1972 Giants Running Back Profiles

RON JOHNSON

Running Back
No. 30
Michigan
"Johnson ran with the ball only 32 times last season but gained 156 yards- an average gain of 4.9. He caught six passes for 47 yards. In 1970 he was the first Giant to rush for over 1,000 yards.
Ron hurt his thigh in a pre-camp basketball game, needed surgery and missed the first six games of 1971. He came back for two games, hurt a knee and that also required surgery, sidelining him for the final six games.
'He's the one guy who makes our attack go,' says Alex Webster. Johnson came to the Giants in a trade with the Browns who wanted Homer Jones to replace Paul Warfield.
Ron is the brother of baseball outfielder Alex Johnson."

-John Devaney, The Complete Handbook of Pro Football 1972 Edition

"Ron missed most of 1971 due to injuries but hopes to return to his 1970 form this season. Aside from breaking the Giants' all-time rushing record that year, he was the second best receiver on the club with 48 catches for 487 yards and four touchdowns. He was All-Pro, made the Pro Bowl and was the Giants' MVP.

Ron was married after the 1970 season."

-1972 Topps No. 207

BOBBY DUHON

Running Back-Punt Returner

No. 28

Tulane

"Duhon was the Giants' leading rusher last season. He gained 344 yards on 93 attempts for a 3.7-yard average, and his longest run was for 28 yards. Bobby was also the team's fourth leading pass catcher, snaring 25 for an average of 10 yards, and his longest catch was for 26 yards. He scored one touchdown and that was by rushing.

Bobby may not be hefty enough to be a big-yardage runner in the NFL. Picked by New York in the third round of the 1968 draft, Duhon received a bachelor of science degree in psychology in college.

He likes golf, hunting and fishing."

-John Devaney, The Complete Handbook of Pro Football, 1972 Edition

"Bobby has been a Giant for four years but has played only three NFL seasons, with a serious knee injury causing him to miss the entire 1969 campaign. He was the Giants' 3rd selection in 1968 and immediately became a standout rookie, gaining 1,005 yards in total offense.

Bobby works for a brokerage firm in New York."

-1972 Topps No. 92

JOE MORRISON

Running Back
No. 40
Cincinnati
"The grand old man of the Giants who goes back to the glory days of the club with Tittle, Huff, Gifford and Rote during the 1960s, Morrison has played for the Giants since 1959, when he was selected by New York in the third round. He has always been a versatile wide receiver and running back.
Last season he rushed 34 times and gained an average of 3.4 yards a crack. Joe was the team's second leading pass receiver behind Bob Tucker, catching 40 passes for 411 yards and one touchdown.
At each summer camp, reporters write about a 'replacement' for Morrison but each fall, No. 40 is doing his thing: being a pest to defenses. He has played six positions during his years with the Giants: fullback, halfback, tight end, flanker, split end and defensive back. He's also returned punts and kickoffs."

-John Devaney, The Complete Handbook of Pro Football, 1972 Edition

TUCKER FREDERICKSON: A STUDY ON COURAGE

Knee Injuries Kept Giant Running Back From Reaching His Potential

"The first time any man saw him, he was a lonely Cyrano cast adrift in a sea of red-jerseyed assassins, doomed to defeat in a cause hopeless from the opening kickoff.

His name was Tucker Frederickson and he was, on this particular day in Birmingham, Alabama, a study in courage and frustration. Bear Bryant was pushing Alabama toward a national championship. He had pushed his team through nine games, and now there wasn't anyone left to push except Auburn. With the kind of team Alabama had that year, it wasn't a push at all. It was more like a technical knockout.

Auburn had Tucker Frederickson, and Tucker blocked and ran and caught passes. But when he blocked, the ball carrier couldn't outrun the red jerseys who were not Tucker's assignment. When he ran, there was nobody to block. When he went to catch the ball, there were too many times when it was never thrown because no passer can heave the ball through the air when he has two defensive tackles growing out of his chest.

But he was something to see. Two years later, the Giants reached out and made him a No. 1 draft choice. Well, there were other factors involved in that choice. Gale Sayers and Joe Namath were not considered within the framework of what management likes to feel constitutes a 'real Giant.' Dick Butkus was a money problem. The Giants settled on Tucker and backed up the choice by proclaiming that he was the total athlete available- and in truth he was.

Whatever the reasons, Tucker Frederickson became the rock upon which the Giants announced they would found their new regime.

And it never happened.

Tucker Frederickson doesn't play professional football anymore. The matter was settled before the start of training camp this year when he officially announced his retirement after seven seasons with the Giants, which were studies of 'occasionally' and 'maybe' and 'might have been.' 

The Giants of this era put together some horrendous football teams and, given the most ideal set of circumstances, there was no way Tucker could have carried them all by himself. Unhappily, the circumstances were hardly ideal. Almost from the start, the thing which betrayed Tucker Frederickson was the one thing people who saw him play three magnificent years at Auburn would have sworn was the one thing he and the Giants could count on. He was victimized by his own anatomy.

Three times before it was over, the surgeon's knife would lay his knees bare. He would use enough plaster of Paris on his ankles to fashion another pieta. Tape- miles of it- was as much as part of his body as his tendons. He played hurt much of the time and sometimes couldn't play at all.

He was paid well for those years, but money has very little to do with his story. In a state where football is treated much like the Punic Wars and where the team for which he played was a distant No. 2 behind Bear Bryant's muscle machines, Tucker Frederickson grew to maturity as one of those gifted young men who had the ability the excite the boy-grown-older in the adults around him and whose obvious future served as a passport to status wherever he went.

He was expected to succeed. He always had. He was coming to the biggest city and one of the league's oldest and most prestigious franchises at a dandy salary. It was surely the best of possible worlds.

You could tick off the list of splintered bones and torn muscles and swollen tendons, and they would sound like Saturday night in the emergency ward.

But the measure of the problem is better taken elsewhere.

They were a strange group, the trio of big-name backs who were on the line in the pro football draft during Tucker Frederickson's senior year. They were Sayers and Namath and Frederickson, and the irony of their bond is the one tie nobody sought and the one time nobody ever stopped to think could happen.

Their knees have turned each of their careers into a guessing game as to how far any of them could have gone had the delicate balance in that hinge remained intact. Sayers has been to the knife, and Sayers can never be the Sayers who once scored six touchdowns in a professional game against the 49ers. Namath has been reduced to a shadowy substance whose credentials are enormous but whose durability is a thing of grave concern anytime he has to perform any act more complicated than tying his shoes.

And Frederickson has already been forced to surrender. People who play this game for money, and who do not need to read what other people assume is truth because they have written it, will tell you that nobody blocked better than Tucker Frederickson- healthy or sick. They will tell you that nobody could come out of the backfield and take that little circle pass and do something with it the way Tucker could. And they will tell you that, since they played against him, his chronic knee problems were a source of relief to them, because they never had to face a set of running backs who could have had the effectiveness which a healthy Tucker Frederickson and a healthy Ron Johnson could have displayed on the same field at the same time.

All of that is behind him now. The crowds aren't going to cheer again and the bands aren't going to play, and even the abuse of the intolerant New York fan is a thing of the past. Mostly it is the players themselves who will remember him. To a professional, that has a private and satisfying meaning."

-Jerry Izenberg, The Newark Star-Ledger (Football Digest, October 1972)