by Jerry Kramer
It was a beautiful season, almost a perfect season, marred by only two disappointments. I regretted my deal with Kraft; after the season, Kraft decided not to compensate us for our losses. And I regretted my failure to make the NEA All-Pro team, the one selected by the players; I did make the UPI team, but I learned in January that Gene Hickerson of Cleveland and Howard Mudd of San Francisco had beaten me out for the NEA team. Outside of those mild setbacks—and the fact that I endured my eighteenth consecutive year of football without scoring a touchdown—I had a lovely season.
While I was touring the banquet circuit a few weeks ago, my wife happened to sit with Dave Hanner at a Cub Scout meeting. Dave told Barbara the coaches had been analyzing the 1967 movies, taking them apart, choosing plays for teaching reels. “Jerry had his best year,” Hanner said. “Never saw him play any better.”
I disagree with Dave. I think I played my best football in 1961, but I definitely played better in 1967 than I did in 1966, and I played better in 1966 than I did in 1965. I'd like to keep up the trend in 1968.
I've been spending the winter running back and forth between banquets and business, talking football almost every day, exploring the possibilities of a television career, looking into a nationwide chain of restaurants, doing nothing more strenuous than a few rounds of golf and an occasional game of handball. I've been on the road most of the time.
I was out of Green Bay the day Lombardi announced that he was retiring. I can't say I was shocked. But I did feel saddened. He was our most valuable player, and I'm going to miss him, even his screaming and his ranting. I have a lot of confidence in my own ability, and I think I would have been a good football player even if Julie Andrews had been my coach, but I don't know if I would have been a champion without Vince. He made us think like champions.
Vince is still general manager, and I know he's going to be popping his head into the dressing room and onto the field, and he's still going to give us dirty looks whenever we do anything wrong.
Phil Bengtson is our head coach now, and Phil, who came to Green Bay with Lombardi in 1959, as the defensive coach, has always been a cheerful, easy-going guy. I've always called him “Uncle Phil” or “Coach Phil.” He'll change a little now; he's got to change. I could sense a change when, a few days after Lombardi retired, I came home to Green Bay and stopped by the coaches' office.
“Congratulations, Phil,” I said. “I'm happy to hear about it.” I didn't start calling him “Coach” right away—I guess, for a while at least, that's still reserved for Lombardi—but there was a glance, a look that passed between us, that made me feel things are going to be a little different. Phil's the head man now, and he's not going to be a nice guy all the time. He can't be a nice guy all the time.
I'm not worried about Phil's capabilities as a head coach. Nobody can question the job he did with our defensive team. He made our defense the finest in professional football, and he instilled in his defensive players an almost murderous desire for perfection. I remember in the National Football League championship game when Ray Nitschke, after tackling Don Perkins of Dallas for a two-yard loss, leaped to his feet and kicked the air viciously, almost kicking Perkins. Nitschke wasn't mad at his opponent; he was mad at himself because he had failed to execute the tackle perfectly, exactly the way Phil Bengtson had taught him.
Four more months, and back to grass drills. Back to the nutcracker drill. Back to Sensenbrenner Hall. I'm actually looking forward to it. Only the bright memories remain, and I feel great. Nothing hurts me—yet.
JERRY KRAMER
Green Bay, Wisconsin March 1968
REMEMBERING DICK SCHAAP
TRISH MCLEOD SCHAAP
In the early sixties, Dick Schaap went to Green Bay to write an article for the Saturday Evening Post about Green Bay Packer player Jimmy Taylor. When he arrived at the dorm room shared by Taylor and Jerry Kramer, he found Kramer seated on his bed reading poetry aloud. A few years later, when Schaap was asked by a publisher if he knew of a football player who could keep a diary that Schaap would then turn into book form, Kramer was the obvious choice. It was the beginning of what Schaap described as one of his most treasured friendships, one which spanned several decades, several marriages, a dozen children between them, and several more collaborations, Farewell to Football, Lombardi, and Distant Replay.
The camaraderie between urban cowboy and city slicker made a person feel good to be in their presence. They laughed, reminisced, told stories, sang each other's praises, played golf in each other's tournaments, and thoroughly enjoyed each other's company as few men allow themselves to do.
Dick Schaap lived to enjoy being an honorary Green Bay Packer and was posthumously inducted into the Lombardi Legends. He grew to love the Packers team of that era with a passion and admitted, when it came to these icons, his hands were not journalistically clean.
Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston may have been the last two people Schaap recognized before he slid into a final coma and died two days later. At his memorial service on January 17,2002, in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, Kramer was among the dozen friends from the world of sports and entertainment who delivered humorous and passionate eulogies to an audience of more than two thousand.
DICK SCHAAP (IN VIDEO)
I started going to Green Bay in the early sixties by train. Not many reporters could find Green Bay then. On one of my early trips, I met Jerry Kramer, sitting on his bed in the dorm, reading poetry out loud. Real poetry, not “There was a young lady from so and so.” When a publisher asked me to ask a football player to keep a diary, I asked Jerry Kramer. He said yes. Neither of us suspected that Jerry's diary would lead up to an unforgettable game, the Ice Bowl, or an unforgettable block with time running out and the Packers down by three points. I remember Kramer telling me Vince Lombardi's theory, that the Packers never lost the game, but sometimes the clock ran out when the other team had more points.
JERRY KRAMER
Dick had come up with the title in his mind, The Day the Clock Ran Out. And it looked like we were going to run out of time. They replayed The Block over and over and over, and pointed me out, and I got some publicity, which was rare for an offensive lineman. But thank God for instant replay. And Dick goes, “That's it. That's the title.”
Dick Schaap was a friend of mine. [We] came from different parts of the universe it seemed like. It seemed like an unlikely friendship. In the beginning, we worked on and off for thirty or forty years. It's awfully difficult to express in a few words what that friendship was all about. Friend, pal, buddy, co-conspirator on occasion. One of the good guys. Trish, Carrie, David, Jeremy, and Michelle: Thank you for sharing him with us. I know he was gone a lot. And I know he traveled a lot. I know he was involved a lot. And I know he gave a lot of little pieces. Thank you. We appreciate you sharing him with us. I think we loved him as much as you did.
I got him to come to Idaho. Now, our worlds were, like I say, poles apart. But I got him to come to Idaho a few years back. I had a ranch. Now, in Boise, Idaho, at that time was about seventy-five thousand people. Which was the biggest city in Idaho. And much too big for me, so I lived about forty-five miles outside of Boise. I always felt sorry about the people that lived in New York, and I would tell Dick about that. And he would always tell me he felt sorry about the people that lived in Idaho. But we had a wonderful relationship. But he came to the ranch to spend a week with me, and I took him up to the Sawtooth Mountains and the high country, where lakes are gin clear and the air is crystal clear and it's got the high mountain peaks and it's virtually uninhabited. Dick would say, “This is nice. This is nice.” I took him down to the Snake River Canyon that's about six thousand feet deep and you're looking at about three billion years of geology. And there's a roaring white-water canyon in a sensational part of the world. And Dick would say, “This is nice. This is nice.” I got him a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and put him on a horse. His eyes got very, very big—but he didn't say “that was nice
.”
A few months later we were here in the city. We come out of his apartment—it's an asphalt jungle, a cacophony of sound. The carbon dioxide. The city. The traffic. The people … New York. Dick throws his arms open wide, and he looks up at the sky and says, “God's country, this is God's country!”
There had been an article written about Coach Lombardi the week prior to the Ice Bowl. And it was a very derogatory article. It belittled him and made fun of him and caused a great deal of pain in his family, and his mother had been talking to him and was crying on the phone. And we heard about it, and I had made up my mind that if I had a chance to say something, I was going to say something about Coach Lombardi. And I was interviewed after the Ice Bowl and it was a rare occasion, but I did have a moment to say something about Coach Lombardi. I said people didn't really understand him. They didn't know him the way we knew him. That he was a really beautiful man. Never had the occasion to use that term again, until today. Dick Schaap was truly a beautiful man.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jerry Kramer was a right guard for the Green Bay Packers from 1958 to 1968. During his time with the team, the Packers won five National Championships and Super Bowls I and II. He was inducted into the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame in 1977, and his jersey has been retired. He lives in Boise, Idaho.
Dick Schaap (1934-2002), a sportswriter, broadcaster, and author or coauthor of thirty-three books, reported for NBC Nightly News, the Today show, ABC World News Tonight, 20/20, and ESPN and was the recipient of seven Emmy Awards.
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
Copyright © 1968 by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap
Foreword © 2006 by Jonathan Yardley
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Insert photos copyright © 2006 by Vernon and John Biever; except photo on insert page 2(top), which is courtesy of Jerry Kramer
Photo on page 295 courtesy of Trish McCleod Schaap
Lines from The Madman by Kahlil Gibran. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1918.
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS ON FILE WITH THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
eISBN: 978-0-307-48632-5
v3.0
