By Stampeders.com staff
His name was Earl Lunsford.
One of his nicknames, as is more or less mandated for anyone named “Earl” who enjoys success in sports, was “The Pearl.”
The native of Stillwater, Okla., was certainly a gem of a player for the Calgary Stampeders in 1956 and from 1959-63 (he served in the U.S. military between his Calgary stints).
Lunsford was a fullback during an era when the position didn’t consist of blocking, occasional catches out of the backfield and even more occasional carries.
Lunsford ran the ball and ran it very well. He was the all-time leading rusher in Stampeders history for almost four full decades until Kelvin Anderson came along and took the honour away from him.
A half-century after he played his final game for the Stamps, he still holds the club record for career rushing touchdowns (55) and most rushing touchdowns in one game (five in the 1963 Labour Day Classic against the Eskimos).
He surpassed the 1,000-yard mark five times. Two of the six 200-yard rushing games in Stampeders history belong to him. He is second on the franchise’s all-time list with 28 100-yard games.
Lunsford was a three-time West all-star and a two-time all-Canadian.
While some ball-carriers relied on speed to get the job done, Lunsford relied on pure power. That led to his other, more famous nickname — Earthquake. His straight-ahead, plodding running style and tackle-breaking ability often had the ground shaking at Mewata Stadium and then later McMahon Stadium.
“He didn’t have great speed, but he had great balance,” former Stampeders general manager Rogers Lehew once said. “He ran low and he ran hard. He was a wrestler in college, and that gives you great balance and body control.”
Lehew remembers a particularly — shall we say, deliberate — 85-yard run against the Eskimos in 1960.
“He broke that run into about a 25- or 35-mile-per-hour wind, and it was the slowest damn run I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lehew recalled with a chuckle. “Two Edmonton players over-ran him and then came back and missed him head on.”
“We ran it back the next day in the film room,” former Stampeders teammate George Hansen said a few years ago when asked about the play. “We thought they had it on slow motion.”
How fast Lunsford moved was irrelevant because the man found a way to get the job done. In 1961, he became the first professional running back in any league to run for more than a mile in a season as he rumbled past the 1,760-mark and finished at 1,794. It would be 14 years before another Stamps great — Willie Burden in 1975 — surpassed that league-record total.
He was elected into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1983.
He returned to Calgary in 1985 as general manager from 1985-87 before giving way to Normie Kwong.
After leaving the CFL, he settled in Texas and remained there until he passed away in 2008 at the age of 74.
His legacy, however, will never be forgotten and Earthquake continues to cause tremors in the hearts and minds of the people who knew and loved him.
“He’s just Earl,” Hansen once said when asked about his longtime colleague. “There were no airs about him at all, just a good, down-to-earth guy. He was as tough as hell. If I had to go to war with somebody, it would be with him and Bill McKenna and Tony Pajaczkowski, and I don’t think anybody in the world would whip us.”