When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  There was an awkward silence after the offensive captain sat down, and then Lombardi harrumphed, “All right! Now that’s the kind of attitude I want to see. Who else feels that way?” Willie Davis, the defensive captain, had been leaning back in his folding chair, and as he came forward again the momentum propelled him unexpectedly to his feet, and there he was, rising at Lombardi’s call. “Yeah, me too. I feel that way, man,” he said, and after that the whole room of Packers came alive—all standing and vowing that they wanted to win as much as Lombardi did.

  If Lombardi had regained the heart of his team, he knew that the soul was still missing. Paul Hornung had disappointed him game after game, even though some of the pressure had been eased with the acquisition of Don Chandler from the Giants to do the placekicking. The once-prolific Golden Boy had made it to the end zone only three times all season. In the loss to the Rams, he had gained nine yards in five carries, his third single-digit rushing effort of the year. For the past five weeks, Elijah Pitts and Tom Moore had been getting more playing time at halfback, and now, against the Vikings the week after the Rams loss, Lombardi did the unthinkable, benching Hornung for an entire game. The Packers won, narrowly, then traveled to the Washington suburbs to spend a week preparing for the key game of the season, a rematch with the Baltimore Colts, defending conference champions, now a half-game ahead of Green Bay with two games remaining.

  Hornung seemed rejuvenated in practice that week, and uncommonly tame during his off-hours. He spent his nights in the motel room watching TV and drinking nothing stronger than Coca-Cola. It all worked—Lombardi’s decision to bench him, Hornung’s solitary nights of atonement—and on Sunday against the Colts he was restored. He scored five touchdowns, three on short runs and two on long passes from Starr, including one in which he caught the ball over the middle and sprinted away with an unexpected burst of speed. If Hornung had still been kicking, he certainly would have broken his own single-game scoring record, but even so, it was the sort of performance that reminded people of his unmatched versatility, a virtual replay of the thirty-three-point effort in 1961 that left Tony Canadeo sputtering about “the greatest day ever by a backfield man.”

  The play that set Hornung apart this time was not a run or a catch or a block, not even a kick, but a tackle, and it changed the game. The Packers were leading by a point, 14 to 13, with a minute left in the half when Baltimore defensive back Bob Boyd stole the ball from Taylor and raced for the end zone. Boyd would have scored if not for Hornung, who pursued him from an angle and knocked him out-of-bounds at the four. Two plays later, Dave Robinson intercepted a Baltimore pass and rumbled eighty-seven yards for a touchdown, and the rout was on, with Hornung’s three second-half touchdowns leading Green Bay to its final 42 to 27 victory. Lombardi was jubilant in the locker room afterwards. It was all about pride for Vince and his boy. “This was the big one and no one on the squad reacts to pressure better than Hornung,” Lombardi said, repeating his favorite words of praise. “The bigger the game, the better he plays.”

  The next big game came two weeks later against the Colts again, this time back in Wisconsin. The game was scheduled for December 26. The Colts arrived in Green Bay on Christmas Day with nothing to lose. Already that season they had lost through injuries not only the superb Johnny Unitas but also his backup, Gary Cuozzo, and were now playing with Tom Matte, a converted halfback, at quarterback. Matte was a gutsy player but could barely throw and remembered the plays by wearing a cheat sheet on his wrist. Passing from the pocket was unknown to him; his basic play was a college-style rollout. Even so, he led the Colts to a final game victory over the same resurgent Rams who had defeated the Packers. Anything was possible, Lombardi feared.

  Searching for ways to motivate his team before the game, Lombardi turned to the signature phrase of his mentor, Red Blaik. Above each locker he had Dad Braisher post a sign that read: “ANYTHING IS OURS … PROVIDING WE ARE WILLING TO PAY THE PRICE.” It always came back to Blaik: how Lombardi taught the game, how he motivated players. “My football is your football,” he wrote in a letter to Blaik from Green Bay. “My approach to a problem is the way I think you would approach it. I just hope and pray I can do justice to it and you.” Paying the price meant that talent alone would not suffice. Lombardi could not have chosen a more appropriate message for a game in which neither team had much to offer beyond endurance and will.

  Hornung was hobbling again, in and out. The first play was a disaster: Starr completes a pass, the tight end fumbles, Colts linebacker Don Shinnick scoops up the ball and heads toward the end zone, Starr tries to knock over one of Shinnick’s blockers but is smacked in the ribs and carried off the field, not to return. No beauty now, not much offense, just pounding and punting and waiting for breaks on a long afternoon. A field goal put the Colts up 10 to 0 at the half. The mistakes started to even out in the third quarter when Baltimore’s punter bobbled a snap and was tackled trying to make a run for it. A short drive led to a Hornung touchdown plunge. In the fourth quarter, with the Packers trailing 10 to 7, they got another break. Zeke Bratkowski, in for Starr, was tackled for a loss on third down, apparently ending a crucial drive—but Billy Ray Smith was called for roughing the passer and Green Bay kept the ball.

  With 1:58 left, Don Chandler kicked a twenty-seven-yard field goal to tie the game. Colts players and fans would argue forever that it was wide of the post. “Wide by three feet,” said tackle Lou Michaels. The Baltimore newspapers ran a picture showing the ball in the air just after it had passed the goalpost, and from the angle of the shot it looked as if it might have missed. The problem was that the uprights in that era were extremely short. Although Chandler did not hit the ball solidly, it soared high and near the imaginary line rising straight above the upright. Two members of the officiating crew were well positioned and considered it good. Ray Scott was on the field behind the other goalpost, waiting to do interviews with the winning team when the game ended. He had a straight-on view of the ball’s trajectory. “I had the best view of it, and it was good, for Chrissakes it was good!” Scott insisted.

  Overtime and sudden death, the first for Lombardi since the championship match between the Giants and Colts in 1958, when he was New York’s offensive assistant. There was nothing as stirring in this one. No long drive with Johnny U hitting Raymond Berry, no Ameche bursts up the middle. Just one ferocious block and tackle after another and twenty-eight plays and punts back and forth and Lou Michaels lining up for a forty-seven yarder, Lombardi on the sidelines thinking his team has played so well that it will be no disgrace to lose, a game that reminds him of the old Fordham-Pitt scoreless ties, but Michaels misses, and the battle goes for thirteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds of overtime until the Packers field goal team trots out, rookie center Bill Curry praying to God for a good snap, all-pro cornerback Herb Adderley closing his eyes and turning away, listening to a scratchy sidelines radio, Chandler lining up from twenty-five yards out and kicking and—it is good, indisputably. The Packers had paid the price, winning what Henry Jordan called the toughest game he had ever been in. “Well, gentlemen,” Lombardi said to newsmen crowded around him in his dressing room after the game. “You can’t say we don’t give the world a thrill.”

  The world championship was played in Green Bay the following Sunday, the Packers against the Eastern Division’s Cleveland Browns. It began snowing before dawn that morning and five inches covered the ground by noon. Dozens of cars slid off the Buttes des Morts bridge near Oshkosh, causing a major bottleneck on the road up from Milwaukee. The Browns were staying in a hotel in Appleton and it took their bus nearly two hours to reach the stadium from thirty miles away. When Jim Brown and his teammates stepped onto the field less than an hour before kickoff, the turf was soft from the snow and protective hay that had just been removed, and a cold rain made the footing treacherous. Henry Jordan had joked before the game that he had a plan to stop the great Cleveland runner: step aside and let Willie Davis get at him. Now the Packers had a bett
er defender—the weather held Jim Brown to fifty yards.

  In time, this game would be nearly forgotten, lost in the middle of Lombardi’s great triumphs. It was the last title game played before the era of Super Bowls, and though it was attached to the two Packers championships that followed in a remarkable string of three straight titles, the fact that it was not hyped as Super in retrospect made it seem oddly apart. This was both unfair and fitting in a sense, because the game was best considered on its own, a faded dream played in the mist and slop, a transitory moment between football past and future. It was, as it turned out, the last great game for Lombardi’s glorious running back tandem of Taylor and Hornung, No. 31 plowing for ninety-six yards despite a sore groin, No. 5 stepping his way to 105 with his ailing shoulder, their jerseys and faces caked in mud.

  The decisive touchdown in the 23 to 12 win came on a Packer sweep: Starr taking the snap at the thirteen-yard line, handing off to Hornung who follows left behind his linemen, Kramer and Skoronski, making textbook blocks, sealing an alley, the Horn cutting at precisely the right moment up the alley, one more time, gliding through the mud to the end zone. The image of that perfect Packer sweep endured even as the game itself diminished with time. Ed and Steve Sabol were at the stadium that day and captured it on camera for NFL Films, and from then on when they went into their film archive for a classic piece of pro football footage, they often turned to those few timeless seconds of the Golden Boy sweeping through the mud and snow to beat the Browns.

  With ten seconds remaining, Lombardi honored his stars just as he had done the last time he won a title at home, bringing them out one by one—Starr, Taylor, Hornung—to standing ovations from the exuberant home fans. The gun sounded and Green Bay was Titletown USA once more. Hornung and Taylor, their faces smudged with the grime of a day’s work, hoisted Lombardi to their shoulders and carried him onto the field, and he rode atop them in his rain hat and slicker, one arm around each, teeth flashing, winning the only thing. In the locker room he said that his 1965 Packers were not the best team he had ever coached, but the one with the most character, and he lifted a champagne glass to his boys and to the new year.

  • •

  THE GAME on the field no longer seemed the most demanding part of football. Year by year the competition between the NFL and AFL had grown fiercer and more expensive, requiring more of Lombardi’s attention as general manager. The Packers had never lost a first-round draft choice to the new league, but that now seemed possible. Only a year before, Joe Willie Namath, the AFL’s first pick, had signed with the New York Jets for a record $427,000, giving them an enormous public relations boost. For 1966 the first pick in the AFL was Jim Grabowski, a fullback from Illinois, chosen by the expansion Miami Dolphins. He had also been Lombardi’s first selection. With Taylor nearing the end of his career, Lombardi intended to groom Grabowski as his successor, the same way that he hoped to bring in Donny Anderson, the lanky halfback from Texas Tech, as Hornung’s eventual replacement. Anderson, Green Bay’s top choice in 1965, had been redshirted a year in college and was only now eligible to play for the Packers.

  The war against the AFL forced rival teams in the older league to form odd alliances of collusion. An informal group of “concerned citizens” with ties to the NFL had been recruited to babysit coveted draft choices. Grabowski’s babysitter was Vern Buol, who was not a Packers fan but an associate of George Halas’s son Mugsy in Chicago. Buol, the vice president of a meatpacking company, was assigned by the league to befriend Grabowski and keep him from the AFL’s clutches. When the young fullback traveled to New York to be honored on The Ed Sullivan Show as part of an All-America team, Buol came along and took his wife and Grabowski’s fiancée, Kathy—the three of them staying at the Plaza Hotel while Grabowski was put up at the Waldorf-Astoria with the players. Grabowski had grown up in northwest Chicago, the son of a butcher (just like Lombardi), and was stunned by the lucrative professional world now awaiting him. The Dolphins kept offering more money, but he considered it an honor to be drafted by the world-champion Packers and expressed little interest in the enticements of the newer league.

  In an effort to keep Grabowski away from the Packers, the Dolphins gave Jets owner Sonny Werblin permission to talk to him. Werblin asked Grabowski whether he would be interested in signing with the Jets if they acquired his rights. He could run in the same backfield with Namath and have a wallet just as thick. Grabowski remained noncommittal; his heart was with the NFL. When his attorney, Arthur Morse, called Lombardi and pointed out that the AFL was offering more money than the Packers, Lombardi summoned the player and his agent to Green Bay. As Grabowski later recounted:

  “So they send a private plane down to pick us up in Chicago, and we’re flying up to Green Bay and Arthur is whispering to me because he’s afraid the pilot might be a spy, one of their guys, and he whispers, ‘Jim, no matter what Lombardi offers, say you need twenty-four hours to think about it.’ And I say, ‘Of course, twenty-four hours.’ We get to Green Bay and a car picks us up and takes us over to Lombardi’s office in the stadium. We walk in there: championship trophies, pictures of all these great players as you are walking down the hall. And for a twenty-one-year-old kid who would have played for a hamburger and a shake, it’s pretty impressive. So we sit down in his office. It’s huge, with a boardroom table on one end. More pictures and trophies. We sit down at one end of the board table, across from Lombardi. I’m looking across at a legend. My attorney is trying to keep me calm. Remember. Twenty-four hours. And Arthur starts by saying, ‘Mr. Lombardi, we told you we wouldn’t go back and forth, but you must know that the Miami Dolphins offer is considerably more than yours.’

  “Lombardi, without hesitation, looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Here’s what we’ll offer you. We’ll give you a three-year contract. The amount is four hundred thousand. You can split it however you want. The only thing is your salary can’t be higher than forty thousand because that’s the highest salary on the team right now.’ He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘What do you think, son?’ And I, without thinking, shook my head yes and said, ‘Sure.’ My attorney is hitting me under the table to remind me of the twenty-four hours. But I couldn’t help but say yes. That’s it. Let’s get it over with. The instructions to me went right out the window. It was the way Lombardi looked at me and said, ‘What do you think, son?’ The look, the trophies, the pictures of the team, the legend, how can you not be influenced by this? I should have known then this was the first sign of the great psychologist that he was.”

  Anderson also signed with the Packers, though for more money, more than a half-million-dollar package, and Lombardi had his next backfield. Grabo and Donny: was this the making of another legend? Sports Illustrated put them on the cover. The press labeled them “The Gold Dust Twins.” As a general manager, Lombardi bragged about them, proud that he had acquired such talented players, though he had paid far more money than he had wanted to, and was pushed by the league to sign his draft choices at whatever cost. As the philosopher coach, he could not celebrate. He had won the war with the AFL, but that did not matter most; what he cared about was his own team, its mental and financial balance. How would the veterans take it, the ones who had paid the price and won for him season after season? Most of them responded surprisingly well, offering variations of the words Henry Jordan said to Grabowski the first time they met: “Kid, I don’t care what you make just so long as you help me win. If you help us win you’ll fit in fine.” Hornung was a prince to them, and so was Elijah Pitts. But one Packer was furious and determined to get his due: Jim Taylor looked at the salaries Anderson and Grabowski were getting and decided that he would play in Green Bay one last year, finishing his contract, then get some big money of his own.

  Money was coming, freedom was here, the world was changing. Lombardi struggled with it himself. The expansion Atlanta Falcons had made him a tremendous financial offer to leave Green Bay that year, but he had resisted, largely because he coveted power mor
e than money. “I just turned down being a potential millionaire,” he told his aide-de-camp, Ockie Krueger. He urged the Falcons instead to hire one of his assistants, Norb Hecker, while he stayed with his Packers, wringing from the executive board another raise and contract extension through 1973. If he was tempted, imagine how his players felt. This all meant nothing but trouble for his football family.

  ON THE ELEVENTH of June, Lombardi turned fifty-three, and the next day he became a grandfather. Another namesake, this one with even the same middle name—Vincent Thomas Lombardi II. The Old Man sounded ecstatic when his son called from the hospital with the vital statistics. Baby Vincent was a big one. “I have a grandson and he weighs ten pounds and is thirty-one inches long!” Lombardi boasted at the office, until Boyd Dowler said to him, “Uh, Coach, I was a long baby and I was only twenty-two inches.” No matter. God, family and the Green Bay Packers. Vince and Marie went to St. Paul for the baptism. He brought a Polaroid with an electronic flash, his latest contraption, and kept forgetting to plug it in, and every time he snapped a picture the flash fizzled and he had to try again. Jill and Vincent soon came out to Sunset Circle with their toddler. Lombardi arrived home and saw his grandson in the family room. “Look at that!” he boomed in amazement—and it was all over. He had traumatized the baby with his voice, and Vincent II started to cry and wriggle unhappily. For months thereafter, much to Lombardi’s dismay, Baby Vincent cried every time his Poppop came into sight.