City Boy – "Goodbye, Blue Monday" (1976)

Goodbye, blue Monday

No one to drag me out of bed

When you’re retired, there’s no such thing as “blue Monday.”  There’s just plain Monday . . . which is no different than Tuesday . . . or Wednesday . . . or any other day.

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Earlier this month, I wrote about Frank Ryan and King Hill, the two men who split time at quarterback on Rice University’s 1957 Southwest Conference championship football team.  Both men went on to have long careers in the NFL.

I graduated from Rice many years after Hill and Ryan played.  I remember seeing them play on TV back in the sixties, when I was a kid who would watch just about any sporting event that was televised.  (We only had two television channels in my hometown back then, so my choices were very limited.)

Frank Ryan was the more successful NFL QB, but King Hill got most of the playing time when both men were at Rice.  Hill was so good for the Owls that he was the consensus first-team All-American quarterback that year and the #1 overall pick in the 1958 NFL draft.  

Hill also captained the college team in the 1958 College All-Star Football Classic.  Most of you have probably never heard of the College All-Star Football Classic, which was first played in 1934 and last contested in 1976.  I’ll not only tell you more about that game in the next 2 or 3 lines, but also explain the curious connection between it and the annual Joplin, Missouri “Sidewalk Sale.”

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The opponent of the collegians in the 1958 College All-Star Football Classic contest were the Detroit Lions, the defending NFL champions.  Coincidentally, the Lions were also quarterbacked by a former Rice player, Tobin Rote, who played professionally from 1950 until 1966.

Rote had led Rice to a 10-1 record and the SWC title in 1949.  The Owls closed out that season with a win over North Carolina in the Cotton Bowl.  

Tobin Rote as a Packer

Green Bay used their second-round pick to draft Rote in 1950, and immediately installed him as their starting QB.  The hapless Packers failed to achieve a single winning season during Rote’s seven-year tenure with the team, but he was certainly not the problem.  Not only did Rote rank third in the NFL in passing touchdowns during his years in Green Bay – only Hall of Famers Norm Van Brocklin and Bobby Layne had more – but he also led all NFL QBs in rushing.

Rote had a remarkable 1956 season for the 4-8 Packers.  He led the NFL in passing yards and passing touchdowns that year, and also topped all other quarterbacks in rushing yards and rushing touchdowns.  The Packers scored 34 TDs that year, and Rote either threw or ran for 29 of them – a total that remains the record for a 12-game NFL season.  

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God only knows why the Packers traded Rote – who was clearly their most valuable player – to the Detroit Lions after his incredible 1956 season.  

Rote as a Lion

The Lions’ decision to trade for Rote was almost as puzzling.  After all, they already had a great quarterback in Bobby Layne, a future Hall of Famer who had led Detroit to two NFL championships.  

The Lions’ strategy seemed to be prescient when Layne broke his ankle in the penultimate game of the regular season.  Rote led his team to victories in their last two regular-season games, then brought them back from a 27-7 deficit to prevail over the 49ers in the Western Conference playoff, 31-27.

Detroit’s opponents in the NFL title game that year were the powerful Cleveland Browns, who had appeared in ten of the previous eleven league championship matchups.  In one of the greatest playoff performances in NFL history, Rote threw four TD passes and ran for another score as the Lions dominated Cleveland, 59-14.

If you watched the Lions-Rams playoff game earlier this month, you probably heard the announcers talking about the 89-year-old Detroit fan who had owned season tickets to the team’s games for 66 years.  His first year as a season-ticket holder was that 1957 season, when Rote led the team to its most recent NFL title.

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In 1960, Rote moved from the NFL to the Canadian Football League.  In the first of his three seasons with the Toronto Argonauts, he threw for 38 touchdowns, which was the most ever by a CFL QB.  But after the 1962 season, Rote was on the move again – this time to the upstart American Football League San Diego Chargers.

Rote as a Charger

The Chargers had won only four games in 1962.  But with Rote at the helm of their league-leading offense, the team finished 11-3 and crushed the Boston Patriots 51-10 in the AFL Championship game.  The 35-year-old Rote was named the league’s Most Valuable Player.

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Rote hung up his cleats after the 1964 season.  He came back briefly with the Broncos in 1966, then quit for good.

Tobin Rote remains the only quarterback to lead teams to both the NFL and AFL championships.  He threw for over 200 TD passes in his pro career, but might have been a better runner than passer – at the time of his retirement, no NFL QB had rushed for more yards in a career.

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I heard about City Boy when I was in law school, and liked their first album enough to buy their next two.

Today’s featured song was released on their second LP, Dinner at the Ritz.  Here’s what the New Musical Express said about that album:

Not even the highest ballyhoo of praise could do justice to City Boy's masterwork, Dinner At The Ritz . . . You hear a composing style which has been influenced by, respectfully, Lennon and McCartney, novelist Ian Fleming, and Noel Coward.  Very English . . . but very strange. 

I don’t think Lennon and McCartney influenced Dinner at the Ritz much if at all.  City Boy’s very sophisticated and clever lyrics and somewhat theatrical music are much more reminiscent of their contemporaries 10cc and Sparks than the Beatles.

Click here to listen to “Goodbye Blue Monday.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Shadows of Knight – "Someone Like Me" (1967)

I’m not changing my suggestion 

You need someone just like me

During his very successful 13-year stint as the head football coach at the University of Michigan, Lloyd Carr’s teams won five Big Ten titles and the 1997 national championship.  As a result, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame after he retired.

But Lloyd Carr let Tom Brady sit on the bench for his first two seasons at Michigan.  And even when Brady was a senior, Carr failed to discern Brady’s greatness, choosing to platoon him at quarterback with sophomore Drew Henson for the first seven games of the season.

Tom Brady, riding the pines at Michigan

Carr wasn’t the only distinguished coach to underestimate Brady’s ability.  Bill Belichick kept Brady on the New England bench his rookie year, and he might have remained there for years if Patriots QB Drew Bledsoe hadn’t suffered a serious injury early the next season.

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Like Brady, the late Frank Ryan struggled to persuade both his college and NFL coaches that he deserved to be a starting quarterback.  

Ryan and King Hill split playing time fairly evenly in 1956, when both were juniors at Rice University.  But Hill was the dominant member of Rice’s QB tandem in 1957 – Ryan took only about a third of the snaps for the Owls that year.

Given how good King Hill was, you might wonder how Ryan got even that much playing time.  Hill was not only the consensus first-team All-American quarterback that year, but also the #1 overall pick in the 1958 NFL draft.

Ryan was surprised to be drafted in the fifth round by the Los Angeles Rams – he had assumed his football days were over, and was planning to pursue a graduate degree in mathematics at his alma mater.  He started only a few games in his first four years in the league.  

Frank Ryan rarely started for the Rams

The Cleveland Browns thought Ryan would be a good backup, and traded for him before the 1962 season.  But their first-string QB was injured halfway through the season, giving Ryan the opportunity to be a starter that he had been waiting for.  

No other NFL signal caller – not Johnny Unitas, not Bart Starr, not Fran Tarkenton, not Sonny Jurgensen – threw for more touchdowns than Ryan did during the years that he was the Browns’ starting QB.  He led the team to five consecutive winning seasons and the 1964 NFL championship, and played in three Pro Bowls.

(Scroll down to read more about Frank Ryan, who was an accomplished mathematician as well as a star quarterback.)

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You may be wondering whatever happened to King Hill, the All-American who beat out Ryan for the starting spot at Rice when both were seniors.

Hill had only modest success as a professional quarterback – due in part to the fact that he spent virtually all of his career on the rosters of some very bad teams – but don’t let that make you think he wasn’t a remarkable athlete.

While he was at Rice, Hill not only was an All-American QB but also an outstanding punter and a defensive back.  In 1957, he almost single-handedly led the Owls to a 7-6 upset win over #1 ranked Texas A&M.  

King Hill

Hill not only scored Rice’s only TD, he kicked the extra point, intercepted a pair of passes, and kept the heavily favored Aggies pinned deep in their own end of the field with well-placed punts.  (Hill was his team’s primary punter during most of his NFL seasons.)

“I have been saying all season that King Hill was a great athlete,” A&M’s legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant said after the game. “He made me look good on Saturday, but I wish he hadn’t.  He did everything but take up tickets.”

Hill wasn’t just a gridiron star in college.  He also played basketball and golf while at Rice, making him one of the last three-sport lettermen in major college athletics.

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Like Frank Ryan, King Hill was more than just an athlete.  Highly respected by his peers, he was a key figure in the formation of the NFL Players Association, helping to negotiate the first collective bargaining agreement between NFL players and owners.  

After retiring as a player, Hill spent the next nine years as an Houston Oilers assistant coach before moving to New Orleans, where he was the Saints’ offensive coordinator for five seasons.  The Philadelphia Eagles then hired him as their scouting director, a position he held for seven years.

Hill loved golf, and helped promote a number of charity golf tournaments after retiring from coaching.  Among the causes he supported were the Ronald McDonald Houses and the Special Olympics.

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The Rolling Stones, Animals, and Yardbirds were English bands who started out playing Chicago-style blues songs.

The Shadows of Knight – who are best known for their 1965 cover of Them’s “Gloria” – were a Chicago band that sounded like they were a British group playing Chicago-style blues.

“Someone Like Me” is a non-album single they released in 1967 that failed to chart.  The record works despite being a hot mess – if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the lyrics and the music were written by two different people who never met each other.

Click here to listen to “Someone Like Me.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon. 

The Band – "Look Out Cleveland" (1969)

Look out, Cleveland

Storm is comin’ through

And it’s runnin’ right up on you

A number of very accomplished people have graduated from my alma mater, Rice University.  But the late Dr. Frank Ryan – who was not only a star NFL quarterback but also a world-class mathematician and computer scientist – was in a league of his own.

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After graduating from Rice with a mathematics degree in 1958, Ryan was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams.  During the next several years, Ryan split his time between quarterbacking in the NFL and doing the work required to earn his master's and doctorate degrees.  

He was awarded his Rice Ph.D. six months after leading the Cleveland Browns to their 1964 NFL championship.  (His dissertation was titled “A Characterization of the Set of Asymptotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc.”  If you have any idea what that means, maybe you can explain it to me.). 

Ryan then joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve University, where he taught advanced mathematics electives at the same time he was quarterbacking the Browns. 

You read that correctly: Ryan was a star NFL quarterback and a mathematics professor simultaneously.  

Professor Ryan in the classroom

Here’s what a former student of his wrote about Ryan:

Ryan was not only a professor at Case Western Reserve, where I was an undergraduate in the ’60’s, but he was at the same time the starting quarterback for the Cleveland Browns.  The starting quarterback for a NFL football team, and a professor with a full teaching load.  

During the football season he taught his class early in the week, and then on Sundays he was behind the center taking the ball. Handing it off, throwing passes, and getting sacked – like any other quarterback in the league.  He was one of the best quarterbacks of his day, and had great successes.  For example, he appeared in three straight Pro Bowls.

I still remember listening to him explain a fine point in complex analysis on Tuesday, and then watching him on TV getting tackled on Sunday.  It was hard to believe, even though I knew it was the same person, the player being taken hard to the ground was my professor.  The player being tackled knew how to throw a perfect spiral 40 yards, and also could go to the board and prove Picard’s Little Theorem.  Amazing. . . .

I still recall wincing when he got sacked during one tough game. Then, a few days later I saw him in class, with his arm in a sling . . . . Sling or not we pushed on, deeper into the beautiful structure of complex analysis.

I think it’s safe to say that there will never again be a star professional athlete who is simultaneously a full-time college professor.

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Ryan was an NFL quarterback for 13 seasons and a three-time Pro Bowl selection.  He led the Cleveland Browns to their last NFL Championship, and compiled a 48-17-1 (.727) record in the five seasons in the 1960s when he was the starting signal-caller for that team.  

During that same five-year time span, no NFL quarterback – not Johnny Unitas, not Sonny Jurgensen, not Don Meredith, not Fran Tarkenton – threw more touchdown passes.

Frank Ryan on the cover of Sports Illustrated

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After leaving the Case Western Reserve mathematics faculty, Ryan became the Director of Information Services for the U.S. House of Representatives, where he supervised a staff of 225 and was primarily responsible for the creation of an electronic voting system for the House.  

After a decade as Yale’s athletic director – he was a lecturer in mathematics at Yale as well – Ryan returned to Rice, where he not only taught mathematics and computer science but also served as the school’s vice president for external affairs.  During his tenure in that post, annual giving to Rice increased some 50 percent.

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Frank Ryan was 87 when he died from Alzheimer's disease this past New Year’s Day – exactly 65 years after throwing a touchdown in the Cotton Bowl matchup between Rice and Navy.  

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may have played a role in the progression of Ryan’s disease.  Later in life, Ryan spoke out about the risks of concussion and other injury risks associated with football.  He donated his brain to the Boston University CTE Center, which is studying the effects of repetitive brain trauma on the human nervous system.

Like other prominent athletes, Ryan received many fan letters and autograph requests.  “He appreciated his fans enormously, and he kept every fan letter that he received,” according to a statement issued by his family after his death.  “Frank fulfilled each and every autograph request that was sent to him, until he became physically unable to do so.”

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“Look Out Cleveland” was released on the Band’s eponymous second album in 1969.

You’re probably assuming that the song refers to the large Ohio city located on the shore of Lake Erie, but my theory is that is it’s about Cleveland, Texas.

That Cleveland is located just northeast of Houston – the home of Rice University – and the lines that follow the ones quoted at the beginning of this post mention Houston:

Look out, Houston

There’ll be thunder on the hill

But for purposes of this post, let’s say that the song is about Cleveland, Ohio and Houston, Texas – the two cities where Frank Ryan distinguished himself on the football field and in the classroom.

Click here to listen to “Look Out Cleveland.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.