It is my firm belief that Claude Crabb was the toughest sonovabitch to ever play in the NFL. Nitschke? Butkus? Big Daddy? The Assassin? Boomer Brown? Nope. Claude tops them all. He HAD to.
It was his name.
How do you get off naming your child “Claude”? Do you want him to be a nuclear physicist with bad skin, or a novelist with social anxiety? Then, Claude is the name. A USC athlete and NFL player? Hell, no.
And, he was a “Junior”. His father consciously decided, “If I had to suffer with this damn name, so will you, my son.” And forget using the middle name—“Clarence”. Claude Clarence Crabb. Junior. Even Claude Humphrey avoided that Freudian nightmare.
It is the “Boy Named Sue” Syndrome. Obviously the Crabbs (God, that was even hard to type) decided that their newborn had to be tough, so they slapped the consonance-riddled name of “Claude” on him—only to have Philadelphia clip the “E” on this card, just to mock him further.
So, all through his life, Claude Crabb dealt with playground agony, schoolyard bullying and pretty girls laughing when he revealed his name, despite being a prototype California blonde dude. So, he got tough. And mean. God—he had no choice. That anger and rage got him through college at USC and Colorado. Then, the Washington Redskins drafted him in the nineteenth round, thinking that no real player existed with that name and decided to share in the fun…and then he showed up for training camp.
One can only imagine the on-field verbal abuse and taunts—imagine Jim Brown’s reaction to being tackled by someone named Claude Crabb, or Johnny Unitas being intercepted by a man whose name belongs to a minor Hanna-Barbera character—and how that turned Crabb into a seething beast of unbridled fury. And he applied that rage and anger into a seven-year NFL career, and his sole football card, which is seven years and one card more than me, and most other human beings.
At the end of his career, with his battles over and his conscience pure, he became a loving husband and father as well as a major supporter of Boys and Girls Clubs. And NONE of his little Crabbs (ugh) were named “Claude”.
