As Always, He’s Cool Under Fire

Man and boy, Otto Graham might have been the best ever to play the game at quarterback. It depends on your yardstick. If you go by quantity--yards gained, passes completed, number of touchdowns thrown--you go elsewhere. If you go by where his team finished, it’s no contest.

Some years ago, the football player, Jim Brown, and the basketball player, Bill Russell, were playing golf and an onlooker asked Brown: “Jim, you’re known to like golf and a wager. How do you keep yourself from getting hustled on the course by a ringer?”

Brown answered: “I watch the way he swings.”

“Not me,” Russell interjected. “I watch where the ball lands.”

If you judge by where the ball lands, Otto Graham is your man.

Every single year he played, his team went to the championship game. That was 10 of them. They won seven of them.

Imagine a quarterback leading his team to 10 straight Super Bowls today and you have a measure of the kind of man Otto Graham was.

He never really got the credit. As a collegian at Northwestern, the school was agog over a schoolboy sensation named Bill DeCorrevont, a running back who used to pull in 100,000 fans for a high school game. Graham won games, DeCorrevont won headlines.

Graham went to the pros, the old All-America Conference Cleveland Browns. The team was named for the coach and the players were considered just movable numbers on his strings.

“He doesn’t even call his own plays!” protested Otto Graham’s detractors. That was considered the ultimate in demeaning in those days. It is so commonplace now, no one expects any quarterback to call his own signals. But, no matter how successful Otto Graham’s teams were, Coach Paul Brown got the credit.

It was Graham, though, who made the Browns go. “They should have named them the Cleveland Grahams,” rival coach, Buck Shaw, once observed dryly. After making the title game 10 straight times in two leagues under Otto, the Browns made it only three times in the next 10 years and lost two of those.

Otto was too good to be true anyway. He had these storybook good looks, dark eyes, wavy hair, collar-ad profile--until the San Francisco 49ers tore a 12-stitch gash in his right cheek from his mouth to his ear. He was an accomplished musician--piano, violin, French horn, cornet--and he played professional basketball with the Rochester Royals, now the Sacramento Kings. He was Otto Merriwell.

But, of all the great personal victories Otto Graham achieved, the lifetime statistics of 23,584 yards gained passing, the 174 touchdowns, the 1,464 completions, the great last-minute drives, Otto Graham’s greatest triumph occurred where no fans cheered, no band played, no pompons waved, no one spiked the ball.

Otto Graham licked a lineup that made the Bobby Layne Detroit Lions look like a set of wimps. He picked apart a zone defense few people can penetrate--cancer. It’s a pass rush that won’t let you stay in the pocket, the ultimate blitz.

Graham handled this adversary as coolly as he did the 1950 Rams. It was the old quarterback’s finest hour.

As usual, it was a question of attitude. As usual, it was a question of don’t panic.

Never mind what old Automatic Otto did to the All-America Football Conference or what he did to the NFL when he came into it, amid dire prophecies that he would finally see what it meant to play real football, the world really had to admire the Otto Graham who riddled an opponent in a game where there was no one to call signals for him.

I don’t suppose there’s a more terrible word in the language than colostomy. It ranks right up there with glaucoma, carcinoma, leukemia, all the most dreaded collections of syllables in any book. Up to a few short years ago, no one said it out loud.

Otto Graham did. He accepted it as just another third and long yardage. He had the arm for it, the play for it, the heart for it.

When you get a catastrophic illness, there are two ways you can handle it. You can go into a spiritual funk, you can rail against the fates, you can rage “Why me, God?” You can become a recluse, a misanthrope, an embittered, hate-filled person.

Or, you can get a tennis racket, a golf bag, a deck of cards and say “Whose deal?”

That’s what Otto did. I remember being at a celebrity golf outing about nine years ago. Otto Graham was one of the athletes invited. In those days, he was partnered with another American legend, Joe DiMaggio.

We all sat around waiting for Otto Graham to show up bundled in a wheelchair, pale, wasting away, swathed in quilts, speaking with difficulty, this bag on his side. We wondered if he could even try to gallery a few holes.

Graham showed up looking for a bet. He had his clubs, shoes, wallet, racket and cards with him, and a middle-of-the-fairway swing. He said he felt sorry for people who had to leave a good conversation to go to the bathroom. He went right where he sat, without missing a deal or a putt, and no one was the wiser, bragged Otto. He figured the whole thing was a blessing in disguise. This way, his handicap went up, he got more shots.

He didn’t need them. Otto was just as automatic on the golf course as he was on the five-yard line.

One afternoon, DiMaggio showed up in some pique. He had missed his golf partner on the practice range and he had tracked him down and found him playing five sets of fierce tennis in another part of the hotel complex. “He’s tiring himself out!” Joe sputtered.

Otto Graham was tiring his opponent out. As usual. He was wearing cancer down to a frazzle. Some people railed at it. Otto just grinned at it. It looked like a sucker for a post pattern to him. Graham never flinched at an opponent in his life and after nine years, the clock, as usual, is running out on the opponent, not Otto.

Otto will be one of several sports greats--the others are tennis’ Rod Laver, skater Peggy Fleming, horse trainer Charlie Whittingham, golfer Tommy Bolt, basketball’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, track’s Wilma Rudolph, baseball’s Don Sutton and hockey’s Bobby Hull--at the fourth annual Tribute to athletes at Hollywood Park’s Pavilion of the Stars tonight. Otto’s inclusion in this select group is, well, automatic.

And to those who will say, “Too bad he never played in a Super Bowl,” the answer is: “Oh, but he played in a super bowl, all right. And pulled it out in the fourth quarter. As usual.”