When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  It seemed that the only establishments that outnumbered churches in Green Bay were bars. Candlestick. King’s X. Piccadilly. The Spot. Cinderella’s Glass Slipper. Buzz Inn. Chatterbox. First and Last Club. Green Arrow. Harvey and Aileen’s. Gail’s. Hank’s. Helen’s Tiny Tap. Howard’s. Harold’s. Josie and Murph’s. Johnnie’s. Jerry and Irene’s. Lucille and Whitey’s. Marie and Harv’s. The culture of Green Bay had always been wet. During Prohibition the town overflowed with speakeasies that closed whenever federal agents ventured north from Milwaukee, then reopened as soon as they left. In 1928 the Milwaukee Journal wrote of Green Bay: “Wine, women, and song, all to be had in variety.” At the same time, the society had always been closed and inward-looking, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere for the town’s football celebrities. Rumors about the players served as a prime form of entertainment. John Ebert, who ran an office supply store, once “tested how fast a rumor would spread through town” by inventing a tale that Marie Lombardi had been made pregnant by Hornung. The next morning a man walked into Ebert’s favorite coffee shop and said, “Hey, anyone here hear about this Hornung and Marie story?” The residents of Brown County considered themselves owners of the team, and were thus perpetually concerned with the whereabouts of their precious property, the players. Lombardi was regularly fed unsolicited information from citizen spies: The Katzenjammer Kids are breaking curfew. McGee and Hornung are out at the off-limits place. Fuzzy’s here. Kramer’s there. Nitschke’s over there.

  Lombardi had rules about drinking. He allowed only two beers on flights home after road games. Any player caught standing at a bar received an automatic fine. They could sit at a table and drink, but not stand at the bar—that sullied the professional image he wanted to convey. He declared certain bars off-limits. But for all of his discipline, Lombardi was more flexible than he seemed. When presented with reports of wild goings-on involving Packers, he gave the benefit of the doubt to his players. He accepted their explanations at face value unless he had hard facts to the contrary. He believed it was better to build trust that way than to impose discipline with a pack of town snitches. He also allowed emissaries to warn the players. During road trips, when he was returning from dinner, he often sent broadcaster Tony Canadeo ahead to walk through the hotel bar and spread the word, “The Old Man’s coming, boys. The Old Man’s on his way”—allowing those standing at the bar to scatter and avoid a fine.

  THE PACKERS defeated the Browns in Cleveland in the fifth game of the season, 49 to 17, and held first place in the Western Conference with a 4 and 1 record. They looked unstoppable on the field, as close to perfection as Lombardi could get them, no obvious weaknesses on offense or defense. When Hornung wasn’t scoring, Taylor was; he busted loose for four touchdowns against the Browns. But there was a sense of uncertainty shadowing the team that had nothing to do with football. World events threatened Lombardi’s drive to his first championship. In response to the construction of the Berlin wall by the Soviets late that summer, President Kennedy and the Department of Defense had activated thousands of military reservists and national guardsmen. Three Packers were among the two dozen professional football players who received call-up notices in October. They happened to be three of his best players: Paul Hornung, Boyd Dowler and Ray Nitschke. Hornung was designated to report to Fort Riley in Kansas by the end of the month.

  Lombardi was openly distraught about the prospect of losing key players during the decisive final stretch of the season. He bemoaned his fate in the press, saying that he felt the Packers were hit harder than other teams. “We can’t afford to lose anybody,” he said. Which came first, Packers or country? In this case, it seemed, he felt the country could wait until the end of the football season, at least. Behind the scenes, according to Army documents, Lombardi personally contacted officials at the Pentagon in an effort to keep Hornung and Nitschke. “On 11 October, 1961, Coach Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers requested that both men be deferred from being recalled to active duty on the basis of their being critical members of the team,” stated a confidential memorandum to the Army chief of staff. A panel of four colonels considered Lombardi’s request and disapproved it. Another appeal was filed a week later, this time by Hornung and Nitschke individually, though with the assistance of team lawyers, “their basis being primarily financial loss, the fact that they are paid by the game, and there are no job rehiring rights.”

  If this had been a real war, perhaps the sentiment would have been different, but for many Wisconsin residents the Cold War confrontation in Berlin did not seem worth depleting their beloved squad for the weekly football battles of the Western Conference. In a bipartisan display of Packers fever, Republican senator Alexander Wiley and Democratic congressman Clement J. Zablocki requested deferments for the players. Packers fans launched letter-writing campaigns to the White House. From fraternity row at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater came a petition to President Kennedy signed by “staunch backers of the Green Bay Packers.” The three activated players, it declared, “are idols to the people of Wisconsin—especially the youth of Wisconsin. They are perfect specimens of physical fitness. If we recall correctly, you want the youth of America to become more physically fit. How do you expect these youths to increase their interest in physical fitness when you take away idols such as these?”

  In considering the Green Bay situation, Army officials acknowledged that deferring the players through December would have “no impact on the units to which they are presently assigned.” They were not regular members of their units, but “filler personnel,” of which there was an abundant supply. But since the players did not meet the established deferment criteria of personal or community hardship, Army officials feared that “an inequity would be created by not granting delays to equally deserving individuals for professional or business hardships.” The final word arrived from Washington on October 18: the Packers had to serve. Lombardi accepted the decision with resignation. “They are going to have to go and there is not much I can do about it,” he said.

  One alternative remained for Hornung: he might fail the Army physical. Lou Cordileone, a defensive lineman for San Francisco, had just been granted a deferment because he needed knee surgery. Was Hornung, with his injured shoulder and pinched nerve, any more fit than Cordileone? His first examination came at the induction center in Milwaukee. “Am I Four-F?” Hornung asked the doctor, after his various ailments were noted on the chart. “Basically, you are,” he was told. “But not bad enough. If I flunk you, they’re going to send you somewhere else until you pass.” It was a political issue as much as a medical question, so the Milwaukee officers sent Hornung on for another examination at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois. When Hornung arrived at the hospital there, a military orderly told him that his examination would be conducted the next morning, and that in the meantime he would be confined to base. “I had looked at it like a three-day vacation,” Hornung said later. “My man Rick Casares [fullback for the rival Bears, but a Hornung pal] was going to pick me up and we had dates for dinner in Chicago that night. So I asked the orderly, ‘Am I in the goddamn service?’ He said no. So I said, ‘Well, then, I’m not confined to base. I’m out of here.’ He said, ‘You can’t do that, Mr. Hornung.’ I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ And I did.”

  A two-day physical began the next morning. Same story. A Navy doctor—“a captain who was likable as hell,” as Hornung recalled—explained the dilemma. “He said, ‘We’ve got to pass you. You’re going in.’ So I went in.” After the results of the physical were announced, Hornung released a statement to the Milwaukee Sentinel in which he said: “I hate leaving the best football team in America, but I have no regrets. I have a duty to the United States which is above all the rest.” Hornung also told the Sentinel that he was sorry “outsiders meddled” in the situation and asserted that “at no time” did he or “any member of the Packer organization make a request for a deferment through a congressman or anyone else”—a claim that he may have believed to be tr
ue, but that was directly contradicted by Army documents.

  Hornung arrived at Fort Riley on November 14 and was assigned to the 896th Engineer Floating Bridge Company, a National Guard unit from the Bismarck region of North Dakota. As a rule, men in that company were restricted to within twenty miles of camp when off duty. Even if Hornung could get weekend passes, was there any way he could play in the remaining games? Perhaps no private in Fort Riley history was better situated for exceptional treatment than the Golden Boy in that fall of 1961. The connections between the Green Bay Packers and the U.S. Army ran long and deep. From his days at West Point, Lombardi knew colonels and generals in the Pentagon and all around the country. His chief scout in the East, Lewis B. Anderson, worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Washington. In a confidential report to Lombardi and Packer personnel director Dick Voris, Anderson suggested that his boss, Brigadier General Robert G. MacDonnell, might prove helpful. “He told me that he knew Vince while at West Point…. He was not certain if Coach Lombardi would remember him or not. Further I might add that the general is an ardent Packers fan.”

  Anderson proved to be as thorough scouting the military as he was in his football reports. He provided Voris and Lombardi with inside information on Hornung’s situation at Fort Riley, where the commanding officer was Major General John F. Ruggles of the First Infantry Division. “Gen. Ruggles, I am informed, is very athletically inclined. He was assigned to West Point a few years ago and quite possibly could have been there at the time Coach Lombardi was at the Point,” Anderson wrote. “In checking with the Public Information Office, they feel certain that there will be no difficulty encountered in obtaining approval for Paul to play with the Packers…. It is my suggestion, and I base this on my discussions with the PIO as well as military personnel in this office, that Coach Lombardi place a telephone call to Gen. Ruggles on an informal basis and advise Gen. Ruggles that he is forwarding a request to the commanding officer of Paul’s unit requesting that Paul be allowed to play ball on Sunday, providing it did not interfere with his military obligations.” In a final instruction to Voris, Anderson requested that his letter be closely held. “I would appreciate it very much if you would destroy this letter by burning same after it has been read by yourself and Coach Lombardi.”

  Perhaps equally helpful was the fact that Lombardi had just persuaded a recently retired friend from his West Point days to move to Wisconsin and run the Packers operation in Milwaukee. Colonel O. C. Krueger had carved out a special niche as an operator on the jock side of the military. Ockie, as he was known, considered himself a “valet” to the powerful. At West Point he served Red Blaik’s interests, and later, as commander at Fort Meade, he became accustomed to “taking care of the brass.” On sunny summer days, Pentagon officials would say they were going to “visit an installation”—which meant they were driving up to Fort Meade to play golf. “I had lockers for all of them,” Krueger said later. “I knew everybody in the Pentagon.” He also, as it turned out, had an intimate acquaintance with Major General Ruggles at Fort Riley; they had been in the West Point class of 1931. Their contact increased as soon as Hornung reached Kansas. “I would call out there and say, ‘Johnny, I don’t want any favors or anything else,’ ” Krueger recounted later. “‘All I want to find out is—is Hornung going to have duty on the weekend? That’s all I want to know.’ ”

  Even before Krueger first called, Ruggles had already received word from the Pentagon that he should let Hornung play, according to his later account. “That arrangement was approved all the way up. It came down to me,” Ruggles said. “To bait Ockie a bit,” he gave Krueger the same answer every time—“We’re going to handle this just like any other soldier”—and would then hang up on his old classmate.

  Hornung in fact did miss the November 19 game against the Rams. He had been on active duty for less than a week by then and had not finished his orientation. Furthermore, the Packers were playing Detroit the following Thursday in the traditional Thanksgiving Day game, and it would have required too much elasticity in the already well-stretched military rules for him to be granted leave for two games in five days. Detroit was in second place, chasing Green Bay. Los Angeles was in last place. Lombardi wanted Hornung for the Lions. He was flown from Fort Riley to Detroit and back in a Cessna 310 piloted by Pat Martin, a Notre Dame alumnus and Packer backer who lived in Green Bay and had married into one of the big papermill families. Although it was not one of Hornung’s better games, he kicked one field goal and two extra points as the Packers prevailed, 17 to 9, solidifying their hold on first place in the conference with 9 wins and 2 losses. The next week Martin flew Hornung to Milwaukee for a game against the Giants. They left Fort Riley at Saturday noon and had to be back by midnight Sunday. The Giants game was a bruiser, Hornung seemed sluggish again, and the Packers played barely well enough to win, 20 to 17.

  Even though the win clinched the Western Conference title, the coach was grumpy and anxious after the game. His team had appeared invincible at midseason, before the call-up. Now it seemed less imposing.

  “Are you working out down there?” he asked Hornung pointedly.

  “Yeah, I’m working out,” Hornung said.

  “Well, we’re going to send you the offense,” Lombardi said. Every week from then on, amid the pile of love letters sent to Private Hornung, was a manila folder from Green Bay, a copy of Lombardi’s offensive plans for the next game.

  Hornung had fibbed to his coach, he said later. He was not working out in the way Lombardi expected. When reporters inquired about Hornung’s activities at Fort Riley, eager to do feature stories on “the Army’s most famous jeep driver,” they were told that he was following the routine of all the men in his company—here waking up for kitchen duty at 4:30 a.m., there walking guard on a cold winter night. He was described as the jeep driver for a lieutenant of the 896th Engineer Floating Bridge Company, Duane Dinius of Bismarck. Dinius was quoted as calling Hornung “a real fine boy.” All of which, except for the lieutenant’s feelings about Hornung, were stretches. “He was assigned as a jeep driver, but he never drove my jeep,” Dinius said in an interview decades later. “They got a picture of him in the jeep but he never drove it. Never drove me. He never went out in the field with us at all. We were out in the field practicing building bridges out by the Kansas River. We only saw him back at the fort for morning formation. He spent the rest of his time in the sauna.” As Hornung explained: “I had that injury showing up on the X-ray so I could go every day for treatment. So I went every day.”

  By the time the Packers flew west on December 9 for their annual season-ending games with the 49ers and Rams, Green Bay was agog over its two-time Western Conference champions. Local merchants coined a community nickname—Titletown USA—capturing the spirit of this unlikely success story. The capital of professional football in America now was not New York or Chicago or Cleveland or Baltimore, but little Green Bay, a place where the people owned the franchise, where the boys in Martha’s Coffee Club (who convened each morning to tell tall tales and talk Packers; fines were imposed on anyone mentioning politics, religion or business) felt as empowered as Wellington Mara or Art Modell; where sheet metal contractor Howie Blindauer printed hundreds of training camp rosters every summer so that his fellow citizen-owners could pretend they were general managers—as powerful as the Pope!—and check CUT or STAY in the margins as they observed the seventeenth-round tackle from North Carolina Central; where these same fans would stand patiently behind the fence in subzero weather to watch their Packers practice on December mornings; where Whitey Klicka, a local movie theater operator, arranged a babysitting service of sorts for Packer-crazed parents: he screened matinees for children that ran from before the kickoff till after the final gun of every Packers game. At least one person disliked the Titletown nickname: Vince Lombardi knew that his team had not won a title yet, and he fretted about overconfidence.

  The squad seemed unusually tight in the dank Kezar Stadium locker room be
fore the San Francisco game. Lombardi had been driving his boys as hard as ever, even though the West Coast trip was meaningless, in a sense, nothing more than a long tune-up before the league championship game against the Giants, who were winning the Eastern Conference. Before Lombardi gave the team his final instructions, he and the assistants left the locker room briefly so the players could talk among themselves. “Anybody got anything to say?” asked Jim Ringo, a captain. “Yeah, I’ve got something to say” came a voice from the side. It was Private Hornung. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “There are three of us here from the service, me and Nitschke and Boydie. And we’re real happy to be here and we needed this weekend a helluva lot more than you guys. And I want to tell you something. I came here for two things. I took care of the first thing last night. Now let’s take care of the second and kick the shit out of the Forty Niners!”

  The room exploded in laughter, which brought Lombardi storming through the door. “What’s so funny, for Chrissakes? What the hell’s going on in here?” he bellowed.

  Ah, nothing, Coach, they said. Nothing. Just Paul.

  The Packers lost that day by one point. Perhaps it was just coincidence that Hornung missed the final game against the Rams, but he was not needed in any case. Better for him to rest his sore shoulder in preparation for the championship game, which was to be held in Titletown on New Year’s Eve. But when Hornung was told of the Christmas leave policy at Fort Riley, he realized that he had another problem. Furloughs had been divided into two sections by the alphabet. Surnames A through L were off the week leading up to Christmas, M through Z the week after. Hornung called Lombardi. “Coach,” he said. “I can’t make the game. I’ve gotta be back the week of the game.” Lombardi was upset, Hornung recalled, but said that he had one more card to play. The coach had seen President Kennedy that month at the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame dinner in New York; they had sat together on the dais and chatted and joked about the Army coaching job, which was opening again with the firing of Dale Hall. Kennedy had given Lombardi the number to his private phone line at the White House and said to call if he ever needed anything. “I’m going to call him,” Lombardi told Hornung. “You be ready to go.”