Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer

by Jerry Kramer

  “Look at yourself, Caffey, look at yourself, that stinks,” Lombardi shouted. Later, Vince added, “Lee Roy, you may think that I criticize you too much, a little unduly at times, but you have the size, the strength, the speed, the mobility, everything in the world necessary to be a great football player, except one thing: YOU'RE TOO DAMN LAZY.”

  During the nutcracker, Red Mack, a reserve flanker for us last year who weighs 179 pounds soaking wet, lined up against Ray Nitschke, who weighs 240 pounds and is the strongest 240 pounds in football. Ray uses a forearm better than anyone I've ever seen; when he swings it up into someone's face, it's a lethal weapon. Red should have lined up against someone smaller. Ray's used to beating people's heads in, and he enjoys it, but he looked down at Red Mack and he said, “Oh, no, I can't go against this guy.”

  Red looked up at Ray and said, “Get in here, you sonuvabitch, and let's go.”

  They went at it and Ray almost killed him. Red fired off the line and Ray hit him with a forearm and knocked him to his knees, knocked him groggy. When he got up, Red just shook it off, the stubborn little bastard.

  Lombardi was in beautiful mid-season form. He kept chewing rookie Bob Hyland, our number-one draft choice, a 250-pounder from Boston College. Hyland's an offensive lineman, both a center and a guard, and he looks like he's going to be a fine football player. But right now he's got a bad stance. “Look at that stance, Hyland,” Vince screamed. “What can you do from that stance? You can't do anything. You can't go right. You can't go left. You can't block. The only thing that stance is good for is taking a crap.”

  JULY 15

  I went to jail today. I started an eight-week sentence in Sensenbrenner Hall, which is a student dormitory at St. Norbert College in West De Pere, Wisconsin, a ten-minute drive from Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Eight weeks a year, since 1958, I've lived in this dormitory; I deserve an honorary degree from St. Norbert.

  The whole thing is a pain in the ass. The worst part is that you're completely a captive of Lombardi and of football. It's not like you put in two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon, and two in the evening. You're required to attend breakfast at 7 A.M., ride in the bus over to the stadium, ride back in the bus, eat lunch, go over to the stadium and back again, dinner, meeting, curfew. If you're lucky, you get an hour and a half or two hours a day to do whatever you want.

  I'm in Room 207, the same room I've had for five or six years, and now that Jimmy Taylor's gone, I'm rooming with Donny Chandler, a place-kicker for six months a year and an Oklahoma businessman for six months a year. Our room is neither spacious nor gracious. It is exactly like every other room, perfect for college sophomores, but adequate, barely adequate, for pro football players. Our beds are about six feet long and three feet wide. My head hangs over one end, my feet hang over the other, and my arms hang over both sides.

  We each have a closet, a dresser and a desk, and everything is jammed. I've moved in a modest wardrobe, fifteen or twenty pairs of slacks, a dozen Bermuda shorts, two dozen sports shirts, and several pairs of shoes and sandals. I'm a little more clothes-conscious than most of the players, although the guys do care about clothes. We're in the public eye a lot, and we have to dress well.

  The room is wired completely for sound. Donny brought in a portable television set and I brought in a stereo system and a dozen records. I've also got a handful of books and, most important, my cribbage board. Cribbage is the national pastime here; I usually support myself in the game.

  For obvious reasons, we try not to spend too much time in the rooms, except for playing cribbage and sleeping. We do get our share of sleep. Curfew, which means in bed with lights out, is 11 P.M. six nights a week and midnight on Saturday. The married players whose families are in town are allowed to sleep at home Saturday nights, but my wife and our three children are out in Idaho, visiting relatives, so I have to sleep in the dorm every night. The curfews are strictly enforced; Lombardi runs this place like a penal institution.

  I still remember Lombardi's first year, 1959, which was also the first year I roomed with Taylor. At eleven on the dot one night, Vince came by our room and Jimmy was sitting on the edge of his bed, with his socks and his shorts on.

  Coach said, “Jimmy, what time you got?”

  Jimmy whipped out his watch and said, “I've got eleven o'clock sir.”

  “Jimmy, you're supposed to be in bed at eleven, aren't you?” Coach said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Jimmy.

  Coach said, “Jimmy, that'll cost you twenty-five dollars.”

  Jimmy looked at me open-mouthed and I raised my eyebrows a little bit and I said, “Ooh, this guy's pretty serious.”

  The next day, Ray Nitschke was in the phone booth two or three minutes after eleven and it cost him $50. (Our fines, incidentally, usually go to charities, like the St. Norbert building fund.) We began to believe right then that Lombardi was very, very serious about everything he said.

  After about three weeks, a few of us decided we had to test Lombardi. Paul Hornung asked me if I wanted to sneak out of the dorm after curfew. It was very difficult to talk me into it; it took Paul about three seconds. At 11:30 we began our big getaway. Paul's roommate, Max McGee, said he was going with us, and the three of us started sneaking down the hall.

  “Wait,” said Max. “Let's get Ringo.”

  Jim Ringo was our captain then, and we figured if he was with us and we got caught, we wouldn't get fined as much.

  I said, “Great, get Ringo.”

  Ringo happened to be rooming with Dave Hanner, who is one of our coaches now, and Dave said that he had a psychological problem, that he couldn't sleep alone, so he joined us.

  When the five of us passed Bill Quinlan's room, Quinlan woke up and said, “I'm going with you.” Quinlan's roommate, Dan Currie, told us he was afraid of the dark; he came along, too.

  Then there were seven of us crazy little creatures, running up to 280 pounds apiece, sneaking down the hall, tippy-toeing, our shoes in our hands. We made it outside, and, of course, we had no plans. We just wanted to sneak out to see if we could get away with it. We went to the local pizza parlor, and naturally everyone in the town knows every Packer by sight and knows what time we're supposed to be in bed. We sat around eating pizza and giggling like schoolgirls till two or three in the morning. Then we snuck back in the dorm, and we thought everything was beautiful. No repercussions, no fines, nothing. Later, we discovered that Vince knew everything, knew exactly who had gone out and where we had gone and how late we had stayed; he was just holding back his fire until he could catch us in the act.

  “People have been phoning me saying that they've seen some of you guys out after curfew,” he announced, “but I don't pay any attention to those crank calls.”

  A few weeks later, Max McGee tried to sneak out alone, and Lombardi caught him, and the following day, at a team meeting, where we try to bring everything out in the open, Lombardi said, “Max, that'll cost you $125. If I catch you again, it'll cost $250.”

  Perhaps a year or two went by before Max got caught again. And again we had a meeting, and again the emotion, the wrath, the screaming, the hollering, a typical Lombardi production. “Max,” Vince shouted, “that'll cost you $250. If you go again, it'll cost you $500.”

  Max doesn't scare easily.

  Another year passed, and Max, a shrewd Texan who loves life, got away with a few. Then one night he snuck out and the Wisconsin state police, who are strict around here, caught him speeding. Max promised them the world if they would keep the ticket out of the newspapers, but they didn't. When the item appeared, Max could hear Coach Lombardi screaming from the training room clear to the dorm: “MAX! MAX!”

  The inevitable meeting followed. “MAX!” Vince said. “That's $500.” Coach was really shaking; he was very, very upset. He seemed to be fighting a losing battle, and Lombardi does not like to lose at anything. “MAX!” he yelled,“I said that'll cost you $500 and”—Vince turned purple—“if you go again, it'll cost you a t
housand.” The room was totally silent, hushed. Lombardi stopped shaking and actually managed to grin a little. “Max,” he said, softly, “if you can find anything worth sneaking out for, for $1,000, hell, call me and I'll go with you.”

  You can imagine the temptation it is to sneak out, fifty or sixty healthy young men locked up for two months, in a college dorm. Women, of course, look better every day, and more remote. (Henry Jordan, our great tackle, once spent ten minutes staring at a girl down the far end of the practice field, saying how pretty she looked, and then, finally, he said, “Hey, that's old Olive”—his own wife.) When your teammates start looking good to you, you know you'd better start drinking a lot of soup. Nobody's ever proved it, but we've always suspected that they stock the soup in training camp with saltpeter.

  At 6 o'clock tonight, we had our first official training camp meal. I sat with Forrest Gregg, Lee Roy Caffey, and Doug Hart, three Texans with Texas appetites. Gregg and Caffey and I are all over 250 pounds, a little more than we should weigh, and we have to watch what we eat. Doug Hart, a defensive back, weighs about 182 pounds, and if he eats a fantastic amount for a week, he goes up to 182 and a half. Doug had a piece of prime ribs that was as big as all of ours put together. I swear it must have weighed four or five pounds. It was three to four inches thick and about eight inches across, and it had two ribs in it. It was the largest piece of meat I've ever seen, and Doug ate the whole thing, along with some carrots and peas and fruit and butter and rolls and a couple of glasses of milk. I sat there with a very small portion of meat and a little dish of peas and one glass of iced tea, and I ate real slow, to make me feel like I was getting a lot more.

  After dinner, Lombardi conducted our first meeting of 1967, and he stressed the tremendous challenge facing the Packers this year. We've won the National Football League championship two years in a row, and since the NFL playoff system was instituted in 1933 no team has ever won three straight championships. We had a similar opportunity in 1963, after we'd won in 1961 and 1962, but then we finished second in our division. Only five other teams have won two straight NFL playoffs, and no other team has done it twice. The challenge of winning a third straight championship is just as important to the players as it is to Lombardi. It's one of the few things that we have left to accomplish, and we want it. We want it badly. We have a lot of pride.

  Vince reviewed the training rules and the club rules and the league rules, all of which I think I've heard a million times. He warned us against fraternizing with unknown individuals; they could be gamblers. “You don't sit down and have a drink with somebody if they come up and want to chat,” he said. “If they say they're from your home town, and you don't know them, don't associate with them. As simple as that. And don't talk about injuries to anyone, not to your neighbor, not to your father, not to your brother. Don't even tell your wife. Keep your mouth shut.”

  We've got a saying posted on the wall in our locker room:

  WHAT YOU SAY HERE, WHAT YOU SEE HERE, WHAT YOU HEAR HERE, LET

  IT STAY HERE WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE. Vince means that, very, very much, especially when you're talking to the press.

  He lectured for a while about the importance of conditioning, about his desire to have every man in top physical shape. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” he said, quoting his favorite source, himself. “When you're tired, you rationalize. You make excuses in your mind. You say, ‘I'm too tired, I'm bushed, I can't do this, I'll loaf Then you're a coward.” He said that when we don't use our ability to the fullest, we're not only cheating ourselves and the Green Bay Packers, we're cheating the Lord; He gave us our ability to use it to the fullest. “There are three things that are important to every man in this room,” Lombardi said. “His religion, his family, and the Green Bay Packers, in that order.” Vince means just what he says, but sometimes I think he gets the order confused.

  Then Lombardi tried to impress upon all of us, especially the rookies, that every man in the room theoretically was a rookie, that everyone had to prove himself, that no one had his position sewn up. Of course, you look around the room at people like Bart Starr, our quarterback, who was the Most Valuable Player in the NFL last year, and you think that's silly. Nobody's going to take his job away from Bart. But you've got to remember that every day there are young guys out looking for your job, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, flat-bellied, whippy-wristed college boys.

  It seemed strange not to have Paul Hornung and Jimmy Taylor at the first meeting. Paul was here ten years, Jimmy nine, and for several years they gave us the best one-two running attack in pro football.

  “We're going to miss Paul Hornung,” Lombardi said. “We're going to miss Paul a great deal. He was a leader and he added a lot of spice to professional football. We're all going to miss him.”

  And then Vince said, “We will replace the other fellow.”

  He does have a thing about loyalty.

  JULY 16

  Today was an easy day, our annual picture day, when the publicity photos are taken of all the players. The photographer set up one shot of me and Fuzzy Thurston and Forrest Gregg and Bob Skoronski, the regular offensive guards and offensive tackles. When we posed, Ron Kostelnik, who plays defensive tackle, started laughing at us.

  “What's this?” he said. “The over-thirty club?” Kostelnik's cocky because he's only twenty-seven. Gregg and Skoronski are thirty-three, Fuzzy's thirty-two, and I'm thirty-one; we've each put at least ten years in pro football. We're certainly not young by football standards; we're practically doddering. But it's impossible to overestimate the value of experience in this sport. We have eleven Packers with ten or more years in the NFL; the only other teams with so many veterans are the Cleveland Browns and the Baltimore Colts. Yet, over the past three seasons, with all the old men in our lineups, the three most successful teams in the NFL have been the Browns, the Colts, and the Packers.

  Some people say that we're getting too old, that experience can't compensate for our loss of speed and agility, but I refuse to believe it. Sooner or later we'll have to retire and make room for younger men, but I doubt we've reached that point yet.

  After the picture session, we had our first major cribbage workout of the year. Lee Roy Caffey and I played against Max McGee and Tommy Joe Crutcher. Tommy Joe's our fourth linebacker, a solid reserve behind Caffey, Nitschke, and Dave Robinson. Tommy Joe's from McKinney, Texas, and he's an intelligent young man, but to amuse himself—and the rest of us—he deliberately plays the country boy. He wears a pair of boots that have to be forty years old; I don't know what holds them together. And he loves to use country sayings. Today, when he was playing Lee Roy, Lee Roy said, “If I could only get a cut,” and Tommy Joe snapped back, “If a frog had wings, he wouldn't whomp his ass every time he jumped.” When he lost to Lee Roy, Tommy Joe allowed, “I ain't seen nothing like that since Cecil Barlow's cow got caught in the brush.” He's beautiful.

  JULY 17

  We started two-a-day workouts today, and the agony is beyond belief. Grass drills, agility drills, wind sprints, everything. You wonder why you're there, how long you're going to last. The grass drills are exquisite torture. You run in place, lifting your knees as high as you can, for ten, twenty, sometimes thirty seconds. When Lombardi yells, “Down,” you throw yourself forward on your face, your stomach smacking the ground, and when he yells, “Up,” you get up quick and start running in place again. We call the exercises “up-downs,” and when Vince is in a good mood, he gives us only three or five minutes of them. If he's upset, he'll keep going till someone's lying on the ground and can't get up, till everyone's on the brink of exhaustion.

  You try to block out all the pain, all the gasping breaths, block it all out of your mind and function as an automaton. Just up and down and up and down and move and keep moving and legs up and when you feel like you can't get up, like you can't possibly make it, then you've got to get up. You've got to make it. You've got to think, “Get up.” We did seventy up-downs this morning, and the only thing that
kept me going was that I looked around and saw some of the other guys my age looking worse than me. Then I figured I wasn't going to die.

  We've never had anybody die during grass drills, but we had a rookie a few years ago who really couldn't bear the pain.

  “What do you do around here to get in shape, Kramer?” he asked me. “I can't take it.”

  “You just got to push yourself, kid,” I said. “If you get a little pain, you just can't think about it. Go on. Don't stop.”

  “But man,” he said, “I see visions out there.”

  “What do you mean, visions?” I said.

  “Visions, man,” he said. “I see people walking around in the air.”

  He got cut a few days later.

  We did more than half an hour of exercises today, and afterward Ben Wilson, the big fullback we acquired over the spring from the Los Angeles Rams, told me that the Rams' total exercises consisted of about our first five minutes. Everything we did after that was over and above what he'd ever done with the Rams.

  No other team in pro football works as hard as we do. Of course, no other team wins so often, either.

  In the morning, we had another lovely nutcracker drill, and I jumped in against Kostelnik, who's about 275 right now, then against Bob Brown, who's close to 280. With pads on, they've got to weigh at least 290 apiece. By the time we finished the nutcracker, I had two scratches on my forehead and the blood was trickling down between my pretty blue eyes and my tongue was bleeding and Lombardi was smiling. Everything was copasetic, as far as he was concerned.