In The Big Leagues Pro And College Football Halls Of Fame Invite Armchair Quarterbacks To Test Their Knowledge, Relive Game’s Greatest Moments

A man on the cusp of middle age with bulging belly and balding pate stands a few steps from the 10-yard line. He stares down at a football ensconced in a kicking tee, runs a few steps forward and lets loose with his right foot.

The ball sails through the uprights.

The man raises both arms in the air, shrieks “Good!” and turns and smiles. A big numeral 3 appears on the electronic scoreboard.

This isn’t the Meadowlands or Soldier Field. The setting is an exhibit called “The practice field” at the new College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind. And, for a moment, a fantasy is fulfilled.

An insurance salesman or cable-TV technician has become Lou “The Toe” Groza or George Blanda. He’ll likely remember that mock extra point long after he has forgotten who won the national championship in 1959 or just what was the game of harpaston.

The Midwest has always been no-nonsense football territory. College teams here have macho nicknames: Badgers, Wildcats, Wolverines. Pro teams are Bears, Bengals and Lions. No Ducks or Saints here.

Appropriately, the region is home to both major football halls of fame in the United States, and each has recently had a major opening.

While the hall for the college game opened for the first time in August 1995, the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, underwent a huge two-year-long overhaul and reopened nearly totally refurbished last October.

Since its debut in 1963, Canton’s paean to the pigskin has grown like kudzu in Georgia and has undergone three major expansions. What started as two connected buildings with 18,000 square feet has grown to five buildings totaling 82,000 square feet - more than twice the size of an actual football field.

Regarding the latest expansion, spokesman Don Smith says, “We needed more display space, more office space, more library space, more storage space. And we had the desire for a dynamic new theater.”

Dynamic it is. “The 100-Yard Universe” shines in its own right. Stand on a ramp at the theater entrance and watch pre-game preparations on a monitor: grounds keepers making white lines on the field; cheerleaders making up their faces; Deion Sanders making an entrance.

Step inside the theater and have a seat. On the behemoth screen before you appears the private world of the NFL pre-game locker room. You can almost smell the liniment as players get rubdowns. A lineman struggles into his pants as he pants, “I think I’m gaining weight.” A coach bellows, “You’ve got 60 minutes to show who you are.”

The players walk down aisles from the locker room to the field, and you follow every step as the theater rotates 180 degrees.

Light from the open stadium begins to envelop the screen as the team takes the field. Cheers from 70,000 fans build to a crescendo and hit you like a verbal fist.

“It’s a crisp 4 degrees outside,” a sportscaster intones, and a close-up shows steam seemingly rising from a player’s head.

There are grunts, groans, bumps, blows, bounces and jounces as Steelers, Packers, Dolphins, Bills, 49ers, Cowboys, Saints and Bengals attempt to advance a football.

“The 100-Yard Universe” concludes with the Dallas Cowboys winning Super Bowl XXX as fireworks explode and the 2-year-old sitting next to me covers her ears.

Exit the theater and you are surrounded by 2-by-5-foot replicas of every Super Bowl ticket, each marking a display telling each game’s tale.

Although most Super Bowls have been anticlimactic, memories of where you were when the games were played flow into your cerebrum as you wander among the mega-tickets. And look at the prices: Super Bowl IV at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans on Jan. 11, 1970 - $15 a seat!

Memories are just as rampant in the museum’s actual Hall of Fame, consisting of two “enshrinement galleries” toned in dark, deep blue. Each of the 180 members is honored with a bronze bust, an illustration back-lit behind Plexiglas, and a brief biographical outline. The names’ familiarity depends as much on one’s ages as on one’s propensity for sports trivia: Tony Dorsett, Red Granger, Larry Csonka, OJ Simpson (yes, he’s still there), YA Tittle, Bronko Nagurski, and Bruiser Kinard of the (football) Brooklyn Dodgers.

The place to acquaint yourself with the teams of yesteryear is the gallery covering the pro game’s first century. Professional football was born in 1892 when Pudge Heffelfinger signed a contract to play in a grudge game for $500.

These Neanderthal days are symbolized by the museum’s oldest football - a fat, nearly spheroid blob of a ball dating from around 1895 - and its oldest uniform, worn in 1902 and including a nose guard looking more like a jock strap.

The strangest artifact might be Tom Dempsey’s shoe. Kicker Dempsey was born with half a right foot, which he used to boot a 63-yard field goal for the New Orleans Saints in 1970. The kick is a record and the stubby half shoe is on view.

Unlike the Pro Football hall, which has been a constant in Canton for 35 years, the college hall has had a restless past.

A College Football Hall of Fame organization has existed since 1947, but it wasn’t until 1966 that plans were made to construct a hall-of-fame building. The setting was to be the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., site of the first college football game in 1869. A lack of money killed that vision.

A decade later, ground was broken on the property of King’s Island theme park outside Cincinnati, and a hall was opened in time for the 1978 season. But it seemed that people weren’t up for visiting a sports hall of fame after a full day riding roller coasters. The hall drew a meager 30,000 visitors a year - just 10 percent of number hoped for - and it closed its doors in 1991.

A new home was sought, and after a failed attempt to move into the Great American Pyramid in Memphis, South Bend was chosen.

Unlike Cincinnati or Memphis, this city has a real college football heritage, where ghosts of Knute Rockne, the Four Horsemen and Frank Leahy are as ever present as “Touchdown Jesus,” the mural on Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library of Jesus with arms raised as if signaling six points.

On the outside, the hall looks like an old-time stadium, with an open plaza resembling half a football field. Inside, your view is immediately seized by a 42-foot-high eclectic sculpture representing the hall’s theme. Comprising the sculpture are models of textbooks, soda cups, pizza boxes, footballs stacked upon more footballs, helmets, televisions and life-sized cast figures of players in action.

While the pro hall tells the story of the game dating from Heffelfinger’s contract, the college hall’s history lesson takes you back 2,000 years. Ancient Greeks played a game called harpaston in which players tried to pass, run or kick a ball over another team’s goal line. Sound familiar?

You can do the same here, at least in simulated settings. As well as attempt an extra point, you can try your arm at passing, or check your dexterity by running over obstacles and blocking a pop-up dummy.

Hands-on is the rule. Step up to a television monitor encased in an 8-foot-high football and watch vintage highlights. In another gallery, push a button and listen to your favorite college’s fight song. Grab a pair of pompons and yell a few cheers. Or enter a glass-enclosed press box, broadcast a few plays and see if that job is as easy as it looks.

Like the multimedia show in Canton, the one here is spirited. The theater interior resembles a stadium with seats fronting a partial field. Life-size cast figures in the forms of players, fans, band members, photographers and cheerleaders are in the theater, and taped recordings indicate their pre-game conversations. A quarterback advises his center, “The tailback option to the strong side is going to be the key.” The saxophone player says, “I’m shivering to death. My fingers are going to stick to the keys.

Showtime itself is a 9-minute mix of video and still photography on a 360-degree screen. There is no narrator, but there are scenes covering 100 years of college football. The 755 hall-of-fame members are enshrined on two groups of relief sculptures.

What school claims the most members? Notre Dame has 40. Michigan is next with 25. And third place is a tie between Yale and Princeton at 24. (The Ivy League was the nation’s football powerhouse from the 1880’s through the 1930’s.)

And by the way, it was Syracuse that won the 1959 national championship.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO The Pro Football Hall of Fame is open daily except Christmas. Hours from Memorial Day through Labor Day are 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Hours the rest of the year are 9 a.m.5 p.m. Admission: $9 adults, $6 seniors, $4 ages 6-14, or $22 per family. Information: Pro Football Hall of Fame, 2121 George Halas Drive NW, Canton, OH 44708; (330) 456-8207. The College Football Hall of Fame is open daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day, 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Admission: $7 adults, $5 seniors, $4 ages 6-14. Information: College Football Hall of Fame, 111 South St. Joseph St., South Bend, IN 46601; (800) 440-3263 (recording) or (219) 235-9999. Nearby attractions: In Canton, the Harry London Candy factory offers hour-long tours (800) 321-0444 or (330) 494-0833; and the McKinley Museum of History, Science & Industry includes a planetarium and children’s science center (330) 455-7043. South Bend boasts the University of Notre Dame, the second-most-visited attraction in Indiana (219) 631-5726; classic motorcars are preserved at the Studebaker National Museum (219) 235-9714. Lodging: Best Western Canton, 6889 Sunset Strip, Canton (330) 497-8799, doubles $61-$73; Motel 6, 6600 Sunset Strip, Canton (330) 494-7611, doubles $38.99. Days Inn, 52757 US 31 North, South Bend (219) 277-0510, doubles, $55; Holiday Inn Downtown, 213 West Washington, South Bend (219) 232-3941, doubles: $79-$95