When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  After the championship game Hornung was in Los Angeles on off-season business when Rozelle reached him and summoned him to New York. It was what Hornung would call “a real bullshit clandestine operation”—meaning that the league tried to house him in a seedy hotel under an alias the night before he was to be questioned. Hornung barely played along. He left the flophouse immediately, checked into the Plaza Hotel, and then went over to Toots Shor’s saloon and had dinner with Shor and Frank Gifford and “got completely smashed.” The next morning he was taken to an office where Rozelle’s agents had set up a lie detector test. It appeared obvious to Hornung that they knew what he had been doing. He suspected that they had wiretapped his phone when he was living with McGee and Kramer. At least the conversations weren’t dull, he joked. But he told Rozelle he did not want to take the lie detector test.

  “I said to Pete, ‘Let me tell you something, I’m not the only sumbitch that’s gambling. But I’ll never say that publicly, because that’s none of my business. But I know who has bet. I know the guys. Forget the lie detector test. I’m not answering any questions about anybody else.’ I said to Pete, ‘I’ll be honest with you. You know I did bet. I did. I admit it. That’s all the farther I’m going.’ ” If Rozelle pushed him further, Hornung said, he might go down to Washington and appear before the McClellan subcommittee. “‘If we go down to Washington your ass is in trouble if I talk about how many guys I know who are betting. Don’t have me go to Washington and raise my right hand.’ ” He was bluffing, but Rozelle agreed he did not want that, and urged Hornung to keep their meeting confidential. “I’m going to have to make a decision on this and get back to you,” Rozelle said. “I want you to swear that you won’t tell a soul.”

  At the end of January, at the Kenilworth Hotel in Bal Harbour, Florida, Rozelle convened a meeting of the NFL executive committee. Owners only—Lombardi was excluded, Olejniczak represented the Packers. According to minutes of the meeting, Rozelle announced that he was investigating several players for betting on games, that the investigation “had been underway for some time,” and that he would give no publicity to it until he had concluded what he considered an adequate investigation. He said it was not his intention to “minimize or in any way ‘whitewash’ the cases.” He said that he had enlisted a team of former FBI agents and was reserving the right to request lie detector tests. And he chastised some owners for being “too liberal” in not laying down “sensible and mature” rules governing the private lives of their players.

  Hornung was home in Louisville then, staying with his mother, enduring the most anxious period of his life. Every phone call jangled his nerves as he awaited word from Rozelle. His nervous behavior made his mother suspicious, so he told her what had happened, and she began offering special novenas for her only son at church every morning. He returned to Green Bay a few times to play on the Packers’ winter basketball team. Bob Skoronski remembered that after one game Hornung said his ambition for 1963 was to make the comeback of the year. It was a curious statement, Skoronski thought, but maybe Hornung meant coming back from his knee injury. Milton Gross, a sportswriter for the NEA syndicate, spent a half hour with Hornung late that winter and brought up the rumors of gambling. Hornung confided to him that Rozelle “had him on the griddle,” but as he related the story to Gross, he had merely had a telephone conversation with the commissioner, nothing more, and he made it sound like a trifling matter, no more troublesome than deciding what shirt to wear on a date that night.

  On the first of April, the league office sent out a bulletin instructing each team to have “No Gambling” signs placed in their dressing rooms at training camp. That same week Rozelle invited Lombardi to his office in New York. They met on April 6 and Rozelle showed him the findings of his investigation, including Hornung’s signed statement. Lombardi was shocked. He was “outraged, saddened, disillusioned.” He was upset with Hornung in every way: that Paul had been foolish enough to bet on games, that he had lied about it when Lombardi first asked him, and that he had not later told the coach about his confession to Rozelle. The evidence was overwhelming. When Rozelle stated that he believed his only choice was to suspend Hornung indefinitely, Lombardi responded: “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.” Then the two men left the office and “wandered around” Manhattan until one in the morning, commiserating. “I warned him time after time not to bet,” Lombardi kept saying. “How could he look me in the eye and keep lying?”

  Life was circling back on Lombardi again. The Packers had reached the top through talent and diligence. They had become the definition of first-class professionalism—and now this. The cadets of West Point were in the same position twelve years earlier, the very best, the model of collegiate prowess and class, and then it all collapsed in a cribbing scandal. A bewildered father asks his son, How could you? It was the question Colonel Blaik had asked his son Bob when the mess broke at West Point and the football team was about to be expelled, and now Lombardi was asking it of his boy Paul. How could he? Why did some of the Fordham Rams play illegally in semipro contests that autumn of 1936 and come back lame for the crucial NYU game and thus ruin the team’s chances of going to the Rose Bowl? Why did the cadets pass the poop and destroy one of the finest squads Red Blaik had ever built? Why did Paul Hornung place bets on the Packers and endanger Lombardi’s awesome team? The answers are as complex and varying as human nature itself: Hubris. A sense of invincibility. Reckless youth. Thrill of winning. Peer pressure. Boredom. Temptation.

  AS OFTEN HAPPENS with people awaiting painful news, Hornung was hoping that the telephone would never ring. But the call he dreaded was inevitable, and it came at last on the morning of April 17. On the line from New York, Rozelle informed him that he was being indefinitely suspended. The commissioner said it was “the hardest decision” he would ever have to make. There was more punishment to be meted out that day. Hours later Rozelle told the press that his investigators had conducted fifty-two interviews “relating to individuals connected with eight clubs.” Along with Hornung, he was also indefinitely suspending Alex Karras, the obstreperous tackle for Detroit, for placing several bets over the years, and fining five other Lions $2,000 each for betting on the 1962 title game. The Detroit club was also fined $2,000 for ignoring reports of gambling by players.

  The suspension of Hornung and Karras, two of the league’s premier players, was dramatic, but Rozelle seemed relieved that it was not worse. “There is no evidence that any NFL player has given less than his best in playing any game,” he said. “There is no evidence that any player has ever bet against his own team. There is no evidence that any NFL player has sold information to gamblers. There is clear evidence that some NFL players knowingly carried on undesirable associations which in some instances led to their betting on their own team to win and/or other National Football League games.”

  Hornung was on the seventh hole at Audubon Country Club that afternoon when a swarm of reporters and photographers arrived at the clubhouse asking for his response to Rozelle’s announcement. Karras had reacted immediately, asserting that he had done nothing wrong and was not guilty of anything. Hornung retreated to the club’s locker room and drafted a statement. He knew many other players who bet on games. But that’s life, he said to himself. If they got away with it, fine. Others could argue that he was being made a scapegoat because he was the Golden Boy, but he did not feel that way himself. He had gained far more as the Golden Boy than he had lost over the years. As he once put it, he felt as though he had lived “a whole life on scholarship.” Now he felt terrible, but he knew that he had erred. There was no question about right and wrong: It was there in the contract, in black and white. No betting on NFL games. Hornung emerged with red, watery eyes and offered words of contrition. “I made a terrible mistake. I realize that now. I am truly sorry. What else is there to say?”

  The story was on the front page of every major newspaper in the country, jolting much of the sporting world. Senator McClellan praised
Rozelle for “taking effective action to clean up conditions in professional football.” Hornung’s teammates reacted with words of support. Skoronski said that the Horn “had great heart” and that the Packers all respected him. “We all thought the world of Paul,” added Jerry Kramer. “You hate to see a good guy like him get fouled up.” Fans in Green Bay responded as though there had been a death in the family. John Holzer, a local pharmacist, wore a black armband and said of Hornung’s relationship with Barney Shapiro: “Anyone who watches practice could pass along information as Hornung did. Just about everybody in the United States gambles. He makes more money. His five hundred dollar bet is like a dime bet for most of us.”

  Dick Schaap, the New York sportswriter who had spent considerable time hanging out with Hornung and his Packer pals in 1961, was among those not surprised by the news. The gambling story, Schaap wrote in Sport magazine, evoked the Golden Boy as he really was—not perfect but endearing and in no way malicious. “To anyone who knows Paul Hornung, who knows his taste for the grand gesture and his thirst for the sweet life, the size of his bets could have been the only legitimate shock,” Schaap wrote. “Within Hornung’s circle, the fact that he had gambled was surely not news; that he had been caught—and suspended—was hardly startling. Paul Hornung is many things, not all of which would qualify him for sainthood, but the one thing he has never been, and probably never will be, is sneaky.” Schaap revealed that Hornung was so trusting that he once placed a football bet in front of writers. “I saw him back the Packers, and when his team won by more than the point spread, he earned $100.” Schaap was reporting the incident now only to “help set in perspective” the relatively benign nature of what Hornung had done. He said that he could have written about it earlier, and gained notice for a scoop, but chose not to because it would have violated “the trust and friendship [Hornung] thrusts upon so many people.”

  The essential relationship threatened by the scandal was not that of the Golden Boy and the press, but of the prodigal son and his father-figure coach. Warned by Rozelle that the announcement was coming, Lombardi, like Hornung, had fled to the sanctuary of a golf course. Marie took the flood of calls at Sunset Circle and said she was not sure where he went. Ockie Krueger finally tracked him down at Oneida. Lombardi’s public statements later that day were utterly without sentiment. The indefinite suspension, he said, was fully warranted and necessary. “One, it will preserve public confidence in this league. And two, it will keep things like this from getting more serious.” As for Hornung’s future, he added: “He’s through for now. We won’t look ahead to the future. Football is too risky to look ahead that far.” When pressed further, Lombardi finally said that Hornung’s return depended on two factors—how the Packers did without him and whether his teammates forgave him.

  It was only in private that Lombardi revealed how devastated he was by Hornung’s fall. He told Rozelle that he wanted to quit, and said the same thing to Marie and many of his friends, who talked him out of it. “It hurt the Old Man more than anything that happened to him in Green Bay,” said Jack Koeppler, his golfing buddy. To Ray Scott, the Packers broadcaster, Lombardi lamented, “You know, Coach, I think he thought he was pulling something on the Old Man.” He expanded on that theme in a discussion with Tim Cohane. “Hornung bet for the thrill of it,” he concluded. “The thrill lay in the fact that it was forbidden. I was fond of Paul and I’m sure he was fond of me. Yet he still liked to feel that there was something he could put over on me.” Lombardi accepted the suspension, he believed in rules and obedience to authority, but still he wished that Hornung had confided in him earlier, especially after he had confessed to Rozelle. Colonel Blaik had always thought that he could have resolved the cribbing scandal without losing his players if only they had come to him earlier, and now Lombardi was thinking the same about Hornung.

  “I wish you would have told me,” he said to Hornung when they first discussed the matter by telephone. “You should have told me. I think I could have rectified it.” This was probably wishful thinking; there was little Lombardi could have done. Maybe it was a way of redirecting his distress, or of absolving himself of responsibility for his player’s actions. In any case, Hornung certainly felt the sting of Lombardi’s anger. He also finished his first painful discussion with the coach sensing that he might work his way back into grace. “You stay at the foot of the cross,”

  20

  Coming in Second

  ONLY TWO of Harry Lombardi’s three sons cared about football. Vince had become the dominant symbol of the NFL by 1963. Little Joe, once an all-county guard at St. Cecilia, had long since stopped playing, but worked at the edges of the game as a regional salesman for a sporting goods company. Harold, the middle brother, never played football, considered it a waste of time to watch on television, and on the rare occasions that he attended games did so primarily to visit with his sister-in-law Marie when the Packers were playing at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. It had been more than a decade since Harold had left the family compound in Englewood and given up teaching for a new life on the West Coast. He had intended to study for a doctorate at Stanford, but dropped that plan and took a job as an underwriter for Northwestern National insurance company.

  Harold looked much like his brother Vince, though heavier, and shared his perfectionism and religious devotion, but at heart he was an artist. Opera, not football, was his passion. He much preferred the stirring world of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin and Der Ring des Nibelungen to the vision of Fuzzy and Jerry pulling out on the sweep or Ray Nitschke crunching another blocker in the nutcracker drill. For many years after he left Englewood, his parents pestered him with the same question each time they spoke on the phone: Harold, when are you going to get married? After years of dodging the question, he decided to write a letter providing the answer and the reason for it. The words were not so direct, but the message was this: He would never get married because he was a homosexual. From the moment he put the letter in the mail, Harold wondered what would happen next. Would Harry and Matty disown him? “I was very nervous waiting for a response,” he said. His father was not a letter writer, but one day Harold picked up his mail and there was the envelope from Englewood, and his father’s handwritten note inside, and a line that he would never forget: “I don’t care. You are my son.”

  During his years in San Francisco, Harold lived on Ashbury Street on a block that later would become the epicenter of the counterculture, but he was no flower child. Since the days when he and Marie had attended an “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden, he shared Marie’s Republican politics. He spent his days examining applications for automobile and casualty insurance, checking credit reports, working out math tables for rating and pricing, and drafting mock-ups of policies for the secretary to type. He found the work interesting and he excelled in it, and at the start of 1963 the company promoted him to a new job at the home office in Milwaukee.

  He moved to an apartment on North Prospect Avenue one block from Lake Michigan and near the Northwestern office, to which he walked. One consolation for leaving San Francisco was the chance to see his brother’s family in Green Bay. He visited Sunset Circle for holidays and many home games, largely because he enjoyed being around Marie, whom he regarded as “the greatest woman” he had met in his life. His brother tended to be a one-track conversationalist, all football, but he was amazed to discover the transformation in Marie since their New Jersey days. “At Fordham and St. Cecilia she sat in the background surrounded by all these people talking football,” he remembered. “Then she decided she was going to get in the middle of it and she learned football, and now she was able to compete with anyone.” The subject of Harold’s lifestyle was not discussed when he was with Vince. “I never said, he never asked, sort of like the military,” Harold reflected decades later. “I don’t know if Vince knew, to tell the truth. He was my brother.”

  Vince did know that Harold was gay, and here was an area where the coach showed an open mind, ac
cording to friends and family. He ignored Catholic teaching against homosexuality and instead considered gays another group deserving respect, like blacks and American Indians, and Italians. In later years he would have players who were gay, and quietly root for them at training camp, hoping they could show they were good enough to make his team.

  If there was any awkwardness in the relationship between Vince and Harold, it was because of Vince’s fame and its ripple effects. As an expert underwriter, Harold had every reason to believe that he was promoted to Milwaukee because of the superior quality of his work. But from the moment he started at the home office, it was impossible for him not to be aware also of the company’s ulterior motive. He was assigned a desk in the middle of the second floor, the first person a visitor saw coming off the elevator. Other underwriters worked in another part of the building. “There was nothing around me. I had this great big space and this great big desk and I was all alone,” Harold said later. “And whoever came in the building was escorted right to me and was told, ‘This is Vince Lombardi’s brother!’ ”

  To see and perhaps shake hands with Vince Lombardi’s brother was regarded as a memorable event for businessmen—another indication of how the coach had become larger-than-life by 1963. Marie by then had developed the habit of walking behind him in airports to watch people stare as he strutted by. He had attained such godly status that Dave Robinson, the Packers’ first-round draft choice that year, a marvelous two-way end and future linebacker from Penn State, was shocked the first time he visited Green Bay and laid eyes on his new boss. “My first impression of Lombardi was that he was smaller than I thought he should be,” Robinson said later. “I had heard that he was a guard on the Seven Blocks of Granite. I thought I would see a guard. Instead I shake hands with this little squatty dude. I said to myself, What is this? He’s kind of short to be Lombardi. You envision a big man ranting and raving.”