When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  The commissioner’s other mission was to make the league seem endlessly exciting, and he believed that this also could be accomplished as much off the field as on, by accommodating and ingratiating the television and print media, encouraging them to promote the new professional ideology.

  There would be a seamless web between playing the game and selling the game, conjoining life and art. Publicity efforts were coordinated by the league office. There were standard rules for press releases, statistics, press conferences. Story lines were conceived in New York and pushed around the country. To the extent that Lombardi had become the symbol of modern pro football, Rozelle hoped to use him in that effort. This was one of many instances during the 1960s when others would try to enlist Lombardi in some larger cause—financial, cultural or ideological—and though he usually obliged them, it was rarely a perfect match. At times Lombardi was seen as a remnant from the old school, but he could no more be assigned to the past than considered a product of Rozelle’s new publicity machine. He was a transitional figure between old and new, but more than that he was singular, with his own distinct philosophy and mythology.

  Rozelle had not yet turned the championship game into a week-long extravaganza, but he had wished that Lombardi would put more into the selling of the 1962 title match than he did. The Packers practiced in Green Bay until noon Friday, then flew to New York and rode the bus into midtown to their quarters at the Hotel Manhattan. Vince had made plans to take the family across the river that night to visit his parents in Englewood. He had prepared his team for Sunday, even installed a surprise passing attack if conditions were suitable, and his pregame duties were mostly done, or so he thought. New York City newspapers were not publishing again, the second time in four years they had been silenced by labor strikes while the NFL Championship Game was in town. Lombardi assumed that he would not have to do much with the depleted press corps until Sunday. But shortly before five o’clock he received a call from Jim Kensil, Rozelle’s chief publicist, who said the league had set up a big press conference at another hotel. It was about to start, but everyone was waiting for the Time cover boy to appear.

  Lombardi started arguing with Kensil. He said no one had told him about the press conference and that he could not attend because his parents were expecting him. Rozelle took the phone from his aide. Lombardi was still angry, but he would not openly defy the league. After a short discussion the commissioner hung up and said, “He’s on his way.”

  Whether Lombardi served any use was another matter. He uttered a string of yeps and nopes, disparaged a few questions and left with his image as a temperamental grouch intact with some reporters. Lombardi considered himself “a city man”—there were times during the off-season when he would escape from Green Bay just to take a room at the Waldorf “and sit, surrounded by the city.” He would go to Toots Shor’s, where the proprietor greeted him as a beloved “crumb bum.” Then over to Mike Manuche’s with his friends Eddie Breslin, William O’Hara and Jim Lawlor and his little brother, Joe, and a group of writers. Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star-Ledger described Lombardi as never happier than in that setting, standing amid his friends, “first among equals, not emperor as he was in Green Bay,” stationed so that he could see everyone in the place, unloosened by a few scotch and waters, talking about Fordham or his favorite singer or place on the road. “At times like this his laughter would fill the room and everybody would smile no matter where you were in the room.”

  Yet nothing could make him laugh or relax now. By Saturday he seemed agitated to a state of exhaustion. Red Blaik, who sat at his table for dinner that night at the Metropolitan Club, was struck by Lombardi’s anxiety. Lombardi talked about how difficult the game would be, and how beat-up his team was, and how the stress of success was starting to eat at him and drive him harder than ever. This was not about television revenues, magazine covers, publicity plans, sexy new ways of selling the game on Madison Avenue—it was about overcoming fate and temptation and paying the price and becoming immortal. “We’re going to win!” he finally blurted out, and then abruptly departed.

  He and Marie had left their daughter back at the hotel with the usual instructions. She was not to open the door for anyone except the waiter delivering dinner, and she was not to leave the suite for any reason. When she was done, she should place the tray in the hall and lock the door and go to bed. This was fine with Susan: she could eat in private and not have to worry about performing in front of her parents’ friends. As soon as they left to meet Colonel Blaik’s dinner party, she put on a bathrobe, turned on the television, picked up the phone and ordered room service. When the knock at the door came, she hurried to her suitcase and threw on a dress, a bright red one that her mother and Aunt Marge had helped her pick out that day, then let the waiter in and watched him set up her food. After eating she did as her father said and set the tray outside.

  Slam. Click. The heavy hotel door closed and there she stood, alone in the hall, without a key, locked out, wearing only a little red dress, no stockings, no shoes, stuck on the top floor of a big hotel. What now? She had to make her way down to the lobby for a new key, but she was at the age where the last thing she wanted was to be noticed, and she was too embarrassed to get in the elevator in her bare feet, so she took the stairs. “I went down flight after flight. I was crying. I was in a panic,” she said later. “I finally got out of the stairwell at an exit on the mezzanine level and all I could do was look down and there was this huge crowd of people in the lobby and I hoped I would see somebody I knew. What were my chances?”

  In the swirling sea of faces, she spotted her brother. He was talking to Paul Hornung. She started waving and shouting his name, “Vincent! Vincent!” He looked up, right at her, then turned his gaze. It appeared that he did not want to acknowledge her. He was a college man, hanging out with the Golden Boy, the coolest guy in the world. This was humiliating. Susan kept yelling and waving, until finally Vincent relented and walked up to the mezzanine and asked, “What’s your problem?”

  She tried to explain. “He was mad at me because I was always a little rat. But he goes down and gets me a key. I think he’s going to take me back up. But he pushes the button, the elevator opens, he hands me the key and says, ‘Go back to your room.’ And I’m standing there in the elevator with these people and no shoes and the red dress and all the way up I’m saying to myself, Someday, I’m going to kill him. I get back into the room and get in bed and I’m a wreck. My parents finally come in. They always come in to kiss me good night. And my dad looked at me and knew that something was wrong. I started to cry and told him what happened and he thought it was funny, and I said, ‘I don’t think this is very funny, Daddy! I was stuck and I was trying to do what you told me to do!’ He was laughing because knowing me he thought that would be par for the course that I’d lock myself out like that and walk down twenty-six flights of stairs. I thought he was going to get mad at me and he just laughed and laughed.” Perhaps, if only for those few moments, his daughter’s human foibles had settled the churning in Vince Lombardi’s gut and provided a welcome relief from his life’s burden of needing to be perfect and to win and win and win.

  BY GOD it was thrilling to be part of this, even if the coach made the job uncomfortable at times, the Milwaukee Sentinel’s Bud Lea noted to himself as he looked around the bus carrying the proud Packers from the Hotel Manhattan up to Yankee Stadium that Sunday morning. Before Lombardi came to Green Bay, covering the football team “never amounted to a hill of beans.” Now, the talent and sense of purpose the players exuded made Lea feel as though he were part of Patton’s Third Army moving across Europe. Tex Maule had the same sensation. He was almost one of the boys now. “He loved the Packers, and we liked him because he knew something about football,” Hornung said later of the Sports Illustrated writer. “He was always with us. We’d go out with him. Get him smashed.” The team had seemed sleepy during the final few games of the season, but their last few practices had grown more inte
nse day by day, and now, on the ride to the showdown in the Bronx, Maule sensed that the Packers “were imbued with a furious professional determination to prove that the licking they had given the Giants a year ago was no fluke.”

  Lombardi was in his pregame trance, saying nothing, looking straight ahead. Phil Bengtson sat in the next row, reviewing his plans for containing Yelberton Abraham Tittle, the bald poet who played quarterback for the Giants and had ripened wondrously in his old age, throwing for 3,224 yards and thirty-three touchdowns in his thirteenth professional season. Bengtson had watched the films so much he thought he had Yat figured out. Likes to throw on first down on the first series. If he calls a running play and it goes six yards or more, he’ll come right back with it. If the last running play doesn’t work, he’ll throw twice. If it’s long, it’s to Del Shofner. Short to Frank Gifford or Joe Walton. Red Cochran, the offensive assistant, was heartened by what he saw out the window: bitterly cold winds whipping paper trash through the city streets. In his hotel room late the night before, he had listened to gale-force winds whistle through the midtown skyscraper canyon and said softly, “Blow, winds, blow. The worse it is, the better for us.” The Giants were a passing team. The Packers had Taylor and Hornung. Cochran liked their chances. Jesse Whittenton, the defensive back, looked over at Maule and said, “It’s cold as hell right now, but my hands are sweating!”

  When the bus stopped and the players lumbered out, Jerry Kramer felt overwhelmed as he walked into Yankee Stadium to defend the championship. It was a “huge thrill” just to be there, he said later. “The House That Ruth Built, all the legends of the place. Playing against Katcavage and Robustelli and Huff. I’m going, ‘Legends! What are you doing going out there against those guys?’ ” Replacing one legend with another is what he and his Packers were doing. That’s what the Old Man said. Back in Green Bay earlier that week, Lombardi had installed a sign above the locker room door:

  HOME OF THE GREEN BAY PACKERS

  THE YANKEES OF FOOTBALL

  But were the Yankees this beat up? The Horn sat at his cubicle, dragging on a Marlboro, his shoulder sore, his knee still tender. He was determined to run and pass and block, just couldn’t kick. Jim Ringo was concerned about his right arm. A nerve problem made it feel numb, hard to snap the ball. He didn’t want to hurt the team. Should he play? Lombardi came by and said, “We’ve come this far, Jim, you have to play,” and that settled that. Ron Kramer, the Big Oof, as Vikings coach Norm Van Brocklin called him, was getting taped up again. It took the trainer twenty minutes: white tape around the ankles, elastic around both knees, elastic around the back—a tight end mummy wrapped from head to ribs. And Jimmy Taylor was looking gaunt. It was a mystery then what was draining him of fifteen pounds in a few weeks. It would not be until many days later that doctors realized he had hepatitis. Taylor was wrapped and ready to go.

  Red, white and blue bunting ringed the second deck of the stadium, filled to capacity with 64,892 frigid, breath-blowing fans, most of them rooting for Giant revenge. “OK, Y.A., Make Green Bay Pay,” read one bedsheet banner. Inside Madison Square Garden earlier that week, New Yorkers at basketball and hockey games had been chanting, “Beat Green Bay! Beat Green Bay!”—and the call was picked up again now. News flashes on the transistor radios announced bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, a mass of steel and humanity inching in the other direction, toward Philadelphia, beyond the blackout zone, where people could watch the game on television. Others mobbed a few enterprising motels in Westchester County that had erected tall antennas to bring in the game from a station in Hartford. NBC had the broadcast rights for the championship, and fielded a bipartisan announcing team of Ray Scott and Chris Schenkel for the play-by-play. But CBS, which broadcast the Giants during the year, held jealously to its booth, forcing Scott and Schenkel to work in an open photography platform down the right-field line. Sportswriters filed into the press box. Red Smith gazed around the stadium to conjure the images that might evoke the scene. When the teams came out for warmups, it was clear that this game would be decided by the basic elements.

  Earth and air, each in harshest form. Hornung ran a practice sprint and pronounced the field “atrocious.” It was hard, frozen in large swatches, with holes and ruts everywhere. “Better suited to ice hockey than football,” wrote Maule. When you fell, Ron Kramer noticed, there were sharp pieces of dirt that cut like glass. Vincent, the college fullback, examined the field with his sidelines pass and thought it would be “like playing in a parking lot.” Bart Starr likened it to “a slag pile.” The Packers and Giants both came out in cleatless, ripple-soled football shoes, not unlike the ones Lombardi always wore at games, though his had blinding white laces. Frank Gifford alone chose sneakers. The wind was as unforgiving as the field. During warmups Tittle threw one pass that was pushed to the ground after five yards and another that soared and flailed up and away toward the first row of stands. “We just lost our passing game,” an assistant lamented to Allie Sherman, the Giants head coach. Red Smith devoted much of his column to meteorology. “Polar gales clawed topseed off the barren playground and whipped it into whirlwinds about the great concrete chasm of Yankee Stadium,” he wrote. “The winds snatched up tattered newspapers, more newspapers than people can find in all New York these days, and flung the shreds aloft where they danced and swirled in a Shubert blizzard. …”

  Once, when all the Packers arose from their wooden bench, it was blown over and onto the field. The temperature at game time was 18 degrees and dropping. This was before the era of wind chill factors, but the winds were 25 to 40 miles per hour, and the athletes remembered it as the single coldest game they had ever played in—colder even, many Packers insisted, than a more famous game five years later in subzero Green Bay. So cold that Lombardi gave up his lucky camel’s hair coat for a thick-lined winter parka. Some of the fiercest scrums were around the heating drums on the sidelines. “There’d be flames shooting out and we’d all be fighting to get closest to them,” said Gary Knafelc. Lombardi had invited Tom Brown, a talented athlete from Maryland whom he had just selected in the second round of the college draft, to join the Packers on the sidelines for the game. An unwise invitation, it turned out. As Brown shivered and looked around at the frigid and foreboding scene, he decided then and there to skip football and sign a contract to play baseball, the summer game, for the Washington Senators.

  Up in the auxiliary press box, an uncovered ledge on the second deck, Red Cochran lost control of his frosted writing hand and was unable to chart the game. Ray Scott, in his makeshift broadcast booth nearby, with his spotting boards resting on his quaking knees, found his face stiffening minute by minute. “We ended up taalllkking … liiiike … thiiis,” he said later. “For years afterward people accused me of being drunk.” He was warmed by a few swigs of brandy from fellow announcer Bud Palmer’s flask, but his paper cup of coffee froze when he poured in the liquor.

  There were eight extra cameras at the game that day, filming not for television but for the league to use in publicity game films. The contract for the job had been won by Blair Motion Pictures Inc., a small outfit in suburban Philadelphia owned by Ed Sabol, who had never before shot a professional game. When Sabol got the job, he called his son Steve, who was then in college, and said, “I just bought the film rights and I can see from your grades that all you’ve been doing is going to movies and playing football and that makes you uniquely qualified for this job.” Steve signed on as assistant producer, launching a family partnership that would later become known as NFL Films, an enterprise that more than any other would be responsible for creating the films and television shows that shaped the new mythology of professional football for the rest of the century. Ed Sabol’s start was inauspicious enough. He was so nervous before the game that he spent most of the next two hours in the restroom.

  Willie Wood kicked off for the Packers. He had the strongest leg, and Lombardi liked to have him back there as a sure-tackling last resort in case the re
turner broke clear. Wood placed the ball on a tee, and it blew off twice. Finally, he called a teammate over to hold the ball, and the game began.

  The Packers realized immediately that Tittle would keep passing despite the conditions, but he could only pass short. The long ball, his specialty, would dip and float aimlessly in the wind. He ended up throwing forty-one passes, but none near the end zone. Lombardi scrapped his surprise aerial attack plan and put the game in the hands of Taylor and Hornung and his defense, led by Ray Nitschke, who recovered two fumbles, forced an interception with a blitz on Tittle and would have had an interception of his own if his hands had not been so cold. Taylor gained eighty-five yards running the ball thirty-one times, almost every effort ending with a smack and thud and sprawling legs, three Giants piling on, Sam Huff, the aggressive middle linebacker, occasionally giving Taylor an extra push into the icy turf or knee in the groin and telling Taylor that he stunk.

  “Did everything I could to that sonofabitch,” Huff said later. And Taylor just looked at him and spit and said, “That your best shot?” Taylor was never considered the brightest Packer—Dick Schaap had once written of him in a Saturday Evening Post article: “Jimmy Taylor, the great fullback of the Green Bay Packers, spent four years in college and emerged unscarred by education”—and some of his teammates found him prickly off the field, but when it counted, in games like this, they were all thankful that he was on their team.

  It is part of football tradition that gridiron violence in the retelling takes on the form of comedy more often than of tragedy. And so it was with the defining story of that game, apocryphal or not, when Taylor groaned at the bottom of a pile and saw an exposed calf and bit it and Giant tackle Dick Modzelewski screamed “Ow!” and Taylor looked up and said, “Sorry, Mo, I thought you were Sam.” But it was not funny then. In the first quarter, Taylor was smacked in the helmet by Huff and cut his elbow and bit his tongue and was swallowing blood for the rest of the half. Dr. Eugene Brusky sewed him up at the break. His teammates could hear his moans of pain, stitch by stitch, as they sat in the locker room silent and freezing, rubbing their bodies trying to get warm, before heading out for the second half. “You wondered if he’d be ready to go in the second half and be the football player he was in the first half,” recalled Nitschke. Taylor did play, and he played just as hard, pushed on by Lombardi. He later explained his gutty performance by saying you never know until you are faced with it how much pain you can endure, how much effort you have left, and then the coach steps in and pushes you even beyond that point. He never held it against Lombardi, though: the push made the difference.