Football Legend’s Boyhood Home Burns

The historic house in Marshall where legendary Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle spent his childhood burned to the ground early Thursday. Marshall fire investigators say it may have been caused by a halogen lamp that had been knocked over at the back of the house.

This house is where Yelberton Abraham Tittle, or Y.A. Tittle, was born in 1926.  Tittle grew up in Marshall and played his high school football with the Marshall Mavericks.  Oldtimers say Tittle put Marshall on the statewide map for high school football.

via History passes Childhood home of Y.A. Tittle destroyed by fire - The Marshall News Messenger: News.

After four years at LSU, Tittle went on to play 17 years in the NFL with the Baltimore Colts, the San Francisco 49ers, and the New York Giants.

Tittle's Giants won division titles in 1961, 1962 and 1963 but lost the NFL Championship Game each year.  He retired after the 1964 season, and he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971.

Aside from his Hall of Fame career, Y.A. Tittle is also remembered because of a dramatic photograph that shows him on his knees, dazed and bleeding after a vicious sack in a game between the Giants and the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1964.  It was a sack that would get a player ejected and fined in today's NFL.

Read the story of how this photo came to be taken at:

via Fallen Giant | People & Places | Smithsonian Magazine.

The picture is one of the most memorable sports photos ever taken. Today it hangs in Tittle's display in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

How famous is this photo?  It's one of only three pictures hanging in the lobby of the National Press Photographers Association headquarters in Durham, North Carolina.

It hangs alongside Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima and the image of the fiery death of the Hindenburg dirigible at Lakehurst, New Jersey.