Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "That's right," he said. "That was when I beat Robinson."

  "I'd forgotten that was the time you beat Sugar Ray."

  "His name was Walker Smith then," he said, "but I never tell anybody that now. We weighed ninety pounds then, and that's not my claim to fame."

  "Whatever became of Popeye Woods?"

  "I never called him that," he said. "I called him Walter. He's around Queens, a steam-fitter. I was fighting Sammy Mastrean, and Walter was up in the gym, at Stillman's, and he said, 'Billy, look what you're doin' in there.' I said, 'What?' He said, 'When you knock that jab aside with your left, you're moving the guy over here. You'd have to square around to hit him with your right. Look. Take a jab, slip the next one, and he's movin' into your right hand. Practice it.' So I practiced it and tried it in the gym and practiced it some more, and I said to myself, 'Aw, I can't do it. Forget it.'

  "So I fought this Sammy Mastrean, and at the end of the sixth round I'm ahead, but it's getting tough. At the start of the seventh round, Whitey is sayin', 'Do this, do that, you Irish this.' I said, 'Listen, you. I know what I'm doin'.' I'm not even listening to him. I said, 'Just wash out the mouthpiece, and put it back in.'

  "The next round he comes out storming, and I figure I've got to do something here. He hit me a jab—bang—on the forehead. When he started the next one, I slipped it and threw the right and down he went. When he got up he was wobbling, and the referee is wiping his gloves under his arms and trying to see if he's all right, and he's dragging the referee around with him. When he motioned me to come back I figured I got to do it now, and I laid it on him—boom, boom, boom—and down he went and out."

  "What is it like," I said, "for that kid who put tape over his eye because he wanted to be known as a fighter? When that recognition comes, is it as good as he thought it would be?"

  "I remember I was boxing in the Broadway Arena," he said. "I was fightin' a guy named AI Guido, and on the way in I was carrying my own bag. When you become a star, Whitey carries the bag, so this guy stops me. He says, 'You're Billy Graham?' I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'Can I have your autograph?' The first time it's impressive, and then it became a part of your everyday life. The recognition makes you feel good, but it happens so often that you don't think about it."

  "Other fighters have told me," I said, "that, right after they retired, they'd see a couple of other guys fighting in the ring—say in the Garden—and they'd think, 'Gee, I could take them. I could do better than that.' Did you ever have that feeling?"

  "It always happens," he said. "Even today I see fights, and I think I could have handled them. Some guys would have given me trouble, but not too many, but once I finished I never really thought of it. I quit in May and went to work for National in July, and there was never any way I could do better than I did."

  "But don't you ever miss it, ever wish you were young and back in it again?"

  "It's a feeling you can't reproduce in any other field," he said. "Not a lot, but two or three times a year, I'll find myself driving into the city, and what comes to my mind are not the big fights, but those smaller fights in that scramble to get to a main event. That's where it's all at.

  "You're in with fellas who are trying to get a $100 fight, and you're trying to get a $100 fight, and that guy is gonna fight harder than the guy who's gonna get fifteen or twenty thousand. I think, 'How did I ever do it for $100?' I used to go in with all those tough guys, and one day at the racetrack I said to George Cobb, who used to promote out in New Jersey, 'I never got more than $90 from you.' He laughed, and he said, 'But look at the education you got.'

  "They had no showers. You had to take a bucket of water, and put one foot in and wash yourself. Elizabeth, New Jersey, $35, six rounds, and $37.50 the second time, and I had Irving and Whitey and myself. Today I'm not sure I'd want to go through all that again."

  "Today no one would," I said. "Our world has changed, and I'm not sure it's all to the better."

  "Today the attitudes are bad," he said. "When I was a fighter, I wanted to give them their money's worth, whether they were for me or against me, and today they don't put the effort in. No matter what I did, I put the effort in, or I wouldn't feel right about it. Today, when I get an order for a case, it makes me feel good. It spurs me, because I'm earning my way. I want to find some new bodies, guys who don't have it in, or get them to take more. I got to go see 'em. A lot of salesmen do it by phone. I may call a few personal friends, but I go around. I put the effort in."

  "I don't want to open an old wound," I said, "but in your dressing room after you licked Gavilan for the title and didn't get it . . ."

  "That's all right," he said, smiling. "It's a lot of years since then."

  "I know," I said. "There was this guy in your dressing room, and he was saying, 'You're still the champ, and when you walk into a joint they'll call you "Champ." ' You walk into joints now every day on your job. Do they call you 'Champ'?"

  "Less frequently than years ago," he said. "A few people still remember that fight, but you know how it is."

  "I'm afraid so," I said.

  "Every old fighter," he said, "is called 'Champ.' "

  More snow had started to fall by midafternoon, and it was coming on dusk as they prepared to leave. There were about four inches of new powder on top of the old, and the air was thick with it when my wife and I walked them to their car.

  "Now, the driving is going to be hazardous," I said, "so you'd better put it in second going down this hill. Then, as you get near Bromley, the wind always whips across the flat there, so you'd better take it real slow."

  "Don't worry about it," he said, the same Billy Graham. "Relax. We'll make it all right."

  We waited while he backed the car out of the driveway, and they started on the road, the red tail lights showing through the falling snow. We went inside and watched out of the window, the headlights searching ahead into the white curtain as the car slowly made the turn to start down the hill.

  "They're really a nice family," my wife said.

  "And he really licked Gavilan that night," I said, "and it's still a damn shame."

  11

  The Coach, Relived

  In Willie Davis we got a great one.

  Vince Lombardi

  It was the first week of July 1962, and we were starting to put a book together in Green Bay. It was to be Vince Lombardi's first, and he had a respect for good books, and so, at the beginning, he was caught up in that romance of being an author. For the two weeks before the Packer training camp opened at St. Norbert College across the Fox River in West DePere, I was living with him and Marie and young Vincent and Susan in their new ranch house at 667 Sunset Circle. Each morning, after he had come back from eight o'clock Mass at St. Willebrord's and we had had breakfast, we would go down into the rec room, and I would get out the notebook. We would put in three hours, and then after lunch we would get in two or three more.

  "How are we doing?" he said, at the end of the third afternoon.

  "We're doing all right," I said, because you hoped never to have to tell him that you were doing otherwise.

  "Are we almost done?" he said.

  "Almost done?" I said. "I'm only on my second notebook."

  "The second notebook?" he said. "How many notebooks are there going to be?"

  "Oh, I don't know," I said. "That's hard to say."

  "Three? Or four?"

  "Five or six."

  "Six notebooks?" he said, those eyes burning into my head and that voice thrown Uke a spear. "Six notebooks? How am I gonna do six notebooks? Six notebooks? I've got paper work to do at the office! I've got players I haven't even signed yet! I've gotta play golf! Once training camp starts I can't play again until the end of the season! Six notebooks? How are we ever gonna do six notebooks?"

  "I don't know, coach," I said, "but we'll find a way."

  "You guys didn't tell me it was going to be this much work," he said.

  "You didn't ask."

  "Well, we'll have to
do some of it in camp," he said. "We'll be living in the dean's suite, and we can get in an hour or two a day there."

  "Relax, coach," I said. "I said we'll find a way."

  I meant that I would find a way, and in the month I spent in camp the dream of working in the dean's suite dissolved, as I had suspected it would, into a total of an hour and a half. Before we went into camp I rode miles in golf carts, following him and his companions around the eighteen holes of the Oneida Golf Club, and then spent hours at the bar listening to replays of hole after hole. While he drove down to Fond du Lac to watch Susan in a horse show, I made notes in the car. We talked over drinks before dinner at home, and in restaurants, and I wedged my way amid the paper work at the Packer office that then occupied the old two story, flat-roofed, red-brick corner building at 349 South Washington Street in downtown Green Bay.

  "I think I've found a way to simplify this," I said to him late one morning, sitting across from him at his desk, and it'll save some time."

  "Good," he said.

  "I'm going to start naming players," I said. "When I give you a name, you tell me the first thing that comes to your mind about him, not as a player—we'll get to that another time—but as a person. Do you understand what I mean?"

  "Of course I understand," he said. "Let's get started."

  "Right, coach," I said. "Bart Starr."

  "Tense by nature, because he's a perfectionist. I've never seen him display emotion outside of nervousness. Modest. Tends to be self-effacing, which is usually a sign of lack of ego. You never hear him in the locker room telling T stories. He calls me 'sir.' Seems shy, but he's not. He's just a gentleman. You don't criticize him in front of others. When I came here he lacked confidence and support. He still lacks daring, and he's not as creative as I'd like him to be, but a great student of the game."

  "Paul Hornung."

  "Can take criticism in public or anywhere. You have to whip him a little. He had a hell-with-you attitude, a defensive perimeter he built around himself when he didn't start out well here. As soon as he had success he changed. He's still exuberant, likes to play around, but serious on the field. Always looks you straight in the eye. Great competitor who rises to heights."

  "Jerry Kramer."

  "Nothing upsets him, so you can bawl him out any time. He's been near death, but he's happy-go-lucky, like a big kid. Takes a loss quite badly, though."

  "Ray Nitschke."

  "The rowdy on the team. Big, fun-loving, rough, belligerent. Like a child. Never gives you an argument, but he'll turn around and do the same thing over again. He's the whipping boy, but he can take it. Criticism just runs off his back. You don't improve him. He improves himself."

  "Forrest Gregg."

  "Intelligent and, like Marie says, a picture-perfect player. Gives you a hundred per cent effort, a team player. Quick temper. I've seen him go at teammates in practice. Has all the emotions, from laughter to tears. Can take criticism anywhere, if it's constructive."

  "Jimmy Taylor."

  "Uses jive talk that I can't understand. Has a lot of desire, because he wants to be the best football player the NFL has ever seen. He likes to knock people down, and he'll go out of his way to do it. You have to keep after him, though."

  "Henry Jordan."

  "All-Pro, all-everything, but don't ever flatter him. He needs public criticism. He thinks he's the greatest and tends to be satisfied. Strangely, he's easily upset, but he needs to be upset to perform. In reviewing pictures I'll make him a target, not to impress somebody else as you do with some of them, but to help him."

  In that hour or so I named off all thirty-six Packers, and out of their instant personality profiles there also emerged a profile of the man often described now as the greatest of all football coaches. In the month in camp and a week during the season, I heard the tongue-lashings. I saw men, grown beyond the size of most of us —some of them fathers—cringe, and I heard others swear under their breaths. They knew, however, and if they didn't they soon learned, what I knew after that morning in the office. He knew them, not just as football players but as distinct individuals, each of whom he was determined to make into a better player than that man had ever thought he could be, in Vince Lombardi's obsession to create, out of all the parts, one entity greater than any team that had ever been.

  "Willie Davis," I said.

  "Traded to Cleveland for him," he said. "A hell of a young man. Very excitable under game conditions. A worrier. Before a game he's got that worried look, so I try to bolster his confidence. He's not worried about the team losing—he's got confidence in the team—but he's worried about how Willie Davis will perform . . . about not letting the team down. Fine brain, too. In Willie Davis we got a great one."

  Fourteen years later, on our way out to Jim Tescher's in North Dakota, my wife and I stopped off at Green Bay for three days. On that Sunday the Packers would be opening another season— under Bart Starr now—and I wanted to visit with old acquaintances. I hoped to find, in one or another, what still lived of Vince Lombardi six years after cancer took him on September 3, 1970, in Georgetown University Hospital.

  "Willie Davis is coming in from California," Tom Miller said. He played end during the mid-Forties for the Eagles, Redskins, and the Packers, and he is the Packer's general business manager. "Willie's doing very well. He has a big Schlitz distributorship in L.A., and he's on the board of directors of the Schlitz Brewing Company. You remember Willie, of course.

  "Of course," I said. "I remember him very well."

  I remember that great smile flashing, and how the others called him "Doctor Feelgood," and I remember that worried look that Lombardi had described and that would shroud Willie Davis in front of his locker before a game. During the week he would be the outward optimist, but he was unable to eat before a game and until the morning after, and once, during that month in camp in '62, we sat in one of those dormitory rooms in Sensenbrenner Hall at St. Norbert, and he told me about his beginnings.

  He was born in Lisbon, Louisiana, the oldest of three children of a broken family. He grew up in Texarkana, Arkansas, where his mother cooked at a country club, did catering and took in laundry. At Grambling College, which has sent so many football players to the pros, he captained the team for two years.

  "When I was drafted by the Browns," he said that day, "I was the seventeenth choice when they picked thirty, and I was concerned. I was from a small Negro school, and there were guys with bigger names picked later. Then in camp you find a guy from Notre Dame or Michigan State whom you've read about."

  "Well, they didn't run you off the field," I said.

  "No," he said, "and pro football has been the difference between me being just another guy and having something today. In fact, I sometimes shake when I think I might not have finished college and not made a pro club."

  "There are a lot of guys," I said, "who are lucky enough to be able to play this game but to whom that thought has never occurred."

  "Well," he said, "I think the responsibility I had growing up of looking after the young ones helped me. I've never smoked, and I'm not considered a drinker."

  "And the coach tells me you're a worrier, always worried about Willie Davis doing his best."

  "That's right," he said. "I constantly replay situations where I could have played better. During the off-season I think of them over and over, and I come back thinking, 'I'm not gonna do that again.' What it is, I guess, is that I try to play so that I can live with myself."

  He became the Packer's defensive captain, and on those Packer teams that won five NFL championships in seven years and the first two Super Bowls, he was one of the finest defensive ends ever to play the game. He made All Pro five times, and he retired at the end of the 1969 season.

  On the morning after Tom Miller had talked about him, I met Willie, the high forehead a little higher but the smile just the same, at the Packer offices at Lambeau Field on what, in 1968, they renamed Lombardi Avenue. He drove me in his car over to the Midway Mote
l, and for an hour or so we talked in his room.

  "Are you the first black on the Schlitz board of directors?" I said.

  "That's right," he said, smiling. "In fact, I'm the second non-family member."

  "How did that come about?" I said.

  "Well," he said, "long before I quit playing I had started to put together for the day when I could no longer live up to Willie Davis's standards. I wanted to avoid that situation where some coach walks up to you and taps you on the shoulder and says, 'We can't use you any more.' The most fearful thing to me was the day when I couldn't play the game any more.

  "My first year in Cleveland I subbed in the school system, but by the second year of subbing I just didn't feel I wanted to be a teacher. I caught on in sales with a brewery out of Pittsburgh, and when I came back to Green Bay the next year I approached the people in Schlitz. I moved to Chicago to work that area, and I enrolled at the University of Chicago, in the business school, and in four years I got my masters in business administration, in marketing. Then, any time the situation warranted, I could leave football."