Merlin Olsen, Football Star, Dead at 69

I remember Merlin Olson most from a part he played in a John Wayne western, The Undefeated and also staring Rock Hudson. It’s one of my favorite Wayne films and Olson is great in it.

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From the New York Times:

Merlin Olsen, the Hall of Fame tackle who anchored the Los Angeles Rams’ Fearsome Foursome, the line that glamorized defensive play in the N.F.L., died early Thursday at a hospital in Duarte, Calif. He was 69.

His death was announced by his brother Orrin, who said he had been treated for mesothelioma, a form of cancer. Olsen was also a longtime color commentator for NBC’s pro football and Rose Bowl telecasts, working with Dick Enberg, and he acted on television, most prominently as the very large and bearded Jonathan Garvey in NBC’s “Little House on the Prairie” and in his own series, “Father Murphy.”
In the early 1950s, the Rams boasted a high-powered offense, led by quarterbacks Norm Van Brocklin and Bob Waterfield and receivers Tom Fears and Crazy Legs Hirsch. The Rams of the mid-1960s were renowned for defensive linemen who earned a collective nickname a decade before the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Steel Curtain.

The Rams had only one winning season from 1963 to 1966, the span in which all four “Fearsome” players were teammates, but those linemen were celebrated for their strength, flair, know-how and agility.
Olsen, 6 feet 5 inches and 270 pounds or so, played left tackle, jamming up the middle, stopping draw plays and screen passes and often pressuring the quarterback. Deacon Jones, another future Hall of Famer, extremely quick and adept at the head slap, lined up at left end. Jones joined with Lamar Lundy, the right end, in rolling up the sacks while Roosevelt Grier, the former Giants star, was a formidable presence at right tackle.

“Merlin had superhuman strength,” Jones told The Los Angeles Times in 1985. “If I was beating my man inside, he’d hold him up and free me to make the tackle. If he had to make an adjustment to sacrifice his life and limb, he would make it. A lot of the plays I made were because he or the others would make the sacrifice.”
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Via New York Times

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