His name was Fred Gehrke. <\/p>\n
His pro football career as a running back lasted seven seasons and 69 regular-season games. <\/p>\n
He set no NFL records and nobody says much about him today. <\/p>\n
But 78 years ago, he changed \u201cthe face\u201d of professional football forever. That\u2019s a case of misplaced anatomy. What he changed was the collective heads. His backup years later was a fellow named Pete Rozelle, who saved Fred\u2019s original idea and, in a dozen other ways, changed the rest of pro football on his own.<\/p>\n
As the Rams head into the NFC Championship Game against Seattle on Sunday, both teams can point to Gehrke as their unofficial fashionista of headwear. So can everyone else. Without him, there would be no seahawk on Seattle\u2019s helmets \u2014 and no lion, no patriot, no symbols of any kind on those of anyone else. Until 1948, there were only boring team colors.<\/p>\n
Nobody got rich playing pro football. Everyone needed an off-season job. Gehrke was no exception. <\/p>\n
He worked every off-season as a commercial artist. Before that, he was an art major at the University of Utah. Nobody seems to know for sure whether it was the team owner, Dan Reeves, or his coach, Bob Snyder, but the running back\/illustrator got permission from someone in authority to try a radical uniform experiment. <\/p>\n
In the summer of 1948, he sat down with a bucket of yellow paint in his garage and drew Rams horns on either side of his team\u2019s blue helmets. He painted 75 helmets to prove his point.<\/p>\n
Nobody knew but Gehrke, Snyder and Reeves. They kept the secret until the players got their helmets before the first exhibition game against Washington in front of 105,000 at the L.A. Coliseum. They went through pre-game warm-ups bare-headed.<\/p>\n
This was a night game. The powerful klieg lights dimmed, then were re-ignited with magnified brightness. The Rams came roaring out of the tunnel in their new helmets, the horns brilliantly reflected by the brightness. The crowd was at first stunned, and then, delighted. It reacted to the horns with a five-minute standing ovation. It was thrilled.<\/p>\n
The opponents were not.<\/p>\n
Mark Duncan, an assistant coach with the 49ers and later the NFL\u2019s supervisor of officials, told me, \u201cWhen I was with the 49ers, I used to hate those helmets. You can laugh if you want, but when we went down to play in that huge Coliseum, they were the glamour team. The horned helmets became their autograph. They would come pounding out of the tunnel with the sun on those helmets. The more we looked at those horns, the more real they seemed. It was a gimmick that worked because in our minds, they gave the Rams an extra fierceness.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Rozelle became the Rams general manager a little over a decade later, the Rams were still the horned warriors. But the coach he inherited, Sid Gillman, ignored tradition. Rozelle would not. <\/p>\n
This is how the two obstinate men settled it. Bill Granholm, the equipment manager, told me that \u201cGillman had a friend in the sporting goods business and he talked to him about bidding for the helmet contract. The guy made several models. I saw Sid come out of his room at training camp, carrying a few helmets, and I saw Pete come out of his room, and he ran after Gillman and finally caught up with him. I saw them talking, but I could not hear them. There was a lot of animated gesturing. Then, Sid walked back to his room. When he appeared again, the helmets were gone. I never saw them again.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Gillman, it was the ultimate insult. For Rozelle, it was the ultimate empowerment decision. And to the horns that rose above it, they were confirmation of the ultimate in pro football fashion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"His name was Fred Gehrke. His pro football career as a running back lasted seven seasons and 69…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2079],"tags":[7,1014,58,2444,2611,6,31185,424],"class_list":{"0":"post-697084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-rams","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-los-angeles","10":"tag-los-angeles-rams","11":"tag-losangeles","12":"tag-losangelesrams","13":"tag-nfl","14":"tag-nflraw25","15":"tag-rams"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115940512672108697","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}