This Time, He Has Been Blocked Out

Knute Rockne’s finest team didn’t include the Four Horsemen. It wasn’t even the one with George Gipp on it.

Rock’s all-time best eleven was his last--the 1930 Notre Dame varsity, a squad that won 19 games in two years and had more All-Americans on it than an Indian reservation.

And the finest player on it is probably someone you never heard of.

Marty Brill didn’t carry or throw the football--at least not very often--but whoever did relied on him totally.

You have to know that Knute Rockne--like all great football coaches--knew that the game ultimately broke down to blocking and tackling. At this, Marty Brill had no equal. Football players went two ways in those days. Under Rockne, they might even have to pick up the towels.

There is no record, though, of George Gipp ever making a tackle. Or laying a block, for all of that. But Marty Brill made the Notre Dame sweep work. He, as they used to say at South Bend, “laid the brick.”

Frank Carideo, the quarterback in Brill’s junior and senior seasons, was more celebrated. So was Marchy Schwartz, the All-American halfback. And Jumping Joe Savoldi, the fullback, who, someone noted, got kicked off the team because he broke not only the school’s rules by getting married, but the school’s religion by getting divorced.

It was perfect casting for a Notre Dame backfield. Marty Brill was Pennsylvania Dutch. So he fit right in with the others--two of them Italians and the other Jewish. There is no doubt he made it work. At 5 feet 11 inches, 195 pounds, he led the Notre Dame shift and blasted the holes for the fleet Schwartz and Nick Lukats.

That Brill found himself at Notre Dame at all was a strange circumstance. Originally enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania (where he was the roommate of the late Carroll Rosenbloom, later owner of the Baltimore Colts and the Rams), he was the son of the city’s transportation magnate; he was a Main Liner, a preppie but a gifted athlete. Only the Penn coach (Lou Young) didn’t think so. He snubbed him, played him third string. Stung, resentful, Brill transferred to Notre Dame, where Rockne had no trouble making him first string.

There was a famous game in 1930 when the Notre Dame team, grateful for his season-long selflessness, got together and agreed to let Brill carry the ball against the Pennsylvania team that had spurned him. He ran wild. Notre Dame won, 60-20, and Brill scored three touchdowns on runs of 66, 36 and 25 yards. Notre Dame rolled up 567 yards, most of them by Brill, and didn’t get a game with Penn again for 22 years.

Nobody made any movies about him, but Brill made several All-American teams. Not as many as Carideo and Schwartz, but some.

Off the field, life didn’t respond to the blocks. The family business went belly up in the Depression, as so many did. Rockne got killed. The money went, the cheering stopped.

Brill hankered to be a coach, but he was no good at ordering people around. He preferred to buy you a drink and talk it over. He tried LaSalle, went to Columbia under Lou Little.

Then, shortly before World War II, Loyola in Los Angeles decided to try its luck in big-time football and hired the old blocking back Rockne had always spoken so highly of.

The war really ended Loyola’s dreams of gridiron glory--also Marty Brill’s.

He joined the Marines, but after the war he drifted into liquor sales, a profession where you drum up sales for your liquor distributor company by drinking copious amounts of it in your calls on customers. It’s all right if your liver and kidneys hold out, but years of downfield blocks and goal-line tackles had not left Marty’s in vintage shape. His hips were in such bad shape they had to be replaced.

It was about this time that one of the inexplicable events in Marty Brill’s career took place. After an all-day drinking tournament with customers, he stumbled into a Skid Row theater on Third and Main one day, presumably to sleep it off. This was in the days before the porno movies and this is what the winos did when the wine and money ran out.

Somehow, an L.A. vice cop dropped in and reported Brill had put his arm around him in the theater. Brill was arrested for lewd conduct. The shocking story hit the wires. Notre Dame was embarrassed, to say nothing of Marty Brill. It was quite incomprehensible. Here was a man with seven children, a drinking problem but, so far as anyone knew--or knows--no history of closet sexual behavior.

The prudent thing at the time seemed to be to plea-bargain. Get the thing off page one. But the prudent thing is not always the long-term wise thing.

Nick Bonness, a lifelong friend of Brill’s and one-time co-worker, thinks Brill should have fought it. “He was dead drunk, no more. He would have put his arms around an orangutan,” Bonness insists. Moose Krause, when he was athletic director at Notre Dame once told this reporter that an in-university investigation seemed to turn up only the evidence that Brill was sodden drunk at the time.

His friends rallied round. Carroll Rosenbloom, lifelong devoted to and supportive of his former roomie, came stoutly to his defense. But the scarlet letter remained.

Nick Bonness is convinced the episode is the only thing keeping Marty Brill out of the National Football Foundation (college) Hall of Fame and he has dedicated himself to righting this wrong.

“Look,” he insists, “there are how many Notre Dame people in there? (Note: 35). The whole Four Horsemen backfield is in there. So is everybody else in Marty’s backfield. (Note: Savoldi is not.) Marty belongs there. What could they do without him?”

Marty Brill died in his back yard at Los Angeles in 1972. He was working on his flowers. He had had a kidney replaced, the two hips and his heart and lungs were on probation. “A lot of it was booze,” Bonness admits. “But a lot of it was football, too. He played hard.”

On both sides of the football, so to speak.

“When they gave him the football, he knew what to do with it,” Bonness says. “He gave himself up for the team. And it was the best team Rockne ever had--Howard Jones (USC coach) himself said it.”

Nick Bonness thinks the old blocking back should be remembered for that--not for an 86-proof afternoon when he was trying to get sober enough to drive home.