Welcome to the NFL 100, The Athletic’s endeavor to identify the 100 best players in football history. You can order the book version here. Every day until the season begins, we’ll unveil new members of the list, with the No. 1 player to be crowned on Wednesday, Sept. 8.
Al Davis loved speed. The late owner of the Raiders was infatuated with players who could outrun the opponent and spent a career building teams around the idea that “speed kills” and “you can’t teach speed.” He chased receivers with scorching 40-yard dash times and quarterbacks with big arms to get them the ball. And it’s easy to trace the origins of Davis’ love affair with speed to the early 1960s and Lance Alworth.
Advertisement
Davis was the Los Angeles/San Diego Chargers’ wide receivers coach from 1960 until 1962. In 1962, the AFL’s Oakland Raiders and NFL’s San Francisco 49ers both drafted Alworth, a flanker out of the University of Arkansas who earned the nickname “Bambi” because of his graceful long strides and leaping ability as a receiver. Davis played a hand in the Chargers trading multiple players to the Raiders for the right to negotiate with Alworth. Alworth didn’t have an agent, but he knew what he wanted was a no-cut contract. The Chargers offered him one with a $20,000 salary and a $10,000 signing bonus over two years. Alworth called the 49ers and said he didn’t care about the money but he wanted a contract that guaranteed his spot on the team. The 49ers said they didn’t offer those.
“So I hung up the phone and never talked to them again,” Alworth recalled in a recent phone interview with The Athletic.
In due time, the 49ers lived to regret that. In 1962, Alworth played in only four games because of injury. But from 1963 until 1969, Alworth had seven straight seasons with 1,000 yards receiving. He had five seasons with at least 1,200 receiving yards. In the 1960s, Alworth had three of the seven best receiving seasons in terms of yards per game of all players in the AFL and NFL. Even as passing statistics have ballooned in recent years, Alworth, who ended his career in 1972, holds the NFL record with 12 touchdown catches of 70-plus yards. He averaged 75.5 yards per game in his career, which is 11th all time and fifth all time if you exclude active receivers. He also averaged 18.9 yards per reception, the highest mark of any player with at least 10,000 career receiving yards.
Even when teams didn’t throw the ball as often as they do now, even when defensive backs could get away with more contact at the line of scrimmage, even when teams played only 14 games in a season, Alworth still amassed numbers that stand up nearly 50 years later.
Advertisement
AFL historian and researcher Todd Tobias said, “If you talk to people that really knew football in the ’60s and had watched Lance play and have watched a lot of football in the decades since, Lance is one of the very few guys that almost universally people say he could still be a star today. Whatever qualities he had would translate to the modern game and he would be just fine.”
Tobias wrote his master’s thesis on then-Chargers coach Sid Gillman, authored a book on the 1960s Chargers and has dedicated his website, Tales from the American Football League, to AFL research. He’s struck up a friendship with Alworth, and one of his projects involved researching another of Alworth’s impressive stats. Alworth couldn’t remember exactly how many passes he dropped in his career, but he guessed it was around a dozen. Tobias combed through the official play-by-play accounts of each individual game and counted exactly 12 drops over the course of Alworth’s 11-year career in the NFL and AFL.
“It’s almost like the position was made for me,” Alworth said. “I love to run and I love to catch the ball.”
Coming out of high school, Alworth had a chance to sign a contract to play for the New York Yankees. Alworth was a star center fielder who loved chasing down fly balls in the outfield. But his parents wanted him to go to school rather than turn pro immediately, and Alworth was more wired for football than baseball anyway.
“In baseball, you don’t get any action,” Alworth said. “You wait for someone to hit you the ball and you bat every three or four innings. In football, you’re busy all the time.”
A Mississippi native, Alworth ended up at Arkansas due to unusual circumstances. Ole Miss football coach Johnny Vaught didn’t allow his players to be married. Alworth had gotten married in high school and thus could only go to Ole Miss to play baseball. When Arkansas offered him the chance to play football, he jumped at it. He played mostly as a halfback at Arkansas, helping the team win or share three Southwest Conference titles.
Advertisement
Once he arrived in San Diego, Gillman shared his vision for Alworth at a new position: flanker. The position proved to be the perfect fit for a player with Alworth’s speed, leaping ability and ball-tracking skills. Gillman once told the Los Angeles Times, “He was the greatest combination runner, jumper and catcher I ever saw. His sense of timing was so great that with him out there, we felt that the fly pattern was no more a gamble than a run.”
Alworth credits Gillman’s offensive genius and the arm of quarterback John Hadl for the gaudy statistics he accumulated during his career. When he watches games now, Alworth wonders what it would have been like to get as many targets as receivers do these days.
“I wish we would have thrown the ball more,” Alworth said. “It’s not even the numbers. It’s just the idea that it would have been a heck of a lot of fun to do. To heck with the numbers, just throw the ball more to me. It’s fun!”
The numbers help Alworth find a spot on this list and many other lists of the greatest players in pro football history. But numbers still aren’t the perfect way to capture what Alworth meant to the sport. It’s difficult to compare statistics from different eras, especially when Alworth played most of his career in the AFL before the AFL and NFL merged. He battled the stigma that the AFL was an inferior league until he became the first AFL player enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
When the Cowboys traded for Alworth in 1971, Dallas coach Tom Landry called him into his office and told him, “If you block for me, we’ll win a Super Bowl.” Alworth said he was willing to block. Landry said, “Good,” and walked out of the room.
They did just that, beating the Dolphins 24-3 in Super Bowl VI in January 1972.
Alworth’s lasting memory of his time with the Cowboys is that they didn’t throw him the ball often. While he may not have been a focal point of the Cowboys’ offense, Alworth did catch the first touchdown in the Cowboys’ Super Bowl win. That and his blocking helped him become the rare player with an AFL championship and a Super Bowl ring.
Advertisement
In one of his first games with the Cowboys, Alworth was chasing a play away from the ball when he got leveled from behind. When he looked up, a player was standing over him and said, “Welcome to the NFL.” Never a trash talker, Alworth found him a few plays later and returned the favor with a hit of his own. Afterward, the opposing player extended his hand for a truce.
That stoic, hard-nosed style of play helped Alworth earn the respect of every cornerback and linebacker he played against. Listen to those who played in both the AFL and NFL and they’ll tell you Alworth was arguably the best receiver in either league during that era.
Johnny Sample, who played for four teams across both leagues, wrote in his book, Confessions of a Dirty Ballplayer that Alworth was the best receiver he ever played against.
“He did everything perfectly, and there was no intimidating him,” Sample wrote.
“I just couldn’t believe that one man could do so many things so well.”
Booker Edgerson, who played eight seasons at cornerback for the Buffalo Bills and won two AFL Championships, still considers Alworth one of the toughest players he lined up against. Edgerson was covering him in the game Alworth set a record by catching a pass in his 96th consecutive game. There’s a picture of the catch in the Hall of Fame, which allows Edgerson to joke with his friends that he made it to Canton.
“He had the speed, he had the hands, he had the athletic ability to maneuver his body around a lot,” Edgerson said in a recent interview with The Athletic. “He would be a star now just as he was back then. He was just an outstanding ballplayer. And he had a great attitude. He never once talked trash. That guy is going to continue to be in the top 50 players of all time. I don’t care how long the league goes. He was that good.”
Advertisement
In Alworth’s mind, he never needed to do much talking on the field. The way he went after the football said more than he ever could.
“The main thing is when the ball is thrown, it’s mine,” Alworth said. “You’re not going to get it. I’m going to do whatever I have to do to catch it.”
Alworth, who still lives in the San Diego area and turns 81 on Aug. 3, said he’s amazed by the life he’s lived. Asked what it meant to still be considered among the greatest to ever play the game nearly 50 years after he finished playing, Alworth got choked up. He said no specific achievements or games meant as much to him as the friendships he formed and the joy they spread to the fans.
“It’s really hard to put into words because you don’t really think about what you’re doing when you’re doing it,” Alworth said. “You just go out and do your thing. And do it to the best of your ability. And you know, whatever happens, happens. You thank the good Lord for your ability and just go out and do it. And if you happen to be better than someone else or achieve things more than other people did, then that’s fantastic. But you did only because you were given that ability.”
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
