Maxie Baughan, some of the fearsome linebackers of the Sixties, who earned 9 Professional Bowl nods as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles and Los Angeles Rams, died on Saturday in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 85.
His dying was confirmed in a statement by the Nationwide Soccer League.
Baughan, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, is one in all 12 players who are semifinalists within the seniors class for the Professional Soccer Corridor of Fame Class of 2024.
For Baughan, born on Aug. 3, 1938, in tiny Forkland, Ala., throughout the Nice Melancholy, glory on any nationwide stage appeared like a protracted shot rising up. His father was a sharecropper turned lineman whose job entailed shimmying up phone poles for repairs.
“You would inform when he got here residence, his arms would have black marks with blood in them,” Baughan stated in a 2016 interview with the newspaper The Information & Advance in Lynchburg, Va. “I made a decision I didn’t wish to try this, so I didn’t. However I positive as heck didn’t suppose I used to be going to be taking part in skilled soccer. I by no means dreamed of that.”
When he left residence to play soccer for the celebrated coach Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech, his father handed him $20 and stated, “That’s it.”
It was apparently sufficient.
Mixing ferocity with a seeming omnipresence on the gridiron, Baughan turned a two-way standout for the Yellow Jackets, beginning at linebacker and heart and changing into workforce captain. By his senior season, in 1959, he was a star. He was named a consensus All-American that yr and voted the Southeastern Convention lineman of the yr.
Though Georgia Tech misplaced the 1960 Gator Bowl to Frank Broyles’s Arkansas Razorbacks, Baughan was named one in all two most precious gamers within the sport, together with the Arkansas security Jim Mooty.
Though not bodily imposing by N.F.L. requirements, Baughan, at 6 foot 1 and 227 kilos, was picked by the Eagles within the second spherical of the 1960 draft. Nonetheless, the league itself was one thing of a thriller to him. At that time there was no workforce in its jap convention additional south than Washington.
“I didn’t even know the names of the teams,” he later stated, “so when the Eagles drafted me, I figured, ‘OK, I’ll see what that is all about.’”
In his rookie 1960 season, Baughan stepped in as a weakside linebacker alongside the long run Corridor of Famer Chuck Bednarik, the punishing linebacker often called “Concrete Charlie” (who additionally performed heart), to bolster a punishing Eagles protection.
The workforce stormed to a 10-2 file that yr and victory within the championship sport over Vince Lombardi’s Inexperienced Bay Packers, with Baughan intercepting three passes.
He got here in second within the league’s United Press Worldwide rookie of the yr balloting and was named to his first of 5 Professional Bowl choices with the Eagles.
After a commerce to the Los Angeles Rams in 1966, Baughan picked up the place he had left off. The Rams’ coach George Allen named him the workforce’s defensive captain and sign caller. Behind the quarterback Roman Gabriel, the Rams reached the divisional spherical of the playoffs twice over the following 5 years, with Baughan cleansing up on protection behind the workforce’s heralded defensive position, often called the Fearsome Foursome, starring Deacon Jones, Lamar Lundy, Rosey Greer and Merlin Olsen.
He would notch 4 extra Pro Bowl appearances throughout his Rams tenure, including to an N.F.L. résumé that additionally included 5 years as a second-team All-Professional and one as a first-teamer.
Baughan retired in 1970 and later turned the defensive coordinator at his alma mater, Georgia Tech. However his N.F.L. taking part in days weren’t fairly over. In 1974, Baughan briefly served as a player-coach for the Washington Redskins, though he suited up for simply two video games.
He would patrol the sidelines for greater than 20 years, serving as a defensive coordinator for the Baltimore Colts and Detroit Lions and head coach at Cornell College. He capped his profession as a linebackers coach for the Minnesota Vikings, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Baltimore Ravens.
In that position, he mentored the long run Corridor of Famers Derrick Brooks of the Buccaneers and Ray Lewis of the Ravens.
Baughan is survived by his spouse of 62 years, Dianne; his sons Max, Mark and Matt; and eight grandchildren.
He’s a member of the Eagles Hall of Fame and was inducted into the Faculty Soccer Corridor of Fame in 1988. The Professional Soccer Corridor of Fame seniors committee was to fulfill on Tuesday to slim the sphere of 12 semifinalists to 3 finalists for induction into the Class of 2024. Gamers within the senior class performed their video games in skilled soccer no later than the 1998 season.
“Being only a small child from a small city, didn’t have however one pair of footwear and didn’t have a sport coat once I went to school,” Baughan stated in a television interview in 1988, recalling the profound honor he felt when he was named the Yellow Jackets’ captain. “There have been some issues that weren’t presupposed to occur to me.”
