George Blanda dies

This won’t mean anything to most of my readers, but former OAKLAND RAIDERS PLAYER GEORGE BLANDA HAS DIED. (The Raiders are one of the classic teams in American football, in case you’ve never heard of them.)

What really struck me about his death was that he was 83 years old. The reason that’s striking is because I can remember his last season as an active player, and now he has just died as an 83-year-old man. Wow.

Blanda’s last season was 1975. I was 7 years old. He was 48, which is outrageously old for a sport as brutal as American football, and that’s why no one else has ever tried it. In those days I was an avid collector of football player trading cards, and Blanda’s card blew me away because they could barely fit all 26 of his season statistics on the back of the card. And besides, his first season was 1949. For a 7-year-old in 1975, the year 1949 may as well have been during the Roman Empire.

I still remember Blanda’s last game, because I was at my friend Mark’s house to watch it. Mark had 3 older brothers who watched sports with extreme seriousness, and this turned our frivolous 7-year-old fandom into a more serious kind of fandom, which means that a good percentage of my earliest sports memories (such as Marquette winning the NCAA basketball title in 1977) are linked in my mind with Mark’s house.

At halftime of Blanda’s final game, the network did one of those sentimental musical film montage tributes for him. He was only 48 at the time, which seemed ancient to me then. The song they chose was “Yesterday When I was Young,” which even at that age I remember feeling was a cruel choice, as well as simply depressing to hear at a moment like that. I felt vaguely as though the poor guy simply ought to die on the spot.

And now he’s actually gone, though he made it to 83. I can’t remember the last time I thought of Blanda, but it might have been at least 30 years ago.