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Fox announcer
Pat Summerall
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Pat Summerall’s 50th season in and around the National Football League is under
way. That’s something for this fast-moving era when it comes to a job, a marriage or
even goin’ fishin’.
As a television broadcaster, Summerall wears well, like an old moccasin. Understatement
and timing are his skills. Understatement because long ago Pat learned to let the camera
do the heavy work. Timing comes in setting up his partner, John Madden, with the analysis
but not the paralysis.
Who else has been around the NFL as long? Billy Bidwill, the Cardinals’ owner, was
a water boy back then for his father’s team, located in Chicago. Bucko Kilroy, now an
80-year-old scouting consultant for the Patriots, was playing a mean nose guard for the
Eagles, and Wellington Mara, the Giants’ 85-year-old president, was the team’s
personnel director without the title. Has anyone been left out?
George Allen Summerall did not expect life to work out this way when he left Lake City,
Fla., halfway between Jacksonville and Tallahassee, to attend the University of Arkansas
on a tennis scholarship. At Fayetteville, he played good football and also studied
Russian, no prerequisite for the NFL.
In 1952, the Detroit Lions made Summerall, a big end, their fourth-round draft choice,
to his shock. "I expected to be a schoolteacher," he has said.
Summerall had a casual touch with that great Bobby Layne-led team before being moved to
the Chicago Cardinals, with whom he did the placekicking for five bad teams.
"I didn’t have a kicking shoe with a square toe until I made the team,"
Summerall said. "You had one pair of shoes, maybe two, one from college which they
let you keep."
After Ben Agajanian, the capable California kicker, quit New York, the Giants got
Summerall, a terrific break for both. The communications capital of the world was
discovering the Giants and pro football up in Yankee Stadium.
On Dec. 14, 1958, as snow swirled in that exuberant stadium, Summerall kicked a field
goal near the end of a match against the Cleveland Browns of Jim Brown and Paul Brown,
giving the Giants a 13-10 victory.
That tied them with the Browns for first place, and a playoff was required. At the same
site the next Sunday, the Giants beat Cleveland again, 10-0, to move on to the
championship game. New York lost to Baltimore in the first overtime contest in NFL history
— the one that made pro football what it is today.
For the Dec.14 contest, the Summerall kick is listed as one of 49 yards, a good boot in
those days of the straight-on, straight-leg effort. Because of the snow, the field
markings were hidden.
"Kyle Rote swears it was a 56-yarder because he was on the sideline,"
Summerall said. "All I remember is that when I came into the huddle, the quarterback,
Charlie Conerly, said, "What the f--- are you doing here?’ "
Summerall told Conerly, his holder, "We’re going to kick a field goal."
They did.
"I didn’t see it go through," Summerall said. "You couldn’t
see that far through the snow. But I knew. You can just tell.
"When I came off the field, the first person I saw was Vince Lombardi, our
offensive coach. He said, ‘You know, you can’t kick it that far.’ He had
been against it."
Television and the Giants locked up in those times, advertising dollars being plucked
like peaches. Local radio was one of the spinoffs, and a nice CBS man named Jimmy Dolan
led one Giant hero after another into broadcasting, anyone who could talk at all. Frank
Gifford, Sam Huff, Rote and Summerall did especially well.
"None of us had an agent or even a briefcase," Summerall noted.
Summerall helped the Giants into one more NFL championship game, in 1961, and then he
went full-time for broadcasting — first radio, then television. The leading TV
announcers were Paul Christman, one of the first former players to succeed on camera;
Chris Schenkel, who did the Giants; and Ray Scott, the voice of the Packers.
To have been a Giant was a real trademark. A dozen of Summerall’s teammates became
assistant or head coaches, and two made general manager. Seven are in the Hall of Fame.
By 1971, the diligent and humble Summerall was comfortable in network television. Good
looking and good company, he also fit with Pete Rozelle’s swanky New York crowd at
the 21 Club and other such watering holes.
Tommy Brookshier, the sparkling and bold former Eagles cornerback, had come along to
join Summerall, and they made up the No. 1 CBS team.
No pair had more fun. They would appear for an NFL playoff game after a New Year’s
sojourn in El Paso, Texas, exhausted and smirking after having "worked" the Sun
Bowl for CBS.
Summerall, who is now 71, eventually let the party times erode the disciplines of
broadcasting, of football. He confessed to alcoholism, cured himself and continued in a
more reserved and somber manner.
Always a versatile broadcaster — he did golf and tennis regularly for CBS in the
old days — Summerall remains ubiquitous. We have all heard his radio commercials,
first the hardware stores and now mattresses.
This a guy who last kicked a football 40 years ago.
Bill Wallace has been writing about pro football for half a century and has been with
Pro Football Weekly since its inception in 1967. He is based in Westport, Conn. |
