Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin
Elroy Leon “Crazylegs” Hirsch
Born Wausau, June 17, 1923; Wausau High 1939–40; Wisconsin AD 1969–87; died Madison 2004, buried Pine Grove Cemetery, Wausau
$20,000
Elroy Leon “Crazylegs” Hirsch was the Wausau halfback who became a Pro Football Hall of Fame receiver, a Hollywood title character, and the athletic director who filled Camp Randall. Born in Wausau on June 17, 1923, and adopted by Otto Hirsch, an iron-works foreman, and Mayme, he grew up German-Norwegian with a left foot that pointed out. He ran the two miles to school skipping and crisscrossing the sidewalk squares so he would be shifty. Wausau High got the halfback in 1939 and 1940. A Chicago writer watching him against Great Lakes in 1942 wrote that “his crazy legs were gyrating in six different directions, all at the same time.” Hirsch was glad to be called anything but Elroy. Wisconsin’s 1942 Badgers went 8–1–1 and beat Ohio State. The Marines parked him at Michigan, where he lettered in football, basketball, baseball, and track in a single academic year—the first Michigan athlete to do so—including a broad jump and a one-hit shutout of Ohio State on the same May afternoon. The AAFC Chicago Rockets were, he said later, the worst decision he ever made, and they cost him a fractured skull. The Los Angeles Rams made him the deep threat of the 1951 championship team: 1,495 receiving yards and 17 touchdown catches. After a second head injury, coach Clark Shaughnessy had an eleven-ounce plastic helmet made for him from fighter-plane material, among the NFL’s first plastic shells. He played himself in the picture Crazylegs; Unchained gave the world “Unchained Melody.” He later ran the Rams, then Wisconsin athletics from 1969 to 1987 until Camp Randall was full, and sued S.C. Johnson over a women’s shaving gel named Crazylegs. He married Wausau High sweetheart Ruth Stahmer in June 1946; they had fifty-eight years. He died in Madison in 2004, and they brought him home to Pine Grove Cemetery in Wausau. The Crazylegs Classic, an 8K from the Capitol to Camp Randall, still funds Badger athletics. Wausau claims the birth, the high school, and the grave; Madison claims the final years.