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Remembering the tragic day Detroit Lions’ Chuck Hughes died on the field 50 years ago

Special to Detroit Free Press
On a gloomy, damp afternoon 50 years ago Sunday, 54,418 excited football fans made their pilgrimage to Tiger Stadium to see if the Detroit Lions, sporting a four-game winning streak and tied for first place with Minnesota in the NFC Central Division, could defeat the “Monsters of the Midway” led by Chicago’s Dick Butkus.

Local radio listeners — the regional telecast was blacked out in Detroit — were glued to the play-by-play of Van Patrick and Bob Reynolds on WJR-AM (760).

With the Lions in a two-minute drill and trailing, 28-23, little-used Chuck Hughes, who entered the game in the fourth quarter replacing the injured Larry Walton, made a 32-yard catch from quarterback Greg Landry for a first down on the Bears’ 37-yard line.

The front page of the Detroit Free Press on Oct. 25, 1971, the day after Detroit Lions wideout Chuck Hughes collapsed during a game and died.
However, by 3:30 p.m. Oct. 24, 1971, the game’s outcome seemed meaningless. The tragedy that occurred with a minute left to play would forever serve as a glaring reminder of life’s fragility.

It is believed Hughes is the only player from the who died while competing in a game.

Hughes, all 5 feet 11 and 185 pounds of him, made his first reception of the season, despite being hit by Bob Jeter and Garry Lyle.

Who was Chuck Hughes?
Although a walk-on at Texas Western (later the University of Texas-El Paso),Hughes finished his college career with the second-most receiving yards and the third-highest number of receptions in NCAA history. He was the 1967 fourth-round draft choice of the Eagles and played sparingly in his three seasons with Philadelphia.

Chuck Hughes as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles.
The reserve receiver was acquired ahead of the 1970 season, when he made a remarkable 42-yard catch that helped seal the victory over the Oakland Raiders in the Thanksgiving Day game.

“Chuck didn’t have great speed but he was a good player, a great guy and teammate, and he worked like hell at practice,” former Lions head coach and Hall of Famer Joe Schmidt said earlier this month. “He would follow me up and down the sidelines asking to get in the game but Chuck never complained.”

Added Landry:

“Chuck ran great routes and had great hands, but what we all remember most about him was the quality of the person and how well-liked he was by everyone,” Landry said recently. “He was always upbeat and never down and was someone you always wanted to associate with.”

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A sudden tragedy
After Hughes’ first-down catch, Landry threw the ball out of bounds to stop the clock, and then appeared to connect with end Charlie Sanders — until the tight end was slammed to the ground by Butkus just as the ball arrived.

With 1:02 showing on the game clock, the 28-year-old Hughes began running back to the huddle when suddenly he grabbed his chest. He dropped face down onto the turf at the 25-yard line.

Bears defensive end Ed O’Bradovich will never forget what he witnessed that day.

“After the play, I turned around and I saw Chuck fall to the ground about 12 yards away and when he was laying there his eyes were wide open,” O’Bradovich, now 81, said from his home in Illinois. “The Lions were out of timeouts and I was thinking he was trying to get an injury timeout so I started yelling at him, ‘You no-good so-and-so, and I screamed at the referee that he was faking it. But then I saw Butkus bend over and start waving to the Detroit bench for medical help and I thought, ‘Oh (expletive), what can this be.’”

Lions center Ed Flanagan saw the linebacker waving his arms while standing near Hughes.

“When I first saw Butkus standing over him I first thought, ‘Oh God, don’t tell me Dick hit Chuck,’ but as we learned no one had hit him on that play,’” Flanagan said recently.

Former Detroit radio and television personality Tom Ryan was sitting with his wife Joan in the upper deck at the opposite end, behind the south end zone.

“We didn’t have a portable radio or binoculars with us and we assumed Hughes had been knocked unconscious, but then it progressively looked more serious with the medical personnel out there for so long and with the crowd becoming eerily so silent,’” Ryan said.

Lions receiver Chuck Hughes is rushed off the field on a gurney Oct. 24, 1971 at Tiger Stadium during a game vs. the Bears. In the plaid trousers is Dr. Eugene Boyle, an anesthesiologist from Grosse Pointe.
Lions team physicians Dr. Richard Thompson, Dr. Edwin Guise, trainer Kent Falb and assistant trainer Gary Tuthill rushed onto the field. After carefully removing the receiver’s helmet Guise began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Hughes as Thompson began rhythmic thumping on Hughes’ chest.

“When I got to Chuck, it was an athlete trainer’s worst nightmare because he was not breathing and was extremely pale,” said Falb, who ran to the concourse area under the stands near the Tigers’ bullpen to notify the awaiting ambulance personnel. They came out with a gurney to transport Hughes to Henry Ford Hospital, 3 miles north of the ballpark.

‘Someone doesn’t just drop’
As the minutes ticked, which many witnesses thought felt like an eternity, a man ran out with an oxygen tank while a Grosse Pointe anesthesiologist Dr. Eugene Boyle, ran down from the upper deck stands and onto to the field to assist the Lion doctors.

Meanwhile, on the radio broadcast, Van Patrick and Bob Reynolds in very somber tones tried to fill the time as best they could. Patrick kept saying, ‘This doesn’t look good, this doesn’t look good at all.’

Hughes’ wife Sharon was sitting in the west upper deck stands with the other player wives.

“Normally after a play, I would be talking with my friend Dru Robb (wife of defensive end Joe Robb) but for some reason after the play ended, I was focused on Chuck and saw him grab his chest and fall down,” Hughes said last week from her home in San Antonio, Texas. “I knew right away it was serious because someone doesn’t just drop in mid-stride when you haven’t been hit. I thought maybe he had choked on his mouthpiece. Dru and I immediately ran down and although they would not let us on the field, we waited next to the ambulance.”

A newspaper clipping shows Sharon Hughes, widow of Detroit Lions football player Chuck Hughes, sitting beside his casket at graveside services Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1971 in San Antonio, Texas. Hughes, 28, died of a heart attack after collapsing during that Sunday’s game with the Chicago Bears. Hughes was buried in Texas.
As the medical personnel ran Hughes off the field on the gurney, the fans were standing and not a sound could be heard. The receiver, one of 14 children raised in meager circumstance in west Texas, never regained consciousness.

“I knew something horrible had happened because when they were rolling Chuck off the field one of his arms fell down and his hand was flopping around back and forth, and I thought to myself, ‘Holy Christ, I think he’s dead,’” said O’Bradovich.

Falb said his wife remembered it was “so quiet in the stadium that the only thing you could hear was the fading sound of the ambulance siren until it finally made it to Henry Ford Hospital.”

Hughes had jumped into the ambulance and accompanied her husband to the hospital.

“Kent Falb worked continually on Chuck giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and I don’t know how he kept on and on but he did,” said Hughes, a college homecoming queen who began dating Chuck when the couple attended Texas Western.

None of the players at that point cared about the game, and when play resumed with 62 seconds left, the Bears ran out the clock with their 28-23 victory after Landry threw an incomplete pass to Altie Taylor.

“When we got into the locker room, we all got down on one knee and prayed for Chuck,” says O’Bradovich.

With the media banned from entering the Lions locker room, head coach Joe Schmidt had gathered his players, many of whom were sitting in front of their lockers, still in their uniforms and openly weeping.

“I was so confused and upset that I really didn’t know how to handle it, but I did my best to speak with the team and asked everyone to pray for Chuck before I went to the hospital,” said Schmidt.

How did this happen?
After the game, a distraught Thompson, told reporters, “His heart stopped on the field. We thought we got it going one time but couldn’t be sure. It stopped again.”

At 4:41 p.m., Charles Frederick Hughes was pronounced dead. He was 28.

“I know that the doctors and Kent Falb tried their very best to save Chuck,” says Sharon Hughes.

Free Press sports editor Joe Falls wrote the next day that as team owner William Clay Ford was choking back tears he said: “Never, ever in the wildest moments would you ever believe a thing like this could happen. It’s just inconceivable. Our whole team is filled with a great sense of sorrow. Chuck was a great player and a great person.”

The following day the autopsy report revealed Hughes had died from an undiagnosed and advanced “arteriosclerotic coronary heart disease with acute coronary thrombotic occlusion” or as otherwise described by Thompson: “He had a hardening of the main artery supplying blood to the heart and a clot had formed in this artery shutting off the flow of a blood.”

The report also mentioned that there was old scarring on the posterior wall of the heart indicating evidence of previous heart trauma.

Guise told reporters, “One dies officially when one is pronounced dead, but in my heart, I feel Chuck died on the field.”

To this day, Falb agrees.

“We did everything we could based upon the skills and everything we knew at the time. You could have had the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic on the field that day but he was not going to survive. He was dead,” says Falb.