When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  In the locker room after losing to the Bears in Chicago, McGee and Paul Hornung told McLean that they wanted to stay overnight in the city rather than ride the train north with the team back to Green Bay. “Nah way,” Scooter said to them in his New England accent, but after a bit more pleading he relented, cautioning that he did not want to read about them in the paper. “So Hornung and I go down and see Don Rickles at the Playboy Club, and he sees us and takes a shot at us in front of everybody, and then we go to Chez Paree and end up with a couple of those dancing girls, and we got back to Green Bay just in time for Tuesday morning practice,” McGee said later. “And there’s Scooter sitting at his desk. ‘Get in here, guys—look here!’ and he points at ‘Kup’s Corner,’ where Irv Kupcinet writes about how Hornung and McGee, after losing to the Bears, were seen dancing with Chez Paree adorables at two in the morning. And he tried to put his foot down. Never again! When he said he was fining us it pained him more than it pained us. It was hard for Scooter to get tough.”

  There were few rules in the McLean regime. Curfews were flexible and roundly ignored. No dress code. Players wore whatever they wanted on the road, sometimes sweatshirts. Scooter himself was rarely seen in coat and tie. Players skipped team meetings, often unnoticed by Scooter, who had a habit of drifting into daydreams when the film projector was running. The story—probably apocryphal, but representative of the way his old players remembered his era with equal parts pity and scorn—goes that once he fell asleep in the middle of a film session and awoke to find himself alone in the room, the projector whirring. Bart Starr, a young quarterback out of Alabama who had been raised in a military family, accustomed to discipline, felt lost and uncomfortable with Scooter. “Miserable, sickening, disappointing, testing,” Starr said of the 1958 season. As the losses accumulated, Scooter lost confidence, and Starr saw no rational pattern to his selection of plays or use of players. “If you made an error you went out and if the other guy made an error you went back in. Not only does it test your resolve, it tests your reasoning, where you’re going wrong. You’re not accomplishing what you want to. It was a tough, terrible year.” Hornung, the Heisman Trophy winner from Notre Dame, grew more dispirited as the season deteriorated, uncertain where Scooter would play him in the backfield (fullback? halfback? quarterback?) and unhappy with an atmosphere in which many players seemed more interested in their statistics than the team’s success.

  He wanted to be traded and thought about quitting. “It was very individual,” Hornung said later. “Those guys in Green Bay that year didn’t give a shit about winning or losing.”

  Scooter cared, but had no clue how to lift his team. On the way to work each morning, he stopped at Paul’s Standard Service on South Broadway and commiserated with Paul Mazzoleni, the gas station owner, a longtime Packer fan who had been a water boy for Curly Lambeau’s team back in the early 1920s. “‘Paul, what am I doing wrong? What’s happening?’ ” Mazzoleni remembered McLean asking him. “He’d get very emotional. And he started to cry. He could see his job was on the line.” Olejniczak and his executive board, a who’s who of Green Bay merchants, bankers, lawyers and civic leaders, also cared about winning and losing; they had to, considering the pressure they were under from league owners and the demanding local citizenry. With funds raised through a municipal referendum, they had constructed a new 32,150-seat City Stadium on the west side of town—Vice President Richard Nixon had attended the opening ceremonies in 1957—and needed to fill it with fans if they were to remain solvent. With every loss the board interfered a bit more openly with Scooter’s decision-making, demanding that he appear before them every Monday to explain what had gone wrong on the field the day before and outline his plans to correct the team’s glaring mistakes.

  One prominent member of the executive board was Tony Canadeo, the Gray Ghost, a former star Packers running back out of Gonzaga University. Canadeo landed a job selling steel after his playing days ended and stayed in Green Bay, one of some thirty Packers alumni still in the area and all embarrassed at the depths to which the team had fallen. The weekly grilling of McLean was humiliating and depressing but unavoidable, according to Canadeo. “When you haven’t won a goldarn game, you want to know what’s going on. If you don’t ask, you’re being a jackass. Scooter, hell, I knew Scooter and played against him and liked him. But Scooter had no control of the team. Deep down in his heart he knew things had to change.” Ray Scott, the announcer from Pittsburgh who had launched pro football’s national television debut on the Dumont network five years earlier, was broadcasting Packers games for CBS in 1958, and quickly discovered that players were manipulating McLean through the executive committee. “If you were a Packer who knew someone on the committee and you thought you should be getting more playing time, you’d go to a committee member, who’d go to the coach,” Scott said. “Oh, it was awful.”

  The local sportswriters were easier on Scooter. He was close friends with some of them, played poker with them, too, in a weekly game that moved from house to house. When it was his turn to host the game, he asked Art Daley if he could borrow a poker table. It was a scene that Daley would not forget: the octagonal felt table wouldn’t fit in Scooter’s car, so the muscular coach held it with his left hand outside the driver’s side window while steering the car with his right hand down the streets of Green Bay. For a softie, as Daley said, Scooter was “one strong little guy.” Unlike many coaches, he never tried to keep the press away or snapped at reporters after a difficult loss. “When we got beat by Baltimore that year fifty-six to nothing, the feeling was, well, you know, what the hell,” according to Daley. “It got away from him. There was a friendly, good feeling and we all felt bad for him.” On New Year’s Eve, his last night in Green Bay, Scooter ended up at Daley’s house at two in the morning. No hard feelings by then about his brief dreary time at the top. “He took it all right. What the hell. Only won one game.”

  They cooked some eggs and drank a final round of toasts to auld lang syne and then Ray McLean scooted to Detroit.

  LOMBARDI was in the kitchen at Lockwood Place, standing near the rose-colored cabinets, when he took the first call from Green Bay. On the other end of the line was Jack Vainisi, the young personnel manager for the Packers, who was conducting his own covert search for a new coach. “I don’t have the authority to make this call, but I’m curious to know whether you’re interested,” Vainisi began. Lombardi had just started an off-season job as a public relations executive at Federation Bank and Trust, where the Giants kept their deposits. He was trying to overcome his annual postseason depression by taking to his new job as though he might someday coach a bank. First he had to learn all the plays and players, so he spent several hours during his first week interviewing tellers and loan officers to find out what they did and how they did it. He had even entertained the seditious notion of abandoning football for the banking life. More money, more time to golf. But there were only twelve head-coaching slots in the NFL, and those were the jobs he coveted most, even though he had already turned down one in Philadelphia. The Packers were offering something the Eagles could not—full control of the club as coach and general manager. Yes, he told Vainisi, he was interested.

  Jack Vainisi was the bright light of the Packers staff: professional, energetic, with an uncanny ability to find football talent. His intention was to prevent Olejniczak and the executive board from making another hiring mistake, and in characteristically thorough fashion he had scouted Lombardi before calling him. He had studied Vince during the playoffs against the Browns and Colts, and interviewed the smartest football men he knew—Paul Brown of Cleveland, George Halas of Chicago, Bert Bell in the commissioner’s office, Red Blaik at Army—all of whom said the same thing: Lombardi was their man, the best assistant in the country, ready to prove his merit as a head coach. Trying to steer the Packers president to the right choice while making him think it was his own, Vainisi told Olejniczak to consider talking to Brown, Halas, Bell and Blaik. Lombardi would be a tough
sell: a New Yorker, Italian, from the other conference, unknown in the upper Midwest, with no head-coaching experience above the high school level. And there were as many job seekers as members of the Packers’ forty-five-man board of directors. Top names being floated by different factions included Blanton Collier, coach at Kentucky; Otto Graham, the former Browns quarterback; Jim Trimble of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Canadian Football League; and Forrest Evashevski, whose Iowa team had just won the Rose Bowl.

  Even Earl Louis Lambeau, the inimitable Curly, founder of the Packers, who had moved to California when his thirty-year coaching career had ended, was seeking consideration, claiming he was the only one who could revive the fallen Pack. Days after Scooter’s dismissal, Lambeau sent a wire from Palm Springs promoting himself for general manager, then flew back to Green Bay, met with Ole over the Christmas break and began drumming up a public relations campaign on his own behalf led by Fritz Van, a local radio announcer. Green Bay was susceptible to appeals from the past, especially from Lambeau. It was an inward-looking town whose culture was rooted in the rituals of church, family, neighborhood tavern and the Green Bay Packers, and Curly, the big, jovial Belgian, held the status of local patron saint. His rise had paralleled Green Bay’s growing identification with football. He had starred at Green Bay East High, then played briefly with George Gipp in a Notre Dame backfield coached by the fabled Knute Rockne. When he dropped out of Notre Dame and returned home in 1919, he persuaded a local meatpacker, the Indian Packing Company, to sponsor a football team, and two years later brought the Packers into the American Professional Football Association, the predecessor of the NFL.

  The history of Curly Lambeau and Green Bay football was as glorious as it was tenuous. His first team, which played against clubs in Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, was a powerhouse, winning ten straight and outscoring the opposition by a total of 565 points to 6. (Typical score: Green Bay 87, Sheboygan 0.) The Packers’ specialty was the forward pass, with the freewheeling Lambeau once tossing forty-five in a game and completing thirty-seven. Matters on the financial side were less splendid. The team played its home games at an open field next to Hagemeister Brewery and did not charge for admission, collecting donations by passing the hat. By 1922 the Packers were on the verge of bankruptcy, and Andrew Turnbull, business manager for the Press-Gazette, stepped in to save them. With a group of businessmen known as the Hungry Five (always hungry for money), Turnbull turned the Packers into a stock corporation, selling shares at $5 each.

  Lambeau brought in a series of colorful stars over the ensuing years, the rambunctious halfback John McNally, known as Johnny Blood, the quarterbacks Cecil Isbell and Arnie Herber, the fullback Clarke Hinkle and the greatest receiver of his era in professional football, Don Hutson of Alabama (the NFLrecord book had a page entitled “Records Held by Don Hutson”). With George B. Calhoun, sports editor of the Press-Gazette, cheering them on with daily stories, the Packers became one of the dominant teams in the NFL, winning six titles under Lambeau, including three straight from 1929 to 1931. But when the team started losing in the postwar years, the town’s unlikely claim to a professional football franchise became endangered. In the old days, Lambeau had survived by his wits, once persuading a fan to auction his roadster to keep the team out of hock. By 1949 the team’s debts had reached a point where that sort of improvisation would not help.

  Professional football had long since left the other small towns where the game had got its start, places like Decatur, Illinois; Hammond, Indiana; Canton, Ohio. Green Bay, barely hanging on, turned to its citizens again for help, transforming the club into a nonprofit corporation and issuing $125,000 worth of stock, with no stockholder allowed to have more than two hundred shares. The move saved the city’s team, for better and worse. On the plus side, by spreading the ownership to more than a thousand local shareholders and prohibiting a single majority owner, the Packers were assured of never being moved from Green Bay. On the negative side, there was no single wealthy owner who could dip into his own reserves to buy players, and the distribution of power among directors and executive directors made the administration of the team exceedingly contentious.

  Now here came Curly Lambeau again, a decade later, seeking a second chance. In many respects, Lambeau was the Packers, but Olejniczak and his allies on the executive board, especially Canadeo and vice president Dick Bourguignon, a progressive-minded real estate man, were skeptical of Curly’s resurrection effort. They remembered his hapless final two years as coach in 1948 and 1949, when he was burned out and the team faded into mediocrity. Curly, to them, was a remnant of the era when pro football was a minor sport populated by tramp players. In the spirit of the new, his days were done.

  Following up on Vainisi’s early scouting work, Ole and members of the executive committee called around the league to check on possible coaches, heard good comments about Lombardi and asked the Maras for permission to talk to him. Vince had a few years left on his Giants contract, and the Maras were torn between graciousness and self-interest. They had already persuaded Lombardi to reject one coaching offer and did not feel they could ask him for patience again. He remained the most likely candidate to be their next head coach, but Jim Lee Howell had given no indications that he was ready to retire. Yes, the Packers could talk to Lombardi, Wellington Mara said, while trying to divert his Green Bay suitors to another option: Wouldn’t they rather have the other Giants assistant, Tom Landry? Ole said he wanted to talk to Lombardi first. It was agreed that he could interview Vince for the job at the second winter meetings in Philadelphia. But if the Packers hired Lombardi, there had to be one caveat, Mara insisted: if the Giants needed a head coach in the future, they could try to get Lombardi back.

  Olejniczak said he had no problem with that.

  WHO’S GOING to the Packers? That question was the buzz of the lobby at Philadelphia’s Warwick Hotel when the league’s owners and coaches gathered in late January to conduct the final twenty-six rounds of what was then a thirty-round college draft. Green Bay’s quaint status as the smallest franchise in professional sports was wearing thin among many in the pro football community; there was a growing sense, especially now that the team was so inept, that the Packers were not just an oddity but a costly anachronism. One New York sportswriter angrily confronted Olejniczak near the hotel elevators and snapped: “You’re nothing but parasites. You couldn’t last in this league if not for the big checks you take away from other teams in the conference.” Ole remained calm. “You just wait,” he said. “We’re going to get a man who’ll impress you.”

  Early on the evening of January 22, he made his move, ambling up to the Giants’ draft table and tapping Lombardi on the shoulder. The two men adjourned to Ole’s room, where Canadeo was waiting. On the way through the lobby, they passed Ray Scott, the Packers television announcer, who caught Vince’s eye and was overcome by a sensation that he would be “seeing more of that man.” The sports department at the Milwaukee Journal believed differently, running with a scoop that the CFL’s Trimble was about to take the Green Bay job. The most likely choice still seemed to be Evashevski, the big and glowering Evy, a proven leader and winner at Iowa. Could it have been mere coincidence that the Packers’ top draft choice was Randy Duncan, the talented Iowa quarterback? Two assistants from Weeb Ewbank’s championship Baltimore Colts were also getting late mention. But Lombardi exuded confidence in his meeting with Ole and the Gray Ghost. Though he would not commit to taking the job if it were offered to him, he talked about how he would run the team, what he expected from the players, the executive committee and himself. And he boldly broached the subject of salary, noting that he was the highest paid assistant in the league, that his wife did not want to leave the New York area but might be persuaded by a big new house and a higher standard of living, and that along with his positions with the Giants and Federation Bank and Trust he was a candidate to replace Colonel Blaik at West Point, where excellent housing was provided by the Army. “He grabbed o
ur attention from the first minute,” said Canadeo. “He knew where he was going. In football terminology, he knew his game plan.”

  On the Sunday morning after the draft, Evashevski made a secret visit to Green Bay to meet with Olejniczak and a few other directors. He left four hours later convinced that he did not want to relinquish his job at Iowa for the pros. That evening Lombardi learned that he was out of the running as Blaik’s replacement at West Point, the Army brass having decided not to make an exception to their traditional practice of hiring only former cadets as head coaches. The news demoralized him. He grumbled to several friends that he suspected the real reason he was excluded from the job was that his “last name ended in a vowel.” But events were unfolding so quickly that he had little time to brood. The next day he was flown to Green Bay for an interview with the Packers. Canadeo and Bourguignon met his private plane at the airport and rode with him to the H. C. Prange Department Store to meet with the company chairman, Jerry Atkinson, who was a Packers director. On the drive downtown Bourguignon asked Lombardi whether the Maras would release him from his contract. “Jack Mara told me, ‘Let your good judgment and training be your guide,’ ” Lombardi answered. When he explained that Mara was referring to their shared Jesuit training at Fordham, Bourguignon noted that he had been trained by the Jesuits at Marquette. To which Canadeo added, “I graduated from Gonzaga and I’ve got that good judgment and training, too!” Lombardi broke into a huge grin, as Canadeo later remembered it, and said, “Between the three of us Jesuits here, we could kick the shit out of these non-Catholics!” He had found his first two friends in “godforsaken” Green Bay.