Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer

by Jerry Kramer

  I ate a little lunch, took a nap, and went back to suffer some more. The second or third play of a scrimmage, Fuzzy Thurston, who's been my running mate at left guard for nine years, hurt his knee and hobbled off the field. Fuzzy's one of my closest friends on the team—on the banquet circuit, he always says, “There are two good reasons the Packers are world champions; Jerry Kramer's one of them, and you're looking at the other”—but I cursed him up one side and down the other and called him a phony. I knew that he wasn't a phony, that he wasn't trying to con anybody, that he really had hurt his knee, but I still couldn't forgive him for leaving me out there alone. The guy who stepped in to take his place was young Gale Gillingham, a rookie last year. Gilly bought 300 head of Black Angus and a thousand-acre ranch in Minnesota after the Super Bowl victory, and he resembles an Angus himself. He's thick-shouldered, powerful, strong. He stepped in and began running plays for Fuzzy and then he ran the wind sprints. For the last nine years, I've been the fastest lineman on the club, and now Gillingham is the fastest lineman on the club. I cursed him for his youth, for his vigor, for his vitality, for all the things I'd lost, and I wondered how much longer I'd be able to play professional football.

  After the afternoon session, we had about an hour free, and Donny Chandler and Zeke Bratkowski, our number-two quarterback, and I went over to the Century Bowling Alley. We go to the alley every chance we get, but as far as I know, Max McGee and Doug Hart bowled the only game any Packer ever bowled there. Li'l Brother beat Max, 97-96, and won $50. We go there mostly because they serve good cold pop. It's brown pop, and it's got a head on it.

  The only thing that keeps you going is a little relaxation, a few moments of the civilized world. At times, you really wonder about football, if you need it, what makes you drive yourself, what makes you go through all that pain. You look at the people who come out to watch you practice and you see them in their cool summer shirts, their golf slacks and their sunglasses, and you wonder, “Why in the world do I beat my head against a 280-pound lineman for six months every year?”

  I don't know, and I guess I never will.

  JULY 18

  We've got about thirty-five rookies here in camp and no more than half a dozen of them can possibly make the team. I've taken a particular interest in one of them, a boy named Dick Arndt. Dick's from my college, the University of Idaho, and my high school, Sand Point High School in Idaho. When I joined the Packers in 1958, he was just starting the eighth grade. When I was All-Pro in 1962, he won the Jerry Kramer Award as the best blocker on the Sand Point High School team. Now he's twenty-two, weighs 275 pounds, and he's looking for my job. It doesn't make me feel any younger.

  One of the other rookies came over to me today and told me he had just received a letter from his wife. He was upset because she told him things at home weren't going quite as well as they ex- pected. It brought back to me the difficulties a rookie faces trying to make a pro football team. It's not only the newness of the whole system, learning the plays and the players. There's also the attitude among the veterans, the feeling of togetherness that makes the rookie feel like an outsider. He's away from home, away from a familiar setting, and often away from a wife he's just been married to for a little while. It's a miracle that any of them make it. In the past, we've had lots of rookies “domino” out on us, just pack up in the middle of the night, sneak out the door and go home. The strain is brutal, going through all the incredible torture we go through and wondering if you're going to make the club.

  The attitudes of the individual rookies are a study. We've got some good, hard-working ones, like this big tackle Crenshaw, who loses four or five pounds every day, and a couple of fast running backs, Claudis James and Travis Williams, but some of them are so cocky it's unbelievable. There's no question in their minds about making the club. They think they're going to be All-Pro the first year.

  And then there's the other extreme. One of them got up tonight after dinner, when we always make the rookies sing, and he sang, “I feel so breakup, I want to go home….” I think that's just about the way he felt. He knows he's too light for his position, he doesn't move well enough, he doesn't have a chance of making this club. Next week he'll be back home in Boston or wherever it is.

  JULY 19

  It's impossible to put into words exactly how horrible I feel. I ache beyond description. We set a record in up-downs this morning. We did seventy-five or eighty of them, to the point where big Leon Crenshaw could barely stand up. His legs were wobbling, his tongue was hanging out, he was just about to fall down when we'd stop and rest a few seconds and then we'd go again.

  It was hot, miserably hot, above 90. Until now, we've had a little cloud, a little haze, a little cool breeze, but today the heat just descended upon us and made everything even more unbearable than usual. Guys were hiding by the fence at the end of the field or under the photographer's tower, anywhere, just to get a little bit of shade.

  I started thinking back to the high country, which is one of my favorite spots on this world, the high country in Wyoming or British Columbia or Idaho. I grew up in the high country in Idaho and I've gone grizzly-bear hunting in the high country in Wyoming and British Columbia, and my greatest pleasure in these places is to climb for half a day, looking for grizzly, and to come upon a mountain spring. The water has trickled its way out from underneath an ice pack and run through its subterranean tunnels to get to this place where it just seems to spring out of a rock. This water is so unbelievably cold and sweet, almost as if it had sugar in it. I started telling the guys about it today—about being up in the high country with the beautiful, crystal-clear, sweet water rolling out from under a rock—and they wanted to beat me to death.

  Fuzzy Thurston was sneaking us ice. They keep ice out on the practice field in case of fractures and sprains and things like that, so Fuzzy put some chips of ice in a towel and stuck it under his sweat jacket and hobbled out to us on his bad knee and gave us the ice, and it was like the sweetest thing I ever tasted.

  Somebody once said that a person lives from want to want, or from pain to pain, or something like that. I don't know exactly what he said, but I know what he meant. When you want it desperately, the smallest pleasure, a sip of Pepsi, a sliver of ice, can be so beautiful. You savor it so much. It tastes so fantastically delicious. I can take a sip of Pepsi and almost go into an ecstatic state.

  It just is unbelievable, the pleasure you get when you're so hot and so dry and so tired, and you get ice-cold Pepsi and you just roll it around in your mouth, and it's like one of the sweetest things that ever happened to you.

  JULY 20

  Lombardi put us through grass drills again this morning, another agonizing session, and at lunch today, standing in line waiting for his food, Leon Crenshaw crumpled up and passed out and lay on the floor groaning. We threw an ice pack on him and tried to cool him off a little bit, but we couldn't move him. He couldn't even sit up. Finally, someone called an ambulance, and they hauled Leon off to the hospital. He was totally dehydrated, totally exhausted. He's lost twenty-five pounds since he's been in training camp.

  We had our first full-scale scrimmage today, and little by little we're starting to take shape as a football team. We're still missing six of our players. Two of the best rookies, Bob Hyland and linebacker Jim Flanigan, are practicing with the College All-Stars, and three of our veterans, Donny Anderson and Jim Grabowski and Bob Long, are finishing up six-month tours in the Army. Fuzzy's swollen knee kept him out of the scrimmage. When he dropped his hat the other day—gave up his position—Gale Gillingham picked it up and I don't know if Fuzzy'll ever get it back, the way Gilly's going. He looks more and more like an Angus every day. We had starting drills this morning—a practice to see how fast the offensive linemen move once the ball is centered—and Gilly was beating everybody by about three yards. Forrest Gregg looked at me and shook his head. “Jerry,” he said, “I guess we might as well give up, we might as well stop trying to beat him, 'cause we ain't going to do it.�
��

  Lombardi was not terribly pleased with the first scrimmage, and he did not hide his feelings. “Some of you people are fat,” he said at the meeting tonight. “You're fat in the head and fat in the body. You're out of shape. It's an absolute disgrace the way you came into camp. That $25,000 you all made at the end of last year for winning the Super Bowl made you all fatheaded. You're lazy.”

  He trotted out another of his pet sayings: “The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.” I can't argue with him; often during the season, when we're in a crucial situation, we look back and we remember how hard we worked all through July and we think, “Is that all going to be for nothing?” It really is true that the harder you work at something, the harder it is to quit.

  “If you quit now, during these workouts,” Vince said, “you'll quit in the middle of the season, during a game. Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit. We don't want anyone here who'll quit. We want 100 percent out of every individual, and if you don't want to give it, get out. Just get up and get out, right now.

  “Your whole life is ahead of you. Most of my life is behind me. My life now is the Green Bay Packers.

  “Today we have the beginning of a damned good football team. You looked a little sluggish out there, but toward the end of the scrimmage, it began to look like we may have a damned good football team.

  “Gentlemen, we are going to have one.”

  We will, too, if he has to kill us.

  JULY 21

  Leon Crenshaw went back to work today, back to grass drills and wind sprints. They kept him in the hospital for only four or five hours, gave him some intravenous injections and sent him back to training camp. Leon's one of about half a dozen Negro rookies trying out for the team, and I was thinking today that when I joined the Packers in 1958, there was only one Negro on the whole team. Now we have eight Negroes in the starting lineups alone, and four of them made All-Pro last year.

  We've got a lot of Southerners, too, most of them Texans, and there's no friction on the field, not even a hint of prejudice. You've got to give Lombardi the credit. The first year he came to Green Bay, we had an exhibition game in the South; the hotels had already been booked—separate accommodations for Negroes and for whites—so he couldn't do anything about that. But when the restaurant where we were eating our team meals told Vince that the Negro players had to enter and leave by the back door, he made certain that every man on the team entered and left by the back door. The next year, when we had to play another exhibition in the South, we all stayed and ate together at an Air Force base. Vince doesn't care what color a man is as long as he can play football, as long as he can help us win, and all the players feel the same way. That's what being a Green Bay Packer is all about—winning—and we don't let anything get in the way of it.

  A few years ago, there was some feeling among the white guys that the colored guys weren't so tough under pressure, or something ridiculous like that. I don't see how you can generalize about any group of people, Negroes or Eskimos or Indians or lawyers or soda jerks. Our guys have destroyed that myth about toughness under pressure. They don't make football players any tougher than Dave Robinson, our linebacker, or Willie Davis, our defensive end, or Willie Wood, our safety. Next to Lombardi, in fact, Wood scares his own teammates more than anybody else does. Wood even scares Ray Nitschke. “I hate to miss a tackle,” Ray says,“ 'cause if I do, I know I'm gonna get a dirty look from Willie. He'll kill you with that look.”

  Wood, who comes from Washington, D.C., and has spent his off-seasons working with juvenile delinquents, was a little sensitive when he came to Green Bay in 1960, a little wary. He was looking for signs of discrimination. Once he realized that his teammates accepted him for what he was—a hard-nosed football player—he relaxed. He became a leader. He's one of the guys the rookies turn to for guidance.

  We rarely think in terms of race. The way we look at it, guys like Wood and Herb Adderley and Lionel Aldridge aren't Negroes—they're Packers; they're teammates. One night several years ago, Max McGee, from Texas by way of Louisiana, lent his new Cadillac to Nate Borden, the one Negro on the Packers in the late 1950 s. Driving back to camp in a rainstorm, Nate skidded and crashed through the window of a furniture store. He phoned Max and told him, apologetically, what had happened. “Well, Nate,” said Max, “how much furniture did we buy?”

  When Nate was with Dallas in 1960 and the Cowboys played us in Green Bay, we all chipped in and bought him a plane ticket from Green Bay to Dallas so that he could stay in town with us an extra day.

  The subject of race generally comes up only in kidding ways. Elijah Pitts—he's our regular halfback, and we call him “ZaSu” and “Gravel” and “Olive” and every kind of pit—likes to sneak up behind me in practice and whisper, “Burn, baby, burn.” And after the Watts riots two years ago, Marv Fleming, who lives in California, told us he could get us all good buys on color television sets; he's walking around camp this year with matchbooks labeled “Muhammad Fleming.” I once got Marvin a bow and some arrows from my company and took him bow-hunting with me. After a couple of hours, he turned to me and said, “Jerry, it's all coming back to me how to do it—just like my great-great-granddaddy did it.”

  Marv can take the kidding, too. Once he said to McGee, “Max, I hear you've opened a restaurant over in Manitowoc.”

  Max said, “That's right, Marvin, why don't you come over for dinner sometime?”

  “You serve colored people?” Marv said.

  “Sure,” said Max. “How do you like them cooked?”

  I know it's not great humor, but we're football players, not comedians.

  Nobody on the Packers is more popular, among the players and the fans, than Willie Davis, the captain of the defensive unit. Willie's the best storyteller on the team; he can imitate almost anyone. For years he's had the nickname of “Doctor,” and once a few of us asked him how he got the name. “Women gave it to me in my youth,” said Willie. “They all called me ‘Doctor' because I made 'em feel so good.” Ever since then, we've called him “Dr. Feelgood.”

  Willie once walked up to Henry Jordan, a big Virginian who's also on the defensive line, and said, “Henry, do you believe in that segregation stuff?”

  “No, Willie,” said Henry, “I don't.”

  Willie brightened. “You don't believe in segregation? Then you must believe in integration.”

  “Nope,” said Henry.

  “You don't believe in segregation,” said Willie, “and you don't believe in integration. Henry, what do you believe in?”

  Henry smiled. “Willie,” he said, “I believe in slavery.”

  Henry was only kidding, I think.

  Lombardi chewed on us again tonight. Sometimes he seems to hate everybody without regard to race, religion, or national origin. First, he compared the Packers to a large corporation, like General Motors or IBM or Chrysler, and he said that a large business cannot tolerate mistakes. “We've got seventy people here in camp now,” he said. “If the ones we have can't do the job, we'll get some more.”

  We held a blitz drill this morning, a drill in which our offensive backs and center try to pick up blitzing linebackers, and Lombardi said the drill was an absolute disgrace. “If you don't do better tomorrow,” he said, “then you're not going to get Sunday off. Nothing says you have to have a day off. I give you a day off, and if you don't perform, you don't get a day off.”

  He went on to say that some of our veterans still weren't in shape, weren't putting out, weren't working as hard as they should. “Some of our All-Pros last year look like hell,” he said. “Some of our defensive backs are ducking tackles, actually ducking tackles. We want men here, not just players. Players are a dime a dozen.”

  Henry Jordan doesn't seem able to make up his mind whether or not he wants to play. Henry's been All-Pro five times, but he's thirty-two now and he's having trouble pushing his body, getting himself in the right frame of mind. He hasn't been working nearly as hard as he could. “Henry,�
�� Coach Lombardi asked him tonight, “you ready to play? You going to quit? Or what is it?”

  Henry said, “I don't know.”

  “Well, you better damn well find out in a hurry,” Vince said. “Your condition is an absolute disgrace. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  JULY 22

  I found out this morning Henry Jordan quit last night. After the meeting, he went to Phil Bengtson, the defensive-line coach, and turned in his play book, the black, loose-leaf notebook in which we record our plays. Henry told Phil he thought he'd had all he wanted.

  Phil had a long talk with Henry and persuaded him to stay in the dorm overnight, and then this morning Coach Lombardi had a long talk with Henry and so did several of the players. It wasn't money that was bothering Henry; it wasn't any one thing in particular. It was just a general letdown in enthusiasm, a feeling that the rewards of football simply weren't worth the pains anymore. A lot of veterans go through the same thing. 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.

  After the talks, Henry decided to stick it out. He's going to try to give it 100 percent from here on in and see if he can do it. I know how he feels. Henry honestly believes he is the best defensive tackle in pro football (he may be the smallest too; by mid-season, he's usually down to about 240 pounds); once he decides he wants to play, his pride alone will make him great. We need him. We need him just around the locker room. A year ago, he decided to try some special tonic to bring back all the hair he's lost, and he had to go into the shower each day wearing a pretty flowered shower cap. Some of the rookies were wondering what kind of a team they were trying out for.