Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer

by Jerry Kramer

  Praise for INSTANT REPLAY

  “In my life as a writer and reader, there are only a few books that I've read over and over again for the sheer pleasure of the experience. Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay is the only sports book among them. I loved it when I was a teenager, and I love it still today.”

  — DAVID MARANISS, author of When Pride Still Mattered

  “One of the great sports books of all time.”

  —Billy Crystal

  “This was the book that started it all—for athletes telling their stories, for sportswriters going in depth, for great athletic tales being bound between the covers. Dick Schaap's classic is timeless. Required reading for anyone who loves sports or sportswriting.”

  — Mitch Albom, bestselling author, columnist for the Detroit Free Press

  “It's forty-five-wind-chill-degrees-below in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dallas leads the Packers in the last quarter of the final playoff of the season. Driving the length of the field in the game's final des perate minutes, Green Bay is stopped by a wall of Cowboys at their goal line. Quarterback Bart Starr grabs the ball, charges at the mass of bodies, dances around Jerry Kramer's perfect block, and suddenly he's in the end zone. He's done it—winning Green Bay its third straight title in a row, a first, on the coldest day of this or any other year. And I was there. I saw it all through tear-frozen eyes. And it was almost as exciting as the book Instant Replay, Kramer and pal Dick Schaap's bestseller that tells how it came to happen.”

  —D. A. Pennebaker, filmmaker

  “As a girl who loved sports, I began to understand the fascinating world of the professional athlete and the magic of wonderful sportswriting from the pages of Instant Replay. I also soon realized I had found a hero in a man who later would become a mentor and friend, the great Dick Schaap.”

  — Christine Brennan, USA Today sports columnist

  “Instant Replay is as timely today as it was twenty years ago. Dick Schaap and Jerry Kramer put a frame around the sport of football when it was played without today's glamour, glitz, and big business. When I read it twenty years ago I did not want it to end, and now it doesn't have to. Instant Replay's honesty is as compelling to day as it was then. It is still a must-read for fans and people who make sport their profession.”

  —Richard Lapchick

  “First the writer George Plimpton stepped into the world of pro football. Next Dick Schaap wrote NFL All-Pro Jerry Kramer into the world of literature. And the partnership of sports and books was in motion. Schaap established a literary genre for the ages.”

  — John A. Walsh, ESPN executive editor

  For Vince and for my teammates

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Jonathan Yardley

  Introduction by Dick Schaap

  Prologue

  Green Bay Packers—1967

  1: Preliminary Skirmishes

  2: Basic Training

  3: Mock Warfare

  4: Armed Combat

  5: War's End

  Epilogue

  Remembering Dick Schaap

  FOREWORD

  What may well be the most famous play in the history of the National Football League took place on the last day of 1967 at Lam-beau Field in Green Bay. The temperature was thirteen below, the field was frozen solid—the game is known in NFL mythology as the Ice Bowl—yet for nearly sixty minutes the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys played one of the great championship games in NFL history. With sixteen seconds to go, the Cowboys held a 17-14 lead, but the Packers were on the Cowboys' one-foot line. It was third down. The footing was dreadful. Rather than settling for a field goal and a tie, with overtime to follow, Green Bay quarterback Bart Starr decided to go for the win. He called a quarterback sneak, to be run behind his right guard, Jerry Kramer, who was facing the ferocious Dallas defensive tackle Jethro Pugh. Let Kramer tell it:

  I slammed into Jethro hard. All he had time to do was raise his left arm. He didn't even get it up all the way and I charged into him. His body was a little high, the way we'd noticed in the movies, and, with [Ken] Bowman's help, I moved him outside. Willie Townes, next to Jethro, was down low, very low. He was supposed to come in low and close to the middle. He was low, but he didn't close. He might have filled the hole, but he didn't, and Bart churned into the opening and stretched and fell and landed over the goal line. It was the most beautiful sight in the world, seeing Bart lying next to me and seeing the referee in front of me, his arms over his head, signaling the touchdown. There were thirteen seconds to play.

  Kramer's perfectly executed block immediately became a signal moment in American sports history, up there with Bobby Thomson's home run and Jesse Owens's four gold medals and Joe Louis's knockout of Max Schmeling. It is a moment that lives not merely in the grainy films of that epic game but also in Kramer's own words. By unlikely but entirely happy coincidence, Kramer had been persuaded to keep a diary of his 1967 season by Dick Schaap, an uncommonly gifted and convivial journalist. Schaap knew that Kramer was intelligent, literate, observant, and thoughtful, and Schaap suspected—rightly—that Kramer could provide a unique view of pro football from its innermost trenches: the offensive line.

  As it turned out, The Block, as it came to be known, provided the dramatic climax for the book that resulted, Instant Replay, which was published in 1968 and became a national bestseller, but the book didn't need The Block to be recognized at once for what it remains to this day: the best inside account of pro football, indeed the best book ever written about that sport and that league. There's much to be said on behalf of Roy Blount Jr.'s About Three Bricks Shy of a Load (1974), a knowing and amusing examination of the Pittsburgh Steelers as they stood perched on the brink of greatness, but no book matches the immediacy of Kramer's or its intimate knowledge of the game and the punishment men undergo to play it.

  My own admiration for Instant Replay was reluctant but then wholehearted. Since the founding in 1960 of the American Football League—known to sportswriters one and all as “upstart”— I had been a supporter of its challenge to the established (and smug) NFL. I was still smarting after the whacking the Packers had administered to the AFL champion Oakland Raiders in the second Super Bowl, played in January 1968. To me the Packers under Vince Lombardi were like the New York Yankees under Casey Stengel: methodical, ruthless, unbeatable, and on all counts unlovable. But when I read Instant Replay later in 1968, Kramer and Schaap forced me to reconsider that, not merely because Kramer himself emerged from its pages as entirely likable and admirable but also because their portrait of Lombardi brought out the human side of a man who, from a distance, seemed like a martinet, pure and simple.

  Astonishingly, considering the great success and high reputation it enjoyed, Instant Replay has been out of print for years. This seems even more astonishing after a second (or third, or fourth) reading, because the book has lost absolutely nothing over almost four decades. It is funny, smart, evocative, honest, and unpretentious. Its prose is Kramer's, dictated into a tape recorder and regularly mailed to Schaap as the season progressed. Schaap's role was “to organize, to condense, to clarify, and to punctuate,” but he “did not have to polish Jerry Kramer's phrases or prompt his thoughts.” All in all, it's as good a job of collaboration between unprofessional writer and professional journalist as I can recall reading, and it is as vivid and engaging now as it was in 1968.

  So this new edition of Instant Replay is especially welcome. It arrives at a time when professional football has replaced baseball as the country's most popular sport, if not as the national pastime. The game has accumulated enough history by now so that past triumphs (and failures) can be vi
ewed with some perspective. The Green Bay team on which Kramer played was the second pro-football “dynasty”—the first being the Cleveland Browns of the early to mid-1950 s—and it has achieved a degree of mythic status that no other pro-football team has enjoyed before or since. In part this is because the Packers were then, as now, the only small-city team in the National Football League, in part because they so emphatically dominated the league, in part because they were an uncommonly appealing group of men, and in large part because they were coached by Vince Lombardi.

  Not merely do we now have this opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with those storied Packers in this best of all pro-football books, thanks to Kramer we can hear as well as read about what it was like to be a Packer in the mid-1960 s. Not long ago he found, in his garage, tape recordings he had made for Schaap during the 1967 season. He has edited them, supplemented them with his own interviews with several of his former teammates, and released them as a two-CD set called Jerry Kramer's Inside the Locker Room: The Lost Tapes of the 1967 Championship Season. They must be listened to carefully, as ambient noise in the locker room is considerable (it includes the pronounced sound of toilets flushing), but players can be heard giving each other low-key pep talks before the Super Bowl against the Raiders, followed by Lombardi's own brief and subdued but emphatic speech to the team. Kramer's interviews with the old vets are revealing and often delightful, especially a hilarious conversation with Doug Hart about the semifinal NFL championship game against the Los Angeles Rams, coached by the tight-sphinctered George Allen.

  Kramer was thirty-one years old during the 1967 season. He'd been with the Packers since graduating from the University of Idaho in 1958(his signing bonus was $250). He played for eleven seasons, was All-Pro six times, and in 1970 was selected for the NFL's All-Fifty-Year Team. Inexplicably, and absolutely unjustly, he has yet to be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He retired after the 1968 season and moved to Idaho, where he continues to pursue various business ventures with considerable success. From that vantage point he was able for a time to look with pride to Atlanta and Tennessee, where his son Jordan played linebacker in the early 2000 s for the Falcons and the Titans.

  The league in which Jordan Kramer played bears only limited resemblance to Jerry Kramer's. For one thing, it's much bigger: It absorbed the AFL in the 1970 s and added expansion teams thereafter, doubling from sixteen teams to thirty-two. Black players, a distinct if prominent minority in Kramer's day, dominate the league today. Television contracts and media attention have multiplied exponentially. So too have coaching staffs and player rosters, and salaries—at least for the relatively small number of players who achieve star status and enjoy long careers—have gone through the roof; the check that players competed for in the 1967 and 1968 Super Bowls—$25,000 per man—wouldn't even come close to buying the kind of car that the typical NFL celebrity drives these days. Not merely are there more coaches, but they are a more controlling presence than they were in Kramer's era; most plays are now sent in from the sidelines, and few quarterbacks enjoy anything approximating the play-calling freedom that Lombardi entrusted to Starr.

  Yet the game is still the game, and the pressures faced by the men who play it remain the same. Training camp is hell—“We started two-a-day workouts today, and the agony is beyond belief. Grass drills, agility drills, wind sprints, everything. You wonder why you're there, how long you're going to last”—and the possibility of serious, career-ending injury is always present. Competition is strenuous and endless, with a long line of fresh young talent all too eager to send the veterans packing. Each week's game is a new opportunity to make a mistake that costs the team a win. Readers who would like a close and well-informed look at the strains under which today's players labor may want to supplement Instant Replay with Wedded to the Game (2006) by Shannon O'Toole, the wife of a man who played on the NFL's margins for several years and who knows, from firsthand and sometimes painful experience, that most players are journeymen and that life in the league is scarcely as easy as we outsiders assume it to be.

  Kramer was keenly aware of the costs the game exacted and the pressures it imposed. “At times,” he writes, “you really wonder about football, if you need it, what makes you drive yourself, what makes you go through with all that pain.” Later he says, “It takes a great deal to play this game. It takes a lot of pride and a lot of determination and a lot of hustle and a lot of sacrifice, and you have to be in the right frame of mind. You can't do it halfway.” The game did reward him with what was, for the time, a handsome income and, following The Block and then the publication of this book, with a considerable measure of celebrity, but in the end he concludes that “for me the main lure of football is the guys, my teammates, the friendship, the fun, the excitement, the incredibly exhilarating feeling of a shared achievement.”

  For the men who played for the Packers of the 1960 s, all the game's built-in pressures were compounded many times over by the presence of Lombardi. He, not Kramer, is the real protagonist of Instant Replay, and he is a formidable figure indeed, “a cruel, kind, tough, gentle, miserable man whom I often hate and often love and always respect.” He “thinks of himself as the patriarch of a large family, and he loves all his children, and he worries about all of them, but he demands more of his gifted children.” He is “a psychologist” or “a child psychologist,” and he knows how to build each of his players up to maximum performance:

  In 1959, his first year, he drove me unmercifully during the two-a-days. He called me an old cow one afternoon and said that I was the worst guard he'd ever seen. I'd been working hard, killing myself, and he took all the air out of me. I'd lost seven or eight pounds that day, and when I got into the locker room, I was too drained to take my pads off. I just sat in front of my locker, my helmet off, my head down, wondering what I was doing playing football, being as bad as I was, getting cussed like I was. Vince came in and walked over to me, put his hand on the back of my head, mussed my hair and said, “Son, one of these days you're going to be the greatest guard in the league.” He is a beautiful psychologist. I was ready to go back out to practice for another four hours.

  There were times when Kramer wanted to choke the life out of Lombardi, times when the man left him utterly confused: “He screams at you, hollers at you, makes life unbearable until you're about ready to quit, and then he starts being real nice to you and makes your life enjoyable for a while.” But Kramer's final judgment is the one that matters: “I loved Vince. Sure, I had hated him at times during training camp and I had hated him at times during the season, but I knew how much he had done for us, and I knew how much he cared about us. He is a beautiful man, and the proof is that no one who ever played for him ever speaks of him afterward with anything but respect and admiration and affection. His whippings, his cussings, and his driving all fade; his good qualities endure.”

  More than anything, Lombardi made the Packers into something that's surprisingly rare in the world of team sports: a team. Whether it's playing football, baseball, or basketball, what we call a “team” usually is a loose conglomeration of people more motivated by individual than collective goals. It's hard to persuade a group of adults to put team above self, but Lombardi was able to do it:

  We're all different. We all have our own interests, our own preferences, and yet we all go down the same road, hand in hand. Maybe, ultimately, we're not really friends, but what I mean is that no individual on this club will go directly against another individual's feelings, no matter what his own opinion is…. There's no friction, no division into cliques. Certainly we have different groups—the swingers, the family men, the extremely religious young men—but everyone respects everyone else's feelings.

  Maybe that sounds a little old-fashioned now, yet early in the twenty-first century the dominant team in pro football, the New England Patriots, has been Lombardi's kind of team. Its coach, Bill Belichick, isn't cast in the Lombardi mold, but he gets Lombardi results by chanting the same mantra: “All
for one and one for all.” Now as then it's a winning formula, as Instant Replay makes abundantly—and instructively—plain on every page. In that respect as in so many others, Instant Replay remains as pertinent today as it was in 1967. It's funny, too, and smart and, in the end, more moving than one might expect a book about football to be. That, of course, is because it's about a lot more than football.

  JONATHAN YARDLEY

  Washington, D.C.

  2006

  Jonathan Yardley is the book critic and a columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of six books and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism.

  INTRODUCTION

  This is Jerry Kramer's book. These are his thoughts, his impressions, his words. He is, I believe, an observant, perceptive, and articulate young man who happens to be a tremendous professional football player.

  Here is how he kept his diary: At least two nights every week, sometimes four and five and six nights, from the start of training to the end of the football season of 1967, he spoke into a tape recorder, preserving his daily actions and reactions. Often, on days when he was too fatigued or too busy or too dispirited to face the recorder, he took notes for reference. He mailed the tapes to me each week, and the transcriptions ran well beyond 100,000 of his words. Additionally, I spent a total of four weeks in Green Bay and three weeks on the road with Jerry Kramer and the Packers, reviewing and amplifying the transcriptions.

  At the end of the season, we took two weeks to go over the diary, adding background and explanations, but never modifying the essence, never changing the mood to suit later developments, never tampering with the spontaneity and immediacy that make this diary, in fact as well as title, an instant replay.