The Lanky Longshot

Raymond Berry Inducted Into SMU’s Athletics Hall of Fame

DALLAS – NFL legend Raymond Berry wasn’t prepared for the psychological impact of his induction into SMU’s Athletics Hall of Fame on May 7.

“It was an unexpected emotional experience to go through, seeing so many ex-teammates,” Berry said the next morning in the lobby of the Hilton Anatole hotel.

One teammate, Tommy Beal, had given Berry a letter he’d saved since the summer of 1954 when Berry, as a senior co-captain, had written it. The letter concerned preparation for SMU’s upcoming season. Every player received one.

Quarterback Duane Nutt, co-captain with Berry on the ‘54 Mustangs, was also in attendance. Nutt stayed long after the autographs were signed and the crowd had thinned just to visit again with Berry, his former roommate.

“You have to stop and kind of digest this,” Berry said. “Think about all the athletes who have come through Southern Methodist University. When I reflect about my life experiences, I have to shake my head over and over.”

Those experiences include a Pro Football Hall of Fame playing career, two NFL championships with the Baltimore Colts and coaching the New England Patriots to Super Bowl XX.

Berry led the NFL in receiving yards and catches three times and appeared in six Pro Bowls. He and fabled Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas were one of the greatest pass-catch duos of all time.

Berry retired in 1967 after 13 NFL seasons with a then-record 631 catches for 9,275 yards and 68 touchdowns.

Raymond Berry is one of six SMU Mustangs to have had their jersey retired by the school. Others include Don Meredith, Forrest Gregg, Eric Dickerson, Lamar Hunt and Doak Walker.

A ‘Way To Win

“My dad is the biggest influence in my life, without question,” Berry said. “To have a father like my dad was a blessing beyond imagination. He was a man that was totally positive.”

Berry’s father, Raymond Sr., coached high school football for 35 years and was Berry’s coach at Paris, Texas.

“He never saw an opponent he couldn’t beat,” Berry said. “He didn’t care if he had an inferior team. He figured there was some way to win.”

“My dad had mastered simplicity and soundness, which, by the way, is one of the more difficult things to master in coaching. As my dad used to say, ‘Any fool can be complicated.’”

Each year, Raymond Sr. let his smartest player, the one who best grasped the offense, call the plays - no matter their position. In fact, Berry said, his dad’s best teams at Paris had a play-calling center.

Berry called plays as a senior wide receiver.

Raymond Sr. never gave his charges play-calling instruction. “What I instinctively did,” Berry said, “was if something worked, I’d run it.” Against Kilgore, Berry once called the same running play 13 times in a row.

Paris finished 9-2 that year, losing only to Corsicana - with Nutt at the helm - and Highland Park. Berry missed the Highland Park game due to injury. That, he said, is why Paris got beat, 33-0. “If I’d played,” he joked, “we’d have probably gotten beat, 28-0.”

Berry had one interest in high school: to play football in the Southwest Conference. “I didn’t really care about anything else,” he said. “But when you’re 150 pounds, the opportunities to be playing college football are not all that numerous.”

Berry’s journey to football stardom initially passed through Kerrville’s Schreiner College, in the Texas Hill Country. Days before his first game there, Berry was still a second-teamer. “I was thinking to myself, ‘If I can’t play in junior college, there’s not any way I’m going to play in the Southwest Conference.’”

But a twist of fate – and a starter’s ankle – changed Berry’s fortunes. Moved to first- team, Berry caught five passes in the opener and scored a touchdown. He went on to have a stellar season.

“That one year was a big boost,” Berry said. “But I didn’t want to stay another year in junior college.”

SMU’s ‘Fair Offer’

The only SWC school that came calling was SMU - and that was after the elder Berry had mentioned his son to Mustangs head coach Rusty Russell.

Russell invited Berry for a visit and made him what Berry calls today “a really fair offer.”

Still not sure if Berry, now 160 pounds, was big enough for the SWC, Russell offered him a spot on the practice squad for one season - a “one-semester scholarship.” Berry accepted.

Practices that fall of ’51 were pressure-packed. “Every time I went out there,” Berry said, “I knew I was being critiqued. So I was uptight and nervous.” But he had this going for him: Russell used his varsity quarterback for throwing drills with practice squad receivers.

That varsity quarterback was senior Fred Benners, who could put the ball on a dime.

“There’s no question, Fred Benners was one of the keys to me getting a scholarship,” Berry said. “I had the best passer in Texas throwing to me.”

Said Benners, by phone from Dallas, “[ Berry] was a very dedicated, hard-working guy who was not flashy. But he obviously had great hands and great determination.”

“He had his mind made up that he was going to earn his scholarship.”

After one mid-season practice, Russell called the team together for a final word. Pointing to Berry, Russell announced, “This little broomstick receiver over here, I want you to know if all you varsity guys would go after the ball like he does, we’d be in good shape.”

“I knew I had my scholarship then,” Berry laughed.

Running Game Returns

Russell was fired before the ’53 season. “Rusty got totally over-balanced on throwing and it led to real problems,” Berry said.

Coach Woody Woodard followed with a T-formation running game. “We had great running backs,” Nutt said, by phone from Corsicana. “Frank Eidom, John Marshall, Don McIlhenny … That’s why Raymond didn’t catch but 33 passes in three years. We barely threw that many.”

Still, he said, “I knew that if you put it in range where he could touch it, he’d pretty well catch it.”

Berry also ran track at SMU. “Coach McAdoo Keaton knew why I was out there,” Berry said. “He knew I wasn’t out there to be a track man. He knew I was out there to get better as a football player.”

“That track was building my legs and my running form, increasing my speed,” Berry said. “I worked against sprinters every day and I started realizing, ‘I can run with these guys.’ … I never really was concerned about my speed after that.”

“I was a long-strider. And long-striders, a lot of times, you can’t really tell how fast they’re moving. … There was a real misconception about my speed.”

Berry said his best SMU catch came at Baylor his junior year, in a game the Mustangs lost in the final seconds. The pass was a corner route thrown by Sammy Stollenwerck. “He put the ball up almost too far,” Berry said, “but I reached out and stabbed it.”

His most agonizing SMU experience was the 13-13 tie with Texas in ’54. “One reason we [tied] is because I fumbled the football twice inside the 30-yard-line, moving in,” Berry said. “The bad news was, in my opinion, it cost us the Southwest Conference [title].”

“I’m glad he felt that way, because I felt like I lost it,” Nutt said. “I threw an interception early in the third quarter that really did fire them up. … After that, we never could get harnessed up again.”

SMU lost the championship by half a game, after having handed eventual champion Arkansas its only conference loss.

Said Berry, “The good news is, the memory of [the fumbles] was so bad, and it angered me so much the more I thought about it, that I resolved to never, ever, let it happen again.”

Berry would be charged with fumbling just once during his NFL career. “I really didn’t fumble any,” Berry said. … “I never had possession.” (nfl.com stats concur with Berry.)

Berry also played defensive end at SMU. “I was a much better natural defensive player than I was offensively,” he said.

Berry started his trademark film study as a senior as SMU. “And it was basically from a defensive standpoint,” he said. “I wasn’t looking at film trying to figure out how I was going to beat a defensive back.”

When asked for funny stories from his SMU days, Berry paused, then grinned. “That filing cabinet is pretty empty,” he said. “I guess because I think I was taking the game so seriously, I really wasn’t into too many funny things happening.”

Raymond Berry

Short Leg ‘Myth’

Berry called the oft-repeated nugget that one of his legs was shorter than the other “a myth.”

“That was started by the Baltimore Colts PR guy,” Berry said. “He was sort of an imaginative type of guy. He observed a little bit of information and made a totally wrong conclusion about it.”

Berry explained: During a high school practice, he was knocked backward and sat down hard, injuring his lower back.

A Paris osteopath determined that Berry had sprained his sacroiliac joint, twisting it slightly out of place - effectively “shortening” one leg. Through pressure and manipulation, the condition improved.

But the surrounding muscles had to remain toned to keep the joint in place. “What I had to do because of that weakness,” Berry said, “was one of the most important things I ever did as a pro athlete. I worked out practically the year-round.”

The injury made hamstring and groin pulls more likely and the problem flared again at SMU. He was fitted with a canvas brace to keep his hips snug and wore it the rest of his career.

His final spring on The Hilltop, Berry began a detailed study of SMU’s 1948 Heisman Trophy winner, Doak Walker. “I ended up watching film of every game that he played at SMU, which was around 35, 36 games,” he said.

Berry observed that Walker averaged 52 minutes a game. “In the open field, he would run right at a tackler, freeze him, dip, and go around him. And he never lost stride when the other guy came to a dead stop.”

Berry said he never imagined his SMU jersey would one day be retired alongside Walker’s. “That was absolutely the last thing on my mind,” he said.

While at SMU, Berry met Walker on campus when Walker returned one spring to assist Coach Russell. They also met on the field in the NFL as Walker was winding down his HOF career at Detroit.

Nothing To Lose?

Baltimore drafted Berry in ’54 in the 20 th round, before his senior season at SMU. He hadn’t yet cracked the Mustangs’ starting lineup.

“In those days, with 12 teams, they picked 30 rounds,” Berry said. “When you get down in the 20s, I don’t know what you’ve got to lose at that point.”

As a 6-2, 185-pound pro, Berry began studying the art of catching a football in earnest. He eventually identified 18 different receiving situations, wrote them in code on a piece of tape stuck to his thigh pad and practiced three or four a day while catching 75 to 100 balls.

“What I was discovering was the power of drill and repetition to the mind and the body,” Berry said.

“I made the team because they didn’t have anybody else,” Berry said of his first year. Thirteen rookies made the young franchise’s 33-man roster. Berry caught 13 passes that season and was certain he’d be cut. He returned to Paris in the spring of ’56 desperate for an edge.

Berry recalled his dad saying a player’s conditioning wasn’t complete until two games into a season. “The connection this made in my head was, it’s playing the game that finishes off the conditioning,” Berry said.

With Colts game films, he painstakingly devised his complete-game conditioning program, paying particular attention to a receiver’s physical requirements in a 70- to 80-play game.

A four- to six-play series, then five minutes on the sidelines; post patterns, a 70-yard sprint, blocking a linebacker; 15 seconds of recovery time between plays.

Berry recreated it all, then executed it – alone at the high school stadium. “By the time I went to training camp that year with the Colts, I’d probably already played ten ‘games’ in Paris, Texas,” Berry said. Two-a-days became “a piece of cake.”

And that summer, Unitas arrived in Baltimore.

Weeb Listens

As the Colts developed their offense, it was clear head coach Weeb Ewbank didn’t like the deep ball, calling it a low-percentage play. Berry argued that defenses would stuff the short passing game without a deep threat.

Finally, exasperated, Berry told Ewbank, “Weeb, I understand your thinking about [the deep pass] being low-percentage. But, actually, with John Unitas throwing, it ain’t going to be low-percentage.”

Ewbank gave in. “And we saw the results of it,” Berry said. “We started hitting the deep ball and burning people deep, picking up huge chunks of yardage. … Weeb listened to players.”

By the time the Colts’ championship seasons of ’58 and ’59 rolled around, Berry had intricate command of every step of every route. And his timing with Unitas was tenth-of-a-second smooth.

“He had a better move across the middle than he did out on a corner route or a flag route,” Nutt said of Berry’s SMU days. “His out route was good but … he had a better move faking outside and coming across in a post pattern.”

Berry used that very move in the iconic 1958 NFL Championship against the New York Giants at Yankee Stadium. During Baltimore’s late game-tying drive, a linebacker unexpectedly lined up over Berry, spread out to the left.

Berry and Unitas had discussed this possibility months earlier and remembered exactly what to do - with one pre-snap glance. Berry faked outside then slanted back across the middle. “John took the snap, saw me make the fake, then drilled it.”

The play went for 25 yards and moments later a Colts field goal tied the game, 17-all, with seconds to spare.

“After reflection on it, that particular play was the most important play of my career,” Berry said. “And that game was the most important game, without question.

In overtime, Berry made two more key catches before Alan Ameche’s one-yard dive ended the NFL’s only sudden-death overtime championship.

Berry finished the day with a record 12 catches for 178 yards and one touchdown.

Baylor Calls

Weeks later, Baltimore assistant John Bridgers took the head coaching job at Baylor and asked Berry to assist with spring drills. The now famous Berry agreed to help his good friend.

“I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I guess it was an unusual situation,” Berry said of his showing up in Waco after winning “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”

There, Berry met his future wife, Sally Crook of Tyler, Texas, a Baylor senior at the time.

Today, nine grandchildren later, the Berrys live in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, next door to daughter Suzanne and her family. Another daughter, Ashley, lives in Nashville and son Mark is a Presbyterian missionary living with his family in Lima, Peru.

What’s the greatest compliment Berry could receive about his playing career? “To be able to feel like you gave them their money’s worth,” he said. “Whether it’s the team paying you or the fans.”

“One of the great experiences I have at this stage, and it just happened again last night, is to meet satisfied customers, many years after they’ve bought the product,” Berry smiled.

“I think back to people I saw that really inspired me. Doak Walker and Elroy ‘Crazy Legs’ Hirsch were two of the biggest influences in my whole growing-up years. They weren’t aware whatsoever of the fact they were affecting the life of a little kid growing up in Paris, Texas. But they were.”

Gerry York of SMU’s Heritage Hall contributed to this story.

Notes:

* Berry was a first-team All-SWC and Academic All-America pick in 1954. His SMU jersey was retired in 2000. Berry was inducted into the Pro Football HOF in 1973.

* Berry followed Ron Meyer as head coach of the New England Patriots in 1984, when Meyer was fired eight games into the season. The following year, Berry led the Pats to their first Super Bowl, earning AFC Coach of the Year honors.

*Other SMU Athletics Hall of Fame inductees on May 7 were: Michael Carter (’84, football/track), Jon Koncak (’85, basketball), Jerry Heidenreich (’72, swimming) and Kajsa Bergqvist (’99, track).