Roger Craig’s path from kickball to Hall of Fame, with a lifelong teammate along for the ride
Bill Walsh saw no reason to wait. Never mind that players were still in their tuxedo jackets on the night they received their Super Bowl rings after winning it all in 1984.
The San Francisco 49ers coach pulled Roger Craig aside during the gala and looked him in the eyes. “Roger, we’re going to need 1,000 yards from you next season,” the running back remembered him saying.
This inspired Craig but also befuddled him. He was coming off a year in which he amassed 600-plus yards as a runner and as a receiver.
“I was fired up. I knew I couldn’t let him down,” Craig once said. “But then I started to wonder if he meant he needed 1,000 yards rushing or receiving.
“I wanted to cover my ass, so I figured I better shoot for both.”
Craig did as instructed, delivering the first 1,000-1,000 season in NFL history in 1985, a milestone matched only by Marshall Faulk (1999) and Christian McCaffrey (2019). That distinction goes a long way toward explaining why Craig will be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday.
How Roger Craig went from 16 catches in college to the Hall of Fame
Daniel Brown
Walsh, who was known as “The Genius,” was hardly the first person to identify Craig’s dual-threat potential, though.
Jamie Williams, the former 49ers tight end who will present Craig at his induction ceremony in Canton, Ohio, this weekend, had Walsh beat by about 20 years.
“My earliest memory was at Jefferson Elementary School, when we were playing kickball with this new kid, right?” Williams, 66, recalled. “And this dude is flying around the bases. He’s also kicking it a mile. It was like, ‘Who is this?’”
So began an improbably athletic journey for Williams, who was in second grade at the time, and Craig, who was a first-grader when his family moved around the corner from the Williams family in the factory town of Davenport, Iowa.
Williams and Craig were teammates on the playgrounds.
Then at Davenport Central High.
Then at the University of Nebraska.
Then in the NFL.
Now at the Hall of Fame presentation.
“You can’t write that script,” said Williams, a tough admission for the former captain of his high school poetry club.
Along the way, the two school chums and their pals attended barn parties in the middle of cornfields, snuck into drive-in movies (with Craig hiding in the trunk), rode their bicycles down to the Mississippi River, reeled in catfish, watched “Soul Train” on Saturday nights and generally lived a cinematically idyllic life in America’s heartland.
“Imagine yourself in a field where it’s just billions of monarch butterflies, and you have to run around trying to catch them, and they’re all over,” Williams said. “That’s kind of stuff we did in Iowa.”
But it’s not just an enchanting origin story. Having witnessed Craig’s path every step of the way, Williams can speak to how his friend turned adversity into opportunity, challenges into advantages, roadblocks into green lights.
“That’s why, to me, he’s going in the Hall of Fame,” he said. “Because nothing was handed to him.”
Williams grew up on Ninth Street by Gaines Street, not far from the bridge that crossed into Illinois. When the Craig family arrived from Preston, Miss., they lived near where Eighth Street intersected with Ripley Street. Roger was one of eight children.
Williams can recall the geography with such precision because the vast terrain of the Quad Cities served as their unofficial training ground during their halcyon and screen-free days of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Long before they were winning a Super Bowl together with the 49ers, Jamie Williams, left, and Roger Craig, right, were biking all over the Quad Cities in Iowa.
“We all had bikes, or we helped friends build bikes, so we could ride around all over the city,” Williams said. “To this day, my parents never knew.”
This wasn’t rebellion. It’s what counted as cross-training.
“We had that kind of adventure,” Williams said. “When I look at Roger’s success, and some of our colleagues from that time, it’s because we were always moving and working out — even when we didn’t know we were working out. Whether it was playing tag, chasing each other, riding up a steep hill, we were always looking for the challenge.”
Williams explained their adolescence in Hollywood terms. He says it was the profound journey of “Stand by Me,” the playful summer vibe of “The Sandlot,” and the nerdy sci-fi chaos of “Stranger Things.”
“We’d trade comic books, sitting on the porch, and then we’d go into these wooded areas and look for aliens,” he said. “We really believed that we were going to be the ones who actually catch a freaking alien and either tie it up or make it a pet. Like, we all agreed that if aliens came, they would definitely come to Iowa.”
As they grew older, however, it was time to take their athletic pursuits more seriously. That was especially true for Craig, who was preternaturally good at everything. He was a terrific hurdler who finished second in the 110-meter high hurdles and the 400 hurdles at the state track and field championships as a senior.
He was an excellent wrestler, qualifying for the state tournament in that sport, too.
“The sport we all gravitated to was wrestling because in Iowa, in kindergarten, they teach the boys and even the girls how to put somebody in the cradle,” Williams said.
Football, of course, was the ideal sport to maximize Craig’s gifts. His brother Curtis was a local celebrity as a star running back at Davenport Central before graduating in 1975. Central coach Jim Fox once called Curtis “the essence of everything good.”
Roger knew where the bar was set. And he embraced the challenge of following in his brother’s high-yardage footsteps. He wanted to be even better. He made his case by once rushing for 353 yards on 41 carries in a Class 4A playoff game. Craig accounted for all the Blue Devils’ scoring that day with touchdown runs of 59, 65, 30 and 31 yards and a pair of 2-point conversions.
At tight end, Williams also blossomed as a force. He was well on his way to the 6-foot-4, 240-pound frame he would play with in the NFL, but he retained the speed of his skinnier days and was named a Parade All-American.
Together, Craig and Williams helped their 1976 team win the Iowa state championship. Then Craig broke a leg playing football during his junior year, raising questions about his collegiate future. But he bounced back strong as a senior in 1978, setting Davenport Central’s single-season rushing record with 1,566 yards. The previous record holder? His brother Curtis, of course.
It took a while, but Roger’s legacy is now part of the Davenport landscape. The local school district voted in June to rename Brady Street Stadium as Roger Craig Stadium.
Craig made a name for himself at the collegiate level, too, with help from a lifelong friend who was already paving the way.
Craig initially had no plans to follow Williams, who was playing for the powerhouse Nebraska Cornhuskers. Craig wanted to stay close to home and was set to commit to Iowa under new coach Hayden Fry.
But when Craig called to tell him that, Williams made an impassioned plea.
“The most important thing about it,” he said in closing, “is who is going to block for you like I can?”
Pause.
“Yeah, you’re right, man,” Craig finally said.
Roger Craig, left, and Jamie Williams combined for 10 touchdowns for the Cornhuskers in 1981. (Courtesy of Jamie Williams)
Teammates again, it took a while to find their footing in Nebraska, but both broke through in 1981. Craig rushed for 1,060 yards with six touchdowns that season; Williams had 22 catches and a conference-high four touchdowns. Williams spent four years with the Huskers, capturing All-Big Eight and All-American honors in 1981 and 1982.
Craig, though, ran into an unexpected detour in his senior year. Coach Tom Osborne turned Craig into a yeoman blocking back for Mike Rozier, the future Heisman Trophy winner. On one hand, the move hardly allowed Craig to show off his skills heading into the 1983 NFL Draft. On the other, it foreshadowed the ego-free approach that would make him one of the best teammates of the 49ers’ dynasty.
Turner Gill, the Huskers’ quarterback for that ’82 season, said it sticks with him to this day that a rushing sensation like Craig embraced grunt work without complaint.
“Those are hard conversations you have with your players, when you have to ask them to move positions,” Gill, who later became a coach, wrote via text. “I just remember thinking that Roger was such a great example of a team player, as he did so with grace. … People who allow others to shine will get their moment in the light also.”
On the West Coast, it caught the attention of a creative NFL coach scouring the draft for a versatile running back.
“His college career was remarkable because of his willingness to sacrifice for his team,” Walsh wrote in his introduction to Craig’s book. “That kind of unselfishness set him back to the second round of the draft. We were very fortunate to acquire him.”
The 49ers took Craig with the 49th pick of the 1983 draft, and he predictably flourished in a loaded offense guided by a brilliant coach. Meanwhile, Williams was selected in the third round (No. 63) by the New York Giants before spending five solid seasons in Houston, where he loved playing with Warren Moon. (“We were like Kelce and Mahomes,” he said.)
Before the 1989 season, it was Craig’s turn to play recruiting matchmaker.
“Roger flipped the switch and started doing the same thing I did with him. He’d call me and say, ‘Jamie, you have to come here, man. You have to. I told Bill about you.’”
Williams, as Craig had done, initially rebuffed the offer. He was leaning toward a deal with the New England Patriots.
“‘Jamie, I’m telling you, you’d be wasting your time there. The 49ers are going to be great for you,’” Williams recalled him saying. “And so that’s how I ended up there.”
Williams won a Super Bowl with the 1989 team, the highlight of his four seasons in San Francisco. And as a nod to the sense of community he learned from the streets of Davenport, he was named his team’s Man of the Year twice during his career.
Before leaving for Canton this week, Williams recalled how he and Craig once hung out with Dan Marino and other future greats before a 1983 college all-star game. Marino, who grew up as a city slicker in Pittsburgh, tried poking a little fun at a couple of Iowa hayseeds.
The future Hall of Fame quarterback wondered what in the world Craig and Williams did for fun back in their corn-covered home state. Williams remembers Marino joking with something like: “Iowa just sounds so freaking boring, man. Like, how did you guys survive?”
Williams was ready for that one.
“Ever gone to a barn party with a band and a keg in the middle of nowhere?” he replied. “Ever climbed into an inner tube with a boombox and float for two hours down the canal? Ever do any cow tipping?”
Williams could have kept listing activities for a few more hours.
Instead, maybe they can resume the conversation Saturday when the kids from Quad Cities reunite at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where Roger Craig will be inducted with an assist from a trusted ally who lived around the corner.
It’s their most improbable adventure ever.
