"And how did you know when it was time to leave?"
"I came back in '69 because of Coach Bengtson," he said. Phil Bengtson, who had coached the Packer defense under Vince Lombardi, had succeeded him. "Coach Bengston had meant a great deal to me, and I wanted to see him have a winning season. I played that '69 season and when, with four games to go, we were mathematically eliminated, it was the first time since grade school that I walked out onto a field and had trouble scrambling for reasons to play.
"After that game—I believe it was against Minnesota—I said to myself, 'There's no need of me kidding myself. There's no way I'm gonna play.' On the twenty-first of December, Forrest Gregg and I walked out onto the field for our last game, and he said, 'Willie, we've broken a lot of huddles together, and we'll never do it again.' Later, Sid Gilman called me from San Diego, and he said, 'We've studied films, and you can play three or four years.' I told Sid, 'When I walked off that field in Green Bay I walked off a field for the last time. I'm never gonna play again.' A week later I got a call from Schlitz to buy out the company operation in Los Angeles.
"I'd been offered a few coaching jobs, five or six," he said, and only later would I learn that one of them had been at Harvard, "but I said to myself, 'I'm going into the heart of Watts, where I want to be an example.' I mean, I see so many basketballs bouncing in Watts. A kid can identify with that, but why can't I impress them that there's another avenue where maybe they can make it?
"You take the Willie Davis Distributing Company. Maybe people say, 'The guy isn't short of ego.' I didn't name the company a minute on ego. If I say that, I may be kidding myself to some degree, but there's a fine line between ego and pride. If the kids get a chance to see me on parade, maybe that'll help them to reach too. In the evenings, when I get ready to leave the place, many times I don't have to open the gate. Sure, maybe some want a dime or a quarter, but we have a relationship."
He was, he said, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, had been on the board of the West Adams Community Hospital, had served on a public commission to study county government and come up with recommendations to go on the ballot. He worked for the United Way, with Explorer Scouts, with the Watts Festival in Black, and on a career task force with junior high and high schools, and during his first four years there he averaged a speech a week.
"What I'd like to do," I said, "is come out and see you in your environment. Then we can talk at length about you and about the old coach."
"I give one man almost ninety per cent credit for whatever I am," he said. "I give Paul Brown credit for two years at Cleveland. I give my college coach, Eddie Robinson, credit for motivation and his approach to education, but right today I have a daughter and a fifteen-year-old son who is playing football, and the one sad thing is that he will never have a chance to play for Vince Lombardi."
In early March I flew out to Los Angeles, and checked into a motel near the airport. It was midafternoon when I called his office.
"Oh, he's out of town for the day," his secretary said.
"What time will he be in tomorrow?" I said.
"Oh, 7:30," she said. "He's usually here by then."
The next morning, after we spoke on the phone, he sent his younger brother Al out to pick me up. Al looks like Willie, tall and high waisted, and he has the same walk. On the way out, we talked about some of the great Packer games and, when we got into Watts, where whole city blocks, although cleared of rubble, remain vacant and weed-grown, we talked of the riots in 1965. We talked of promises unkept and dreams left still unfulfilled by a nation that, it seems to me, too often functions as if it is a battalion aid station that has neither the time nor the resources to do more than stop the bleeding.
At the plant he drove through the gate of the eight-foot chain link fence with the barbed wire on top, and up to the entrance to the two-story, modern red-brick office section that fronts the warehouse. He took me through the warehouse, high-ceilinged and immaculate, the cases stacked in perfect alignment, a white truck, spotless and with the name on the doors, being loaded.
"We usually have 150,000 cases in here," he said, "but we're down to about 120,000 right now."
While I was still trying to imagine 150,000 cases of beer being consumed, all that heisting of bottles and cans and the aftermath, he opened the door of the refrigerator room, the cold air hitting us. We stepped into an aisle between the stacked aluminum kegs.
"We have the Coliseum," he said, "and the Forum and the Sports Arena, so we move a lot of draft beer."
Back in the office reception room, he led me up a flight of stairs. There were two carpenters working, putting up the studding for new walls, and he said that Willie had just bought an FM radio station that would broadcast from there.
"KACE FM," he said. "It'll be 103.9 on the dial."
Willie's office is on the ground floor, a windowless interior room, walnut-paneled, on the wall behind the dark oak desk a black-tinted, gold-specked mirror; the carpeting tomato-red. On the wall to the left of the desk there was an oil portrait of Lombardi in the dark green Packer coaching jacket and holding a football. On the other walls there were two full-color Packer team photographs, award plaques, and framed certificates.
"I was very sorry to read about Henry Jordan," I was saying.
Willie was sitting behind the desk in a brown leather swivel chair. He had on a gray shirt, open at the neck, a dark green tie and dark green trousers. On his left ring finger was the Packer ring with the three diamonds denoting the successive championships in '65, '66, and '67.
"It was a shock to me," he said. "I've been affected. I've been moved."
Ten days before, at the Milwaukee Athletic Club where he had been jogging, Henry Jordan had died of a heart attack. He had been a five-time All Pro defensive tackle on those teams with Willie, and he was forty-two.
"I went to the funeral," Willie was saying, "and I was one of the pallbearers."
" 'I saw the picture in the paper," I said, "of you and Bart and Hawg Hanner and Bob Skoronsky and . . ."
"Ron Kostelnik and Lionel Aldridge," he said. "After the service they slide the casket out, and you take a hold and you feel this weight. I thought, 'I've lifted tables and I've lifted cases of beer, but this is my friend that I played football with for eleven years.'
"That's a weight," he said, and he leaned back and put his hands behind his head, "and it makes you think. Henry was six months younger than I am, and how much time do any of us have to enjoy life?"
"Never enough, I guess," I said, "and I'm sorry to tell you that you'll have this feeling more often from now on."
"There's so much a man wants to do, and that he can do," he said, "and Henry's passing made me realize again that you have to get about the business of doing it."
"Lombardi got both Henry and you from Cleveland," I said. "I remember how, before Lombardi turned everything around, they used to say in the league that being traded to Green Bay was like being sent to Siberia. What was it like when they told you in Cleveland that you'd been traded?"
"By then the Packers had had their first winning season under Lombardi," he said, "but it was sort of—well—disturbing. I was subbing in the school system on the west side of Cleveland, and that evening I heard it on a sports flash on the car radio."
"What a nice way to be informed," I said.
"Yeah," he said, smiling. "I had started ten ball games for Cleveland as a rookie and played three games both ways, as an offensive tackle and a defensive end. I was in Cleveland last year, and a trivia question there was, 'Who was the last Cleveland player to play a complete game both ways?' I was kind of shocked by the answer: Willie Davis.
"The next year, I'd just signed three weeks before and been told I'd graded out second best to Jim Ray Smith, and I was to start in the old Lou Groza spot. Being traded I was probably as confused as any person could be, but I drove to Green Bay, with just a couple of rest stops, and when I got near I was kind of bug-eyed. I thought I could see what seemed like ha
y coming across a field toward the road on some kind of a conveyor. I thought it was an optical illusion, but it was a big wagon of hay being pulled by a tractor, and the guy came up and right across Highway 57 in front of me.
"I went off the road, and I thought, 'Where am I going? I get up here, and I darn near lose my life.' When I got in, they said the coach wanted to see me, and you know that Coach Lombardi, with all the meanness and toughness that's been written about, had that smile that could melt an iceberg. He said, 'Willie, I want you to know one thing. We really wanted to make this trade. When I was the offensive coach in New York we took advantage of you because it was the defense you were forced to play. I was impressed by your quickness and aggressiveness. If you play like that for us, you'll make it big.' Then he said, 'What were you making in Cleveland?' Now, he knew, and before I could say anything, he said, 'We're increasing it by $1,000.' Well, I was ready to be shown the practice field, and I started behind there for one week and I moved up and started for the next ten years."
"I heard him jump on any number of people," I said, "but never you. Did he ever abuse you?"
"Yeah," Willie said, smiling. "Henry Jordan told about it once. We were in training camp, and nothing seemed to be in Lom-bardi's style. He'd been after Jordan because he'd come in heavy, and in that seven-o'clock meeting he went up and down Henry, and he finally said, 'But Jordan is not a one-man team, so there have to be some other contributors.' I'm sitting there, thinking I'm having my best camp, when he jumped on me and he said, 'Davis, what about you? When are you gonna get with this game?'
"Well, I was shocked, and I almost thought he was kidding. That night, like around midnight if he'd been on the premises, I think I'd have told him, 'I quit.' The next morning Henry went to Bengtson and he handed in his playbook, and he actually wanted to quit. When Lombardi saw me that morning he said, 'I've got to prove nobody's beyond chewing out.' I said, 'Yeah, coach, but give me some warning.'
"The worse game I ever played in my life was the Sunday we played the Forty-Niners after the Kennedy assassination. Such an attitude pervaded the whole team, but Lombardi hardly said a word. He realized that that thing had taken a lot of starch out of everybody, including himself."
"He had met Jack Kennedy, and he greatly admired him."
"Then, after a Minnesota game he got on me in a deserving way. The frustrations of Fran Tarkenton just left me bewildered. At one of the pro bowls I told Fran, 'I went a whole season saying that, if I ever catch up with you, you're gonna be in a world of trouble.' So Lombardi got on me then, but once Max McGee said, 'This had to be a tough day. He even got on Willie.'
"What he would do was, he would never hit you when you expected it. When we'd win by 40, he'd take us apart. We'd lose by 17-14, and he would make a point of why we'd win again. He could walk you out of a defeat, and the next week you'd be absolutely convinced you were gonna win again. He'd pick out two or three essentials, and he'd say, 'If you get back to these basics, it's never gonna happen again.' When we were at the fatigue point, he'd sympathize, but when he thought we were ready to win and we didn't, he took us to task."
"To put it mildly," I said.
"The man knew us," he said. "He told me once, 'Not that I can ever be black, but I can understand. When you reach out, I can understand the reach.' Forrest Gregg was another one he never had to get on."
"Well," I said, "Forrest and you were a lot alike. You were both dedicated guys."
"For ten years," he said, "Forrest and I lined up across from each other day after day, and it was like a . . . a . . ."
"A mirror?"
"Yeah," he said, smiling. "A black and white mirror."
"Speaking of black and white," I said, "I would judge, from walking around the plant and office with Al, that you've got an integrated company here."
"Is that right?" he said, laughing. "Since my favorite color is green, I really don't know. When I came here, there was one black in the office and one black truck driver and a few as salesmen. We're near fifty-fifty now, although I guess there are more black."
"Can you remember," I said, "when, growing up, you first became conscious of the difference between black and white?"
"Growing up in the South," he said, "you're segregated by so many patterns that the sight of a white person denotes the difference. My first real, believe it or not, experience in a black and white situation was when I worked at the club where my mother worked. You really felt like an object. It was the haves and the have-nots, and nothing distresses me more now than going into a restaurant and seeing a guy who has money giving a waiter or a waitress, regardless of color, a hard time.
"When I got up with Cleveland, it was the first time I was functioning as a peer, working with a white guy on the same level. In Cleveland we worked it out, and that made me appreciate Paul Brown, as I did Lombardi."
"But when you went to Green Bay," I said, "there was no real black community, and only two or three other blacks on the ball club. What was that like?"
"My wife was teaching school in Cleveland then," he said, "and the whole thing there was so interesting for both of us that my pre-disposed instinct was not to go. Being accepted by the Packers, though, was like being accepted into a family, and as to the people, they looked at you on the street kind of in awe. I'm not sure they looked at me as a Packer, or as a black Packer."
"You never found any prejudice?"
"The closest I came," he said, "was my second year, and I was looking for an apartment for the season. I saw something in the paper and I called on the phone, and it was still available. I went by, and it had just been rented. I left, and I had a friend call and it was available again.
"There was an emptiness in me. I thought, 'How can they see you on the street and make you feel so good, and turn around and they won't rent to you?' Then I said to myself, 'That's one person. It's a population of 80,000, and let's multiply that person a few times and you're still going to have a chance to meet mostly good people.'
"I went to a service station there and I mentioned it to this guy, Paul, and he got so interested that he got on the phone and turned something up. Then, two years later, I met Fabian Redman, a builder in Green Bay, and he kept an apartment open for me, and I had that every year. I'm sure he missed the income, renting only between times, and in Green Bay I saw people who almost dealt with you with kid gloves. You had to turn down invitations to dinner.
"When I went to Green Bay I went with a lot of resentment on being traded, but I would say right now that, even taking the success and having it someplace else, I honestly enjoyed myself there as much as any place I could be, with the ease in getting to the ball park and the closeness. In Cleveland we saw each other at practice, and then there was a mad exodus. In Green Bay, even if you didn't go out socially with that guy, if you went out you saw him there, anyway.
"When you lost," he said, "some woman would come up to you and say, 'That's all right. You guys will get 'em next week.' You would look at the disappointment on their faces, and it was so strong that you had to win the next time."
His phone had rung, and he picked it up.
"I'll be right out," he said into it, and then to me, "It's my insurance man. I'll be back in a few minutes. I've got some problems with the guy about claims."
On his desk there was a copy of The Wall Street Journal. On the coffee table in front of the sofa there were copies of Nation's Business, Business Week, and Black Enterprise, and I looked through those until he came back with the insurance man, whom he introduced as Hector Rexton.
"But look," Rexton said, sitting down, and obviously picking up their previous conversation, "I'm sure that they're all indoctrinated, but what happens between the indoctrination and the execution that results in these claims?"
"Well," Willie said, leaning back in his chair behind the desk, "let me say this. You send a man out with a truck and fifty cases, and he makes stops and unloads. If, somehow, you can motivate each man so that he is accident-proof, then I'm tel
ling you that you're 'Man of the Year' every year."
"I recognize your point," Rexton said, "but if you have another year this year like last year, your premium will be four times what it is now."
"But what are we talking about?" Willie said. "Sixteen cases, but it's only those two. I think you people have to get tough. If you fight these claims, not the legitimate ones but these ones that you and I understand, maybe it would stop.
"The saddest thing in this country," he said, "is that there's not a desire to work, but to get hurt working. It almost makes you ill when you see a guy come to work, and you almost know he's going to figure a way to make a claim."
They talked a few more minutes about coverages, percentages, and alternate plans. Rexton reeled off numbers, Willie nodding, and then he handed Willie some papers in a folder and shook hands and left.
"It's a problem," Willie said. "You hungry? Do you want me to send out for some sandwiches?"
"This problem," I said, after he had phoned the order, "it's not just those few who are looking to cop injury claims. It seems to me, and a lot of other people who remember another time, that there's a growing reluctance everywhere to do a hard day's work, a lack of pride in personal performance."
"You deal with what you see in this country," Willie said, "and you end up with opinions you've heard, as well as your own. You hear about minorities being shiftless, that they don't want to work, but you're being insulting when you generalize. There is a work-ethic problem in this country. To say that every guy should want to be gainfully employed is probably an unrealistic expectation. Today a lot of guys just don't believe they can get a decent job in which they can take pride.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 34