Leo F. Murphy

CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Cleveland Browns were still wearing leather helmets when coach Paul Brown hired Leo Murphy as a trainer in 1950, the team's first year in the NFL. After star quarterback Otto Graham took a vicious elbow to the face in a game in 1953, Murphy worked with Brown to develop a prototype of what became the face mask.

The face bars won quick acceptance, though Murphy said some players resisted the protection because they said it impeded their view.

He worked on another innovation in 1956, helping Brown construct the helmet radio. Now standard equipment, it was far enough ahead of its time that it didn't win league approval until 1994.

Murphy, who worked 39 years for the Browns until 1989, longer than anybody in the team's history, died July 28 in Strongsville. He was 94 and lived in Medina.

"I thought I could work my way from the ground up and I never got past (taping) the ankles," he quipped to sportswriter Dan Coughlin when he announced his retirement in 1989. "But I liked ankles. My father was a chiropractor. I guess I just had it in my bones to be a trainer."

Born in Elmira, New York, Leo Francis Murphy graduated in 1948 from the University of Notre Dame, where he played both baseball and basketball on scholarship, and went to work as trainer for the Chicago Rockets of the All-America Football Conference.

He moved in 1949 to the league's New York Yankees, which had the same owners as the Yankees baseball team. The game was so different then that he said he once used foot powder to make yard markers on the field because the team didn't have any paint.

The Browns were the only team he knew that supplied its players with football shoes, and the work was seasonal for players and staff. Murphy worked for a sporting goods firm in the off-season until his job became full-time in the mid-1960s.

He was inducted into the National Athletic Trainers' Association Hall of Fame in 1982 and the Ohio Athletic Trainers' Association Hall of Fame in 1990. Cleveland Touchdown Club Charities in 2012 formed the Leo Murphy Memorial Field and Equipment Grant, an annual award to support local youth football.

He was known as a great storyteller, an accomplished jazz pianist and a good golfer.

He was still in college when he married the former Betty Horvath. She died in 1992.

Survivors include Ellen Jack, his partner of 24 years, a daughter, a son, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Services will be private. Arrangements are by Waite & Son Funeral Home in Medina.