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stadiums, team line-ups, heavy advertising and schedules as they've become today.

A Chicago teammate of Grange in the 1930s was a guy with the perfect football name for the time, Bronko Nagurski. While Grange was slim and shifty in his actions, Bronko was huge for his time, six foot two and 225 pounds. However, for all his bulk, he was fast, must famous for his bulldozer style that carried defensive tacklers down the field many yards with him. Nagurski, like Grange and many other running stars of the day, was a 60-minute-guy. He played both offense and defense, and there haven't been any of those supermen in the NFL since the 1940s, when player specialization came into being. Nagurski's known as the player who ran for two touchdowns in the first NFL championship game in 1934, the precursor to the Super Bowl.

OK, fans of the not so distant past, you'll certainly agree when I start with my later great running backs with Jim Brown, star of the Cleveland Browns from 1957 to 1965. Jim may be the only NFL star who ever voluntarily quit at the height of his playing skills, and as he declared, so he'd be healthy enough to become a Hollywood star. And as determined as he was to dash down the field, he did very well as an actor.

He was in a slew of movies, but I remember him best as a World War II commando in "The Dirty Dozen", when he made that spectacular zig-zag run with live grenades as he dropped them one-by-one down airholes to the basement where a bunch of Nazi generals were hiding. The super-handsome dude was also in a string of Westerns, where in one, at the end he got the girl, Hollywood's sex queen at the time, Racquel Welch. Now, wouldn't you quit football to earn even more money while having such less bruising shoot 'em up fun?

Brown made all kinds of records in his nine years in the NFL, including being selected for the Pro Bowl in every year. His total rushing record was more than 12 thousand yards, and scored 106 touchdowns. To many experts, he is still the most spectacular runner in NFL history.

Another Chicago Bear who was one of the rushing greats was Gale Sayers. He dominated the 1960s with his speed, broken-field running and ability to evade tacklers. In his first year, he scored 22 touchdowns, a feat no one has come close to since. In one game that year against San Francisco, he scored six touchdowns, another NFL record that still stands. Sayers only played for seven years, and had to retire at age 28 because of severe injuries, and we can only speculate

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