National Football League

Pro Football 101: Lance Alworth ranks No. 46 on all-time list

Updated Mar. 30, 2022 2:15 p.m. ET

By Joe Posnanski
Special to FOX Sports

Editor's Note: Throughout 2021 and 2022, Joe Posnanski is ranking the 101 best players in pro football history, in collaboration with FOX Sports. Posnanski will publish a detailed look at all 101 players on Substack. The countdown continues today with player No. 46, Lance Alworth.

The very best nicknames are the ones that need no explanation. It’s fine to nickname people "Hollywood" because of how much they crave the spotlight or "Spaceman" because of their flakiness or "The Say Hey Kid" because they have a habit of saying "Say Hey" when they see you.

Great nicknames are still great nicknames even if they require a backstory.

But the nicknames that transcend are the ones that reveal themselves without any explanation at all.

You only had to watch Lance Alworth run one pass pattern to know why they called him "Bambi."

Bambi was in every part of Lance Alworth. His body shape. His demeanor. His brown eyes. His voice. And mostly in the way he ran. Alworth was the fastest guy on pretty much every field he played, yet he always looked as if he were running unsteadily, like a deer first learning to walk.

Lance Alworth might have looked unsteady running, but it was his speed and leaping ability that helped him post Hall of Fame numbers as a receiver. (Photo by Charles Aqua Viva/Getty Images)

Charlie Flowers, a one-time All-America fullback at Ole Miss (where Alworth wanted to play), saw Alworth run during a summer practice with the Chargers and immediately announced, "You’re Bambi."

Flowers was cut from the Chargers shortly after that, but he had left his mark on professional football history.

Alworth did not care at all for the nickname at first. He tried some things to separate himself from it; he dyed his hair red, went weeks without shaving, tried to give himself a tough and hard look that would dissuade anyone of the notion that he was a fawn just trying to make his way in the world.

But none of it mattered. He was Bambi, then and forever, and after a while, he simply accepted it. What did a nickname mean, after all, as long as he could continue to race past defensive backs?

He grew up in a small area of Mississippi called Hog Chain, just south of the small town of Brookhaven, where he went to high school. Alworth grew up playing football on gravel fields with players much older than himself.

"Our faces would be scraped to shreds," he said. "But it was fun."

I wonder if it was playing on the gravel fields, with the pebbles and stones shifting underneath his feet, that inspired Bambi’s unique running style.*

*Boston Patriots defensive back Ron Hall once said, "I think he trains on a trampoline."

Alworth was always blazing fast. He came from a blazing fast family; his sister, Ann, qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials as a sprinter.

Lance famously earned 15 letters in high school — football, track, baseball, basketball. He was offered a baseball contract by the Yankees, but football was his first love, so he signed instead to play football at Ole Miss, the dream of every kid he knew. But there was a problem: Alworth was married — at age 17, he had wed 15-year-old Betty Allen — and Ole Miss had a strict policy about not signing married players.

Frank Broyles, the new coach at Arkansas, had no such policy. Broyles raced into Mississippi, entirely charmed the Alworth family — "If you’re a high school kid, and Frank talks to your parents, you’re going to Arkansas," Alworth would say — and got himself one of the best players he would ever sign.

Alworth became a Razorbacks running back and kick returner. He never played receiver in college because Broyles ran an offense that didn’t have much need for, you know, throwing the ball.

Despite not playing the position until he became a pro, Alworth was a six-time All-Pro receiver in the NFL. (Photo By John G. White/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Bambi was drafted in the first round twice — once by the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers and once by the AFL’s Los Angeles Chargers. This was 1962, so the AFL was still very much a struggling league with an uncertain future. There seemed no possibility that the Chargers could outbid the Niners for Alworth.

But the Chargers had a secret weapon: Their general manager was a guy you might have heard of named Al Davis. And if Alworth thought Frank Broyles had hypnotizing charm, well, he was about to meet someone who made Broyles look like an amateur. Davis came at Alworth in waves. Come to the Chargers, he said, and you’re guaranteed to play right away. Come to the Chargers, and we’ll give you a no-cut contract. Come to the Chargers, and we’ll build an entire offense around you. Come to the Chargers and — have you heard of Sid Gillman? The guy’s a genius; he’ll make you a star.

Alworth was swept away. When the 49ers came with their offer, Alworth asked if they would give him a no-cut contract.

"We don’t really do that," the 49ers said.

"I didn’t like the attitude," Alworth would say, and by the time the 49ers figured out what was happening, it was too late. Alworth signed with the Chargers and Al Davis.

Davis would not get to enjoy his victory, though — he left to be head coach of the Oakland Raiders at the end of Alworth’s rookie season. This is the wonderful irony of it all: Davis had used his hypnotic powers to sign the AFL’s first big college star, and he would spend the rest of the decade watching Alworth run through the Raiders’ defense, again and again and again.

"Lance was one of maybe three athletes in my lifetime who had what I would call ‘it,’" Davis said 25 years later.

*** *** ***

There’s a Sid Gillman story I love. Supposedly in the early 1930s, while working as a movie theater usher, Gillman would cut out football clips from newsreels, splice them together into one highlight package and study it on his own projector.

I have no idea if the story is true — it sounds a bit farfetched — but it is true that Gillman had his own projector for studying football. He bought it in a pawn shop for $15, about half his weekly salary at the time. Even better, he bought that projector while on his honeymoon. "I thought I would kill him," his wife, Esther, said.*

*Gillman would spend his entire life watching football film, filling literally hundreds of notebooks with sketches, diagrams and dreams. In 1991, when Sports Illustrated’s Paul Zimmerman went to see the master, he found Gillman in a dark room watching film, even though he was 80 and no longer coaching.

"Sometimes," Gillman said, "I think, ‘Why am I doing this? I’m almost 80 years old. Why am I evaluating these quarterbacks?’" And then, after letting the thought sink in, he would say, "Well, why not? What else would I be doing?"

Gillman was obsessed with football and, more specifically, obsessed with offensive football and, even more specifically, obsessed with the passing game. He deeply believed the running game was limiting because it forced defenses to defend only a relatively small area. "The field is 100 yards long and 53 yards wide," he used to say. "We’re going to use every damn inch of it."

Gillman worked the geometry of it all, running players in motion, putting a receiver in the slot, motioning a running back outside, splitting the tight end out wide, spreading out five receivers, blending short slants and deep outs. It’s not hyperbole to say Gillman, more than anyone else, invented the modern passing attack.

"Much of what I did," Bill Walsh would say of his groundbreaking West Coast Offense, "I got from Sid Gillman 20 years ago."

Gillman was exactly the right person to devise an offense for Bambi.

Gillman did not ask Alworth to run patterns, exactly, but instead to get to a spot on the field that he called "the breaking point." How Alworth got there was, more or less, his business. The only thing that really mattered was that he got to the breaking point on time and that, when he got there, he won the ball.

In Sid Gillman's offense, Alworth had a knack for getting to "the breaking point" and coming down with the ball. (Photo by Ron Kuntz Collection/Diamond Images)

"There was no better end than Lance Alworth," Gillman said, and this was true whether the pass was a quick slant or a bomb over the top. Alworth mixed quick moves, surprising power and a unique kind of leaping ability to put up receiving numbers that boggled the mind.

From 1963 through ’69, Alworth averaged 64 catches for 1,250 yards and 10 touchdowns — and remember, these were 14-game seasons. No receiver had ever put up numbers like that over any length of time. He led the AFL in receptions three times, in receiving yards three times and in touchdowns three times, and those were not in the same years.

I mentioned that unique leaping ability — Alworth did not seem, necessarily, to jump higher than other players. He never felt he could jump all that high on command; he couldn’t dunk a basketball, for example. But he had this gravity-defying knack for staying in the air longer than other players. Even he couldn’t explain it.

But time and again, he and a defensive back would go up for a ball, and then the defender would descend back to earth while Alworth dangled for just an instant longer, just enough time to pull in the pass.

Joe Posnanski is a New York Times bestselling author and has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations. His latest book, "The Baseball 100," came out last September.