by Jerry Kramer
The only thing upsetting Vince a little was that some of the guys seemed to be thinking negatively about the game—saying things like IF we did something or other, we'd kill L.A., or IF we had some luck, we'd win. Vince didn't like that tone at all. He was unhappy with my remark to one of the Milwaukee sportswriters. “Merlin Olsen is very big, very strong, has great speed and great agility,” I said, “is a very smart ballplayer, gives at least no percent on every play, and these are his weak points.” Lombardi cussed everybody for worrying about the Rams. “Just knock the hell out of somebody,” he suggested.
We've watched a few extra reels of the Rams in action, sent to us courtesy of George Halas, the coach and owner of the Chicago Bears. Halas wants us to whip the Rams. He hates the Rams because their coach, George Allen, used to be one of his assistants and broke his contract to take the job in Los Angeles.
I'm beginning to get a good feeling about the game. I'm very happy with our plays. I'm very happy with my own chances against Olsen. I'm very happy with my weight; I've lost ten pounds, down to 251, in about ten days. I'm getting a positive approach to the whole thing. There's one strange thing, though. We've never, as long as I can remember, gone into a game with so much respect for an opponent. We always say we respect an opponent, we always try to sweet-talk him to death, but we don't always believe it ourselves. We believe it this week. We respect their front four. We respect Roman Gabriel. We respect just about everybody on their team, except maybe Jack Snow, their split end. He told some sportswriter that he's not going to have his hair cut until after the Super Bowl game. He shouldn't have said that. He's got us a little angry. We want to give his barber some business a little early.
DECEMBER 22
We worked out in Green Bay this morning—the weather turned colder, which is good for us and bad for the Hollywood crowd—then drove down to Milwaukee in our chartered buses. I spent most of the afternoon playing poker, but I didn't enjoy myself as much as usual. I couldn't concentrate on the cards. I kept throwing my money into the pot and thinking about the Rams. Everybody seemed a bit nervous and tense, everybody except Max. He never gets nervous. He was the big winner in the poker game.
I went to Frenchy's for dinner tonight, not wanting to eat too much, and my appetite wasn't helped by the fact that (1) Coach Lombardi and Mrs. Lombardi were eating at one table nearby and (2) a bunch of the Rams had picked Frenchy's for dinner. Merlin Olsen was sitting about three tables away from me, and I walked over and said hello to him, and we sweet-talked each other something terrible. “Gee, Jerry,” Merlin said, “you're having a helluva year. You really looked great against us.” He told me how glad he was that I'd made it through the whole season without serious injury for a change, and he told me how he was looking forward to getting together with me in Los Angeles during the week of the Pro Bowl game.
The horrible part was that Merlin meant everything he said. He and I have always gotten along very well. I honestly like him, both as a football player and as a person, and I know he likes me. I told him how great he looked against Baltimore and how great his whole team looked, and we both agreed the game tomorrow should be a real struggle. We smiled and we shook hands, and then we both sat down to our dinners and sort of picked at our food. I was so tense I passed up the escargots.
A few other Rams were sitting at the table next to mine, and we kept offering to buy each other Martinis and, of course, we kept sipping soft drinks. They've got an exotic menu at Frenchy's, with things like African lion chops and kangaroo steaks, and Joe Scibelli of the Rams said to me, “C'mon, Jerry, eat some raw possum.” We'll feed him raw possum tomorrow.
DECEMBER 23
I couldn't get to sleep last night. I started reading Only a Game, a novel about pro football, and I put it down around 10:30 and tried to sleep. I lay in bed and I thought to myself, “Sleep, sleep, sleep, a thousand and one, a thousand and two, a thousand and three, sleep, sleep, sleep, got to go to sleep, going to sleep any minute, going to sleep now…” I couldn't sleep. I got an itch on my leg and then an itch on my shoulder, and I turned over and changed my position, and I thought, “Sleep, sleep, sleep.” At 11 o'clock, I got up, went in the bathroom so I wouldn't disturb Chandler, and read a little more of the book. I got back in my bed at midnight, tossed and turned for another hour, then took a sleeping pill. Olsen, the game, the $25,000, the third straight championship—everything kept marching through my head. Lord knows when I finally fell asleep.
We had our usual prayer meeting this morning, conducted by Carroll Dale, and we had a guest speaker, a Milwaukee lawyer named Paul Connors. He talked about how three men had impressed him and influenced him during World War II: A chaplain he met in a foxhole just before the chaplain was killed; his commanding officer, William Darby, of Darby's Rangers; and the war correspondent, Ernie Pyle.
When Connors landed in the invasion of Africa, he told us, he was very scared, and he saw Ernie Pyle next to him. “Son,” Pyle said to him, “you're in the big leagues now.” The application to us, and to our situation, was rather obvious. At the end of the meeting, we prayed that we'd all come through the game healthy.
In the locker room, before the game, Coach Lombardi took his text from one of St. Paul's Epistles. I don't know which one. Maybe Vince was just using St. Paul's name to back up his own theories, but anyway he said the key phrase was, “Run to win.” Coach said that many people enter a race and just think about finishing, or about coming in second or third, but that when we enter a race, we're only looking for one thing: We run to win. Vince has a knack for making all the saints sound like they would have been great football coaches.
They kicked off to us, a short kick to keep the ball away from Travis Williams—the Rams had learned their lesson in Los Angeles—and while Jim Flanigan was returning the ball almost to mid-field, I got in a good lick and shook my butterflies. We lined up and Bart called for one of our new quick openers through the middle, and Donny Anderson hit the hole just right and picked up seven or eight yards. The Rams seemed a little surprised, and the next play Bart came right back with Donny through the middle, and he picked up a first down inside their territory, and I was lying on the ground near Roger Brown, their big tackle, and I could read the look on his face. “What the hell are they doing?” he seemed to be thinking. “They can't be doing this to us.”
A fumble stalled us before we could score, and then we got a little sloppy on our blocking assignments, and after two or three exchanges of punts, they got a break. We fumbled again, and a couple of plays later Gabriel passed for a touchdown. The Rams led, 7-0.
For a few seconds, I had that bad feeling again, that sinking feeling, a hint of disaster that quickly disappeared. But we definitely were disorganized after their score. We lost a few yards on the ground, and then Bart threw a pass that was intercepted and they took over on our 10-yard line. They could have broken the game open right there. They could have put us in a terrible hole. But our defense, as usual, rose to the challenge, pushed the Rams backwards a few yards, and then, on fourth down, when they attempted a field goal, Dave Robinson burst through and deflected the kick and saved us.
Then we started to move. Unconsciously, they began closing off the middle, tightening things up, and a few minutes later, after Tommy Brown returned a punt about 40 yards to their 46-yard line, we went into our huddle and Bart decided to capitalize on their concern with the middle. He called a 67, a play in which Travis Williams cuts off right tackle, outside Forrest Gregg. “Run to win,” I said, in the huddle, quoting either Vince Lombardi or St. Paul.
Gilly pulled out from left guard, came over, and, with Gregg, double-teamed Davy Jones, forcing him to the outside. I blocked Merlin Olsen to the inside, and he got caught in a pile of his own men, Roger Brown and Jack Pardee and a couple of others. As Travis brushed past me at the line of scrimmage, with the other Los Angeles linebackers already out of the play and Bob Hyland leading a path downfield, I knew Travis was going to go all the way. I raised my arms over my head,
signaling a touchdown, when Travis was still 40 yards from the goal line. And I was right. I knew I'd done my job perfectly, and I felt somehow that this was the turning point, that this was the game for us.
After the kickoff, while Los Angeles controlled the ball for a few minutes, I chatted with Bart on the sidelines. I don't like to bother him in the huddle, so whenever I have any thoughts, I pass them to him on the sidelines, usually after checking with the rest of the offensive line. I didn't bother to check with anybody else this time; I trusted my own instinct. Travis's touchdown run had come from a brown right formation—the tight end, Fleming, lined up on the right side; the halfback, Williams, lined up directly behind the left tackle, Skoronski—and I said, “Bart, if you can come up the middle with something from a brown right, I think it'll go. They're scared to death of the ‘seven' hole right now.”
We didn't even have a brown right 41-quick in our game plan, but when we got the ball again, after they missed another attempted field goal, Bart probed the seven hole a few times and then—I spoke to him again during a time-out—called a brown right 41-quick. He didn't have to explain the play in the huddle because we had been using a 41-quick from a different formation. The Rams must have been looking for Travis to hit the seven hole again, and when we zone blocked and opened a quick hole in the middle, he broke through for fifteen yards. Three plays later, a pass from Starr to Dale put us in front 14-7.
At half-time, Vince said, “Magnificent. Just magnificent so far.” He didn't say much more. Some people think we get big pep talks between the halves, but that stuff went out with Rockne. There isn't any time for it. We lick our wounds and drink our Gatorade and review our plays and go to the john and that's it. Today, everybody kept patting everybody else on the back and saying, “Great job. Great job. Keep it up. Let's get 'em.”
We kept getting them in the second half. Our defense played a fantastic game. Ray Nitschke and Henry Jordan, in particular, were incredible. Both of them had been left off the All-Pro teams and the Pro Bowl squads, and both of them have tremendous pride. Each feels he is the best man in football at his position, and each set out to prove it today. Henry seemed to spend all his time roaming around the Los Angeles backfield; he had his arms around Roman Gabriel so often they should have been engaged. Nitschke stopped everybody who cracked the line of scrimmage; he stopped them in the middle, on the left, on the right, everywhere. Willie Davis, who'd looked bad in Los Angeles, ate up the man in front of him, and Kostelnik and Aldridge enjoyed themselves, too. In the whole third quarter, I found out afterward, the Rams gained a net total of seven yards.
Bart kept mixing up his plays beautifully, exploiting first one hole, then another, taking to the air whenever he felt like loosening up the Rams. He had his finest passing day of the year, and his play calling was even better. It was a great feeling in the line, sensing the frustration of the Rams, sensing their confusion, knowing how helpless they must have felt. Late in the third quarter, Chuck Mercein, cast off by the Giants and by the Redskins, leaped through a quick opening in the middle, kicked off a few tacklers and went six yards for our third touchdown. I never saw a Yale man get so excited. Of course, playing pro football, I hadn't seen too many Yale men before.
We could do no wrong, on offense or defense. Travis dove for another touchdown in the final quarter, even though I only gave Merlin half a block, and we won the Western Conference championship, 28-7. The fans carried Travis off the field—he had a fantastic day—and we rushed to the locker room, laughing and shouting and absolutely floating.
“Magnificent,” Coach Lombardi said, when we all reached the locker room. “Just magnificent. I've been very proud of you guys all year long. You've overcome a great deal of adversity. You've hung in there, and when the big games came around…” He couldn't finish the sentence. He broke up, and the tears started trickling down his cheek. He just knelt down, crying, and led us in the Lord's Prayer. We thanked God that no one had been injured.
Guys walked around the room, hugging each other. Nitschke actually was kissing and hugging everybody. He came up to me and said, “Thank you, Jerry,” and then he turned to Gregg and said, “Thank you, Forrest,” and he thanked all his teammates. “I just wish the game hadn't ended,” Henry Jordan said. “I could have played another half. I had so much fun. Sure, it was a money game. I'm broke, and I have an expensive wife.”
“Hey, Jerry, I don't have to send the coat back,” Fuzzy said. He had bought his wife a mink coat for Christmas on an “if” basis. If we won the game, she got the coat.
I was misty-eyed myself I felt so good. I felt so proud, proud of myself and proud of my teammates and proud of my coaches. I felt like I was a part of something special. I guess it's the way a group of scientists feel when they make a big breakthrough, though, of course, we aren't that important. It's a feeling of being together, completely together, a singleness of purpose, accomplishing something that is very difficult to accomplish, accomplishing something that a lot of people thought you couldn't accomplish. It sent a beautiful shiver up my back.
DECEMBER 24
All our coaches were told to report to work at 8 o'clock this morning, but Coach Lombardi got soft and changed his plans and didn't make them come in until 11 A.M. Y ou wouldn't think they'd be working so hard the day before Christmas, but it's typical of Coach Lombardi. He may drive his players hard—and treat us all like dogs, as Jordan says—but he drives himself and his staff even harder. During the season, they work every night of the week except Thursdays. They put in fifteen, sixteen hours a day. Someone once figured out that, on an hourly basis during the season, a Green Bay coach earns less than a Green Bay garbageman.
(The coaches don't let up too much during the off-season, either. They don't get a vacation until about May or June. I once walked into the office during the off-season, and all the assistant coaches were working on a game plan for a theoretical game between our offense and our defense. The offensive coaches were concentrating on finding the weaknesses in our defense, and the defensive coaches were concentrating on finding the weaknesses in our offense. It was a smart way to evaluate our personnel, to find out which special talents we needed to develop.)
The coaches guessed that Dallas would beat Cleveland for the Eastern Conference title today, so they spent the morning looking at Dallas movies. When the Dallas-Cleveland game began, they left the movies and watched about the first ten minutes on TV. “OK, that's enough,” Lombardi said. “It's Dallas.”
He was right, of course. Dallas destroyed the Browns, 52-14, and I didn't enjoy the show as much as I had expected to. I settled back to watch the game with a big cigar in my mouth and a glass of beer in my hand, enjoying the fruits of victory, I suppose, and I started getting antsy about the middle of the second quarter, seeing how good Dallas looked. My man, big Jethro Pugh, looked very tough. I thought I was going to have a few days to savor that victory over the Rams, but I'm getting tense already. The pressure is here—not so intense as it was before the Los Angeles game, but it is definitely here.
I don't think Dallas has as powerful a team as Los Angeles, but the Cowboys have something special going for them that can mean even more than talent. They've had a full year to brood about their loss to us in the 1966 NFL championship game. A defeat like that—with the score 34-27, we stopped them just short of the goal line in the closing seconds—really eats at you. They're going to want to beat us so badly it's unbelievable.
Coach Lombardi told some sportswriters in the dressing room yesterday that the Los Angeles game was our first real challenge all year, and I agree with him. But Dallas is in a position similar to ours. They won their own division without being seriously pressed, and they didn't even have to get up too high for their conference championship game. They had beaten Cleveland during the regular season. But they are going to be up this week. They may consider us their first real challenge of the season.
This evening Barbara and I went over to the Nitschkes' for Christmas Eve eggnog. Jac
kie Nitschke had invited a bunch of the players and their wives to stop by for a glass or two, and Ray couldn't understand why so many of us hung around, filling up his living room, sitting on his floor. He ran out of both chairs and glasses. About 9 o'clock, Ray found out why we were all waiting. Jackie told him to look out the window; she said she heard a strange noise or something. Ray went to the window and looked out and saw, perched on his front lawn, a 1968 Lincoln Continental. It was his Christmas present from Jackie. Ray got tears in his eyes he was so thrilled. He was like a little boy. He had to take the car out for a spin right away.
Ray didn't have an easy childhood. He grew up without any luxuries, without anybody ever coming close to spoiling him. “You know,” he told me tonight, “once, when I was a little kid, someone gave me a ride in a Lincoln. Ever since then I've dreamed of owning one. I never thought I would.” I swear Ray was ready to bawl. I don't suppose any NFL ballcarrier would believe that.
DECEMBER 25
I celebrated Christmas this morning in the sauna bath at the stadium. Forrest Gregg joined me, sweating out the eggnog, and he said, “Jerry, I took a page from your book Saturday. I worked it just the way you did against Alex Karras. I let Davy Jones have a real good game against me the first time, out in Los Angeles, just so everybody would watch the two of us the next game. It sure did work beautifully.”
Everyone around the Green Bay Packers, of course, had a very merry Christmas. It was a diamond year. Don Chandler bought his wife a diamond ring, and his wife and mine both bought us diamond stickpins. Lee Roy Caffey bought his wife a gold-and-diamond watch, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Max bought a whole gross of diamond rings, to hand out to all his fiancées.