Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "The problem, if you're the employer, is to impart pride, but that's not easy with some guys. When^you tell a guy that, hey, he's not doing the job and he'd better start cuttin' it, he lights up. He's going on unemployment insurance. That's the problem."

  "So what do you do about it?"

  "With some there's nothing you can do," he said, "but what I try to do here is what Lombardi did at Green Bay, instill pride in the organization. When a new guy walked in there, he got caught up. Chuck Mercein, Ben Wilson, Anderson, the tight end, it was almost like they were saying, 'Hey, you guys really expect to win!' When I set up an incentive, it's how well are we going to do it? I try to make a guy grow in his own position, but always remembering that you can't compare some guy who just doesn't have it with a Dave Robinson. The ability is just not there, but I have brought salesmen in here who have said, 'I can't believe the attitude you guys have.' It's what Coach Lombardi used to say, 'Success is contagious. It breeds.' "

  "Seeing you here," I said, "running a sizeable operation, and knowing that you sit on the board of the parent company, I have to make an adjustment. I had the same feeling at Green Bay last fall, watching Bart Starr on the practice field ordering people around. I remember you all just taking orders, subservient and day after day just following commands."

  "Yeah," he said, smiling. "I can see what you mean."

  "I recall, too, something Jerry Kramer once told me. He said, T often think, What am I doing? Here I am, a grown man, with a wife and three kids, and I'm rolling around on the ground like a kid myself.' "

  "You know, it is a child's game," Willie said, "but all the years I played, and when I was getting older, I maintained my enthusiasm for it. Only in my last year, in those last four games did I say, 'What am I doing here?' "

  "A fine athlete," I said, "expresses himself in his sport as he can in nothing else, regardless of whatever success he has later in some other endeavor."

  "That's right," he said.

  "Do you ever miss that moment when you would break through the block and make the perfect tackle, knowing that feeling you can never reproduce in anything else?"

  "Yes," he said. "That's right. I do."

  "Is that an idea I've just put in your mind?"

  "No," he said, "I've thought of that, but what I really miss is being one of the guys."

  "As a boss?"

  "Right. People look at you in a different way. You want to say, 'Hey! I'm me!' You know?"

  "Yes," I said. "I would imagine that maybe there's a sort of fraternity here of, say, drivers. They share experiences."

  "Exactly," he said. "I go out, and I see them laughing and talking, and I walk up and something happens. It changes. On the Packers I was kind of a fun guy, a laughing guy. Now I see them standing around, and one guy is telling a story and laughing and they're all listening, and I walk up and I can see the guy's eyes change, and he goes on with the story, but it goes flat. I remember I'd be telling something and laughing, and Coach Lombardi would come up, and it was like it just wasn't that funny any more."

  We talked, over the sandwiches and coffee, and between phone calls that he accepted and made, of the changes in professional football. We spoke of players' agents and the rocketing salaries and bonuses in all team sports.

  "As long as the money is there," I said, "I'm for it going to the athletes. After all, who would pay to see Wellington Mara kick a football around with Edward Bennett Williams or Art Modell?"

  "That's right," he said. "People ask me, 'Don't you really wish you were playing now? Wouldn't you like all that money?' I wouldn't trade my years for anything, though. I played in a period when football reached its maturity in this country, and I'm still so pleased that I'll take my period, the people who played with me, and what it meant to me. That's why it's hard to put away a Henry Jordan.

  "Every time I get back to Green Bay it warms my heart all over, because the people reach out and bring me back to left end. They say, 'If you were at left end, this Packer team would have what it needs.' I chuckle, but that's unfair to the guy out there."

  "You look like you could almost step in there," I said. "You haven't put on much weight."

  "I'm 255," he said, "and I played last at 247. I jog in the morning, and there are days when I wake up and I don't feel like getting up and crawling into the office. I say to myself that I own the Willie Davis Distributing Company, and today I'm going to exercise my prerogative and not go in. Then I think, 'What would Lombardi do?' I get up and out of bed. It's six o'clock, and I throw on my sweats and drive here and I jog and do a few wind sprints. They get harder to do. I think that today maybe I'll do six, and then I say to myself, 'Why don't I do two extra?' So I do, and then I take my shower."

  "The Lombardi syndrome," I said. "During those terrible grass drills—up and down, up and down—when you guys were ready to collapse, he'd call for more. You remember how Bill Quinlan was always trying to cheat on them, and Lombardi would jump him?"

  "Yeah," Willie said, smiling.

  "One day Quinlan said to me, 'When I give up this game and start to miss it, I'll have it solved. I've got a film of this grass drill, and I'll run that and sit back and say, 'The hell with it!' "

  "The Lombardi syndrome is everywhere," Willie said. "Jerry Kramer and Bob Skoronski and people like that—we'll sit down and share experiences. I'm involved in the school supply business with Bob, and we'll compare notes on motivational speakers at conferences. You not only find that there are those Lombardi principles that work, but you can't believe the admiration they had for the man. Whether the speaker is from IBM, or whatever, you hear them throw back at you again dedication, effort, pride . . ."

  "And the importance of winning," I said.

  "I've made it a point to clarify that statement," he said. "When Lombardi said that winning is the only thing, it was so expressive in my own mind. If you knew the man, you knew it was the pursuit, and you don't prepare to lose. I say that I hope we never reach the point where we're planning to lose, and that's all Lombardi meant."

  "He caught a lot of flak for that," I said, "and he caught some more when we did a couple of pieces in Look, and got onto the subject of competitive animosity and the need, each week, to build up a hate for the opponent. Of course, it dissolves the moment the game is over."

  "That's right," Willie said. "Gale Sayers lived in the next block from me in Chicago, and he's one of the nicest human beings. We'd have dinner together, but when I'd see him in that Bear uniform, I could take him on with determination and hostility. That's what Lombardi meant."

  It was shortly after five o'clock when Willie' had finished with phone calls and office appointments and the signing of letters. He said he would drive me back to my motel, and we walked out into the parking space where, although I had failed to notice it coming in, there was an old double-decker London bus. It was painted a dark red, and a sign on it advertised a firm of accountants specializing in preparing income tax returns.

  "We just got it today," Willie said. "We're going to have the engine reconditioned and have it reupholstered and repainted, and take it around for the radio station."

  "As a sort of mobile unit?"

  "That's right," he said. "To take it to the people."

  He opened the door and I followed him in, and we climbed to the upper deck. Mounted in front and in back to face into frames were the black scrolls with the white letters that had revealed to those inherently patient and polite British who had queued up at stops 6,000 miles away, even amid the rubble of the London Blitz, the destinations: Oxford Circus . . . Regent Street . . . Picadilly Circus . . . Trafalgar Square.

  "I've been meaning to ask you," I said, as we got out, "about your plans for the station."

  "Well," he said, "I have felt for some time that one of the most important involvements I could have would be in the community where I'm selling my product. All my life I'd heard, especially in minority communities, of selling products and then going home every night regardless of the q
uality of life of the people. One thing I knew was that I was going to be able to sleep at night, and so I've worked with the Urban League and those other things, and the radio station can provide me with another opportunity.

  "My greatest commitment with the station will be to serve the people. Equal to my profit motive is my motive to provide an outlet for the citizens within the coverage area. KACE will be a station of credibility."

  "That's fine," I said, "but how do you accomplish that?"

  "We did a survey," he said, "and found crime and unemployment were what were troubling people. You expect that, but I personally went out and I said, 'If you had a station, what would it address itself to? What do you like and dislike?' Now, this is not some computer-derived survey. Maybe we haven't gone through all that I went through at the University of Chicago. I don't care about the randomness or the statistical reliability. I talked with the people, and music and our public service will be what it's about.

  Music transcends all racial backgrounds, and I want this to be a station that anybody can listen to and one that's sensitive enough to address itself to issues with meaningfulness and impact."

  We got into his car. It was a new light-gray Cadillac Seville, and he backed it out of the parking space.

  "This is the first Cadillac I've ever had," he said. "It's the smaller model, though."

  "You don't have to apologize," I said. "You've earned it."

  "I don't know if I should say this," he said, "or how you can put it in the written word."

  "Try me," I said.

  "When I go to white banquets—and I mean basically white motivated—people come up and say, 'I'd like an autograph for my kid.' When I go to a black dinner, nobody comes up. Now, I don't mean that I'm disappointed for myself, that I need that."

  "I understand."

  "I've wondered about this. I've thought that the black kid is maybe being deprived of the incentive that maybe the white father is trying to stimulate when he takes the autograph home, like, 'Hey! See what you might achieve.' "

  "Maybe," I said, "it's because the black community still is not a community of achievers."

  "Hey, that could be it," he said. "I don't know."

  "It might be something," I said, "that your station might address itself to."

  "It might," he said. "I'll think about that."

  The decor of the cocktail lounge in the motel was American Anthracite, black banquettes, black tabletops, dark walls and carpeting. Candles were flickering in globes on the tables, and when we ordered, Willie asked for a glass of white wine.

  "When you think back over the years," I said, "what games keep coming back?"

  We had one of the banquettes. Willie was leaning back, his arms spread along the top, his eyes following the traffic between the tables.

  "I know two or three experiences," he said, "maybe four. I know what the first championship meant in '61, when we beat the Giants, 37-0. I don't think any football team in the world could have beaten us that day. Then I think of the first Super Bowl, how uncomfortable it was to represent the NFL against the new kid down the block. How impressive, how convincing would we be? Would we convince the AFL fans?

  "One thing Coach Lombardi said to us was, 'If there is any doubt you have about this Kansas City team being good, look at their roster. Look at the Ail-Americans—Dawson, McClinton.' "

  "Did you have a fear of losing?"

  "Oh, yeah," he said. "There was the reason to fear we might get beat. It was very uncomfortable for me. I didn't want to get hit by Mike Garrett on a quick trap. I didn't want Curtis McClinton busting one up the middle. That was the reason we played the first half so conservative."

  With both CBS and NBC carrying it on television and radio and the press building it for weeks, that first Super Bowl had become the Game of Games, the pride of the old league against the precocity of the new. At the half, the Packers led only 14-10, and then they came out again and turned it into a 35-10 rout.

  "When Lombardi huddled everybody for the second half," Willie was saying, "he said, 'Look. I'll tell you what. You went out and played thirty minutes where you adjusted to Kansas City. Now I want you to go out and make Kansas City adjust to you.' The man was so right."

  "What about the two Dallas games?" I said.

  They were for the NFL title in '66 and '67 and for the right to meet Kansas City in the first Super Bowl and Oakland in the second. They were playing, as it turned out, for winners' shares that added up to $23,000 per player that first year, and $24,700 the second.

  "The Dallas games were important," Willie was saying, "in that they made the Packers, and in the same sense they didn't make the Cowboys. Even in preseason we didn't want the Cowboys to think they could beat us."

  In '66 in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, with time running out, and the Packers leading 34-27, Dallas had a fourth down on the Packer 2-yard line when Don Meredith, with Willie Davis chasing him and Dave Robinson hanging on to him, lofted the pass that Tom Brown, the Packer left safety, intercepted in the end zone. In '67, in that ice bowl at Green Bay, with time for only one more play and the Packers behind by 17-14, Bart Starr sneaked the ball in from the 1-yard line and the Packers won, 21-17.

  "In that second game," I said, "what was it like on the side line? When Bart came trotting over, and it was all coming down to one single play, were you close enough to hear what he and Vince were saying?"

  "I heard," he said, "but I couldn't understand what the play was. As Bart trotted back out, I thought of all the possibilities. You know, a bad snap, whatever? I said to myself, 'Aw, hell.' I turned my head. I didn't want to see it. I waited, until I heard the crowd reaction. When I looked up, it was just a mass of bodies out there. I didn't know that Bart had run a sneak.

  "I think of other games, though," he said. "The Rams play-off in Milwaukee in '67. That was our challenge game, and you didn't challenge us, really—but they did. We'd already won our division, and they beat us out here on a blocked punt in the last minute, and then we started to read all about how they'd broken the Packer mystique and whatnot. Lombardi had those clips on the bulletin board, and he played it low all week."

  "In other words," I said, "the Rams and the press dealt him a pair of aces."

  "Right," he said. "He didn't have his Wednesday speech, and if he had put his Sunday morning talk, the one he gave us then, on Wednesday, we'd have just bubbled out by game time. He always had great respect for the Rams—Merlin Olsen and trying to handle their inside men—and in the dressing room he said, 'This is the game I wish I could play myself. If I could, I'd be sure how it could be played, but I have to trust it to you guys.'

  "Then he got into it. He said, 'There are 50,000 people out there, waiting for you to come out of this dressing room. They're all your family and your friends. They didn't come here to see the Rams. They came here to see you, and any time you let a team sit in California and say how they've broken your magic and what they're going to do to you, they're challenging you, and if they get away with it, it will be something you'll have to live with the rest of your lives. It's like a guy calling you out before your family and saying, 'I'm gonna whip you.' "

  "Well, Nitschke was growling, and Boyd Dowler ran to the bathroom and threw up. This man had aroused our emotions so much, the guys were so mad that when they ran out, they were running heavy. You could hear their feet pounding, and the first two series, I couldn't adjust, I was so fired up."

  "And you clobbered them," I said, for the Packers won that one, 28-7.

  "Yeah," Willie said, "and we might have beaten them anyway, but I don't know that. I say it was the man."

  We ordered another round, Willie staying with the white wine. We went on talking about the man, his perfectionism, the fear of him that pervaded practices, his temper tantrums, and his tears.

  "I remember," I said, "that Lions game in Green Bay in '62, when they had you, 7-6, with less than two minutes to go, and Herb Adderley intercepted the pass and Hornung kicked the field goal with thi
rty-three seconds left and you won it, 9-7. In the locker room, Vince tried to say something and his voice broke and I looked at him, and his eyes were filling."

  "I think I was the last Packer to see him," Willie said. "Norb Hecker was an assistant coach with the Giants then, and I was in San Diego when they were there. He told me, 'The coach is real bad, and he's going.' So I flew from San Diego to Washington, and I called Marie, and we went to the hospital.

  "Coach Lombardi must have been down to 150 pounds. I said, 'Coach, if you'll come back to Green Bay and coach again, I'll come out of retirement.' He smiled, you know?"

  "As you said, it would melt an iceberg."

  "Yeah," Willie said. "He tried to smile, and the tears started to come out of his eyes and he said, 'Willie, you're a hell of a man.' Then he said, 'Get out of here.' And we left—Marie, too—and we weren't in there for more than a minute-and-a-half. Since then I've wondered if maybe I shouldn't have gone. He cried."