When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  BY THE TIME the Packers reached Los Angeles for the final game, they were alone in first place with a 7 and 4 record, one game ahead of the Colts, who had lost three straight. They controlled their own fate at last; all they had to do was beat the Rams to win the Western Conference title. The Rams were out of the race and hobbling, with eight starters injured, but they had upset the Colts the week before and enjoyed being spoilers.

  Bart Starr usually slept soundly the night before a game, just like Coach Lombardi, comforted by the thoroughness of his preparations, and “woke up refreshed.” But he found no rest on the eve of the Rams game. All night long he flailed about uneasily, playing the next day’s game in his subconscious, reviewing game situations that his roommate Gary Knafelc had been drilling him on the night before. (“It’s second-and-three, we’re on the far side against a 5-2 defense. What do you call?”)

  Knafelc could not sleep either, and shortly after dawn the two Packers climbed out of bed like brothers eager to scamper downstairs for Christmas. “I realized that the big day had finally arrived,” Starr wrote in a diary he kept for that game. “We’d been aiming at it all week.” He turned on the television and heard news of a massive midair collision over New York Harbor involving United Air Lines and TWA jets that killed 134 people, but he was so anxious about the game that even that stunning report could not hold his attention. He showered and dressed—without shaving; he never shaved on game day—and took the elevator down to the lobby of the Miramar Hotel. Jim Ringo and Hawg Hanner were already lounging in the lobby. Starr needed time alone. He walked across the street to the ocean front “and thought about the game—trying to adjust myself.”

  On the way back to his room, he stopped at a newsstand and bought a copy of Johnny Unitas’s book. No subject interested Starr more than how to play quarterback, and Johnny U was the best, but even that seemed a bother now. The pregame meal began at nine, and Starr picked at his food. “Everything seemed so dry,” he wrote, “even with all the butter on the baked potato and toast.” After breakfast he and Knafelc went to the trainer’s room to have their ankles taped. Lombardi believed in taping, every ankle, every game—an untaped ankle, if discovered, meant a certain fine, and injuring an untaped ankle meant a Lombardi eruption. All jokes and lightness in the taping room, as usual, “everybody laughing and cutting up” with equipment man Dad Braisher and trainer Bud Jorgenson, getting their “last-minute jokes out of the way.” What next? Starr returned to his room one last time, losing himself briefly in a magazine story about a Seeing Eye dog. Then out the door and down the elevator to take the team bus to the stadium. What? Everybody was already on the bus, and there was Lombardi, in front, glaring at them.

  That’ll be fifty dollars, gentlemen! Starr thought they were seven minutes early, but they were eight minutes late; they had apparently missed an announcement at breakfast that the departure time had been changed. Starr was embarrassed. “It was,” he wrote in his journal, “the first time I had ever been late for anything in my life.” Bart Starr late for the bus for the most important game of his career—this did not go unnoticed by some of the more rambunctious players on the team, who had been fined many times already by the punctual Lombardi. Jim Taylor, an ornery individualist, would usually loiter around the side of the bus until the last possible second, just to get the Old Man teed off a little. Some of the team playboys might be seen hustling out the hotel door, tucking in their shirts, putting on their sport coats and clearing their pockets of extra condoms not used the night before. But never before was Bart Starr late. “Welcome to the club!” one shouted. A few giggles, then the bus grew quiet for the ride to the stadium.

  It was Starr’s habit to take a brief look at the field before going into the locker room to dress for the game, but he said that he didn’t want to see the field this time. He and Knafelc dressed quietly in their cubicle. Starr read a game program, “trying to quiet the butterflies.” He was struck by an open letter to the fans from Coach Bob Waterfield asking them to help keep Rams players in Los Angeles during the off-season. Starr had been thinking about that issue a lot in recent days; the closer his relationship became with Lombardi, the more sense he thought it made for him and his wife, Cherry, to live year-round in Green Bay. That thought was broken by Lombardi’s booming voice—time for his pregame meeting with the quarterbacks. Starr and Lamar McHan and the coach went over the personnel of the Rams defense, the offensive game plan. Starr called his own plays, but Lombardi gave him the first few to start the game.

  When Starr reached the field for the pregame warmups, his anxiety disappeared. Now he was feeling loose and easy. Max McGee, the team cutup, made a great catch in the drills, and everybody hooted and whistled at him. Then back in the dressing room one last time, heart pounding, adrenaline flowing. Starr rinsed his face and removed his jersey to put on the shoulder pads, and took a seat in the main squad room for the players’ meeting. The old guys, Hawg Hanner and Em Tunnell, did most of the talking. “Em says the most intelligent things before the games,” Starr noted in his diary. “He sizes up the situation perfectly. Only mistakes would beat us, he told the squad.”

  The players ended their session with the Lord’s Prayer. Lombardi entered the room. “I was anxious to hear him,” Starr wrote. “He said three weeks ago they had counted us out and now we were getting a second chance. He said he didn’t have to tell us what this game meant but warned us about keying ourselves up too much. He told us how big the Rams are and kept reminding us that football is two things—blocking and tackling, plus running the ball. And play the game with abandon, because every time you played with abandon you won, the coach said. He always does an extremely fine job of getting us worked up. You could run through the wall when he lets you go. He doesn’t plead. He just stands there telling us what to do in his very authoritative voice. We rushed out of the dressing room door with a shout and I felt well prepared to play the game.”

  The Packers threw only eleven passes all afternoon, nine by Starr, two by Hornung, yet they won the game with a spectacularly effective passing attack. Thunder and Lightning could go nowhere on the ground, gaining only sixty-six yards between them. But Starr completed eight of nine passes, including touchdown tosses of ninety-one yards to Boyd Dowler and fifty-seven yards to Max McGee, and Hornung completed a forty-yard halfback option pass to McGee for another touchdown. The Rams gained nearly twice as much yardage and accumulated twice as many first downs, but after scoring the first touchdown they were never again in the game. The final score was 35 to 21. The Packers had won their first conference title since 1944. In the locker room after the game, Fuzzy Thurston was a madman, grabbing people and shouting. A Hollywood contingent including Bing Crosby’s sons and Gardner McKay came in to snap pictures and mingle with Hornung and his handsome young teammates. Starr and Knafelc were relatively quiet amid the celebration. Knafelc had been knocked cold in the second quarter and played the entire second half semiconscious, without memory. He was still in a trance when Coach Lombardi came around shaking hands, and when he reached their cubicle he said, “Great game, both of you. Forget the fine!”

  “Thanks a lot, you sonofabitch!” mumbled the dazed Knafelc. The coach walked away smiling.

  The team returned to Green Bay the following night, and as their charter plane rolled down the runway to the terminal, the players looked out into the frigid December blackness at an amazing scene. There were fans everywhere, roaring swells behind the cyclone fences at Austin Straubel Airport, eleven thousand Packer backers who had been waiting for hours, chanting and screaming for their team, holding signs that read “Eight and Four, Just One More!” and “It’s a Cinch with Vince.” With the team riding in two buses behind a police escort, and a mile-long line of cars behind the buses, a joyous caravan snaked through town from the airport, passing a fireworks display at City Stadium and crossing the Fox River to the Hotel Northland. At the homecoming ceremony, the players and coaches were given engraved wallets, each with a fifty-dollar bill.
Lombardi was gracious in his comments, praising his players, his assistant coaches, the “wonderful fans of Green Bay”—and the scout with the oversized heart who died too soon. “A great part of this team is due to Jack Vainisi, who no longer is with us,” he said. But nothing Lombardi said could diminish his own stature. He had earned a new nickname during the triumphant swing through the West. In restoring the Packers to their old glory, he was becoming not just a football coach but the stuff of myth, a transcendent figure. St. Vincent? No, more than that. Green Bay was an area with a bishop and a vicar-general, eight monsignors, fifty priests and 350 religious sisters, but there was only one Lombardi. There he is! people screamed. The Pope! Look at the Pope!

  THEODDSMAKERS favored Green Bay by two points in the title game against the eastern winners, the Philadelphia Eagles, but both teams were a surprise to be there. They had followed the same fast track, zooming from last to first in their conferences in two years. The Eagles had some talented young players, including running backs Tim Brown and Ted Dean, backup quarterback Sonny Jurgensen, receiver Tommy McDonald and linebacker Maxie Baughan, but for the most part their championship season was seen as a curtain call for three grand old pros: their coach, Buck Shaw; their quarterback, the fiery Norm Van Brocklin; and their indestructible throwback, Chuck Bednarik, who was playing not only his normal center position but also filling in for an injured linebacker. Concrete Charlie was the last real sixty-minute man in the league. The championship matchup in that sense contrasted two cultures: the Eagles were the old way, with gunslinging quarterbacks and two-way players, all grit and improvisation; the Packers were Lombardi’s vision of the new professionals, methodical and relentless. They were also still a curiosity for much of the country.

  “From Los Angeles to New York, from Green Bay to Dallas, pro football fans are wondering: ‘How did Vince Lombardi do it? How did a 47-year-old Brooklynite become a hero to every native of a small midwestern city by leading the Green Bay Packers into next Monday’s championship game with the Eagles?’ ” Frank Dolson, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, posed that question in his December 22 column and found one man, Colonel Red Blaik, who knew the answer. Blaik was retired from football by then. He had left the Army job two years earlier to work for a defense contractor, but he was thoroughly enjoying the success of his former assistant. “Surprised?” Blaik responded, when Dolson asked him about Lombardi’s rise to the top of the coaching profession. “I was anything but surprised.”

  The only thing that puzzled Blaik was that it had taken so long for others to appreciate the qualities in Lombardi that he had seen during their time together at West Point. Lombardi was “a superior individual all the way around,” he told Dolson—loyal, decent, inspiring, someone who “believes in winning” and never “rationalizes a defeat,” and hates to lose “whether it’s pinochle or cribbage or football,” though he learns from every loss. Style rather than substance, Blaik said, allowed coaches of inferior character and talent to rise more quickly than Lombardi. “He doesn’t look like a man of great intellect. But what do appearances mean? I deal with a lot of scientists today. You ought to see how little some of them look the part. Some fellows have that Madison Avenue smoothness. They get a coaching job and then they rattle around. Vince isn’t that type of man. Oh, he has an extrovert side to him. He can be a dynamo when he has to be. But like a lot of men with ability, he’s a man of moods.”

  Lombardi was in a generous mood in the days before the championship game. The weather in Green Bay plunged toward zero on Friday, so the coach limited outdoor practice to just ten minutes of loosening up. When he heard that Bob Skoronski’s in-laws lived near Philadelphia, he invited the offensive tackle to bring his wife and three young sons along on the flight east. The Packers left Green Bay on Christmas Eve, taking a two-and-a-half-hour charter flight captained by Don Smith, a former Green Bay resident. Lombardi had a thousand little superstitions, and Smith was one of them, his “good luck pilot.” As the delegation deplaned, an AP photographer captured Skoronski, loaded down with three kids, shouting for help, and Lombardi grinning broadly as he scooped one-year-old Steve Skoronski into his arms. “THE GANG’S ALL HERE,” read the caption. Here was Lombardi, portrayed as the gregarious family man. Vincent and Susan could be excused for doing a double take when they saw the picture; he always seemed so loving with other people’s kids. Lombardi and his troops arrived at their hotel at five that afternoon, greeted in the lobby by a band playing “On, Wisconsin,” followed by Hornung’s favorite, the Notre Dame victory march. It snowed in Philadelphia that night and the Packers woke up to a white Christmas.

  The television sports industry had not yet cracked the sacrosanct Christmas barrier, so the championship game was held not on Sunday but Monday, December 26. And since the venue was venerable Franklin Field, which had no lights, the starting time was set at noon to assure that the final quarter would not be played in the winter gloaming. Monday noon was not exactly television prime time, but even placing the game that close to Christmas seemed excessive to many people, a sign of commercialism run amok. As the 1960s began, the writing press was still struggling with the new way, lamenting the fact that major sporting events were not just for the scribes in the press box and fans in the stands. “The sense of order, of propriety, has been offended,” wrote New York columnist Jimmy Powers. “How far can commercials go? But with time we grow accustomed to a lot of things. It matters little now how many fans attend an event in person. Sports slowly are being beamed for the mass TV audience, the millions who sit comfortably at home. In effect, today’s game between the Packers and Eagles is the World Series of football. It is reasonable to state that for every person who sits shivering in the stands to watch it in person, hundreds will be at home absorbing statistics and, through the magic of powerful lenses, actually seeing more of the intricate play.”

  The point clangs with absurd obviousness now, but it was fresh enough to seem worth making then, though in truth 1960 was not the best year for the NFL on television. This was through no fault of the new commissioner, Alvin Ray “Pete” Rozelle, the young publicity wizard who had made the Los Angeles Rams a glittering West Coast enterprise. Rozelle had revolutionary plans for promoting and selling his league on television, but it required what he called a “unity of purpose” among the set of cantankerous owners. He had to persuade them that they could have more power, and get richer, by negotiating collectively and pooling their resources, rather than operating each franchise like an individual business. They were in the process of reaching that unity in 1960—pushed along, to be sure, by the upstart American Football League, which had a league-wide contract with ABC—but they were not quite there yet. While ten teams were broadcast on CBS, the Browns were under contract with the independent Sports Network in Cleveland, and the Baltimore Colts and Pittsburgh Steelers were broadcast on NBC, which also had rights to the championship game. The ratings drop in 1960—to 10.6, from 12.5 the previous year—was a one-year oddity, a result of the novelty of the AFL and the fact that teams in the NFL’s three largest markets (New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) had mediocre seasons.

  There were, in any case, enough people at Franklin Field that Monday noon to fill the stadium (67,325, the second-largest crowd in pro playoff history), and Powers need not have worried about their comfort—there was no shivering. The temperature soared to the upper forties, leaving the playing field in peculiar condition, with a thin layer of soggy grass over rock-hard earth in patches heated by the sun, but still icy spots in the shadows. From the opening play, when wild Bill Quinlan intercepted a Van Brocklin lateral pass on the Eagles fourteen-yard line, the Packers seemed relentless, but somehow kept coming up short. They ran Taylor, Hornung, Taylor, Taylor on the first four plays, but they could not grind out ten yards and the Eagles took over on downs. That was the first of two instances in the game when Lombardi chose to run on fourth down deep in Eagles territory—and failed—instead of taking the easy three points by kicking a field g
oal. When it happened the second time, during the opening drive of the third quarter, the Eagles were leading 10 to 6 even though the Packers had been controlling the ball and seemed to be dominating the line of scrimmage. The only Philadelphia touchdown to that point came when Hank Gremminger slipped on the ice and Tommy McDonald scooted by him to make a thirty-seven-yard touchdown catch.

  It took a freelance scramble by Max McGee late in the third quarter to bring Green Bay back. Hornung was out of the game by then, a nerve in his left shoulder pinched from a ferocious hit by Tom Brookshier that would haunt him for the rest of his career. Starr had misfired on three consecutive passes (high to McGee, low to Taylor, high to Dowler), and McGee dropped back to punt from his nineteen-yard line. As he waited for the long snap, two thoughts ran through his mind. First were the words that Coach Lombardi had barked at him when he took over as coach: “McGee, you’re gonna be my punter. You’re not gonna run the football on fourth down!” Second was the vision in front of him. Wide open. “I catch this friggin’ ball and all my instincts would not let me kick it,” McGee recalled later. “I see these guys going back to set up their return. Normally, they keep one guy to make sure you kick it. They didn’t. I could see the first down.” Ignoring Lombardi’s warning, the old Tulane halfback tucked the ball in and loped thirty-five yards downfield, taking the ball into Eagles territory. Seven plays later he caught a seven-yard touchdown pass from Starr to put the Packers ahead. When he trotted off the field after the extra point, even though his derring-do had given the Packers a 13 to 10 lead, he found a spot on the sidelines as far away from the coach as he could get.