When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Heinz wrote the book in his makeshift den, a bantam-size office that he had constructed off the TV room in a corner of his garage. A radiator warmed him as winter approached. The cement floors were softened by cork tiles, the walls by Philippine mahogany paneling. There was just enough room for a desk and chair and small daybed for naps. With his notebooks and index laid out before him, he rolled two sheets of yellow copy paper around the platen of his Remington portable and began tap-tapping away. He wrote every day from September through Thanksgiving without taking a day off. On Sundays he paused to watch football on television and track the remarkable progress of the Packers. The wins kept coming after the close call against the Lions: Minnesota, San Francisco, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia (49 to 0, payback for the title defeat in 1960) and Baltimore again. Lombardi and his Packers had ten wins and no losses—unbeaten and seemingly unbeatable.

  The astounding team in the heartland was luring more eastern writers to Green Bay along the route of the Blue Goose. Herbert Warren Wind of The New Yorker blew into the Northland for stays in October and November, arriving the second time to witness the rematch with the Colts. Wind paid homage to football particulars, calling the Packers perhaps “one of the authentically great teams of all time,” but his true function seemed to be that of an anthropologist relating the practices of an exotic aboriginal tribe to the sophisticates of New York City. He described the airport limo driver who had blurted out “Real great! Real great!” in response to one of Wind’s dry jokes. “I mention this because it soon became evident that a second addiction of the people in Green Bay is the phrase ‘real great,’ which they use as frequently and with as many shades of intonation and meaning as the French do with ‘Ça va.’ ” When Wind arrived at the stadium an hour before the Colts game, he took note that “several thousand people were already on hand, milling around the food concessions and taking on frankfurters, bratwurst and coffee as reserve fuel against the sharp, cold air. With a food counter tucked under the stands at nearly every portal, City Stadium is as beautifully designed for eating as it is for football. The field itself, like that at the Yale Bowl, is sunk well below ground level.”

  After watching the Packers defeat the Colts, 17 to 13, aided by a 103-yard kickoff return by Adderley and two stirring goal line stands, Wind signed off with this summation of Green Bay culture: “According to our native folklore, Green Bay, all wrapped up in football, epitomizes the sort of Midwestern community that drives its gentler spirits out of town—to Chicago, to New York, to Paris, to anyplace where their alien talents have a chance to flower. It is hard to know about these things, but my own feeling is that Green Bay would be an excellent place for any boy or girl to grow up in. Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend that a visitor launch into a long disquisition on the coureurs de bois for the benefit of the gang at the Packer Playdium, but if he did, there would be no bother about it. The chances are that they would simply think he was running on about some new quarterback who had just come up with the Montreal Allouettes.” One can see the gang at the Playdium reading that line and muttering in various shades of intonation “Real great! Real great!”

  Which is not what they would have been saying in the early afternoon of November 22 during the Thanksgiving Day game against the Lions. Detroit had a defense as tenacious as Green Bay’s—and on that day a demonstrably better one, with Joe Schmidt and Wayne Walker battering away at linebacker, and Night Train Lane, Yale Lary and Dick LeBeau closing off the passing lanes. The scariest Lions were in the middle: rarely did two defensive tackles dominate the way Roger Brown and Alex Karras did for those few hours in chilly Detroit. Brown stood six foot five and weighed three hundred pounds, and he looked even larger as he tossed aside Packer blockers and lumbered into the backfield in pursuit of Bart Starr. The lasting image of the game is of No. 15 disappearing into the turf as Brown smothered him in the end zone for a safety. Karras was three inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than Brown, but played just as large, harassing Starr all day. Jim Ringo, Fuzzy Thurston and Jerry Kramer seemed at a loss on how to stop the mad rush. Thurston joked later that it was during the first half of that game that he perfected the lookout block, a maneuver in which he would look over his shoulder and yell, “Look out, Bart!”

  Bill Austin, Green Bay’s line coach, later acknowledged that he had a copy of Detroit’s defensive game plan—a scout had slipped it to him before the game—but that it made no difference. “We deciphered as much as we could, but we couldn’t understand some of the words, I guess,” Austin said. Starr ended up being sacked eleven times. With the Lions leading 26 to 0 as the fourth quarter began, the Packers knew they were beaten. The players seemed ready to head back to Green Bay; this did not promise to be the most joyous turkey dinner at the Elks Club, but anything was better than getting knocked around for another fifteen minutes. During an offensive huddle the bloodied Starr asked his bruised receivers if any of them believed they could get open. One after another these usually ball-grubbing athletes demurred, until Max McGee finally broke up his teammates by advising, “Bart, why don’t you throw an incomplete pass and nobody’ll get hurt.” With that single joke it was as though all the weight of the afternoon was lifted, and the Packers regained a small measure of pride with two last-quarter touchdowns, making the final score a less humiliating 26 to 14.

  As he watched the Turkey Day debacle on television back in Connecticut, Bill Heinz grew increasingly glum. He was a realist, but nonetheless had harbored some hope of a perfect season, the sort of year that would make Lombardi and his Packers even larger in the national imagination and in so doing “help the sale of the book.” Lombardi, however, was not as dismayed as his co-author. He was even seen laughing in the dressing room after the game as he told the press, “You didn’t think we were going to win them all, did you?” It was the psychology of the moment that mattered to Lombardi. After chatting warmly with Frank Mautte, an old Fordham teammate who lived in Detroit, he went around the locker room and quietly talked to his players. Fuzzy Thurston had lost his mother that week and was preoccupied; Lombardi said he understood. Starr seemed too hurried; Lombardi told him to maintain his normal patience. Then he gathered the team around him and said that the true challenge was now before them. “Let it be an example to all of us. The Green Bay Packers are no better than anyone else when they aren’t ready, when they play as individuals and not as one. … Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

  Everyone had been too confident, he said—his team, the press, but mostly himself. In the week before the game, he had allowed a television crew inside squad meetings for a report on the making of an undefeated team. No more of that. Now the press would stop writing about how invincible his team was. And he could whip the players again, reminding them that football was not easy, that they had to pay the price. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was in favor of losing that game,” said Terry Bledsoe. “But he seemed delighted the next week because he could scare everybody about what they had to do. He was always figuring that we were trying to get him to say they were a great team. He didn’t want his players to think that unless he told them.” The loss, said Willie Davis, the defensive end, “did more than remove the pressure. From that point on we never again got shook by losing.” And they returned to their winning ways.

  By late December, Heinz had written six chapters: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. He waited until the season was over to write Sunday. Lombardi traveled to New York again for league meetings, and he and Heinz met one morning at the Prentice-Hall offices in Englewood Cliffs, where editor George Flynn set up a projector and they watched the film of the first Lions game. Lombardi offered more thoughts on each play and Heinz asked questions and took notes. With details he gleaned from that film session, Heinz returned to Stamford and continued pecking away in his cork-bottomed room. He was Lombardi again, and one afternoon in February, before he packed up his Remington and took the childre
n on a holiday to Washington, D.C., he typed the final few paragraphs as though he were inside the coach’s head driving home from City Stadium in Green Bay on the October evening after the Lions game:

  I’ve got to make them believers, I’m thinking, and then the problem all week will be to get them up again, all of them, for next Sunday. After this, how will I ever get them up again for next Sunday? That’s what I’m thinking now, turning off Oneida Avenue in the traffic. Then for the first time I feel the fatigue coming, the tiredness coming all over me.

  The book came out the following September. Heinz had wanted to title it Six Days and Sunday, but Red Smith vetoed that idea. “With that title it’ll end up in the bookstores with the biblical tracts,” Smith said. What phrase did Lombardi use that might capture his personality? “How about, ‘Shut up, Marie!’ ” George Flynn suggested wryly. But of course Marie would not shut up. As Heinz realized better than most, the fact that she kept talking made the book possible. It was only fitting, in the end, that Marie came up with the title. She said she loved Vin’s phrase describing his philosophy of offensive football. Perfect, the others realized, and here at last was the title for a book that became a sports classic, with twenty-three printings over the ensuing decades. They called it Run to Daylight!

  18

  The End of Something

  MARIE HAD TRAVELED to nearly every road game since the end of their first year in Green Bay. She sat at her husband’s side in the front row of the plane and bus, shopped on Saturday in whatever city they visited, attended the Five O’Clock Club late that afternoon, accompanied Vin to mass Sunday morning, and watched the game from a seat in the stands with Ockie Krueger and his wife, who supplied her with coffee and cigarettes and warm blankets. She was an essential part of the team’s winning dynamic. As contentious as her relationship with Vince could be, it was never more clear how much he needed her than when the Packers were on the road. Marie could take Lombardi and give it to Lombardi like no one else, serving as both release valve and governor for his temper. Once she skipped a game in Texas and Lombardi turned so surly that the players beseeched her never to do that again. No problem: she truly enjoyed the traveling life and any opportunity to leave her remote northern outpost.

  The touchier part was Vince’s insistence that their daughter, Susan, come along. One variation of God, family and the Green Bay Packers was that wherever God and the schedule took the Packers, the Lombardis followed as a family. In explaining her father’s motives, Susan later concluded that “he felt that his job wasn’t going to entitle him to be home at five o’clock every night like any normal father, so one way to keep the family together was to bring it along.” Susan stayed home only for the West Coast swing at season’s end, which would have taken her out of school for two weeks. The rest of the time there was a seat reserved for her on the charter. And she hated it. “You look back and say how lucky you are, but at the age I was then, a teenager, I was involved with my friends and I wanted to stay home,” she said later. “I never put away my suitcase from weekend to weekend. I packed clothes, washed them, put them back in. My father made me go.”

  The entire family, including Vincent on break from college, boarded the flight three days after Christmas carrying the Packers to New York for the 1962 championship game, a rematch with the Giants. The Lombardis were national celebrities now. One week earlier, in the December 21 issue of Time, on page 60, there was a picture of “Lombardi & Family” near a paragraph extolling Vince’s proud home life: “He lives in a comfortable $35,000 home whose den is filled with trophies won by Daughter Susan, 15, an accomplished horsewoman, and Son Vince, 20, a 195-lb. fullback for Minnesota’s College of St. Thomas.” And there was Lombardi, with his oversized hands around both children, teeth shining; Marie to the side, her neck ringed with pearls, laughing at the joke; Susan staring straight at the camera; Vincent stiff at attention in sport coat and tie, hands clasped politely in front of him, head tilted up with eyes closed, as though humoring his father’s public joviality.

  Why wouldn’t the Old Man be happy? His team had finished the regular season 13 and 1. The photograph was part of a huge cover story on Lombardi and his team and his sport. His bespectacled face dominated the cover, a color portrait of the coach in lucky camel’s hair coat and fedora, with two indistinct Packers behind him in uniforms, winter capes and helmets with the simple G, and beyond them twelve rows of anonymous fans in the City Stadium stands. The identifying slash across the upper-left corner promoted Time’s trendy contention that professional football had reached a new place in American life. “The Sport of the ’60s,” it declared, correctly, two years into the decade. The story ran under a familiar headline, “Vinnie, Vidi, Vici,” and it seemed that every word was aimed at constructing a new mythology with Lombardi at the center. He was called “the world’s greatest football coach.” His Packers were labeled “the current wonder team of football, a group of superstars romantically molded out of a gang of has-beens.” And the game they played was defined in Tex Maule style, as the ultimate modern spectator sport and best expression of athletic professionalism and specialization:

  Football, as the pros go at it, is a game of special brilliance, played by brilliant specialists. … So precise is the teamwork that a single mistake by one man can destroy the handiwork of ten. So many are the complexities that connoisseurs argue endlessly in a mysterious lingo over slotbacks, stunters and buttonhooks. Even the innocent are mesmerized. Action piles upon action, thrill upon guaranteed thrill, and all with such bewildering speed that at the end the fans are literally limp. … No other sport offers so much to so many. Boxing’s heroes are papier-mâché champions. Hockey is gang warfare, basketball is for gamblers, and Australia is too far to travel to see a decent tennis match. Even baseball, the sportswriters’ “national pastime,” can be a slow-motion bore. …

  The Time article was well received not only in Wisconsin but also at the league office in New York, where Pete Rozelle, the aggressive commissioner, had been striving for three seasons to make the NFL anything but a bore. He could not have created a more effective cover himself. As a former publicity man in Los Angeles, he had paid special attention to creating the right buzz, and took notice at league meetings whenever magazines focused on the pro game. Life, Look, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Time had all done big spreads that yaar. The word was out among advertising agencies, publishers and corporate executives that pro football was hot. One of Rozelle’s missions was to make the NFL outrageously rich, and he had taken a crucial step toward that goal, convincing the owners to adopt his “unity of purpose” plan on television rights by signing a single network contract for 1962. The plan strengthened the league all around, according to the commissioner, giving it more bargaining leverage with networks and more clout with blue-chip oil, beer and cigarette advertisers, while also distributing revenues evenly to the benefit of small-market clubs. Lombardi and his Packers perhaps benefited most of all, as the joint venture meant that they earned as much from television as the New York Giants, where previously they were earning less than half as much.

  By the end of the 1962 season, it was apparent that pro football and television were made for one another. Baseball might be the national pastime, but its wide field, slow pace and long summer season worked against it on the tube, whereas pro football was a weekend sport with fewer than twenty games a year, most of them played in fall and winter when more people were indoors. The game also seemed to benefit more from television technology: the zoom lens, slow motion, isolated cameras (and later, instant replay) all made it easier for the average fan to pick up nuances of the action that were hard to see from a seat in the stands. Baseball was a long novel whose story grew in complexity and richness over the course of months; pro football offered a discrete live drama every week, with an uncertain ending. The sport had a new cliché, that any team could win on any given Sunday, and the Lions had proved it once again on Thanksgiving Day with their defeat of the otherwise
unbeaten Packers.

  Of the 54.9 million homes in the United States then, 49.8 million had television sets, and nearly 12 million of them had been tuned to that Packers-Lions game, a record number for a regular-season contest. The overall viewing audience for pro football had grown every year since 1956, with the exception of 1960. The ratings had gone up 10 percent in 1962 alone, a rise that made pro football attractively cost effective for advertisers, according to Philip Morris Inc., one of its major sponsors. Using a formula that took into account the expense of a minute of advertising and the number of homes reached, Philip Morris determined that its advertising on an NFL game cost $4.56 to reach a single home, compared with $5.45 for college football. To reach adult males, advertising an NFL game was even more cost effective than sponsoring the average prime-time show—$4.21 to $6.33. Efficient advertising made the NFL more alluring to sponsors, which made it possible for Rozelle to get more money from the networks and put more into the pockets of his owners.