RIP Lions Great/Actor Alex Karras

Mad Ducks and Bears was a great read. Basically Alex Karras and John Gordy telling stories.

 

Unfortunately, the only memories I had of Alex Karras were when he played his role in Webster. I later learned of his legendary NFL career and only recently of his other roles, including Monday Night Football.

What an extraordinary life. RIP.

 

Jeff MacGregor's tribute to Karras. Sums him and the NFL back in the day to a tee.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/8488016/alex-karras-death-marks-end-another-time-nfl

The NFL in those black-and-white and black-and-blue years was elemental, nothing but ice and mud and players like something sprung from the earth. Karras was one of these, a character in a fairy tale down from the crags or up from the dust, life breathed into him by the late Steve Sabol and the slow-motion mythology of NFL Films.

 

MDAB (the original, unrevised version) is a great but very disjointed book.

It's really three or four books in one: a semi-sequel/coda to "Paper Lion," including the shooting of the 1968 movie starring Alan Alda; Plimpton's account of his return to exhibition football with the Colts in 1971 (against the Lions, as it turned out), and free-form oral-history flashbacks from Karras, Gordy ... and Bobby Layne.

The Gordy stuff is very brief and limited. I think Plimpton actually originally conceived of the book as a how-to football manual for linemen in the words of Gordy, a great offensive guard, and Karras, one of the most famous DTs of the 1960s. But that quickly fell apart and the book started rambling.

I think Plimpton ended up with a bunch of disjointed material he wanted to wrap together into a book and decided the Gordy stuff should stay, even though it was hugely overshadowed by the stuff from Karras and Layne.

Funny thing was, Karras arrived just as the great Lions dynasty of the early-to-mid 1950s was burning out. He only played one season with Layne but he got enough stories out of it to fill up half a book.

I've gone on in several threads about how I always thought the rollicking, hard-driving, hard-partying Layne Lions of the 1950s would make a great sports biopic, but it's never happened -- maybe the NFL is wary about a movie which would glamorize an "Animal House" bunch of party animals, maybe Layne (or his family), who struggled with alcohol much of his life, didn't want to go along with it, maybe Karras himself wanted to keep his image family-friendly over the years --- who knows?

 

One of my favorite scenes from Paper Lion was when Karras and his crew sneaked out of training camp and headed to the local bar. Then on the way back they made so much noise singing they woke up Joe Schmidt. Have not seen in a while but I remember Karras singing some words that sounded like 'zuma , zuma zuma" over and over.

 

Boy that's well done by McGregor. Only thing that would make it better would be if you could have John Facenda read it.

 

Layne is responsible for one of my favorite sports quotes of all-time: "My goal in life is to run out of money and breath at the exact same moment."

 

The prime time to do a movie about the rollicking Layne Lions of the 1950s was probably the late 1990s/early 2000s, when Matthew McConaughey was still the right age to play a 30-ish Layne, Tiger Stadium (maybe Cleveland Stadium, too) was still standing and a few more people who actually remember those days were still around.

 

I know this is a few weeks late, but in case you wondered what MNF was like in its heyday, here's a 1975 game between the Giants and Bills with Alex in the booth (and some good signs).

 

Wow, Cosell was extra-awful in the booth that night.

 

There's one scene from MDAB that was uproariously funny in the original book in 1974, which would probably not be looked upon so humorously today: Karras recounts that in his one training camp with Layne, when he was adopted as the star QB's personal flunky/sidekick/whipping boy, "I was his chauffeur. I used to drive him from bar to bar. Cutty and water, that's all he drank, hour after hour. He used to call me Tippy. He would just yell, Tippy, get me another Cutty and water."

Plimpton then asked, did Karras have to buy all that booze? "Nah, I never paid for a thing. Layne picked up every tab. He'd drink Cutty and I'd drink Cutty. All he wanted me to do was drive. I would drive and he would sing 'Ida Red' at the top of his lungs."

But one night, Karras said, he was too blasted to drive, so Layne ended up driving with Karras slumped half passed out in the seat next to him. Karras recounted pulling out of a drunken stupor to look out the window and realizing Layne was driving down Woodward Avenue at 80-100 mph, singing 'Ida Red' (better known as Chuck Berry's 'Maybelline' to post-50s teenagers) in a yodeling howl as the car swerved, careened and screeched from one lane and then another, blasting through red light after red light.

Karras said the cold wind blasting in his face sobered him up somewhat, and he looked over at Layne, who had his right foot up on the dashboard -- and his left leg out the window. Layne had jammed something in the gas pedal which held it right flat to the floor. Karras then said he "got down on his knees screaming and begged, just BEGGED, Layne to stop the car."

Finally he did and Karras said, "From that moment on I insisted on driving the car no matter how much Cutty and water I had in me. I could be driving down the freeway at 10 mph with my chin on the steering wheel, but Layne didn't care as long as he could keep singing 'Ida Red.' "

Of course in today's atmosphere of drunken driving being a worse-than-murder abomination (and yes, probably rightly so), that scene could never be used in a movie without Layne wrapping the car around a telephone pole.

And Karras's solution that rather than have Layne drive drunk at 100 mph, it was better to have HIM drive drunk at 10 mph, would not have been considered a good option by MADD.

 

Layne had one of the greatest quotes of all-time: "My goal in life is to run out of money and breath at the exact same moment."