Sonny Jurgensen, who helped build the Washington Redskins into a popular cultural phenomenon that once consumed the city with his Hall of Fame arm and broadcast charm, died Friday.
He was 91.
“Sonny was to Washington, what Mickey Mantle was to New York,” said longtime Washington sports talk host Andy Pollin. “A Sonny pass, like a Mantle home run, was majestic. If the Redskins had a defense to match his skills, they would have been contenders before George Allen came to town. And had Vince Lombardi lived to coach more than just the one season he did, it would have been incredible to see what they could have done together. When he finished playing, Sonny’s shined just as brightly on television and radio, cementing his iconic status. That for a man who never started a playoff game.”
Jurgensen was considered by many the greatest pure passer the NFL has seen, and it was his artistry with the forward pass that turned the Redskins into a box-office juggernaut, with the team’s legendary consecutive-game sellout streak starting his third season in Washington in 1967 and continuing for decades.
Though many of Jurgensen’s early Washington teams did not win consistently, he led an exciting offense, along with fellow Pro Football Hall of Famers Charley Taylor and Bobby Mitchell. In 1967, he led the NFL in passing yards with 3,747 (the fifth time he led the league in passing yards) and touchdowns with 31. He was named to five Pro Bowls and was a first-team All-Pro twice.
“We were a quick-striking team,” Jurgensen said. “The kind of offense we had, you may have stopped us three or four times, but then we were going to hit you on and on.”
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Taylor, who died in 2022 and who caught most of his 649 career receptions from Jurgensen, said, “We were unstoppable offensively. We had a guy with a great arm and no fear at quarterback, but we would lose games 35-33, scores like that.”
Yet it wasn’t just his passing prowess that fans loved. It was his working man style — a body that would never be mistaken for a Greek god, with a noticeable paunch when he donned his burgundy-and-gold uniform.
“I didn’t have a good tailor for my uniform, so I always had this little roll in front of me,” Jurgensen once said in an interview. “Fans liked it. They could sit at home and say to their wives, ‘I want to watch football,’ and maybe the wife would say, ‘You’re just sitting around here drinking beer. Get in shape.’ The guy could point to the television and say, ‘Wait a minute. Look at that guy. If he can play, I can play.’ Fans knew that I enjoyed life, but I played hard, and they knew that, too.”
The late Len Hauss, who was the center for nearly every game Jurgensen played in his 11 seasons with the Redskins, said in an interview that the quarterback had both style and substance.
“Sonny had style,” Hauss said. “One time, the Washington Touchdown Club had chosen Sonny as its Most Valuable Player, and Tom Jones, the singer, was chosen as the Most Valuable Performer. One of the Washington reporters walked up to Sonny and asked him, ‘What does it feel like to be in the presence of a real star?’ Sonny responded, ‘Why don’t you ask him?” referring to Jones, who at the time was probably the biggest entertainer in the business.
“History has shown [Jurgensen] was one of the best quarterbacks to ever play the game,” Hauss said. “He probably had one of the best arms in football at the time. He was extremely smart and very much a leader. Coaches allowed him to run the show, and that worked for Sonny, who was a take-charge guy. He had an excellent football mind.”
Lombardi, who won five NFL championships — two Super Bowls — with the Green Bay Packers before coming to Washington to coach the Redskins in 1969 (Lombardi died after one season), loved Jurgensen and once reportedly said to the quarterback, “If we had you in Green Bay, we never would have lost.”
Jurgensen may not have looked the part, but make no mistake about it — he was one of the elite quarterbacks of his time. He finished an 18-year-career with 255 touchdown passes, 32,224 passing yards and an 82.62 passer rating, the highest of any quarterback in the era of 1968 and earlier.
Born on Aug. 23, 1934, in Wilmington, North Carolina, Christian Adolph “Sonny” Jurgensen was a three-sport star — football, basketball and baseball — in high school. He played his college football at Duke (where he also played baseball briefly and reportedly was invited to play basketball as well) from 1953 to 1957 and was drafted in the fourth round by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1957.
Jurgensen was part of the Eagles’ 1960 NFL championship squad and took over as the starting quarterback from Norm Van Brocklin in 1961, leading Philadelphia to a 10-4 record with 32 touchdown passes, tying the NFL record, and 3,723 yards, earning a place in the Pro Bowl. But after an injury-filled 1963 season, Jurgensen, on April Fools’ Day in 1964, was traded to the Redskins in exchange for quarterback Norm Snead. Jurgensen is a member of the Philadelphia Eagles Hall of Fame, in addition to being included in Washington’s Ring of Fame.
When he heard the news, Jurgensen said he thought it was a joke. “I had just had a lengthy meeting in Philadelphia about what we were going to do,” he said. “I left the office with the understanding that I was going to be around there. I went to have some lunch, and some people told me they heard I was traded to the Redskins. I said, ‘Don’t tell me that. I just left the coaches.’ It was April Fools’ Day, and I thought they were just kidding me. … It was a shock, but in retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Another division rival, New York Giants linebacker Sam Huff, was also traded to Washington, and so began a close friendship between the two, which would become legendary when the two Hall of Fame players were teamed up with play-by-play announcer Frank Herzog in 1981 to create the Redskins game radio team of Sonny, Sam and Frank who would call the action of the Super Bowl glory years and beyond. Herzog was replaced in 2004, while Huff retired in 2013 and died in 2021. Jurgensen, who was also a fixture on local television sports programs and reports for many years, continued in the booth until he retired in 2019.
His final years on the field were with coach George Allen, a defensive-minded coach who brought in the more conservative, ball-control quarterback Billy Kilmer in a trade when he took over in 1971. Jurgensen found himself in a quarterback controversy, playing behind Kilmer much of the time while the Redskins enjoyed their greatest team success since their arrival in Washington in 1937, making the playoffs four straight seasons and winning the NFC championship in 1972. Jurgensen did not start any of those playoff games for Allen.
“We clashed over the system,” Jurgensen said of his conflicts with Allen. “It was a power struggle from the get-go.”
They would lose 14-7 to the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl VII, which Jurgensen watched from a booth in the stadium, with a torn Achilles heel he suffered earlier that season against the Giants. Some Redskins players believe that if Jurgensen had been healthy, they would have won that Super Bowl. “If Sonny had been healthy, he would have eaten them alive,” receiver Roy Jefferson said.
Despite being rivals — and fueling one of the legendary marketing campaigns in town, the great quarterback debate, with people driving around the Washington area with “I Love Sonny” and “I Love Billy” bumper stickers on their cars — the two veteran quarterbacks became close friends and remained so long after both were done playing. “We were friends,” Jurgensen said. “We respected each other because we were competitors, and we appreciated each other.”
Punter Mike Bragg said in an interview that Washington “thrives on that kind of controversy. It’s the way it is in this town … but Sonny and Billy were close, and they helped each other a lot with what they were doing on the field.”
Jurgensen, who, at the age of 40 in his final NFL season in 1974 would lead the league in passing, would be recognized for his football accomplishments with the ultimate reward — election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in 1983.
“I didn’t play for championship teams,” Jurgensen told the crowd at his Hall of Fame induction ceremony. “I had nine operations … There were a lot of frustrations and disappointments, but this makes up for a lot of those.”
He was just starting his second career, though, as a media star, the face of football in Washington for generations of fans, on and off the field.
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