In a 1950 late-season football game on a chilly day in New York, a young quarterback from Cincinnati added one more touchdown to a professional campaign that already belonged to him.
George Ratterman, not yet the sheriff who would help clean up Newport’s entrenched gambling and vice, was the National Football League’s most daring passer, and every score he threw that fall stitched northern Kentucky a little deeper into the fabric of American sports history. Here’s a holiday trip down memory lane.
Area star with national reach
Born in Cincinnati in 1926 and raised in Hyde Park, Ratterman grew up with the kind of athletic range that made coaches shake their heads. At St. Xavier High School he starred in multiple sports.
At the University of Notre Dame, he became a four‑sport letterman in football, basketball, baseball and tennis, one of just four athletes in Fighting Irish history to do so.
Legendary coach Frank Leahy once called him “the greatest all‑around athlete in Notre Dame’s history,” a line that sounds like hyperbole until you look at the record.
But Ratterman’s football rise wasn’t straightforward. The quarterback spent most of his college career backing up Frank Dancewicz and Johnny Lujack, waiting for a chance that never fully arrived in South Bend. He played on the 1946 national championship team. He left Notre Dame after his junior season.
His big break came in 1947, when the Buffalo Bills of the All‑America Football Conference signed him to a professional contract. At the age of 20, he finally had an offense to run, and he ran it with audacity. Ratterman threw 22 touchdown passes as a rookie, setting a professional record that stood until Peyton Manning broke it in 1998.
Over the next two seasons he added 30 more touchdown passes and led the AAFC in 1949 with a Bills career‑high 57.9% completion rate. The AAFC, which challenged the NFL from 1946 to 1949, folded after that season and merged with the NFL and Ratterman landed with the New York Yanks.
By 1950, Ratterman was in his fourth professional season and playing with a kind of controlled recklessness that made him impossible to ignore. He threw often, he threw deep and he threw without hesitation.
The 1950 touchdown binge
Ratterman passed for 2,251 yards, second in the league behind Bobby Layne of the Detroit Lions, and led the NFL with 22 touchdown passes in 1950. Runner‑up Norm Van Brocklin of the Philadelphia Eagles had 18 TDs, so it wasn’t close.
Thanksgiving Day in Detroit added another chapter. The Yanks lost to the Lions, but Ratterman delivered a touchdown strike that became his second‑to‑last of the year. For fans reading about it back home, it was one more reason to cheer a local rising star who had climbed to the top of the league.
Two weeks later at home against the Baltimore Colts, Ratterman threw his final touchdown of the season, tying the 22 he had thrown as a rookie. The December 10 contest was an early Christmas present for the QB and the entire team. The Yanks beat the Colts, 51-14.
The year also showcased the volatility that defined Ratterman’s pro career: he led the league in interceptions for the third time in four years, throwing 24. Through the end of 1950, his professional totals stood at 74 touchdown passes and 79 interceptions, a ledger that captured both his brilliance and his risk.
Still, the stretch he put together in 1950 was remarkable. Over seven weeks, he threw for at least 200 yards in every game and 18 touchdowns overall, averaging one TD for every five completions. He threw four TDs in Week 3 against the Lions, then followed with back‑to‑back three‑touchdown games in Weeks 4 and 5. For a brief window, he was the most dangerous quarterback in professional football.
Ratterman’s next NFL chapter took him to the Cleveland Browns, where he backed up Otto Graham before briefly becoming the starter in 1956, his final season. That year he became the first quarterback in NFL history to wear a radio receiver in his helmet, allowing head coach Paul Brown to call plays directly. It was a revolutionary idea, one that foreshadowed the modern game, but Ratterman’s season and his career ended early with a knee injury. Brown wound up co-founding the Cincinnati Bengals.
Graham called Ratterman “a natural comic.” On the field, Ratterman was much more serious. His career was a blend of daring, innovation and volatility, but he left behind a statistical and stylistic imprint that made him unforgettable. Across ten professional seasons, Ratterman amassed 10,473 passing yards and 91 touchdowns. At the time of his retirement following the 1956 season, Ratterman ranked ninth in NFL history in passing TDs and 11th in passing yards.
He appeared in four straight NFL championship games with Cleveland, winning titles in 1954 and 1955. In limited duty with the Browns, he completed nearly 63% of his passes, considerably higher than his New York years.
Ratterman earned a law degree in 1956 at Salmon P. Chase College of Law. He was admitted to practice in both Ohio and Kentucky in 1957. One of his post-playing career duties was acting general counsel for the American Football League Players Association in the 1960s. He worked in broadcasting. He was also part of an investment firm and lived in Fort Thomas.
The sheriff who took on Newport
If football made him famous, Ratterman’s second act made him a legend. In 1961, reformers in Campbell County recruited Ratterman to run for sheriff in an effort to take on the entrenched syndicate that controlled Newport’s gambling halls and nightclubs. Since the Civil War, Newport had been known as the “Sin City of the South.”
The mob attempted to force him out of the race by smearing him. This included drugging him with chloral hydrate and staging compromising photographs with a stripper. Ratterman was arrested at the Glenn Hotel in Newport.
The blackmail scheme collapsed. Voters saw through the frame‑up, and Ratterman rode a wave of outrage to victory. The quarterback who once threw a football like no one else now carried a badge and a mandate.
Once in office, he worked with federal agents and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to dismantle organized crime in Newport. By 1962, the local syndicate and mafia had relocated their operations to Las Vegas, ending nearly a century of vice dominance in Campbell County.
Ratterman never lost his humor or competitiveness. In his memoir, Confessions of a Gypsy Quarterback, he recalled telling a rookie messenger guard to “go back and get another play” because he didn’t like the one Paul Brown had sent in.
Sports Illustrated later profiled him as the first‑base coach of his family’s co‑ed softball team in Denver, where, according to one of his children, he “did not tolerate his adult kids screwing around on the field. We won several championships.”
Whether on the football field, in the sheriff’s office, or at a family game, Ratterman demanded excellence. Now, 75 years after he led the NFL in touchdown passes, Ratterman’s feat can look like a footnote. But it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that northern Kentucky has produced figures who straddle local and national history.
Ratterman wasn’t just another quarterback. He was a local son who rose to prominence on both sides of the Ohio River and fought corruption. His legacy is not only the touchdowns he threw but the courage he showed when the stakes were higher than any football game.
Ratterman died in 2007 at the age of 80 after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Married 59 years with 10 children, he was a man who took risks and absorbed hits but kept moving forward before, during and after football. As we celebrate the holidays, it’s the kind of story that deserves retelling.