Jim Reese, who has been writing for both CompuSports and Florida newspapers for ten years, recently published a book entitled, “Sports Stories-Old School.”

Jim, a former quarterback at the University of Minnesota and a past high school and college coach, reminisces about the times and people he has met in a fifty-five year journey through sporting fields, locker rooms and lives, ranging from his relationship with Vince Lombardi, to an unheralded second-stringer on a losing high school football team who was determined to play college football.

Jim’s book Sports Stories-Old School is available now in eBook and paperback format. His past articles can be found under the Inside the Hash Marks category, and his ebook How to Win at Flag Football is available here.

Below is one of the stories from his new book.

Len Ford
Jim Reese

On a bitterly cold day in late 1958 with snow swirling throughout the entire Midwest, the Los Angeles Rams visited Green Bay to play the Packers. The Vikings had yet to be formed so the Packer games were televised into Minneapolis where I was attending college.

The Packers were closing out a disastrous 1-1-10 campaign, their tenth straight losing season. It would be another year before Vince Lombardi arrived to build a dynasty that would change the game in Green Bay and everywhere else. Future gridiron greats such as Hornung, Nitschke and Starr, as well as many has-beens, were members of that ’58 team, improperly used, under-motivated and poorly coached, awaiting the coming of Lombardi. None perhaps exemplified the frustration of this rag-tag crew more than old timer and All-Pro Hall of Famer, Len Ford.

Ford had been drafted by the old Los Angeles Dons of the All American Football Conference in 1947. Ford’s short stint with the Dons saw him catch sixty-seven passes in his first two seasons, an outstanding amount given the emphasis on a brutal running game in those years. The Dons folded after two seasons, and Ford, switching positions, went on to a stellar career with the Cleveland Browns, making All-Pro five straight years, and spearheading three NFL championship teams as a defensive end.

By 1958, however, Ford’s talents had all but withered away. Cast aside by the Browns, he was sent to the Siberia of pro football, Green Bay. Seeing limited action on even such a woeful team as the Packers, Ford rode the bench, coming on the field only to block for the extra point and field goal teams, a skill requiring scant more than a brutish charge upon the snap of the ball against the closest body in a different colored shirt.

But the final game of the year would prove especially disheartening for this native of Washington, D.C., who had to spend his freshman year at all-black Morgan State before being allowed into the University of Michigan when black athletes became more accepted at prestigious universities after the World War II.

As I sat in the warmth of my fraternity house on that cold, grey day, with the Packers badly in need of a big play to allow them to finish the season with a win and a modicum of dignity, and with Len Ford in even greater need of contributing something, anything, to extend his career for one more year, the Packers lined up for a late game tying field goal. But this play would be different. This would be a fake field goal, going for the win.

From his position on the right end of the line, Ford waited a second and then began to run diagonally for the distant corner of the end zone, his tired old legs pushing his body one last time to get him home to gloryville and maybe one more season of paychecks. The holder rolled right and spotted Ford through the swirling snow, his green and gold Packer jersey barely visible through the raging snowstorm. Wearing tape all over his hands to protect knuckles broken and battered from years of football, Ford watched anxiously as the spiral came directly at him. With the experience garnered from having caught those sixty-seven passes so many years before, the aging gladiator lifted his taped hands one final time to make the game-winning catch.

Lenny Ford died of a heart attack at the age of forty-six, knowing the last pass ever thrown to him bounced off his bruised and bandaged hands, falling helplessly to the frozen ground below, sending him out of the NFL.

I felt, and feel, very sorry for Lenny Ford.