new most effective tools and he carried the ball a career-high 236 times. He averaged 4.4 yards per carry, led the league in rushing yards and was named UPI’s comeback player of the year.
His raw strength always was a mostly unnoticed part of his game, but it was not overlooked by those who felt it. Former Rams defensive tackle Rosey Grier remembered a collision with Sayers after he caught a screen pass.
“I hit him so hard near the line of scrimmage, I thought my shoulder must have busted him in two,” Grier said, according to the book “We Are The Bears!” “I heard a roar from the crowd and figured he must have fumbled. I was on the ground, and when I looked up he was 15 yards down the field and going in for the score.”
His comeback didn’t last long. In a 1970 preseason game, Sayers injured his good knee. He missed two of the first three regular-season games, and then in the fourth game of the season, the truth was revealed in a cover-your-eyes moment.
Vikings defensive tackle Alan Page recovered a fumble and took off running. Sayers started out close to Page, and the gap between them kept getting longer until finally, Sayers pulled up.
Another knee surgery followed. Sayers tried to return the following season but lasted only two games. He was finished at 28 after playing what amounted to five seasons. He retired officially in the 1972 preseason.
Participating in only 68 games did not prevent the doors of the Pro Football Hall of Fame from swinging open as soon as he was eligible. At the age of 34, he is the youngest inductee ever.
Sayers’ second act also was remarkable. He worked in athletic administration for Kansas and Southern Illinois before founding Sayers Computer Source, a business that once did $360 million in sales in a year. He was a dedicated philanthropist who helped many by working with the Boys and Girls Club, Cradle Adoption Agency, and the Sayers Foundation.
On a Monday night in 1994, when rain fell sideways and ponchos blew around Soldier Field like hot dog wrappers, Sayers’ No. 40 retired by the Bears in a halftime ceremony.
**** Butkus’ No. 51 also was retired that night. Butkus was chosen one pick before Sayers in the 1965 draft, and they forever are linked as legendary Bears and lifelong companions.
“Will miss a great friend who helped me become the player I became because after practicing and scrimmaging against Gale I knew I could play against anybody,” Butkus said in a statement released by the Bears. “We lost one of the best Bears ever, and more importantly, we lost a great person.”
In 2016, **** Butkus and Gale Sayers were among the Hall of Famers honored by the Bears at a game. (Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
Butkus checked in on Sayers monthly until his death, sometimes visiting him in Wakarusa, Ind., where Sayers and his second wife Ardie lived since his retirement in 2013. He is also survived by his children Gale Lynn, Scott, and Timothy, his stepchildren Gary, Guy, and Gaylon, 12 grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.
Sayers couldn’t talk much in recent years because of dementia. He lost at least 40 pounds. While he often seemed distant, he enjoyed watching his old football movies.
But it was a real movie that made him more than just one of the greatest football players. In 1971, ABC premiered “Brian’s Song,” about the unlikely friendship between Sayers and Bears fullback Brian Piccolo. The movie, starring Billy Dee Williams as Sayers and James Caan as Piccolo, became the most-watched made for TV movie in history and won four Emmys.
In the late 1960s, Halas’ son-in-law Ed McCaskey thought it would be a good idea to have a Black player and White player room together. Sayers was assigned to room with running back Ronnie Bull, but he asked McCaskey if he could room with Piccolo instead.
“Gale was such an introvert,” says Joy Piccolo-O’Connell, Brian’s widow. “It was hard to get him to engage in a conversation. Brian was as outgoing as Gale was quiet.”
They turned out to be more than the NFL’s first interracial roommates — they became best of friends. At a time when many lines were drawn between Black and White players, Sayers and Piccolo proved that race did not have to be a barrier to brotherhood.
During Sayer’s comeback year in 1969, Piccolo started coughing. Six weeks later, he still was coughing. He had cancer.
As Piccolo lay dying in a room in early 1970 at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Sayers was at a banquet a few miles away accepting the Most Courageous Player award from the Pro Football Writers of America.
“You flatter me by giving me this award, but I tell you that I accept it for Brian Piccolo,” he said in a speech that was immortalized in the movie. “It is mine tonight. It is Brian Piccolo’s tomorrow. … I love Brian Piccolo, and I’d like all of you to love him too. Tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him.”
As Sayers concluded his speech in “Brian’s Song,” they played the song “The Hands of Time.”
If the hands of time
Were hands that I could hold,
I’d keep them warm and in my hands
They’d not turn cold.
The song was about Piccolo then. It’s about Sayers now. Said Piccolo’s widow, “I’m sure they are together today.”