When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  And out came more writers from the East to see the genius coach and his prodigious left halfback. One of them was Dick Schaap, at age twenty-seven the sports editor at Newsweek and frequent contributor to Sport. The lone problem with the Packers story as far as Schaap and other New Yorkers were concerned was its travel requirement. “You had to be brave to go to Green Bay,” Schaap once declared, advancing a theme articulated earlier by Alexis de Tocqueville of France and Marie Lombardi of New Jersey. “You had to fly the route of the Blue Goose, North Central Airlines, which gave out free beer on its flights.” The first time an editor at Sport asked Schaap to visit Green Bay to gauge whether Hornung was reality or myth, Schaap responded jokingly, “Can’t we check on the phone?” As a rule, he noted, “out-of-town sportswriters go to Milwaukee only under threat of torture; the thought of going a hundred miles farther north is unthinkable.”

  To remote Green Bay Schaap ventured nonetheless, arriving in town between Hornung’s spectacular performance against the Colts and the first road game in Cleveland. What struck him immediately in Green Bay was how open the players were. They welcomed him as a brother, inviting him to hang out at the rambling brick house near the stadium on the west side that Hornung shared that year with Ron Kramer and Jesse Whittenton. (Max McGee, Hornung’s usual bachelor pad pal, was married then, briefly—“a six-month tryout-type deal,” as Hornung put it.) They were all about the same age. Wealth or fame had not set them totally out of reach. They were narcissists, as most athletes tend to be, Schaap thought, but there was none of the maddening condescension of millionaire athletes of a later era. The Packers seemed honored that an eastern sportswriter would come see them.

  Lombardi was not what drew Schaap to Green Bay, but the broad shadow of the coach was palpable everywhere. “I remember being frightened of him,” Schaap recalled of his first impression. “But I was probably frightened of all authority figures. He looked tough. Even when he said hello, he sounded tough. He had that bulldog bark along with the bulldog face.” The players were equally intimidated by Lombardi, Schaap noticed, though their feelings were complex, at once irreverent and awed. They joked about his “martinet tendencies”—when he was not around to hear. Hornung and McGee once hid a tape recorder outside his office before traipsing in for one of his bawling-out sessions. All that could be heard on the tape was Lombardi yelling. Later, they re-recorded it, inserting obscene retorts between the coach’s rants. “Yeah, sure. Yeah. Go fuck yourself, Vince! Yeah, who do you think you’re talking to, you asshole.” All the things that they would never dare say to his face, and as they replayed the spliced version they laughed with hilarity and glee and terror. The players needed that private release from the pressure Lombardi imposed, but as Schaap noted in an article that autumn in Sport, “to a man they respect him and what he has done for them.”

  Much of what Schaap saw and heard in Green Bay found expression in his writing, but not all of it. Along with his interview notes, he kept separate mental note of Hornung’s off-hours existence during that first trip, a chronicle of youthful saturnalia. “Each morning Paul would get up about quarter to nine and be at the field by nine o’clock. They would practice until twelve and there would be meetings to three. At three he’d come home, mix a pitcher of martinis and drink martinis until six o’clock with Kramer and the others. Then they’d go out to dinner, a group of players. Scotch before dinner. Wine with dinner. Brandy after dinner. Then back on scotch. Every day. I lost count by the time it had reached more than sixty just how many drinks he had in that week leading up to the Browns game. Also, he never went to bed before four in the morning, he never went to bed alone, and he never repeated himself. Paul by that time had become such a sex symbol that he had lost the power to differentiate. All women looked the same to him. They could be tall, short, fat, beautiful. It was part of his image that he was supposed to get laid every night. And therefore to live up to this image he would get laid every night.” And run and block and pass and catch and kick like hell on Sunday afternoons.

  Myth or reality? Hornung seemed both. It was said that half the world wanted to be with him and the other half wanted to be him. The yearning he stirred in others is evoked in one Saturday afternoon scene in early fall. A young boy named Gary Van Ness is sent by his mother to pick up a bag of hamburgers at Sneezer’s takeout place near the corner of Highland and Ashland on the west side. As Gary approaches on his bike, he sees a cream-colored 1959 Cadillac convertible in the driveway. A beautiful girl sits in the front, her head tilted to the sky. And out from the storefront steps Hornung, his wavy locks shining above his brilliant high forehead. He is wearing light slacks and a fresh T-shirt, and he is carrying a case of Hamm’s beer under his right arm. He puts the beer in the back, eases into the Caddy, glances at the kid, smiles, winks and drives away.

  To trade places for a moment with the Golden Boy—among those who made such a wish might have been none other than his straight-arrow coach. “I don’t know what it is about Hornung that gets me,” Lombardi confided to a visiting friend one day. “Maybe,” came the reply, “he is the other side of Vince Lombardi.”

  “Maybe,” Lombardi said.

  A significant part of it was that Hornung was so skilled at football. He was a money player, the one Lombardi knew would somehow find a way to score when they were near the goal line, that rare gifted runner who was not too proud to block, a charismatic leader who wanted to be one of the boys yet lifted the hearts of his teammates just by being among them. But the free and easy side of Hornung also attracted Lombardi. Ruth McKloskey thought her boss “got a kick out of some of the things Paul did—what he wanted to do and couldn’t do.” Lombardi needed daily prayer and relentless discipline to make it; with Hornung it seemed effortless. Jack Koeppler, Vince’s golfing buddy at Oneida, concluded that “given a different time and place, the Old Man would have loved to have stepped out with Paul and those guys.” The coach’s son, the collegiate Vincent, also felt that his father wanted to live vicariously through Hornung. “I always suspected he had an affinity with Paul. He was a bit of a hell-raiser in college. He liked to have fun, he liked his scotch, but he felt that he had to be so responsible all the time.”

  There were, in a sense, three Lombardi sons, not one.

  First Vincent Henry Lombardi, the conflicted son, who looked like the Old Man and talked like the Old Man and blinked his eyes like the Old Man but struggled to live up to his expectations. No flesh and blood son could, perhaps. Vincent was a good kid, smart, bottled up, tense, but his father thought he was soft, too much like his mother, not ready to pay the price, a decent athlete, but he got hurt too easily—a genetic trait? an unwanted reminder of Lombardi’s own injury-prone past?—and he ran awkwardly at fullback, lifted his legs wrong. No way he could compete. It was always complicated with Vince and Vincent.

  Then Bryan Bartlett Starr, the dependable son, his opposite in culture and demeanor, yet the one who did everything that Lombardi wanted, who believed in him and sought only to please him. Bart alone among the players seemed actually to want to be with Lombardi. He looked forward to their meetings, yearned to hear him explain football and life, and appreciated—while it was happening—how much the Old Man had shaped him. Lombardi knew that he would always be there, clearly and soberly and rationally acting as his surrogate on the field. It was a relationship of trust between Vince and Bart.

  And finally Paul Vernon Hornung, the prodigal son, talented and wasteful. All the bona fides that Lombardi coveted: Notre Dame, Heisman Trophy, good Catholic boy, polite to his mother and Marie. How could Vincent—or even Bart—compete with that? Here was the son who moved Lombardi. “He loved Hornung, loved him,” said Tony Canadeo. Marie often told this story: Late at night the telephone rang at Sunset Circle, and she stirred, and Vince grumbled, “Don’t pick it up! Hornung’s in trouble!”

  “What?” Marie asked.

  “Don’t pick it up. I know something’s happened to Paul.”

  “Well, don’t y
ou think we ought to pick it up and see if it’s one of our kids?”

  “Oh.”

  Hornung, for better or worse, was often the first thing on his mind.

  PAUL HORNUNG never enjoyed much of a relationship with his own namesake father. His mother, Loretta, was pregnant with Paul when she separated from her husband, an insurance executive on Long Island, who had begun a long downward spiral brought on by excessive drinking and carousing. Loretta Hornung moved home to Louisville, where she and little Paul, born in 1935, stayed with her parents, who ran a grocery on the blue-collar west side. His dissolute father eventually returned to Louisville and bounced from job to job as his drinking worsened. When Paul was nine his grandmother died, and he and his mother set off on their own. “You’ll have to be a man now, Paul,” she said to him. For a time they shared a room in another family’s house, sleeping on two army cots. “I was very close to my mother,” he said later. “She was the only person I had.”

  Despite the hardship Hornung would look back on his early years as idyllic. He lived “a perfect athletic childhood,” playing football, baseball and basketball with ease. “Back in those days you didn’t lift weights. You were either an athlete or you weren’t. You couldn’t artificially chisel it. I was always the best athlete on the block.” When he was in sixth grade he starred on the eighth grade basketball team. At Flaget High, where he played quarterback, he became the most sought-after scholastic star in Kentucky history. Paul Bryant, then head coach at Kentucky, tried everything to lure Hornung to the state school. He brought the governor to visit Loretta. He promised that he would offer scholarships to every senior player on Flaget’s squad if Paul signed with him. A Kentucky booster showed him a shiny new Cadillac. But his mother loved Notre Dame, and nothing Bryant did could turn Paul away from the Irish after he visited South Bend and walked into Frank Leahy’s office, and the coach who had once taught blocking to Vinnie Lombardi and the fabled Fordham wall put his arms around Hornung and said, “I think I can make you the greatest football player in the country.”

  Leahy was sparing with praise, but remained effusive during his prize recruit’s freshman year. He predicted that Hornung would be the best quarterback in Notre Dame history and offered an unerring metaphor to describe his running style. Hornung cut through a defense, the coach said, “like a lawnmower going through grass.” Leahy left Notre Dame later that year, and the program slumped into a dim era brightened mainly by Hornung. To be the Irish quarterback was to hold the most glamorous job in college football, and Paul fit the role. He became known as the Golden Boy, playing under the Golden Dome. Looks, talent and Notre Dame’s prestige combined to create a global athletic idol. He had fan clubs everywhere; thirty teenage girls sent pictures from the south of France. One of Paul’s friends, a shy but eloquent classmate, the Irish equivalent of Cyrano de Bergerac, answered letters to Paul from strange women, sending out romantic missives under Hornung’s signature. He was a “205 pound Adonis,” wrote John M. Ross in America Weekly, who “constantly runs the risk of becoming the first player in history to be carried triumphantly from the field on the soft shoulders of a shrieking female horde.”

  Hornung had his own agent in college, Julius Tucker, who lent him a Studebaker and set up speaking engagements. During the summer before his junior year, he was flown out to speak at a Catholic high school in Pueblo, Colorado. Pueblo was the hometown of Gary Knafelc, then finishing his second year with the Packers, and the pro was stunned to see a banner hanging across a downtown street welcoming the college kid. “I was in town, too,” Knafelc said. “And nobody cared. I wasn’t even invited. He was the Golden Boy.” Flashy sportsmen who rooted for Notre Dame became Paul’s newfound friends; one of them, Abe Samuels, introduced him to the high life in Chicago, where he began dating dancers from the Chez Paree. “It was carte blanche for me all over Chicago,” Hornung said.

  His legend on the playing field grew during his junior season, when he played his first two classic Hornung games, compiling 354 total yards against Southern Cal and displaying all his skills in beating Iowa. In that game, during a crucial late drive, he completed four passes, including one for a touchdown, kicked the extra point, boomed a deep kickoff and made the tackle himself, and finally kicked the game-winning field goal. It was all the material Notre Dame’s sports publicist needed to push him for the Heisman the following season. Hornung essentially had the trophy won even before his senior year started, luckily, since he was occasionally injured and his team was pathetic, winning only two and losing eight. The national class of seniors was amazing that year, with Johnny Majors at Tennessee, Tommy McDonald at Oklahoma, John Brodie at Stanford and Jim Brown at Syracuse. Majors later insisted that he should have won the Heisman. Hornung confided that he thought McDonald deserved it. History might favor Jim Brown. “But Brown didn’t get the publicity,” Hornung said. “We had the best publicity guy in the world. Everybody loved Charley Callahan. All the sportswriters knew him.” And they voted for Paul Hornung.

  Jack Vainisi, the Packers scout and Notre Dame alumnus, considered Hornung the best of the group, too, persuading Green Bay to select him as the bonus pick, the No. 1 choice, in the pro draft. After playing in the College All-Star Game the following summer, Hornung and his newfound pal and teammate, Ron Kramer of Michigan, drove north together to the Packers training camp, then held in Stevens Point. The Golden Boy’s reputation had preceded him. As soon as they reached the dormitory “this girl came up to Paul and grabbed him around the neck and screamed, ‘I’ve been waiting hours for you!’ ” Kramer recounted. “I thought she was going to kill him. She looked like a Purdue guard—a big girl. He finally got her off him and we go into the dorm, and the coach, Liz Blackbourn, comes up to Paul and yells, ‘You’re here five seconds and you’ve got a girl on your arm!’ ” The young woman had reason to think Hornung would greet her affectionately; she had been among those who received romantic notes from his ghostwriter back at Notre Dame. This odd first impression became a symbol of Hornung’s precarious early standing in Green Bay. Until Lombardi came along, it appeared that the Golden Boy was simply the hyped creation of the Irish publicity machine. Blackbourn sarcastically called him “Golden Dome.”

  HIS TEAMMATES in Green Bay had other nicknames for Hornung. They called him the Horn, or Goat (because of his drooping shoulders), or Eileen (during the off-season, he had gone to Hollywood for a role in the television show My Sister Eileen). All were uttered with affection. Hornung “could be an asshole at times,” Ron Kramer said, “but he was a lovable asshole.” There was nothing stingy about him; he was as willing to pick up the check at the bar as he was to throw the block to spring Jim Taylor. He treated rookies with respect, and was especially generous in that summer and fall of 1961 with halfback Elijah Pitts, a thirteenth-round draft choice from tiny Philander Smith College in Arkansas. Pitts, the son of a sharecropper, went to camp with the attitude that he was “as good as anyone,” telling friends back in the little town of Mayflower that he would not see them until the end of his rookie season. But he was overtaken by anxiety at times at St. Norbert, fearful that he would be overlooked, and never forgot how the Golden Boy believed in him. “I gotta make it. I gotta make it,” Pitts kept saying softly. “You’re gonna make it. Believe it. You’ll be playing here longer than I will,” Hornung replied.

  Another aspect of Hornung’s generosity involved Lombardi. He served as a buffer between the fiery coach and the other players. Lombardi could rant at Hornung, blister him with criticism, fine him if necessary, and Hornung would accept it with equanimity. “Coach could whip him and Paul would take it. He wouldn’t break. He could handle it,” said Ron Kramer. Most of the other prominent players could not. Starr felt that practice field criticism undermined him with his teammates. Taylor sulked, certain that Lombardi was picking on him. Even the seemingly unflappable McGee churned inside whenever Lombardi singled him out. Hornung’s willingness to absorb the heat made it easier for less talented players. They knew Lomba
rdi adored Hornung, so they thought, as Gary Knafelc put it, “Jeez, if Paul can take it, we all can.”

  The Horn was larger than life in some ways, yet always one of the boys. As a team, around Lombardi, the Packers were models of discipline and professionalism, but on their own they were closer in disposition and lifestyle to the left halfback than they were to the quarterback or the coach. Many of them were what Ron Kramer called “jerk-off young kids, swearing all the time, bullshitting all the time”—and smoking and drinking incessantly as well. Cartons of Marlboros were stacked on the floor at Hornung’s house, freebies that he received from the tobacco company for advertising them. The boys often took little giveaway four-packs downtown to hand out to young women in the bars. They smoked the rest themselves. Before every game Hornung sat alone on his stool, puffing away, gathering his thoughts. There would be time for two cigarettes during halftime, when the clubhouse was dense with smoke: Marlboros passed around (none for Starr, who never smoked), Lombardi dragging on his Salem, Henry Jordan bumming a Camel from Phil Bengtson, Jimmy Taylor pulling out a cigar.

  The sixty-odd drinks that Hornung consumed during the week before the Browns game, by Dick Schaap’s calculation, were nowhere near a club record. Fuzzy Thurston was the undisputed drinking champion. Dan Currie dared to challenge the buoyant left guard once in San Francisco: after a night-long martini marathon, Currie was carried from the bar on the shoulders of a cordon of pallbearing teammates, semiconscious, an ice pack on his head, while the unfazed Fuzzy performed push-ups on top of the piano.