Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Before Sam Darnold was quarterbacking the Seattle Seahawks to Super Bowl 60, his maternal grandfather was doing things that would get a screenwriter laughed out of a pitch meeting. Richard Bernard “Dick” Hammer (yes, that was the name on his birth certificate) was a 1964 Olympic gold medalist, a Los Angeles County firefighter, and, for a stretch of the 1970s, one of the leathery cowboys selling Marlboro cigarettes to a nation that was told to smoke regularly for health reasons. His grandson Sam Darnold is now a Super Bowl starting quarterback, which frankly sounds like the least interesting line on Dick Hammer’s résumé.
San Darnold Sr. Sr. (Marlboro ad)
Hammer won gold at the Tokyo Olympics in volleyball’s debut as an Olympic sport. He was 34, which in volleyball years is roughly 90. The U.S. team swept the Netherlands in three sets in what remains the first Olympic volleyball victory in world history. Hammer was there. He was always there.
After Tokyo, Hammer returned to Long Beach. He worked for the parks department building playgrounds, then pivoted to firefighting, eventually becoming captain of the fire crew at Universal Studios during the lot’s 1970s golden era. The job put him in proximity to cameras, and the cameras noticed. Hammer began appearing as “Capt. Dick Hammer” on NBC’s Emergency!, a show about a fictional LA fire station staffed by people with significantly less interesting names. He quit after half a season because he felt the acting interfered with the firefighting, a sentence that only makes sense once you’ve accepted that this man’s entire biography is a stress test for credulity.
Then came the Marlboro ads. For much of the decade, Hammer’s square jaw and quiet machismo graced billboards along Sunset Boulevard and television screens across America, selling cigarettes with the kind of effortless cowboy authority that only a man named Dick Hammer could muster. The LA Times, in a 1975 piece on cigarette marketing, called the Marlboro cowboys “the most virile image in the advertising world” and cited Hammer by name, presumably while chain smoking. It was the 70s after all.
According to family accounts, Hammer grew uncomfortable with the role toward the end of his life, as the lung cancer death toll mounted and the irony became harder to outrun. He died of cancer himself on October 18, 1999. His grandson Sam was two years old.
Sam Darnold, happy he's no longer a Jet. (AlexanderJonesi/wikimedia)
There are no statues of Dick Hammer outside any arena, no banners hanging from stadium rafters, no official commemorations beyond the occasional Wikipedia deep-dive by someone who Googled “Sam Darnold grandfather” and didn’t believe the results they got. But the stories keep surfacing, usually whenever Darnold does something noteworthy, which is often enough that the name “Dick Hammer” trends on social media at least once a year.
If Darnold wins Sunday, someone should probably suggest a statue. It seems only right. The man was an Olympian, a firefighter, an actor, and a cigarette cowboy. The name was already doing a lot of heavy lifting.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
