Too old, too slow? Yet he made it to 90
Y.A. Tittle led Giants to 3 title games
Y.A. Tittle, the Hall of Fame quarterback who led the New York Giants to three consecutive National Football League championship games in the early 1960s after the San Francisco 49ers had discarded him as too old and too slow, died on Sunday night. He was 90. Louisiana State University, where he played his college ball, announced his death.
Tittle threw for dozens of touchdowns and thousands of yards, won a Most Valuable Player award and was selected to seven Pro Bowls. But he endeared himself to New York not as a golden boy but as a muddied, grass-stained scrapper.
He was a balding field general with a fringe of grey who, at 34, in his old-fashioned high-topped shoes, had undeniably lost a step or two, but kept picking himself up off the ground to find a way to beat you, and New York cheered.
“For all Y.A.’s bumpkin ways, I suspect the city saw in him a reflection of itself,” former Giants star and broadcaster Frank Gifford remarked in his 1993 memoir, “The Whole Ten Yards.”
“He was somebody who had come from somewhere else, who’d been gotten rid of, and a lot of New Yorkers can identify with that.”
Though he was the first to admit that he didn’t look the part — “I’ve been old and baldheaded and ugly since I’ve been 28,” he reflected long afterward — Tittle became a marquee figure with the Giants and one of their most popular players.
The Giants’ radio station played the novelty song “I’m in Love With Y.A. Tittle,” and when Tittle connected on long passes, Yankee Stadium reverberated to chants of “Y.A., Y.A.”
Tittle led the Giants to Eastern Conference titles in 1961, ’62 and ’63, though they were beaten each time in the NFL championship game.
He threw for 242 touchdowns and 33,070 yards in his 17 years as a pro, and his 36 touchdown passes in 1963 set a record that stood for 21 years. He was named the league’s most valuable player in ’63 in an Associated Press poll and elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in ’71.
The end for Tittle as one of football’s best and most resilient quarterbacks essentially came in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20, 1964, in his 17th bruising year in the pros, when a massive lineman slammed him to the ground in a game that Tittle’s Giants lost to the Steelers.
Slowly, Tittle tried to pull himself up off the turf, woozy from a concussion, and Morris Berman, a photographer for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was there to snap the picture: Tittle kneeling, his shoulders drooped, his helmet knocked off, his bald pate exposed, his face bloodied.
Perhaps more than the Pro Football Hall of Fame would do later, the image immortalized Tittle in football lore — in the image of the aging warrior who had finally fallen.
Yelberton Abraham Tittle Jr. was born on Oct. 24, 1926, in the East Texas town of Marshall and grew up there, the son of a postal worker.
As a youngster, he idolized Texas Christian’s star quarterback Sammy Baugh and threw footballs through hanging tires as he had seen Baugh do in newsreels.
His older brother Jack, who went on to play blocking back in the single wing for Tulane, honed Y.A.’s football skills when he played junior high and high school football.
Tittle became a two-time AllSoutheastern Conference quarterback playing for LSU from 1944 to ’47, having been deferred from military service in the Second World War because of asthma.
As a junior, he led the Tigers to the 1947 Cotton Bowl game, a 0-0 tie with Arkansas on a windy, frigid day.
He made his pro debut with the Baltimore Colts of the All-America Football Conference in 1948 and was named rookie of the year. He credited his coach, Cecil Isbell, formerly an outstanding passer for the Green Bay Packers, with fine-tuning his technique and bolstering his confidence.
Tittle joined the 49ers when the Colts disbanded after the 1950 season, their first year in the NFL. (Another Baltimore franchise, also called the Colts, joined the league three years later.)
He played for two seasons behind Frankie Albert, the 49ers’ future Hall of Famer, then became the No. 1 quarterback in 1953. He handed off to running backs Joe Perry, Hugh McElhenny and John Henry Johnson in what became known as the “million dollar backfield” (for brilliance on the field, not for the salaries they earned) and later threw soaring “alley oop” passes to R.C. Owens, who would race downfield and then outjump defenders.
But Tittle’s San Francisco teams never won a conference title. Late in the 1960 season, coach Red Hickey installed a shotgun formation, which required occasional scrambling that the aging Tittle could not handle. Hickey benched him in favour of the much younger and more agile John Brodie.
In August 1965, Tittle told Sports Illustrated: “I’m too old to give it one more shot. But I wish I could.”