If you're old enough to remember before the merger between the NFL and the AFL, or if you're a Philly football fan, the name Tom Brookshier is a familiar one for you. Philly fans will remember Tom as a hard-hitting defensive back and part of the 1960 Philadelphia Eagle championship team.

But for the mainstream NFL fan, Tom Brookshier was the sideman to Pat Summerall before John Madden. That was when the NFC was on CBS, and Summerall and Brookshier were the top broadcasting team.

On Friday night, January 29, Tom Brookshier succumbed to cancer at the age of 78. At his hospital bedside when he died were his wife, Barbara, and his partner for so many years, Pat Summerall.

Former CBS and Fox football announcer (and New York Giants placekicker... just ask my dad how good he was) Pat Summerall has written a new autobiography, and he talked to Richard Sandomir of the New York Times about some of what happened to him just after his liver transplant surgery four years ago. It turns out that fatigue and medication made Summerall (right, with former broadcast partner John Madden) think that parts of his body were falling off. And, at one point, he shaved off part of his head with an electric razor in order to look like Bruce Willis. "Why I had to look like Bruce Willis, I don't know," he tells Sandomir. "I'm not a particular fan of his." He was also told by his family that he'd sing "God Bless America" and "Amazing Grace" at the top of his lungs, but he didn't remember doing that.

But Summerall, who is doing radio work for the Dallas Cowboys, feels great now, and wants to call games again. He felt he was "mailing it in" the last four years he was at Fox, a notion that I and most football fans tend to agree with. Good to see he's doing better. I'd love to hear a healthy Summerall in the booth.