Merlin Olsen, who passed away earlier this month, cast a very large shadow in our family. We didn’t really know him in a personal sense, but we knew and honored most of what there was to know about him.
We knew, for instance, he was a hometown hero who grew up in Logan, Utah, and attended Utah State University where he won All-American football honors playing on both the offensive and defensive lines and won the Outland Trophy as the nation’s best interior lineman.
I doubt if we were really all that hip to his biography before the Los Angeles Rams decided to take him as the third overall pick of the 1962 NFL draft just behind quarterback Roman Gabriel. We were L. A. Ram fans an inclination that more than likely unfolds when one’s karmic bank account is bottoming out.
And, to us anyway, it was also common knowledge that, not being satisfied with only his undergraduate degree, he went on to earn a master’s degree in economics from USU, which, for an athlete with an imposing pro football contract, was pretty much unheard of at that time.
Merlin made such a huge impression his first night in Rams training camp that Director of Public Relations Jack Teele called General Manager Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch and warned him that if he didn’t make it back to the team’s facility in 48 hours, Olsen would probably have taken over his job.
The job he did get with the Rams, of course, was “in the trenches,” the defensive line. Along with Deacon Jones, Lamar Lundy and Roosevelt Grier, he became a member of the legendary and iconic unit known as the “Fearsome Foursome.”
These were the guys who, out of whole cloth, created the “stunt” and “loop” techniques, came up with the term “sack,” and generally raised defensive football to the intellectual level of the offense. It also gave Rams’ fans something in which to have a sense of pride, as the offense most always stunk.
When Olsen would consistently cover territory left vacated by the hard-charging Jones, the Deacon came to call him “the eraser” due to his consistency at erasing the deficiencies of the teammates around him.
Named All-Pro six times and selected for 14 Pro Bowls in a 15-year career, Olsen joined the 1982 induction class into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Then came the sports broadcasting and acting careers, the latter which planted him even more firmly into the public eye.
Of course, to his hometown of Logan, his overall eminence couldn’t be greater. Merlin Olsen was the guy for whom the phrase “larger than life” truly applied. Everyone has to come from somewhere. For Dizzy Gillespie, it was Cheraw, South Carolina. For Pablo Neruda, it was Parral, Chile. For Merlin Olsen, Logan, Utah, got the honors.
One of my favorite all-time Olsen lines referred to his overall toughness and came from another of our family’s heroes, the late Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray. It went something like: “Olsen went swimming in Loch Ness, and the monster got out.”
I think I started seeing him around Park City every so often beginning sometime in the mid ’80s. You couldn’t miss him — or mistake him, for that matter. I would give great meek, never more than a nod of the head or a tip of the hat. To intrude upon his space would have been unthinkable. I mean he was Merlin Olsen, for chrissake!
Destiny did come calling not long after the turn of the most recent millennium, however, when my longtime golf buddy, Lee Fontana 80 years young at the time — and I approached the first tee at Park City Municipal. We had been assigned to join two singles to fill out the foursome.
I quickly learned the name of the unrecognizable of the two and hands were shaken all around. Mine continued for some time. Merlin was as relaxed and gracious as you would imagine. He often showed up at the Park City course without a tee time when a window opened in his day-to-day routine, he explained.
Merlin opened up about the Rams’ move to St. Louis and what he thought of the Georgia Frontiere ownership administration. He found the positive side to everything. Reunions, it turned out, were a matter of course with his old teammates.
He never seemed to be in a rush and, even when he sliced one into the woods, he had a good chuckle. Neither did all the football questions try his patience. After a small bit of prodding, ol’ number 74 even admitted that our group was his second “fearsome foursome.” In 18 holes, he had erased our deficiencies.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.