HIGHLAND PARK, Texas
The Green Bay Packers, who face the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday in the Super Bowl at Cowboys Stadium, practiced Wednesday at the indoor training facility for Highland Park High School, which says everything about the importance of high school football in Texas.
It is a complex that rivals some NFL indoor training facilities — including the Washington Redskins, who, as we all know, don’t have one.
But when the Packers arrived at Highland Park on Wednesday, they likely had little idea that this was hallowed ground in the history of Texas football.
This was where Bobby Layne, the standard bearer for the sport in the Lone Star State, once played.
There are all sorts of tributes this week to football in Texas. There are Cowboys and ex-Cowboys everywhere. There are programs and tributes to Tom Landry and other well-known symbols of Texas football. But Layne has been a forgotten man, and that’s not right, because he was one of the most colorful and charismatic players ever to practice the gridiron religion in Texas. And he has a Super Bowl connection as well, having once played for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Layne played in the 1940s with the great Doak Walker at Highland Park and went on to become one of the greatest quarterbacks in Texas history. He was named to four straight All-Southwest Conference teams from 1944 to 1947. In the 1946 Cotton Bowl Classic, Layne was responsible for every one of the 40 points Texas scored in a 40-27 win over Missouri — including the extra points.
He would go on to play 15 seasons in the NFL, leading the Detroit Lions to NFL titles in 1952 and 1953 and finishing his career with the Steelers from 1958 to 1962. He was a five-time Pro Bowl selection, a member of the NFL’s 1950 All-Decade team and was inducted to both the College Football and Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Layne’s legacy, though, was his personality on and off the field. He is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest leaders ever to line up under center, and his sheer will and toughness made him an NFL great. He is acknowledged to be the first quarterback identified with the creation of the two-minute drive and was one of the last players in the league to play without a face mask.
Off the field, Layne was a legendary good-timer. Lions teammate Harley Sewell was one of those rookies who had to serve as Layne’s pledge — for lack of a better word — as part of rookie initiation.
“When I was a rookie, I went with Layne to get a tube of toothpaste and didn’t get back for three days,” Sewell said.
It was part of the Layne legacy at a time when quarterbacks were swashbucklers and not robots. In today’s ESPN-Twitter culture, Layne, who died in 1986 at age 60, would have been damaged goods. He was an outlaw, and that would not have fit with today’s law and order NFL.
But nobody — certainly not Troy Aikman or Roger Staubach or any quarterback who is identified with football in Dallas or Texas — represented the identity of the state more than Bobby Layne. This week, somebody in Dallas should take note of one of its favorite sons.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
