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Billy Shaw, an offensive guard for the Buffalo Bills who was known as a Southern gentleman off the field but a terror on it, and who became the only member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame to play his entire career in the American Football League, died on Friday in Toccoa, Ga. He was 85.
The cause of his death, at an assisted living facility, was hyponatremia, a condition caused by excessively low sodium levels, his daughter Cathy Thornton said.
Once described as an “‘aw, shucks’ sort of guy from Mississippi,” Shaw was a star two-way lineman for the Georgia Institute of Technology before being selected in the second round of the 1961 A.F.L. draft.
In a nine-year Bills career that dovetailed with all but one season of the decade-long run of football’s “other” professional league, Shaw was considered one of the best guards of the 1960s in either league.
Bobby Bell, the Hall of Fame Kansas City Chiefs linebacker and defensive end, said in a 1999 interview with the football historian Joe Horrigan: “When you played against Billy, you brought your lunch. He played every down to the maximum. He was relentless.”
Shaw helped Buffalo carve a path toward two A.F.L. championships, in 1964 and 1965. He also earned first-team all-A.F.L. honors four times and played in eight A.F.L. All-Star Games.
Playing for the Bills gave him a particular opportunity to shine: Buffalo was a rare run-first team in a league known for high-flying aerial attacks by teams like the San Diego Chargers, coached by the famed passing guru Sid Gillman.
“We ran the ball probably two out of three times,” Shaw said in a 2011 interview. “We were more like an N.F.L. team back in that day.”
At 6-foot-2 and roughly 260 pounds, Shaw had unusual quickness for a lineman. That made him an ideal pulling guard, charged with racing from his usual spot at left guard to take on blockers on the right side.
Clearing a lane for standout running backs like Cookie Gilchrist and Wray Carlton — and a rookie O.J. Simpson in 1969, Shaw’s final year — he would often continue his blocking well downfield. His strength and athleticism made him “the driving force of the offensive unit,” Jerry Smith, his former offensive line coach, said in a statement.
William Lewis Shaw was born on Dec, 15, 1938, in Natchez, Miss., the eldest of two children of Carl and Mary (Haynie) Shaw. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father owned a machine shop.
In addition to his daughter Cathy, he is survived by his wife, Patsy Shaw; two other daughters, Cindy Matthews and Cheryl Henderson; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
After a move to Vicksburg, Miss., Billy was a gridiron star for Carr Central High School there, earning a scholarship to Georgia Tech.
A standout at both offensive and defensive tackle for the Yellow Jackets, Shaw was named the most valuable lineman of the Southeastern Conference in his senior year, among other honors.
After graduating, he played in the 1961 Chicago Charities College All-Star Game, an annual battle between top collegians and the reigning N.F.L. champion. His coach, the Hall of Fame quarterback Otto Graham, prepared him to play defensive end against the Philadelphia Eagles, but Shaw ended up having to fill in for an injured guard.
Shaw “was scared to death,” he told Horrigan, but he made his presence felt on one play when he knocked the wind out of his Georgia Tech teammate Maxie Baughan, a star Eagles linebacker. “The papers made a big fuss about it,” he said, “because we had been roommates in college.”
Although he had already signed with the Bills after the A.F.L. draft that year, the Dallas Cowboys drafted him as a linebacker in the 14th round of the N.F.L. draft. As Shaw, a member of the 1999 Hall of Fame class, recounted in his induction speech, it was his college coach, Bobby Dodd, who steered him toward Buffalo.
“There is room for another league,” Shaw recalled Dodd telling him, “and 10 to 12 years after the first season, the two leagues will merge. And you can say you were part of football history.”
That statement proved prophetic: The leagues completed their merger after the 1969 season, Shaw’s last. After retiring, he moved to Toccoa, his wife’s hometown, in northeast Georgia, where he started a concrete business.
But his tenure with the A.F.L. was not his only brush with history. For several years, he blocked for the Bills quarterback Jack Kemp, the future Republican congressman and running mate of Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election.
“We didn’t run the ball very far to the right or very far to the left,” Shaw, a Democrat at the time, later said, “because Jack wouldn’t go too far in either direction. Then we’d make the mistake of telling him how conservative he was, and he’d call a timeout and really explain to us what being conservative meant.”
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