A few thoughts about Norm Willey, one of the forgotten players of the pre-television age. Over the years, his performance against the Giants in a 1952 game has become the stuff of myth and legend. Willey died Thursday at age 83.
Norm Willey was one of the N.F.L.’s most explosive pass-rushers of the early-to-mid 1950s. His name is usually raised in connection with a single performance on a Sunday afternoon at the Polo Grounds in October 1952. In that game, it was reported that Willey sacked Giants quarterback Charlie Conerly 17 times. A more reliable account confirms that Willey did indeed have a great day, but not that great.
Willey was selected by the Philadelphia Eagles in the 13th round of the 1950 draft (170th over all) out of Marshall. Willey was drafted as a fullback, and in his first training camp, he found himself behind two veterans, Joe Muha and Jack Meyers. The Eagles’ coach, Greasy Neale, liked Willey’s aggressiveness, so he moved him over to the other side of the ball, to defensive end.
In one of the early practices, Willey knocked quarterback Tommy Thompson to the ground on three consecutive plays. Finally, Thompson had enough. “Somebody block that wild man,” he said. (Ray Didinger and Robert Lyons, “The Eagles Encyclopedia,” Temple University Press, 2005) From then on, Philadelphia’s right defensive end was known as Wild Man Willey.
Willey’s game was about speed and quickness. He usually lined up on the outside shoulder of the offensive tackle and as close to the neutral zone as possible without being offside. He’d get off the ball with a good first step and then accelerate around the corner. Sometimes, Willey would get upfield so fast that that tackle would be beaten while he was barely out of his stance. Like all the great pass-rushers, Willey was relentless.”Wild man was a good description of how he played,” recalled his teammate tackle Vic Sears. “He went full-speed all the time.” (Didinger)
When the coaches tried to convince Willey to vary his pass-rush moves depending on the line split of the offensive tackle, it made him think too much and slowed him down. He was a natural. They finally gave up and just told him to go and get the quarterback. As Sears said: “He’d just go. He played on instinct a lot, but he was so quick and aggressive, he was always around the ball.” (Didinger)
In 1952, coming into their Week 5 home game against the Eagles, the Giants knew that their offensive tackles would have trouble against Philadelphia’s crashing defensive ends, Willey, and the Hall of Famer Pete Pihos. They decided to pull their guards, Ray Beck and George Kennard, in an attempt to get a better angle and cut off Willey and Pihos before they could turn the corner, similar to what the 49ers did with John Ayers against Lawrence Taylor in a divisional playoff game after the 1981 season. That protection scheme failed spectacularly.
According to contemporaneous newspaper accounts, Willey tackled the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage 17 times that day. “Eleven of those dumpings came in sequence”, wrote Hugh Brown in The Philadelphia Bulletin, “causing New York scribes to remark ‘He’s the greatest defensive end we’ve ever seen and probably the greatest we’ll ever see.’ ” (Didinger). Frank Gifford, a rookie on that Giants team, said decades later: “Norm Willey was very fast, and we were very slow.” (Didinger) The Eagles won the game, 14-10.
Those newspaper stories did not use the word “sack.” Deacon Jones is generally credited with introducing that term to football in the early 1970s, and the N.F.L. didn’t recognize it as an official statistic until 1982.
Did Willey really have 17 sacks? Paul Zimmerman was at the Polo Grounds that day, too, and as he wrote in Sports Illustrated in 2000: “Count me as one of (the) non-believers.” Zimmerman’s charts credit the Eagles with 14 sacks, 8 by Willey, and 6 by Pihos. The official N.F.L. record for sacks in one game is 7, set by Derrick Thomas of Kansas City against Seattle in 1990.
In “The Eagles Encyclopedia,” Ray Didinger states that Willey lined up that day against New York’s Hall of Fame left tackle, Roosevelt Brown, a claim picked up by some of the obituaries. For the record, Brown didn’t join the Giants until the following season. He was drafted in 1953.
Willey played his entire eight-year career in Philadelphia. He made first-team All-Pro in 1954 and was elected to two Pro Bowls, in 1954 and 1955. Willey broke his right leg in 1956 and, even though he came back, he wasn’t the same player. He retired after the 1957 season.
Norm Willey played in an era before pro football was widely available on television. Today, everything is captured from multiple angles, in slow motion, and in high definition, and can be replayed over and over. With all the wonderful technology, maybe something’s been lost. Perhaps the mystery of what exactly happened on that fall day nearly 60 years ago has helped make the story even more compelling with the passage of time.
Was Conerly holding the ball for too long? Did he step up into the pocket to avoid the outside rush? Were the receivers running the correct routes? Why didn’t the Giants change the protection scheme? Eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Memories fade.
We can, however, safely assume one thing about that game: No matter how many times Conerly hit the ground, no one was celebrating over him. No sack dances. As Willey said, many years later: “In those days, no one even slapped each other on the hands, the high-fives and the low-fives. You just went out and got a drink of water and kept on playing.” (Ron Pollack, “The Legend of Wild Man Willey,” Pro Football Weekly, 1984, reprinted in “The Coffin Corner,” 1997)
Andy Barall writes about pro football history for The Fifth Down.
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