A Special Kind Of Brute With A Love Of Violence

If every college football team had a linebacker like Dick Butkus of Illinois (see cover), all fullbacks would soon be three feet tall and sing soprano. Dick Butkus is a special kind of brute whose particular talent is mashing runners into curious shapes. He is, in fact, the product of an era—an era that has seen his position properly glamorized by such professional primates as Sam Huff and Joe Schmidt, and an era that has fostered defensive specialists in college through the gradual casing up of substitution rules. But while the 1964 season has therefore uncaged a rare group of first-rate collegiate linebackers, there is only one Dick Butkus. No linebacker mashes as many opponents as this Illinois senior, and what is more he does it in the Big Ten, a conference that offers little else to mash except fellow brutes.

There are a lot of reasons why Butkus is the most destructive defensive player in collegiate football, one who personally made 145 tackles and caused 10 fumbles last season and who this season has a good chance to become the first lineman in 15 years to win the Heisman Trophy. The first reason is his size. Butkus is 6 feet 3 and weighs 243 pounds, which means that he is the biggest college linebacker on a list of exceptionally good ones that includes Texas' Tommy Nobis, Washington's Rick Redman, Auburn's Bill Cody, Duke's Mike Curtis, Arkansas' Ronnie Caveness, Georgia Tech's Dave Simmons and Rice's Malcolm Walker. While these players are just as tough and willing as Butkus, they cannot hit as hard because they simply are not as big. Butkus not only hits, he crushes and squeezes opponents with thick arms that also are extremely long. At any starting point on his build, he is big, well-proportioned, and getting bigger. Once this summer Butkus reached a hard 268 pounds, but he trimmed some of it off for fear of losing speed.

There are, to be sure, linebackers who are faster and quicker than Butkus—Texas' Nobis, for example, is perhaps the quickest of all—but none of them have Butkus' instinct for getting to the play.

"He has intuition," says Illinois Coach Pete Elliott, whose sudden success last year is traceable in part to the day he recruited Butkus. "On the first play of his first spring practice, before we had told him anything, he smelled out a screen pass and broke it up. In two seasons Dick has only been out of one screen pass. By that I mean he either diagnosed them and forced an incompletion or got there and made the tackle."

Elliott says, "He's naturally great at jamming up the middle against running plays, and I would think the pros will certainly use him as a center linebacker. But somehow he manages to cover wide real good. He gets there, you know, because he wants to. Football is everything to him. When we have a workout canceled because of bad weather or something, he gets angry, almost despondent. He lives for contact."

Contact to Butkus is really only one thing: the moment of impact with the player unfortunate enough to have the ball. All of that other business, such as people bumping into him, foolishly trying to block him, he ignores. He is hurrying to the fun which, he says, consists of "getting a good measure on a guy and stripping him down."

Linebackers have more of this fun than anyone, of course. In a sense, they are defensive quarterbacks. They prowl up and down the line behind their tackles and guards, anticipating where the daylight may occur so they can close it off. Their job is to secure all hatches. They must know when to gamble on a blitz—or dog or storm or shoot or blow, depending on your terminology—which is the act of a linebacker darting through a gap in the line on the snap and trying to smash a runner for a loss or smother a passer before he throws.

"I can shoot any time I want to," says Butkus, who calls Illinois' defensive signals. "Pete leaves it to me." On Illinois' normal defense it is reasonably safe for Butkus to put on the blitz because the tackles, 262-pound Archie Sutton and 234-pound Bill Minor, share the middle responsibility with him. They, too, have size, agility and experience. So, for that matter, do the guards, 220-pound Ed Washington and 215-pound Wylie Fox. In fact, Illinois' interior line, from tackle to tackle, is as strong and big and experienced—all are seniors—as any in the country. Consequently, no team wears itself out running inside on Illinois. "I don't see why they would," says Butkus, honestly. "Archie and the others can take care of things pretty good—even if I guess wrong on a shoot."

The guess begins as soon as an enemy has broken its huddle and the opposing quarterback has bent over to stare into Butkus' small, cold and dark eyes. "He's calling signals and I'm calling signals." says Butkus. "I look first at the formation. Then I look to see if a halfback is cheating a few inches. I look at the halfback's eyes, and then the quarterback's eyes and head. Some jokers, they throw in the first direction they look. I may decide at the last second that I'm gonna call a stunt, or that I'm gonna shoot. If I shoot, the thing I hope is that I get a good angle on the runner, or if I've played the pass that I can strip the guy down and make him drop the ball. That takes it outta guys."

Butkus first began taking it out of opposing players as an All-America prep-school fullback at Chicago Vocational High. Even then he preferred defense and made 70% of his team's tackles. As a member of a full-blooded Lithuanian family of nine, growing up in a blue-collar district of Chicago's South Side, Butkus had never known many sports other than football. He used to swim some and he tried baseball, but from the eighth grade on football was it. And Big Ten football was what he always looked forward to.