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A Gathering of Greats: Football

Dick Butkus This is the legacy of the fiercest defensive player the game has ever known: seven All-Pro selections, eight Pro Bowls, innumerable ballcarriers terrified. "If every college football team had a linebacker like Dick Butkus ... all fullbacks would soon be three feet tall and sing soprano." —Dan Jenkins, SI, Oct. 12, 1964

Jim Brown In nine seasons he rushed for 12,312 yards and 106 touchdowns, won an NFL-record eight rushing titles and never missed a game. "It is possible that had he continued to play, he would have put all the league's rushing records so far out of reach that they would have been only a distant dream -- like DiMaggio's hitting streak -- to the runners who followed him. As it is, his most telling number is 5.22, which was Brown's average yards per carry over nine years." —Peter King, SI, Sept. 19, 1994

Otto Graham He won four AAFC titles, three NFL championships, two player of the year awards and a much-deserved tag as pro football's nonpareil winner. "Otto Graham played for 10 years with the Cleveland Browns beginning in 1946, and the Browns were in a league championship game every one of those seasons. If you're looking for a record that will never be matched, that's a good place to start." —Paul Zimmerman, SI, Aug. 17, 1998

Red Grange A collegiate runner of such mythic status that despite his rather pedestrian professional career, his mere participation in the pro game in 1925 did nothing less than save the sport. "The weekly newsreel clips that made the rounds of the movie houses back in those days took the images [of Grange] and enhanced them.... They stoked the illusion of speed and made even more impressive the other eerie components of his long touchdown runs: the sublime shifts and feints, the paralyzing stiff arms, the breathtaking bursts of speed. Reviewing those reels now, you get the impression that if Red Grange were not, indeed, a Galloping Ghost, he surely must have seen one." —John Underwood, SI, Sept. 4, 1985

Don Hutson Before Hutson -- he of the 488 catches, 99 touchdown receptions, five consecutive scoring titles and two straight MVP awards -- there was no such thing as double coverage. "He was an unexplained force in the NFL, a meteor that lit up the sky. An original. A legend." —Paul Zimmerman, SI, July 7, 1997

Joe Montana A third-round draft choice, he became the greatest clutch player in NFL history, with four Super Bowl wins in four tries and three Super Bowl MVP Awards. "Montana often leads us into thinking that pro football is scripted in storybook fashion, that he is the white-hatted, all-American Comeback Kid for whom the impossible just happens. But his triumphs are forged from real talent." —Rick Telander, SI, Sept. 19, 1994

Photographs by (from top) Neil Leifer, Daniel Schwartz(Artwork), APPhoto/CSU/Cleveland Press Archives, Culver Pictures, AP, Peter Read Miller

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