Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer

by Jerry Kramer

  But his personal feelings, I suspect, end up running second to his professional feelings, which are summed up in another one of his favorite sayings. “Winning isn't everything,” he tells us. “It's the only thing.”

  JULY 26

  Two-a-days ended today. I was sure the last twenty-four hours that I had leukemia or polio or some incurable disease because it was such an effort to raise my arm, such an effort to walk, such an effort to climb three or four stairs—not flights of stairs, just stairs. I was so tired I could hardly lift my arms to comb my hair. I was certain that at any moment it was all over for me.

  My little six-foot-by-three-foot bed felt like heaven after lunch today, and the cold pop at the Century Bowling Alley tasted so sweet after the afternoon workout. I felt human again.

  Donny Anderson, our second-year halfback who wants to grow up to be Paul Hornung, came in from the Army today, and he began telling me about all the business deals he's getting into. When Donny signed with us in 1966, he received a contract worth something like $600,000, including bonus and salaries. He told me today how he negotiated the contract. He started off by talking to Lombardi, and Vince told him that Green Bay would meet any other offer he had. Then he went to Bud Adams, the owner of the Houston Oilers in the American Football League, and Adams told him the same thing. So Donny told Adams that Green Bay was offering him x dollars, and Adams topped it, and then Donny went to Lombardi and told him that Houston was offering y, and Lombardi topped it, and it just kept going back and forth, getting higher and higher. “Hell,” Donny said, “at the end, I just couldn't think of anything else to ask for. I couldn't think of anything else I wanted.”

  I never heard of an offensive lineman having a problem like that.

  JULY 27

  We had our annual intrasquad game tonight, the offense vs. the defense, in front of more than 30,000 people. We ate breakfast at ten o'clock and the big pregame meal at four, and spent the rest of the day just sitting around, killing time, telling war stories.

  It's awfully hard to get ready for the intrasquad game. In order to play pro football, you've got to have a bit of hate in your heart, hate for your opponent. It's not easy for me to hate Henry Jordan, who's my neighbor, and Willie Davis, who's my friend, and I had to play against them tonight. Everybody's always glad when the game's over.

  The game is doubly demanding physically, too, because the defense knows your plays almost as well or even better than you do. The other day, I missed a play in practice and Henry Jordan said to me, “Jerry, y'awl supposed to crossblock on that 37, ain't you?”

  I said, “How'd you know, Henry?”

  “I been watchin' those plays for ten years,” he said. “I oughta know them by now.”

  It's one of those nights when you really can't win. If the offense looks good, Lombardi screams at the defense. If the defense looks good, he screams at the offense. It's impossible for the whole team to look good in his eyes.

  Before the game, a man came over to the dorm with a weight-lifting machine he'd invented. He was planning a brochure about the machine and he wanted some of our guys to pose for pictures. I said, “How much?”

  “All the guy's got is $150,” said Chuck Lane, our publicity director.

  I said, “Apiece?”

  “No,” said Chuck. “For everybody.”

  He wanted five of us, and that amounted to $30 apiece, and I told him what he could do with his machine. I had just finished posing with seven of the other guys for the 1966 Associated Press All-Pro team, and I guess I was feeling uppity. I growled at the man for offering me $30 because I was feeling pretty valuable.

  Maybe half an hour earlier, I'd been sitting in my room and Donny Anderson had come in and he'd said, “Jerry, these hair-tonic people want me to do a commercial for them, and do you think $7,000 is enough?”

  That's more than a quarter of my whole salary, and I said, “Yeah, Donny, that doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.”

  Now here's a guy offering me $30 for a commercial. The guy finally got Forrest Gregg to pose for $40. “What the hell,” Forrest said, “I might as well.” Forrest had heard Donny Anderson talking about the $7,000 hair-tonic commercial, and he said, “I've been in this league eleven years, and in eleven years I haven't even made $1,000 for all the commercials put together.”

  I went over to the locker room a little early and went through my ritual. Everyone has his own superstitions. One of mine is that when I tape up my long socks, I've got to use a new roll of tape, and nobody else can use the same roll. I can't take a half-used roll, and once I've used my share, the roll's got to be thrown away. I don't know why. It just has to be that way.

  The offense won the game, which wasn't surprising, since the defense never gets the ball, except on punts and interceptions and fumbles. The score was 10-0, but that wasn't quite enough points for Lombardi, and he had a mild hemorrhage after the game. He said the offensive line looked like Maude Frickert and her crew.

  My roomie, Don Chandler, missed two field goal attempts, and he felt pretty low. Kicking is a lonely chore; you don't have an opportunity to take out your emotions on anyone else. When I get real upset, real nervous, real emotional, I just hit one of those 280-pound defensive tackles, and all my jitters disappear.

  JULY 28

  Lombardi, whose generosity knows no bounds, gave us off till noon today, to recuperate from the game last night. Chandler was still feeling blue this morning about missing those field goals, but Zeke and Max and I talked him into renewing the golf match. On the seventh hole, Don pushed his drive into the adjoining fairway and a man walking up the fairway caught the ball right in his head. He needed about eight stitches to stop the bleeding, and Chandler was so shook up he could hardly talk, except to thank all of us profusely for talking him into a golf match.

  We worked out after lunch, and Vince suspected that some of us were a little tired. “There's too many deadasses out there,” he screamed. “Move. Move. Move.” I wish he weren't so excitable.

  JULY 29

  Lombardi's lungs were going all day long today. “This is a game of abandon,” he told the backs, “and you run with complete abandon. You care nothing for anybody or anything, and when you get close to the goal line, your abandon is intensified. Nothing, not a tank, not a wall, not a dozen men, can stop you from getting across that goal line.” He stared at the backs hard. “If I ever see one of my backs get stopped a yard from the goal line,” he said, “I'll come off that bench and kick him right in the can.”

  Vince was a little gentler on the rookies; he knows exactly who can take what. “Some of you boys are having trouble picking up your assignments,” he said. “It's a tough task. You've got so many plays to learn, so many moves to learn. If you make a mistake, if you drop a pass or miss a block, anything like that, hell, forget it. If we had a defensive back here who felt bad every time he got beat on a pass pattern, he wouldn't be worth a damn. Take an education, but don't dwell on it. Don't let it affect your play. You will drop passes. You will make mistakes.” Then he added, “But not very many if you want to play for the Green Bay Packers.”

  Vince found time to discuss the singing in the dining room, too. “The singing absolutely stinks,” he said. “It's lousy. I don't give a damn what you sing, but I want to hear you. I want to see what kind of a man you are.” He does, too. He can judge a man by his singing performance. If a man has the guts to stand up in front of fifty or sixty guys and try to carry a tune, especially if he's got a bad voice, the same man is likely to handle himself well in a crucial situation in a ball game. At least he's got poise.

  I had dinner tonight with Bob Brault, the doctor who seemed to spend all his time operating on me in 1964 and 1965. He's some guy, a young guy, thirty-five, thirty-six, a heart surgeon. I was one of his first patients in Green Bay. Our team physician sent me to Bob and recommended that Bob operate on me. I had a hard spot just below my breast bone, above my stomach, and the doctors were 95 percent certain it was cancer. They wer
e going to go in and remove as much of my intestines as they could, hoping they'd save me.

  We had exploratory surgery and found a large tumor growing on the liver, a nonmalignant growth called actinomycosis, something like a fungus, about the size of a grapefruit. While I was waiting in Bob's office one day, I opened a medical book and read that actinomycosis in the intestinal tract was invariably fatal. He told me the book was outdated. Dr. Brault cut my tumor open and packed it and drained it, and I started to get better, but a few weeks later, when I was about to rejoin the team, I discovered another lump growing down inside my groin, near the bottom of my abdomen. I went out to the Mayo Clinic, and they operated on me and resected my intestine and found I had a leak in it, and they didn't know why. They operated again and put it back together, and four days later I developed postoperative pneumonia and four days after that the intestine burst again, and they rushed me back up to surgery. They performed a colostomy and attached a plastic bag to my side, which I had to live with for several months. Around the end of 1964, I went home and I was down from 255 pounds to 205. A month or so later, I returned to the Mayo Clinic, and they said the wound in my intestine was still draining, and they still didn't know why. They sent me home and told me to wait.

  After a few weeks, I talked to Bob Brault and he said, “Look, Jerry, I think we ought to operate again. I think there's a foreign object in there. I don't know what it is, maybe a suture, a sponge, something, something to cause the wound to keep draining.”

  I certainly didn't want to go through any more operations. I felt I'd had my share already and, besides, I was starting to feel a little stronger. But Bob talked me into it. He set one date, and I didn't show up at the hospital. I was plain scared. Then he set a new date, and this time I showed up. The operation lasted six and a half hours.

  Bob found in my intestine, in that area, four splinters varying in length from two and a half to four and a half inches, each about an eighth of an inch in diameter. They were lodged in a muscle-and-scar-tissue area in the lower left quadrant of the abdomen. The slivers had been in there for twelve years. When I was seventeen, I stepped on a plank of wood and the plank flew into my groin. I was operated on then, too, to have the splinters removed, but the doctor must have missed a few.

  Brault and his assistants removed the splinters, resected the small intestine and the large intestine and gave me four transfusions during the operation. Ten days later, I was playing golf. I still had to have two more operations, one to fix the colostomy and one to fix a hernia near the breast bone, but everything was beautiful. If it hadn't been for Bob Brault, I wouldn't be playing professional football. I'd be doing something else, like lying in the ground.

  Anyway, we had a fine dinner tonight and we had a long talk about our occupations and about life in general. Really, despite all the operations, my life's always been easy. I've never had to fight for anything. I've always been able to do almost anything I wanted to do without great effort, almost naturally. And, maybe because of this, I don't have any definite feeling of achievement. I don't have any great enthusiasm about anything I've accomplished. My life seems a little empty.

  Doc Brault was telling me about some of the rewards of his profession. Just last week he was operating on a man, open-heart surgery, and the man's heart stopped in the middle of the surgery, the middle of the operation. The man died right on the table. And somehow Doc revived him and got his heart going again, and now the man is a healthy human being again. It must be tremendous to know you've accomplished something like that.

  I went back to the dorm after dinner and called my wife out in Idaho and talked to her for a while, and then I got in bed, and I began thinking about our first exhibition game, against the College All-Stars, and about my particular problem, a 300-pound giant with the unlikely name of Bubba Smith.

  THE GREEN BAY PACKERS' EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

  DATE OPPONENT SITE

  August 4 College All-Stars Chicago

  August 12 Pittsburgh Steelers Green Bay

  August 18 Chicago Bears Milwaukee

  August 28 Dallas Cowboys Dallas

  September 2 Cleveland Browns Cleveland

  September 9 New York Giants Green Bay

  JULY 31

  We start our exhibition season Friday against the College All-Stars, and they're supposed to have the biggest, fastest, and meanest team in the history of the College All-Stars. I suppose I've drawn the biggest and meanest of them all. Bubba Smith, the All-American from Michigan State, is going to be playing defensive tackle opposite me. He's listed at 6′8‘' and 287 pounds, but I've heard that a month ago Bubba weighed 325 pounds.

  I've been watching movies of Bubba in the Senior Bowl game last season, and he looks like he's going to be a handful. I knew he was strong, but I didn't realize he was so fast, so quick off the ball. If he's got a weakness, it's that he doesn't seem to use his hands too well. I'll try to take advantage of that. If a man doesn't use his hands well, you can generally pop him, just drive right into him and push him back. But if he uses his hands well, he can grab you and throw you when you try to pop him, and he'll go right by you.

  The Chicago Tribune's doing its best trying to sell tickets for the All-Star game. They're running big ads saying: COME SEE BUBBA SMITH HIT BART STARR. I know that if Bart gets hit Friday night, somebody else is going to get hit a lot harder, and that somebody's me.

  I've got to stay between Bubba and Bart, or Coach Lombardi's going to be very, very unhappy with me.

  AUGUST 1

  Vince is still driving us to get in better shape, pushing us, cussing us, but now that we practice only once a day, it almost seems easy.

  Paul Hornung called Max McGee today. Paul's not going to play this year—the doctors told him that if he played, he'd be risking permanent injury to his neck—but he's helping coach the New Orleans Saints. He told Max that the Saints had to do fifteen up-downs the other day, and the whole team damn near mutinied. Nobody trains the way we do.

  AUGUST 2

  Coach Lombardi lectured today about the importance of the special teams—the punting, punt-return, kickoff-return, and kick-off teams. He said he wanted absolute perfection from every man. We spent a full day last week working on the special teams, making certain that each man knew his assignment exactly. Phil Bengtson is in overall charge of the special units, but his assistant, Dave “Hawg” Hanner, the defensive line coach, handles the personnel. Hawg's responsible for seeing that new men replace injured men, and he's responsible for the teams being ready on the sidelines when they're needed. We try to instill pride in the men on the special teams. Vince always says that a few key plays decide each football game, and you never know when a key play is going to come up.

  AUGUST 3

  We flew to Chicago today for the All-Star game tomorrow, minus Jim Grabowski, our regular fullback. Jim's on riot duty with the National Guard in Milwaukee, and I don't think they'll let him go just for a football game.

  The temperature was around 80 degrees this afternoon, and we had a hot, stuffy bus ride from the airport to the Drake Hotel. The hotel stuck Don Chandler and me in a closet; Henry Jordan and Bart Starr have a three-bedroom suite. Typical. I knew I should have grown up to be a quarterback—or at least to room with one. Chandler and I wandered around a bit, bought some clothes, ate dinner, then got in the bus to go out to Soldier Field for a workout.

  Our practice session was beautiful. By the time we reached the stadium, it was raining and thundering and lightning. We all put on sweat pants and rain jackets, instead of our uniforms, and when we left the locker room and hustled out to the field, the lights were off. A groundskeeper came over and said, “Mr. Lombardi, the weather's too bad to use the field. Your team's got to get off.”

  The groundskeeper shouldn't have said that. Mr. Lombardi told him he could go straight to hell in a hurry. Vince said he'd damn well better get the lights turned on immediately. A couple of other groundskeepers showed up, trying to protect the field, and one of the
m said they might summon the police to keep us off the field.

  “Hell,” said Max McGee, “they'd better bring a whole squadron if they expect to keep Vince off the field.”

  Vince won, of course. The lights were turned on, and we ran out on the field in the rain and thunder and everything. We had a short drill, maybe thirty, thirty-five minutes, mostly throwing the ball around to get a little loose, and then Coach Lombardi gave us a little talk. He reminded us that we are the world champion Green Bay Packers, and that everyone who wears a Green Bay uniform should act like a world champion, on the field and off.

  AUGUST 4

  Jim Grabowski surprised us and showed up this afternoon. He got to the hotel around 2 P.M., still wearing his Army fatigues, and the doorman told him he had to enter through the rear door. He'd been staying up all night in Milwaukee, tramping around the streets, catching a little sleep in a pup tent. He looked bleary-eyed.

  We had our pregame meal at 4:30, four hours before game time, the way we always do. We had a choice of steaks or ham and eggs and a little tea or a little coffee. We're allowed one pat of butter a man. We eat a lot of honey for energy.

  The team bus was supposed to leave the hotel for the stadium at 6:20, but almost everybody was on board by 6:05. We operate on Lombardi time, which is about fifteen minutes ahead of all other clocks. If you're only ten minutes ahead of schedule, you're the last one there, and if you're only five minutes ahead of schedule, you're late. Dave Robinson got on the bus tonight at 6:15 and all the coaches glared at him like he was really late. So did all the players. Vince has us even thinking in Lombardi time.