Tommy Nobis was once described as “6-foot-2, 240 pounds of raw pain.”

This assessment was not lost on his teammates.

In the early 1960s, the squads in Texas’ annual Orange & White spring game were comprised of players from all levels of the team. Coaches mixed and matched starters, reserves and scrubs.


That meant first-teamers could end up facing fellow first-teamers.

This was especially troubling for Ernie Koy Jr., Harold Phillips, Tommy Ford and Tom Stockton, who comprised the team’s fleet of running backs.

“They didn’t divide us up until right before the game,” Phil Harris, a former Longhorn wingback and now a retired attorney in San Antonio, said Wednesday. “They posted it in the locker room. The offensive backs would go check the list. And if…”


He chuckled, then continued.

“…Nobis was on the other team, the offensive backs would just groan because they knew what they were in for that day.”

Nobis, a former all-state player at Jefferson, All-American at UT and All-Pro for the Atlanta Falcons, died Wednesday at 74 after an extended illness. His wife, Lynn, was at his side.

Nobis played at a time before anyone discovered the link between repeated head trauma and brain disease. It was the golden age of football, when the hard-nosed game of the 1950s began to overtake baseball as America’s most popular sport.

Guys like Nobis didn’t shy away from the physical risks of football. If he was a young high school player today, even knowing what we know now about traumatic brain injury, I suspect Nobis would have played the game the same way.

Nobis was remembered as one of the greatest of college football linebackers and was, by consensus, considered the hardest-hitting guy to ever play the game.


“He was just terror out there,” said Harris, a teammate at Jefferson and in Austin.

“I’d rather play against (legendary linebacker) Dick Butkus than Nobis,” former Dolphins back Larry Csonka once told Sports Illustrated.

Which brings up a sore subject. Butkus is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but Nobis inexplicably isn’t. It’s possibly due to Nobis’ Falcons teams always posting losing records.

Playing for the expansion Falcons, Nobis was named the NFL Rookie of the year and made 294 tackles that season, still a rookie record. Over 11 years, Nobis led the team in tackles nine times. He went to five Pro Bowls and was named All-Pro twice. He was named to the NFL”s “All-Decade Team” for the 1960s.

Nobis was an All-American twice at UT — once as a linebacker and once as an offensive guard, a feat that couldn’t happen in today’s football climate. He was the only sophomore to start on UT’s 1963 national championship team.

If there was an award for a lineman or linebacker, Nobis won it, including the Maxwell Award as the nation’s best player and the Outland Trophy as the nation’s best interior lineman.

Not bad for a kid who got his first taste of the gridiron in sandlot football, being stomped by older, bigger and faster kids on the playgrounds of the East Side’s Booker T. Washington Elementary.

“It was tough for him at first, but he came back every day,” said Karl Hartfield, who played in those pickup games and would later letter in track and field at Southern University. “There was no quitting in that kid. Before you knew it, he started dishing out the punishment.”

Nobis was still a smallish kid, weighing about 145 pounds, when Emerson Junior High met Harris’ Horace Mann team in the city championship.

“He was a good player,” Harris said, “but he wasn’t that big.”

Nobis hit the weight room after his sophomore year, and returned to the team for his junior season beefed up. One account says Nobis put on 35 pounds that summer.

“He earned it,“ Harris said of Nobis’ success. “He worked very hard at it.“

Nobis’ health had failed in recent years, friends and family say. He had good days where he was lucid, and other days that weren’t so good.

“We lost a good one,” Harris said. “But I’m happy that he’s no longer in pain.”

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Thanks for posting this. I had forgotten about the man until I read that name. I remember his playing time at TEXAS very well. I was an OU fan & always wished he played for us.

RIP Tommy.

quote:

Originally posted by recoatlift:
Thanks for posting this. I had forgotten about the man until I read that name. I remember his playing time at TEXAS very well. I was an OU fan & always wished he played for us.

RIP Tommy.

Thanks. I’m pleased to see you have recovered from being an OU fan.

I remember the Army coach, when asked if Nobis was the greatest linebacker he’d ever seen, said, “No, he’s the greatest linebacker who has ever lived.”

I saw him make a great many very enthusiastic tackles.

Many wished he had signed with Houston which had drafted him in the AFL, but he said he had always dreamed of playing in the NFL and signed with Atlanta.

Haha, i liked TEXAS. The Red River Shootout aged me quite abit.

JALLEN, thanks for posting this. I grew up watching Tommy Noblis @ UT. Incredible talent and a good guy as well.

A good friend's dad was a UT alum and I followed Nobis from his college days on, even in Bumlove, Illinois. I remember a preseason UT football publication with Nobis on the cover, he was scary in two dimensions.

RIP Tommy Nobis

quote:

Originally posted by Ripley:
A good friend's dad was a UT alum and I followed Nobis from his college days on, even in Bumlove, Illinois. I remember a preseason UT football publication with Nobis on the cover, he was scary in two dimensions.

RIP Tommy Nobis

I was in some classes with him. It was a good thing he made a living in pro football, put it that way.

My favorite memory is the cover of Sports Illustrated after the Orange Bowl in January 1965. I was at that game in the Longhorn Band. Late in the 4th quarter, Alabama behind on the scoreboard, intercepted a pass and drove down to 1st and goal. Joe Namath was the Alabama QB. They ran a couple of plays and now it is 4th and not much. Namath tries a QB sneak. The cover of Sports Illustrated had No. 60 diving into the pile stopping Namath short of the goal line.

Supposedly Namath jumped up and ran over the the Referee hollering, "I was in, I was in!" The Ref flashed the familiar hand signal known to Longhorns the world over and said, "Joe, you missed by this much!" \m/

I didn't actually see that last part, you understand.

I'm not a big football fan so I heard his name mostly because of his charity work. Seems like he was a pretty good guy.
https://nobisworks.org/

The Atlanta radio stations have spent a lot of time talking about him for the past couple of days. He was the first draft pick for the expansion Atlanta Falcons, and was nicknamed Mr. Falcon because of his work on and off the field. As 220-9er noted, he established the Tommy Nobis Center, a charitable training center that helped provide training for the unskilled and underemployed. Some years ago, he used to do the radio commercials for the center; I donated my old car to the center after hearing one of them about their work.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
Tommy Nobis was once described as “6-foot-2, 240 pounds of raw pain.”

Probably the best linebacker to ever play the game.
 

Imagine him with modern conditioning techniques. I'm glad he went with the Falcons, and that the Chiefs didn't have to face him if he went with the Oilers.