One telling difference between that age of football and today: “We didn’t want — we were afraid — to have substitutions, afraid they’d take our job away,” Robustelli told Gerald Eskenazi, a reporter for The New York Times, in his book “There Were Giants in Those Days.”
Robustelli was a 19th-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Rams in 1951 out of tiny Arnold College in Milford, Conn., but he became a hard-hitting tackler, at 6 feet 1 inch and 230 pounds, and a superb pass-rusher with a keen sense of how an opponent’s plays were developing.
6'1" and 230 –these days quarterbacks are bigger than that
He played in eight N.F.L. championship games, two with the Rams and six with the Giants after joining them in 1956. He was a first-team All-Pro six times, received the Maxwell Club’s Bert Bell Award as the N.F.L.’s most outstanding player in 1962 and recovered 22 fumbles. He missed only one game in his 14 seasons, in the last three doubling as a Giants assistant. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971.
it was the defensive alignment, featuring Robustelli, Roosevelt Grier, Dick Modzelewski and Jim Katcavage on the line, Sam Huff at middle linebacker, and a secondary led by Emlen Tunnell, that captured the fans’ imagination. They evoked a celebrity aura, captured in the television documentary 'The Violent World of Sam Huff.' “Never in the history of football had fans gone to a stadium to root for a ‘DEE-fense,’ ” Gifford, a Hall of Fame halfback and receiver, recalled in his memoir, “The Whole Ten Yards.”
I remember seeing that documentary. For the first time I really understood just how violent the game was; I tyhink the same is true generally, and I venture to guess it changed how people thought of and saw football, and how the sport was broadcast.
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