Sid Luckman, Jewish Football Legend...Now Jake Retzlaff
"Sid would be handing out $20 bills as if we'd all found the afikomen. Then his grandsons and I would team up and wrestle the 65-year-old legend. He threw us around the couch like Nerf footballs."
By Michael Golden
Today is the birthday of the greatest Chicago Bears quarterback of all time — and one of the best to ever play the position. Sid Luckman, one of the few Jews to ever play pro football — much less stand out — led the Bears to four NFL championships between 1939 and 1950. A three-time NFL All Star and a five-time First Team All-Pro, Sid was known as one of the greatest long-range passers of all time.
He was also a great guy. When I was a little kid, my family would have Thanksgiving dinner at the home of their best friends, Bob (Sid's son) and Gale Luckman. It felt like family.
Sid would be handing out $20 bills to the kids like we'd all simultaneously found the afikomen. Then I and his grandsons, Brian and Craig, would team up and wrestle the 65-year-old legend. He threw us around the sectional couch like Nerf footballs, and we would laugh hilariously.
Sid still holds the all-time record for touchdown percentage at 7.9, and the seven touchdowns he threw in a single game has been tied but never beat. Sid was inducted into both the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame in the 1960s, and also was honored in 1985 with the Walter Camp “Distinguished American” Award.
Oh, and in 1979, ‘round the time we were wrestling after turkey, Sid was enshrined into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. I wonder what took them so long! (insert punchline)…
Speaking of which, there is a line from the 1980 movie Airplane! that makes me laugh out loud every time I hear it. Flight attendant Elaine is carrying a thick stack of magazines down the aisle and offering them to passengers. When she asks an elderly woman if she’d like something to read, the woman asks:
“Do you have anything light?”
Elaine awkwardly looks through her stack, then smiles and says:
“Uhhh…how about this leaflet? ‘Famous Jewish Sports Legends.'”
Airplane! took a lot of risks in its rapid-fire jokes, which took shots at everyone. It was a different time, and it was positively hilarious from start to finish. But it makes perfect sense that that line in particular was concocted by three Jews who wrote the screenplay and directed the movie, Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker. And I doubt anyone laughed at it harder than Jews themselves.
The only quarterback after Sid Luckman who ever led the Bears to a Super Bowl victory was Jim McMahon in 1986 (not Jewish). The colorful “punky QB” didn’t have an illustrious NFL career overall, but we loved him in Chicago. McMahon was, however, a huge standout at Brigham Young University, where he held 70 NCAA records by the time he left.
BYU is a private school run with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It has an enrollment of about 35,000 students, 95 percent of which are Mormon. There are three Jewish kids on campus this year, which makes it wildly ironic that their star quarterback, Jake Retzlaff, who led the Cougars to an undefeated 9-0 start this year — is one of the three. His nickname: “BYJew.”
Retzlaff is not what you would call a Torah-observant Jew (what many refer to as “Orthodox).” I mean, he’s playing football on Saturdays. Hello. But as our broad spectrum of writers at JEWDICIOUS have expressed many times, Jewishness can be a quite personal thing; there are many different streams and communities. And this brings us to a second irony: How being at BYU has brought out more of the BYJew in Retzlaff. He talked about it recently:
“I came here thinking I might not fit in with the culture, so this will be a place where I can just focus on school and football. But I found that, in a way, I do fit. People are curious. And when everybody around you is so faith-oriented, it makes you want to explore your faith more.”
There are a whole lot of Jewish sports fans — and non-sports fans — who are wishing Jake Retzlaff huge luck this season as he tries to get his BYU Cougars into the College Football Playoff. I’m one of them.
Sid Luckman died in 1998 at the age of 81. But I’ll bet you $20 — or a hidden piece of matzah — that somewhere, somehow, the immortal #42 is rooting for Retzlaff too.
Michael Golden is the Editor-in-Chief of JEWDICIOUS.
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