Monday, February 14, 2011
Posted: 8:10 p.m.
By Reuben Frank
CSNPhilly.com
Former Eagles offensive lineman Gerry Huth, who provided the block on the touchdown that gave the Eagles their last NFL championship, died Friday in his hometown of Floyds Knob, Ind., the team announced Monday. He was 77.
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It was Huthplaying left guardwho sprang Ted Dean on his historic five-yard touchdown run that gave the Eagles a 17-13 lead over the Packers with five minutes to go in the 1960 NFL Championship Game at Franklin Field.
The Eagles held on to win their third NFL championship in 13 years and hand Packers coach Vince Lombardi and quarterback Bart Starr their only career postseason losses.
I put my head down like a battering ram, ran behind a block behind Gerry Huth, and I was in, Dean said in an interview in 2008. I wasnt touched until just before I got into the end zone.
Huths family told the Eagles Huth will be buried next Monday in the Eagles jacket that was given to him at halftime of the Eagles-Packers regular-season game last September, when the Eagles honored the 1960 championship team.
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Even though he has a championship ring from the Giants, he is going to his final rest as an Eagle, the family said in an e-mail to the Eagles.
Huth was the Giants 24th-round draft pick out of Wake Forest in 1956. He spent just one year with the Giants but was a part of the team that went 8-3-1 and beat the Bears 47-7 at Yankee Stadium in the NFL Championship Game. Huth finished third that year in balloting for the NFL Rookie of the Year Award.
After serving in the Armys Fourth Infantry, Huth joined the Eagles and spent the 1959 and 1960 seasons in Philadelphia. The Vikings selected him in the expansion draft, and he spent 1961 through 1963 in Minnesota.
According to his family, Huth is donating brain and spinal cord tissue to the Boston University study on traumatic brain injuries so researchers can continue to study the affects of playing professional football on the human body.
In 2007, Huth was inducted into the New Albany (Ind.) High School Hall of Fame. He was inducted in November into the Wake Forest Sports Hall of Fame.
E-mail Reuben Frank at rfrank@comcastsportsnet.com