FAREWELL FUZZY
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| The gang with Fuzzy & Jerry in 2012. |
Fuzzy Thurston, an Ex-Packer, Dies at 80; Was a Big Broom in the Great Sweep Play
Fred Thurston, better known as Fuzzy, who rumbled to football fame as one of Vince Lombardi’s pulling guards on the Green Bay Packers’ sweep, perhaps the most famous running play in the history of the N.F.L., died on Sunday in Green Bay, Wis. He was 80.
His daughter, Tori Thurston Burton, said he had Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
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.
At 6 feet 1 and about 245 pounds, Thurston, who played left guard, was an excellent pass blocker for Starr. More significant, along with right guard Jerry Kramer, he was a crucial cog in the sweep, the play that was the foundation of the offense.
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.
In an interview on Monday, Kramer spoke about the coordination that was necessary to run the sweep effectively, not just between him and Thurston, but also among all the linemen (including center Jim Ringo and tackle Forrest Gregg) and the running back. Kramer said Thurston never made a mistake, never pulled in the wrong direction, always positioned himself properly for the pivot toward his block and timed his cut perfectly.
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| These two are forever linked in football lore -- and in friendship. |
“If somebody broke down, the play broke down,” said Kramer, whose diary of the 1967 season, “Instant Replay” (written with Dick Schaap), is one of the landmark books in sports literature. “Fuzzy was great at pulling. He had quick feet. And if you look at pictures from that time, with Fuzzy and me leading Hornung, all three of us have planted our feet. We’re synchronized, where we cut and turn upfield at the same time. It was like we were one.”
Frederick Charles Thurston was born in Altoona, Wis., near Eau Claire. His father, Charles, was a laborer who died when Fred, the youngest of eight children, was 2. (The nickname Fuzzy dates from his childhood.) His mother, the former Marie Miller, struggled to support the family, and for a time, she sent Fuzzy to live with an aunt in Florida.
He graduated from Altoona High School, where there was no football team, and went to Valparaiso University in Indiana on a basketball scholarship. He did not play football until his junior year.
“He had a growth spurt in college — or maybe a weight spurt,” Kramer said with a laugh. “I think he found beer, or something.”
Drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1956, he did not stick with the team. After serving in the Army, he was a backup guard for the 1958 Baltimore Colts, who won the N.F.L. championship, defeating the Giants in the title game.
(Thurston is one of a handful of players to have played on six N.F.L. champions.)
The offensive coach for the Giants was Lombardi, who became the Packers’ coach the next year; the team traded for Thurston before the season began. In 1961, when the Packers sweep first asserted itself, Thurston was named a first team All-Pro by five news organizations, including The Associated Press and The Sporting News.
Thurston’s wife of 55 years, the former Susan Eggleston, died in 2012. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two sons, Mark and Griff, and three grandchildren.
After his playing career, Thurston for a time owned a chain of taverns around Wsconsin. Long a popular figure in Green Bay, where Fuzzy’s #63 Bar & Grill remains a gathering spot for Packer fans, Thurston was known as a good-humored player, one of few who could get the severe Lombardi to crack a smile and who seemed to recognize that in the end, football was just a game.
In the memoir “Golden Boy,” Paul Hornung recalled that as good as Thurston was, he always had a difficult time blocking Roger Brown, a tackle for the Detroit Lions, the result of which was Thurston’s invention of what came to be called “the lookout block.”
“So this one game, Roger Brown sacked Bart about six times,” Hornung wrote. “It got to be a joke. Finally, Fuzzy got set to pass-block, and just as Bart was getting ready to take the snap, Fuzzy looked over his shoulder and yelled, ‘Look out, Bart.’ That cracked everybody up.”
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