Gary Larsen, the Marines veteran who teamed along the line with Marshall, Eller and Alan Page to form the original Purple People Eaters, remembered the banquet scene.
“They voted Joe Kapp the most valuable player, he got up in front of the room and said, ‘There is no one valuable player. There’s 40.’ So it kind of went on from there,” Larsen recalled.
Cornerback Bobby Bryant joined the Vikings as a seventh-round pick in 1967.
“He coined the phrase, and that’s the way we went, to have 40 players playing together for 60 minutes. If we do that, we can be a winner,” Bryant said.
Receiver John Henderson played for the Vikings from 1968-72. He kept memorabilia that was created with the slogan.
“You didn’t give up,” Henderson said. “If you had momentum, you wanted to sustain momentum for 60 minutes.”
He said the mantra meant more because of what teammates thought of Kapp.
“Joe Kapp was a true inspirational leader. Every play in the huddle, you make eye contact with him and could see the passion in his eyes and his desire to win and perform, to execute,” Henderson said. “That inspired us as players to do the same. We didn’t perhaps have the greatest talent on our team, but we had an attitude, and Joe had a lot to do with that. He was scrappy, he would give his body up, and if he could do it, we felt like we could do the same thing, so we played for each other.”
Kapp accented his moxie with a combination of jump passes, bootlegs, QB runs that usually ended with him delivering a hit and the will to win.
Proud heritage and historic games
Descended from Mexican-American (mother) and German (father) heritage, Kapp was Viking through and through.
Born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on March 19, 1938, Kapp and his family later relocated to California, where Joe and his four younger siblings were raised primarily by their mother.
He played quarterback for Hart High School in today’s Santa Clarita, and he also shined on the basketball court.
Kapp starred collegiately at the University of California – Berkeley, where he led the Golden Bears to a 1958 conference championship and then to the Rose Bowl. The impressive campaign earned him All-American honors, and he received the W.J. Voit Memorial Trophy as the Pacific Coast’s outstanding football player.
Kapp initially was selected by Washington in the 1959 NFL Draft but was not contacted by the team; he instead signed with the Canadian Football League’s Calgary Stampeders and General Manager Jim Finks, who would go on to hold the same…
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