This Day in Football History (Billy Cannon’s Broken-Field Run to Redemption)

December 1, 1959—When the 25th Heisman Trophy winner was announced, Louisiana State University halfback Billy Cannon had run away with the award for the year’s most outstanding U.S. football player as surely as he had put away the game on his astounding punt returned for a touchdown a month earlier on Halloween.

With 519 first-place votes, Cannon wound up with 1,316 points over runner-up Richie Lucas of Penn State. (Placing third: a quarterback who would go on to greater fame with the Dallas Cowboys and as a color commentator on Monday Night Football, “Dandy Don” Meredith.) Eight days later, the LSU big man on campus would receive his trophy from Vice-President Richard Nixon.

A quarter century later, Cannon and Nixon would be in contact again, under far less auspicious circumstances for both. When Cannon went to jail for his part in a $6 million counterfeiting scheme and found himself shunned by friends and the college football establishment that once worshipped him, Nixon—a huge football fan who also knew more than a bit about being a pariah—wrote the disgraced former player a sympathy note.

I’ve been interested in writing about Cannon ever since I discovered he might have inspired the Frank DeFord novel Everybody’s All-American, which was later turned into a 1988 film starring Dennis Quaid, Jessica Lange, and Timothy Hutton. (I write “might have” because DeFord has always denied that Cannon was the source, insisting that his Gavin Grey character was a composite.)

There’s another reason to write about him. Think of the odd conjunction between the subject of yesterday’s post, Louise Brooks, and Cannon. What could they possibly have in common?

Redemption, that’s what—a long, depressing decline in middle age from a career pinnacle, then, when all seemed lost, someone enabling them to rescue their self-esteem and be rediscovered by a new generation of fans. This rebirth of hope always strikes a chord with me, especially during the holiday season.

For Brooks, it was two mad admirers—James Card, film curator at Eastman House, and Kenneth Tynan, the British theater critic who late in the 1970s, fighting cancer, had taken to writing profiles for The New Yorker—who found the then-reclusive, aging beauty and helped bring to the surface her incisive observations on film.

In 1997, bankrupt and at the end of his rope, Cannon got a job as the dentist at the Louisiana state prison at Angola. Amazingly, he found a purpose in life again. Eventually, the warden put him in charge of straightening out not just the dental program but the entire medical system at the prison.

The prisoners were thrilled to have a dentist who took his clients seriously, and eventually Cannon—who, between his guilty plea to the counterfeiting charges in 1983 and his acceptance of the Angola post 14 years later, went into a shell—was welcomed back to Tiger Stadium, the scene of his former triumphs, by adoring crowds.

No sport, it seems to me, features more of the walking wounded than football. In revenues, media attention, and the interest of young athletes, the sport has now eclipsed baseball as the national pastime. That means that the withdrawal from adulation becomes more prolonged and painful. And, except for boxing, I can’t recall another sport where those who have left it are so physically maimed.

Cannon’s movement away from the spotlight was especially fraught. His performance on that humid October night in 1959 would have been endlessly scrutinized anyway, given the stakes in the game—two undefeated conference rivals competing for the mythical national championship. (Seats were so coveted that one fan offered his Cadillac for four seats.) The LSU Tigers were down 3-0 and seemingly stalled when Cannon caught the punt from Jake Gibbs (later catcher for the 1960s New York Yankees).

Consider the aesthetics of Cannon’s run. Take a look at it, here through the magic of YouTube. Even in this grainy black-and-white footage, you can glimpse his combination of speed (running 100 yards in 9.4 seconds), power (able to bench-press 435 pounds), and sheer force of will (watch him break several tacklers, including not just Gibbs but Larry Grantham, later an All-Pro linebacker with the New York Jets). And all in front of thousands of fans who would remember the moment for the rest of their lives.

What thrill could compete with it? Not pro football, which, as DeFord’s novel and the movie adapted from it make clear, simply did not elicit the same bond between fan and player that existed on the collegiate level. (Even if, like Cannon, you become the object of a bidding war between rival leagues and the first $100,000 player in the game.) And certainly not the orthodontist trade that Cannon took up as his decade-long pro career wound down.

In considering Cannon’s triumph, fall and regeneration, I thought of a quote not from another sports film: Robert Redford’s The Natural. Iris, the long-lost love of his character, Roy Hobbs, tells this slugger haunted by a youthful mistake, that she believes we all have two lives: “The life we learn with and the life we live with after that.”

Cannon, like Louise Brooks, has managed to make the most of his “two lives.”

This Day in Film History (Brooks’ “Pandora’s Box” Delivers Lulu of an Impact)

November 30, 1929—Hollywood didn’t know what to do with Louise Brooks, but German director G. W. Pabst did, immediately hiring her once Paramount Pictures freed the restless starlet from her contract.

Die Buchse der Pandora, a.k.a. Pandora’s Box, premiered on this date in Berlin, one day before this second of two Pabst-Brooks collaborations opened in New York City.

American critics were as unimpressed by Brooks as studio execs. As the actress recalled years later, the general tone of the reviews went, “Louise Brooks cannot act. She does not suffer. She does nothing.”

Nowadays, of course, film aficionados—especially critics—feel differently. With her dancer’s body, flapper smile and trademark black bangs, the free-spirited Brooks set a standard for unapologetic amorality on screen that shocked in its own time and remains provocative to this day.

Her character Lulu, a kind of Zelig of carnality, turns up seemingly everywhere, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake, until, in her one act of kindness, she agrees to forego sex for pay with a penniless stranger: Jack the Ripper.

Brooks, who also worked with Pabst on Diary of a Lost Girl, came to revere the director for “his truthful picture of this world of pleasure which let me play Lulu naturally,” in what she termed the “childish simpleness of vice.”

The actress had another reason to be grateful to the director, besides his careful but sure-handed guidance of her performance: he had gone to bat for her at a critical time.

Waiting in his office when Pabst received the cable from Paramount stating that he could have Brooks was another actress whose knowing lasciviousness was not what he had in mind for the passive temptress Lulu. Germans would come to resent the fact that this landmark role would go to an American rather than one of their own, but within a year, with The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich would make her mark anyway.

In certain ways, Brooks’ life after her iconic performance was not unlike Lulu’s. There was the same allure to men and women (including, reportedly, not only Dietrich but Greta Garbo); the same string of lovers who couldn’t forget or get over her; the same headlong descent (in Brooks’ case, not just leaving Hollywood but taking up drink and escort work); the same financial maintenance by lovers (or, in the case of CBS head William Paley, an ex-lover).

But, against all the odds, Brooks’was saved from destruction by the power of art—both the acting that absorbed her energy for only a decade of acting, and the film writing on film she began in middle age. Her essays, featuring both her piquant takes on the magic of cinema and her memories of legends such as W.C. Fields and Humphrey Bogart, were good enough to be collected into Lulu in Hollywood.

As for her acting, well, let’s put it this way: In her seventies, living in seclusion in Rochester, N.Y., her image in Pandora’s Box was still enough to obsess the critic Kenneth Tynan, who tracked down the actress and profiled her in the 1979 New Yorker article, “The Girl in the Black Helmet.”

Her image has become so indelible--even for those who might not immediately recognize her name--that Jonathan Demme paid a knowing tribute to her by naming Melanie Griffith's wild alter-ego "Lulu"--and giving her the requisite dark bangs to go with it--in Something Wild.