In reply to: I recently saw a Twitter question “Who are your favorite posted by sprack
George Blanda, Ed Brown, and Billy Wade.
Not sure who was the starter when. I think they alternated back and forth. More-so Avellini in the earliest handoff to #34 days.
too bad under Papa Bear Halas, and then came the slide: Concannon, Carter, Douglas, and the 1969 season (1-13). It was (no pun intended) unbearable. We watched the games on the family TV, with verbal bets on how they would f' up the next or any given play, especially in the red zone. That season exceeded the Keystone Cops and Three Stooges in striving for hilarity. They were truly a f'n joke. The eras of Dooley and Gibron were torturous, and made us weep.
was handing off to Ricky Bell and Mosi Tatupu. He beat us twice as a starter but but other than one big pass play in the '76 game, he was largely a game manager type quarterback. It was the same for the Bears when his main strength was handing off to Walter Payton.
Whenever I think of the incomparable Joe Kuharich, I think of Ed Brown who quarterbacked the undefeated USF Dons in 1951 coached by Kuharich. My dad, a big fan of Ollie Matson and the Chicago Cardinals, used to tell me about that USF team. In addition to Brown and Matson, USF had Gino Marchetti, Bob St. Clair, and Dick Stanfel (who would later coach at ND). Pete Rozelle was the asst AD!
from my dad's high school alma mater (St Ignatius). My dad came along a few years later, but he got to know a lot of those guys (especially Stanfel) very well. I believe Stanfel was involved in trying to get the program re-started at USF at one point. My dad also had a chance to practice basketball with Bill Russell and KC Jones, who were at USF when he was at SI.
It kind of went with the territory - if you were a White Sox fan you were a Cardinals fan, and if you were a Cub fan you were a Bears fan. That was not easy in the 1930's when the Cubs were going to the World Series and the Bears were dominating the NFL.
My dad eventually did become a Bears fan, but it took him 15 years after the Cardinals left to fully get there - and when the Cardinals left they were dead to him as they were with just about all their former fans. There really was no such thing as a St. Louis Cardinal fan in Chicago. Fortunately he wasn't one of THOSE people who became Packer fans.
He was a fan of all the Chicago teams. When I say "fan" I refer to the CWS and the Cardinals. When it came to da Bearss and the Cubs, he was a fanatic. He grew up on the North Shore after all. But he didn't like Northwestern because it was in Evanston, the home of New Trier's hated rival, the Evanston HS Wildkits. He rooted for the Fighting Illini.
my grandfather when he first arrived in the US in 1907, lived on the South Side for a few years with his brother (who stayed on the South Side). That decade was the glory years for both teams - the Cubs won the World Series the following year, only 108 years before the next time - and he became a Sox fan due to proximity after embracing baseball. By the time he moved to the West Side, the Cubs had moved from the West Side to the North Side.
And on the West Side, it was divided and of course as kids the Cub fans (including his two closest lifelong friends) would jab my dad mercilessly about being a Sox fan when they were terrible and the Cubs were good. Of course that's the age when it all gets solidified, as it was for me growing up in the western suburbs.
The Cardinals were secondary (he was always primarily a Notre Dame fan as any Catholic kid was then), but since they played in Comiskey Park they were part of the package.
obnoxious cub fans. But I was a steadfast Bears fan, and remember continued bad blood with the football Cardinals. Years later, Conrad Dobler made it easy to hate the football Cardinals.