Jim Marshall, a former Minnesota Viking who started in more consecutive N.F.L. games than any other defensive player, but who may be best remembered for romping 66 yards into the wrong end zone after recovering a fumble during a game in 1964, died on Tuesday in Minneapolis. He was 87.
His wife, Susan Landwehr Marshall, confirmed the death, in a hospital. She did not specify the cause but said he had been hospitalized for an extended period.
Marshall started every game for the Vikings over the franchise’s first 19 seasons, making four Super Bowl appearances as part of Minnesota’s formidable defensive line, known as the Purple People Eaters.
When he retired after the 1979 season, two weeks before his 42nd birthday, he had started 270 consecutive regular-season games at defensive end. Quarterback Brett Favre broke that N.F.L. record decades later in his waning years with the Vikings, finishing with 297 consecutive starts.
Marshall also started in 19 playoff games during a dominant stretch for the Vikings, who won the N.F.C. Central division 10 times in 11 years across the 1960s and ’70s. But although Minnesota advanced to four Super Bowls, it lost every one decisively. (The Vikings remain one of a dozen N.F.L. teams that have never won a Super Bowl.)
A lithe athlete, Marshall wielded a judoka’s leverage and a boxer’s quick hands to slide past heavier offensive linemen, using their own momentum as a springboard toward the passer. He attacked the quarterback’s blind side and collected 130.5 career sacks, which did not become an official statistic until 1982.
Despite the inescapable contusions, strains and aches in an era of vicious hits and unrefined medical treatments, Marshall suited up Sunday after Sunday. To play on one game day, he sneaked out of a hospital where he was being treated for asthmatic bronchitis.
Marshall was “a physiological impossibility,” Bud Grant, the longtime Vikings coach, told Sports Illustrated. “He just doesn’t rip, bust or tear.”
He was buttressed by two Hall of Famers — Carl Eller and Alan Page — on one of the best defensive lines in N.F.L. history. The teammates earned their nickname, which borrowed from a hit pop song and riffed on the Vikings’ color scheme, by swallowing up quarterbacks.
The entire unit, including Gary Larsen, made the Pro Bowl after the 1969 regular season, when the Vikings only once allowed a team to score more than 14 points. Marshall recorded a career-high 14 sacks that year.
He finished his career with 30 fumble recoveries, among the most for an N.F.L. defender. The most indelible came in October 1964, when the Vikings stripped running back Billy Kilmer of the San Francisco 49ers (Kilmer later became a quarterback with the team) after he caught a pass in the fourth quarter.
As the ball settled into the grass at the San Francisco 34-yard line, Marshall pounced. But he had been trailing the play, and on regaining his balance took off in the wrong direction.
After jogging into the end zone and launching the ball toward the stands — officially recording a two-point safety for the 49ers — he began searching for teammates to celebrate with. Instead, it was San Francisco’s center who ran up and patted him on the back. As reality set in, Marshall put his hands on his hips in exasperation.
Although the Vikings held on to win, 27-22, the play became a staple of football follies programs. Marshall never acted bitter.
“It took a lot of guts for me to go back on that field,” he said about the gaffe in a 1994 television interview. “Because I took football very seriously, and I had made the biggest mistake that you could probably make.”
James Lawrence Marshall was born on Dec. 30, 1937, in Danville, Ky., to George and Ann Marshall. Other than starring in football, his high school years in Columbus, Ohio, were not easy. His mother died while making him breakfast when he was 17, and as a teenager he would resell stolen hubcaps to earn some cash.
His athletic career blossomed at Ohio State, where he set school records in the shot put and discus and was named a football all-American the season after helping the team to win a national championship. In one game, a 14-14 tie against Purdue, he scored both Ohio State touchdowns, on an interception and a blocked punt.
Interested in a paycheck yet ineligible for the N.F.L. until his class at Ohio State graduated (a rule the N.F.L. changed in 1990), Marshall left college after his junior year to join the Canadian Football League. After one season with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, he was selected by the Cleveland Browns in the fourth round of the N.F.L. draft in 1960.
Marshall played in all 12 games as a rookie with the Browns. But after a mosquito bite in the off-season put him in a coma with encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, he lost dozens of pounds and was traded to the Vikings, an expansion team established in 1961.
He proceeded to lead Minnesota in sacks (tying once) in each of the team’s first six seasons, before Page arrived on the scene.
As dependable as Marshall was on the field, he was a daredevil off it. He sky-dived hundreds of times during his playing career; the year after retiring, he broke a leg and an arm after crashing a hang glider.
When a blizzard separated the participants on a snowmobile expedition in Montana and Wyoming into four small groups, Marshall, his teammate Paul Dickson and a few others were forced to spend the night huddled in a patch of trees. To stay warm, they started a fire using money from Marshall’s wallet and his checkbook. One person in another group died from exposure to the weather.
After his football career, Marshall worked for a brokerage firm and in real estate.
His first marriage, to Anita Baker, ended in divorce. He married Susan Landwehr in 2008. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Angie Marshall Moore and Jimi Belanger; his sister, Deloris Bosley; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. He lived in St. Louis Park, Minn.
Marshall, whose number was retired by the Vikings in 1999, was considered one of the best players never to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was a finalist in 2004.
Although his leadership was praised by teammates and his longevity uncontested — only a handful of defensive players have ever taken a snap in their 40s — Marshall was named to only two Pro Bowls, after the 1968 and 1969 seasons.
Some suggested that his career had been unfairly defined by the wrong-way run. He managed to find humor in the situation, though, joking about the play shortly after flying back to Minnesota following that road game in San Francisco.
“They kept telling me to get up in the cockpit and fly the plane,” he said of his teammates in an interview with The Minneapolis Star. “That way we’d end up in Hawaii instead of Minnesota.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research and Ash Wu contributed reporting.
The post Jim Marshall, Iron Man Defensive End for the Vikings, Dies at 87 appeared first on New York Times.
