Bobby Layne's curse. (original) (raw)

Bobby Layne's legend started at Highland Park High School in Dallas, where he paired with classmate and teammate Doak Walker, who was so good the NCAA named its annual award for the best running back in college football for him. The two parted ways when it came time to play college ball. Walker went to SMU and Layne went to UT. Alums from both schools and a certain breed of sports historian like to speculate about the records and legacies the dynamic duo might have coauthored for either school if they had been in the same backfield for four years. We'll never know, of course, but we do know that in the 1946 Cotton Bowl, Layne ran, passed and kicked for every point in 40-27 rout of Missouri. Nobody else has ever done that either.

Layne began his pro career with the Chicago Bears and spent a year with the New York Bulldogs, who traded him to the Detroit Lions. He was the heart and soul of the Lions teams - both on and off the field - that won three NFL championships in six years. As teammate Yale Larry once said, "When Bobby said block, you blocked. When he said drink, you drank."

Layne was the first in a long line of playboy quarterbacks who got almost as much attention for what he did and said off the field as he did for his play. Caught in a prostitution sting, Layne pleaded "extreme entrapment." The judge asked him to explain what he meant and Layne said, "Well, your honor, if you set a trap for ol' Bobby, you're going to catch him every time."

The Lions traded Layne to the Pittsburgh Steelers early in the 1958 season, and he - allegedly - placed a curse on the Lions, vowing that they wouldn't win another championship for 50 years. They've exceeded that dire prediction by almost another decade. The year the curse was supposed to expire - 2008 - the Lions went 0-16. We don't know if Layne actually decided to hang half a hundred years of bad football voodoo on the Lions or not. He might have, but no one recorded it or noted it at the time. But as Detroit's football fortunes floundered, fans might have started looking for an explanation.

"It was a whisper once and then it was like, maybe this thing is really happening," Detroit columnist and best-selling author Mitch Albom told ESPN a few years ago. "And then it just became an explanation as to why we're going through this heartbreak."

But there may be hope for the Lions. They have a quarterback from Texas named Matt Stafford, who broke Bobby Layne's 55-year old team record for passing yardage. And here's the kicker. Stafford played for Layne's high school alma mater, Highland Park, and even grew up on the same street that Layne did. If there is a curse to break, Stafford might be the guy to do it.

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Clay Coppedge
"Letters from Central Texas" October 2, 2017 column