Today’s pass-first
NFL claims to have no place for a lunch-bucket grinder like Gore and yet he abides, quietly scaling the record book as the Bills aim for a first playoff win in 24 years
A great running back has a career that’s easily reduced to a 10-second highlight. For Cleveland’s Jim Brown, it’s a black-and-white montage of him barreling through wall after wall of humanity to paydirt. For Chicago’s Walter Payton, we smash-cut from Sweetness sloughing off would-be tacklers like George Costanza fleeing a smoking kids’ party to Sweetness dolphin-diving over a stacked front onto a concrete end zone. For Detroit’s Barry Sanders, roll that clip from the 1992 playoffs of him going all Great Tiger on the eventual
Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys.
As for the Buffalo Bills’ Frank Gore? Well, his greatness isn’t easily GIF’d. Look up the five-time Pro Bowler’s highlights on
YouTube, and, sure, the hits – mostly of him jetting through scrums in his younger days and piling up yards after contact now – aren’t bad. It’s just not the kind of mental time-capsule fodder that autoplays at the very mention of his name.