That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory

by John Eisenberg

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Introduction

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART II

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue

  GREEN BAY PACKERS 1959 SEASON

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright © 2009 by John Eisenberg

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eisenberg, John, date.

  That first season : how Vince Lombardi took the worst team in the NFL

  and set it on the path to glory / John Eisenberg.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-618-90499-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Lombardi, Vince. 2. Football coaches—United States—Biography.

  3. Green Bay Packers (Football team)—History. I. Title.

  GV939.L6E37 2009

  796.332092—dc22 [B] 2009028269

  Book Design by Brian Moore

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my mother,

  JEAN EISENBERG,

  and in memory of my father,

  SEYMOUR EISENBERG

  Author's Note

  Material previously published in newspapers, magazines, and books greatly informed this narrative, but the primary source was new interviews with almost three dozen people who either witnessed or participated in the 1959 season: players and coaches, some of their family members, journalists, fans, and Packer board members. I sought to depict all thoughts, attitudes, and conversations precisely as they were relayed to me, using italics where supposition was required or memories conflicted. If any errors of fact, intention, or tone exist, they're mine.

  Introduction

  PEOPLE STARTED gathering at Austin-Straubel Field shortly after sundown. It was a cold, wet Monday night in December 1959, and the Green Bay Packers had just completed their first winning season since Harry Truman's early years in the White House. Now they were flying home after beating the San Francisco 49ers in California, and the fans were coming out to the airport to welcome them. By 8 P.M., when the team's charter flight was scheduled to arrive, the crowd had swollen to a rollicking eight thousand, filling a field by the terminal. Cars were backed up for a mile on the airport road.

  Although the Packers had gotten themselves together too late to challenge for the National Football League's Western Division title, they had ended the season with a flourish, scoring a series of one-sided wins over opponents that had dominated them for the past decade. It was something of a miracle: just one year after embarrassing themselves with the worst season in their forty-year history, they appeared ready to challenge for a place among pro football's elite.

  The Association of Commerce, a businessmen's group, had hastily planned an airport welcome, and typical of Green Bay, the littlest town in the big leagues, everyone pitched in. The local newspaper, the Green Bay Press-Gazette, publicized the event. A transportation company contributed flatbed trucks and a wagon to support the stage. The manager of the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena brought a platform, lights, and a public-address system. The Civil Defense Auxiliary Police were mustered to oversee traffic and parking. The ceremony would include a speech by Green Bay mayor Roman Denissen and music by the St. Norbert College band.

  Only the weather—thirty degrees and rain—failed to cooperate, but when it was announced that the plane would be an hour late, people just smiled, turned up their collars, and huddled closer under their umbrellas. After suffering through years of atrocious football, Packer fans didn't mind enduring a little more to show their support for a winner. Hey, it could be worse. We could have snow up to our knees.

  The Packers were like every high school football team in a small town, if on a somewhat larger scale, eliciting widespread but soft-spoken grousing when they lost and a giddy unanimity when they won. Fans had come to the airport with hand-painted signs that read, "Our Team Is Red Hot!" and "We Love Our Pack!" The lead editorial in that morning's Press-Gazette had congratulated the team for finishing the season so impressively.

  While the fans waited in the rain for the Packers' homecoming, the band rolled through its halftime fare, drawing hearty applause after each tune. A cheer went up at 8:30 when the emcee, anchor Les Sturmer of WBAY-TV, announced that the airport tower had been in contact with the plane and the Packers would arrive in half an hour.

  On board the returning flight, Don "Bud" Smith, pilot of the United Airlines DC-6 charter, leaned back from his conversation with the tower and told Packers coach Vince Lombardi that a crowd had gathered to greet them. Thousands of people, they're telling me.

  Lombardi, a short, stout New Yorker in his first year with the Packers, got out of his seat and walked down the aisle with a smile, delivering the news to the players in his thick Brooklyn tongue. How about that? The fans are out to greet us. They're standing in the rain. Thousands of Pack-ah fans! Heh! How about that?

  Lombardi had been a brutal boss throughout the season, continually subjecting players to volcanic outbursts of criticism, pushing them to the brink of their physical and mental limits, accepting nothing less than perfection. But he was as unpredictable as he was tough, and could turn chummy, almost paternal, without warning.

  One of his favorite players, Max McGee, a wry receiver, shook his head in amazement when Lombardi told him about the crowd at the airport.

  "What would they do if we actually won something?" McGee asked.

  Heh! Good one, Max. Who knows?

  The players were ready to be home. They had been in California for two weeks, playing games in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and now they had been crammed into a plane for eight hours. They were gratified to hear about the warm welcome. The year before, when they had been laughingstocks, they stopped going to restaurants around town because they grew weary of being ridiculed and asked what was wrong.

  But incredibly, it turned out that the pieces of a winning team had been in place that season, just utilized incorrectly or, in some cases, not at all. Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, and Jim Taylor had spent most of the season on the bench, but now they comprised the starting offensive backfield. The whole team had been undisciplined, unorganized, and in poor physical condition, but now the Packers played with the crisp confidence of a military unit on marching maneuvers. Lombardi, formerly an assistant coach with the New York Giants, had engineered a remarkable transformation.

  As the plane approached Green Bay, Bud Smith warned that the foul weather might prevent a landing, in which case he would "fly to Milwaukee, refuel, and head for Bermuda." Lombardi and his assistant coaches and players laughed hard; that sounded pretty good. But then Smith brought the plane
through the clouds and down.

  The fans cheered the sight of the aircraft chugging in for a landing. There was a flurry of activity as the DC-6 taxied toward the crowd. Someone turned on the spotlights. The mayor fingered a key to the city, which he would hand to Lombardi. Sturmer, the emcee, cleared his throat. Men from the Association of Commerce brought up a stack of green-and-gold Packer blankets to give to the players. The fans started clapping rhythmically as the plane stopped in front of them, engines still running. The band swung into a blaring version of "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight."

  Watching from on board, the players were stunned. No one spoke until Jesse Whittenton, a veteran cornerback, finally sputtered the question McGee had asked minutes earlier: "I mean, what would they do if we won something?"

  McGee, sitting nearby, drawled, "They'd probably give us the whole town."

  Players and fans alike sensed a new era dawning. Though a season had just ended, the Packers seemed at a beginning. The promise of a better future had drawn this crowd out to the airport on a cold, wet night.

  Smith killed the engines. The players stood up, stretched, and headed for the exit as an airport crew rolled a portable stairway up to the door. The first player to emerge into the drizzle was Forrest Gregg, a burly offensive tackle. Fans chanted his name as he smiled and waved from the top of the stairway. One by one, his teammates followed him through the door and down the stairs as the crowd cheered and the band played.

  Finally, there was one man left on the plane other than the pilot. He shrugged into his tan overcoat, adjusted his fedora, and ducked through the doorway. The fans, seeing him emerge, sent out their loudest roar. Lombardi took it all in, smiled the gap-toothed grin the whole world would soon know, and waved his right arm above his head.

  Just one year in, and Green Bay was his town now.

  PART I

  1

  IT WAS A GAME they would never forget, their worst defeat, a day so miserable some players just shrugged and gave up before the final gun.

  On November 2, 1958, the Green Bay Packers were in Baltimore playing the undefeated Colts. They did little right on offense or defense as rain fell and fifty-two thousand fired-up fans screamed for their heads, and by early in the second half, they trailed by six touchdowns. A few players decided that since they had no chance of winning—and they sure as hell didn't—they could ease up and go through the motions for the last twenty minutes. Why not? Their coach, Ray "Scooter" McLean, wouldn't mind, as long as they didn't make it obvious. Scooter was a swell guy. Everyone liked him.

  Not every Packer quit. Jim Ringo, an All-Pro center, quietly continued to knock down defenders as others stampeded past. Tom Bettis, a veteran middle linebacker, screamed for better effort in the huddle as the rout spiraled out of control.

  A few Packers, in frazzled frustration, dreamed of stealing a sideline policeman's gun and shooting that damn white horse, the Colts' team mascot, which took a celebratory gallop across the field whenever Baltimore scored.

  But more than a few Packer players just gave in, their minds drifting from this pitiful scene toward more pleasant thoughts, such as the steak dinner they would enjoy on the plane ride home that evening, or the paycheck they would receive later in the week—the paycheck they pocketed win or lose, thank goodness.

  The Packers were fixtures on the bottom of the NFL pile, chronic losers who until recently had played their home games in a former high school stadium. They didn't practice hard, didn't mind losing, and hadn't produced a winning season since 1947. They were just happy to get to spend the fall playing football instead of selling tires or insurance, as many did during the rest of the year.

  Their franchise's past was as glittery as its present was miserable: the Packers had reigned during the NFL's rough and rowdy early years, attracting loyal fans and accumulating six championships as charismatic legends Johnny Blood and Don Hutson led them to glory. But those heady days were just hazy memories now. The Packers' losing habit had swallowed up three head coaches in the past decade, and Scooter, just halfway into his first year on the job, was already seeing his dreams disintegrate.

  A wiry bantam with a narrow face and squinty eyes, Scooter had been a quick-footed halfback for the Chicago Bears in the 1940s, and he resembled a mob machine-gunner now as he paced the sideline in a crisp dark suit and fedora. But in reality, he had a genial and forgiving nature and was grossly miscast as a boss. He had been a Packers assistant coach for the past seven years and still saw himself as one of the boys. He played poker with the players on the road, didn't enforce curfews, and failed to scold veterans who repeated mistakes. When he called for wind sprints at his laughably easy practices, he shouted the squad through a few until Billy Howton, a veteran receiver, groaned, "Come on, Scooter, we need to save our legs for Sunday." Scooter would smile, blow his whistle, and end practice.

  The Packers had come to Baltimore for this midseason game with a record of one win, three losses, and a tie, and the Colts, winners of five straight, were favored by nineteen points. But the Packers, incredibly, in hindsight, believed they could win. They had almost upset the Colts earlier in the season in Wisconsin—as Western Division rivals, they played a pair of games every year on a home-and-home basis—and they thought they could finish the job this time.

  Their optimism wasn't entirely unwarranted. They had capable veterans such as Ringo, Bettis, Howton, linebacker Bill Forester, and Bobby Dillon, a superb defensive back despite being blind in one eye. And Scooter, for all his shortcomings, knew offensive football. His system traced to the strategies of Clark Shaughnessy, a legendary guru who had reworked the T-formation in the 1930s to improve the passing game. Chicago Bears coach George Halas had picked up the offense and won four NFL titles in the 1940s, and Scooter, after playing on those teams, had added his own wrinkles—a lot of them. His playbook was a four-inch-thick maze of diagrams, so complicated that Jim Taylor, the Packers' rookie fullback, couldn't get a handle on it and had to sit on the bench. But the Packers could move the ball, or at least, had so far in 1958. Even though their quarterbacks, Bart Starr and Babe Parilli, had proved to be just modest talents, receivers Howton, Max McGee, and Gary Knafelc could get open, and the Packers were averaging more than twenty points per game.

  Earlier in the season they had beaten the Philadelphia Eagles and tied the Detroit Lions, the defending NFL champions. But they had almost blown a twenty-four-point lead against the Eagles, needing a recovered onside kick by rookie linebacker Ray Nitschke in the final minute to survive; Scooter had looked ashen after that one, wondering what had gone wrong. And to say they were lucky to tie the Lions was an understatement. The Lions were in position to kick a game-winning field goal in the final minutes, but Lions quarterback Bobby Layne imperiously waved off the kicker and threw an incompletion on fourth down, preserving the tie. Layne, the hard-drinking leader of a Lions team that had won three NFL titles in the 1950s, was traded to Pittsburgh two days later.

  Encouraged by such performances, the Packers didn't see an epic defeat brewing in Baltimore. But their bad habits were bound to catch up with them and finally did, turning the rematch with the Colts into the game that exposed them for what they were, a team destined to be recalled as one of the worst in NFL history.

  On the night before the game, they stayed at the Washingtonian Motel in Gaithersburg, Maryland, nearer Washington, D.C., than Baltimore. It was out of the way, but the Packers had stayed there when they came to the area to play the Washington Redskins a few weeks earlier, and the motel cut the team a deal for agreeing to stay twice. That was how the Packers traveled, always looking to save pennies.

  As the players checked in and headed for their rooms, Scooter hollered, "Practice in half an hour!" The bare-bones Washingtonian had a football field on its grounds (the Redskins used it during their preseason training camp) and the brief practice that ensued was typically light: a short run, some calisthenics, a run-through of a few plays. Scooter was "saving the legs" for the
next day.

  That evening, some players and coaches went to a movie while Scooter, Howton, McGee, second-year back Paul Hornung, and a few others played poker. They played religiously, on trips, during training camp, after practice during the season—often enough that they almost passed for a card club that dabbled in football. They talked animatedly about memorable poker hands more than memorable football games, and recorded their wins and losses on the backs of their playbooks, settling up at the end of the year. McGee, a lanky Texan who found the humor in most situations, was an intuitive card shark who had fleeced his teammates for hundreds of dollars over the years. Scooter regularly lost.

  Some players didn't go to the movie or play poker. Before the Redskins game a few weeks earlier, Bettis, Knafelc, and Starr had headed out just to stretch their legs. They were married, by-the-rules guys. When they passed by the poker room, Scooter leaned back and said, "Hey, where you going?" When Bettis shrugged, Scooter said, "Well, make sure you're back by ten thirty." Bettis walked away cursing their poker-playing coach for believing he had any right to dictate how they should prepare to play.

  On this Saturday night, before the Baltimore contest, the card game broke up a little after Scooter's curfew, but what the hell, Scooter said, at least the guys were in. The next morning, some players attended early church and then everyone ate breakfast and boarded a bus for the forty-five-minute drive to Baltimore. The players quietly stared out the window during the ride, contemplating what lay ahead. Despite the closeness of their earlier game, they knew the Colts were capable of pounding them. Led by Johnny Unitas, a brilliant, hunch-shouldered young quarterback, the Colt offense had already scored fifty-one points against the Bears and forty against the Lions this season.

  Hornung was disconsolate as the bus rolled through the Maryland countryside toward Baltimore. He knew he wouldn't get off the bench in this game except to kick field goals and extra points. Eyeing his reflection in a window, he glumly told himself, Your career is going nowhere, buddy.