Whipped Cream Difficulties

Fred “Fuzzy” Thurston, former Green Bay Packer.

Lombardi, the Hall of Fame coach, led the Packers for nine seasons, and Thurston was there for every one of them. The pre-eminent team of the 1960s, the Packers won championships in 1961, 1962, 1965, 1966 and 1967, including the first two Super Bowls, and though much of the team’s success was built on a ferocious defense, some of the game’s great players — including quarterback Bart Starr, halfback Paul Hornung and fullback Jim Taylor, all Hall of Famers — made Green Bay a powerful offensive force as well.

Thurston was a key element in Green Bay’s implementation of the sweep:

In the sweep, sometimes called the Lombardi sweep for the coach’s fine-tuning of a play that originated in an earlier football era, the two guards are required to pull. That is, instead of pushing forward against the defensive players lined up in front of them, they race in tandem along the line of scrimmage toward one sideline or the other before surging upfield, one ideally blocking a linebacker and the other a defensive back, providing an avenue for the runner behind them.
With Hornung and Taylor carrying the ball behind Thurston and Kramer, the Packer sweep was close to unstoppable, even though opponents often knew it was coming. Generally speaking, guards are among the most anonymous players on the field, but the Green Bay sweep was iconic enough that Thurston and Kramer became well known to football fans.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2014 at 8:52 am and is filed under Clippings, NFL, Obits, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.