David, the old Lions defensive back who passed away recently at age 79, was nicknamed “The Hatchet.” He’s another link to the Lions’ championship days to leave us. Fewer and fewer are the still-alive members, which is only to be expected when your last ring was captured 50 years ago.
I was thinking about David, and others of his time, as I watched today’s version of NFL football – specifically the attempts by the secondary men to cover gigantic wide receivers – in the form of the Lions-Bengals pre-season game Thursday night.
The men who catch NFL passes these days are growing exponentially. The Lions’ heralded rookie, Calvin Johnson, stands 6-5 or 6-6, depending on who you believe. Any pass catcher shorter than 6-2 is considered a shrimp. Yet the poor defensive backs haven’t grown as rapidly. In fact, they’ve hardly grown at all. The league is filled with 5-9, 5-10 guys trying to deny the ball from skyscrapers with legs.
Oh – and they have to defend these behemoths with a rule book that is ridiculously slanted against them. I’m not sure, but I think garlic consumption by today’s DBs is disallowed, for if you breathe that on your man, a yellow flag will be thrown.
If you ever choose to look, you’ll see that interception rates of the quarterbacks in the 1950s and 1960s are considerably higher than those in the 21st century. Why? Two reasons: the receivers weren’t bean stalks, and the men covering them could actually, you know, COVER them.
Hence the earlier reference to NFL Films.
It’s wonderful to look at the black-and-white footage and see DBs giving a forearm shiv here and there. Or watching an unsuspecting ball carrier getting roped to the ground because of the beatific clothesline tackle – the tried-and-true method of ending a play by engulfing the ball carrier’s neck in the crook of your elbow and following through until said carrier is pounded into the brown, muddy grass. In fact, you’ll hardly see a tackle made by those secondary men that was below the shoulder blades.
There was a maniacal defender named Hardy Brown, who played for the San Francisco 49ers. Hardy learned to play football with his brothers in an orphanage. True. Once, his orphanage played another group of tough kids from across town. Halfway through the game one of them started to complain.
“All of us have busted lips!,” the bigger kid said to the smaller Hardy Brown, who recalled the moment for the NFL Films folks. Brown chuckled and said, “That’s the way I learned to play football. I only know one way.”
Brown’s way was to line up a receiver, or ball carrier, in a manner that Brown could see him, but not vice-versa. Then, at the precise moment, Brown would ram his right shoulder somewhere near the jaw line of the exposed player, leaping off his feet in the process. This was the day before face masks on helmets. I saw the move several times, repeated in quick editing on different victims. Always the result was the same: victim’s head snaps back, his body going in a different direction, before slamming onto the turf, flat on his back. It was one reason why little Hardy Brown, the orphaned football player, was widely regarded as the meanest SOB of his day.
But back to Jimmy David. His teammate on the Lions was Dick “Night Train” Lane, whose nickname wasn’t secured because of his affinity for locomotives. They called Lane “Night Train” because that’s what it felt like hit you after he clotheslined you to the ground. David was “The Hatchet” because he cut down everything that came his way.
You could do a lot more in David’s time to ensure a thrown ball wouldn’t be caught. None of this moratorium on touching a receiver past five yards downfield. Pass interference rules were much looser. And, of course, if a man did happen to be lucky (unlucky?) enough to catch the football, you could bring him down in much more creative, entertaining, effective, and hazardous ways.
There are cornerbacks playing in the NFL today that would have a hard time tackling their grandmother. It’s amazing to me how many of them avoid, like the plague, any physical contact. Deion Sanders, one of the best cover men of his generation, was a pip squeak when it came to tackling.
Jimmy David, after he put his forearms on ice, became an assistant coach for his old teammate, Joe Schmidt, with the Lions in 1967. He didn’t hold the title, because it hadn’t been invented yet, but he was basically Schmidt’s defensive coordinator. And with the Hall of Fame linebacker Schmidt at the helm and the six-time Pro Bowler David calling the shots defensively, it’s no wonder that those Lions teams (’67-’72) annually fielded one of the league’s stingiest defenses. One of David’s first pupils was Hall of Famer Lem Barney, a rookie in ’67. He left coaching, never to return, after his boss, Schmidt, quit the Lions in January 1973.
David was drafted in the 22nd round of the 1952 NFL draft by the Lions, out of Colorado State. That means that some 160-170 players were taken in front of him. Yet there he was, a fixture in the Lions’ defensive backfield, and a three-time NFL champion (1952, ’53, and ’57).
The Detroit area has been blessed. Frequently our old sports heroes stay in town after they retire, occasionally gracing us with their presence at banquets, golf outings, or down at the ballpark/arena/stadium.
Mike O’Hara of the Detroit News wrote of a Jimmy David memory in Saturday’s edition.
A few years ago, David was watching the Lions. Of course, he paid strong attention to the work of the secondary. After a DB had a noticeably difficult time wrangling a receiver to the ground, David shook his head.
“Should have clotheslined him,” David said.
It was during practice.
Today, they’ve buried “The Hatchet.” But not those precious moments on celluloid. Thank goodness.
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