Before a game, at halftime and after a game, his players thought of Lombardi as a football genius. He always seemed able to anticipate what the other team was going to do. Although his game plans seemed simple, it was because of the dozens of plays that he had eliminated—following Blaik’s dictum of discarding the immaterial—to get to the fifteen or twenty that he was certain would work. But once the game started, the joke on the team was that Lombardi was the most useless guy on the sideline. Starr called the plays for the offense. Bengtson called them for the defense. Lombardi never wore a headset. Red Cochran, the offensive coach in the press box, was afraid to call down to Lombardi for fear he would snap at him on the phone. “All Lombardi would do,” said Gary Knafelc, “was stand there and holler. Hornung thought his coach “wasn’t worth a crap during the game. He was an observer. A kibbitzer. All you’d hear is, ‘What the hell’s goin’ on out there?’ ” He was always on the go, striding up and down the sideline, watching the down markers, yapping away at the officials, correcting every call. The game itself was the superficial part of coaching for Lombardi. He had already done his work getting his team prepared.
This title game in New York drew on all the lessons he had learned from the Jesuits and Colonel Blaik: simplicity, subsuming individual desire for the needs of the group, second effort, enduring pain as a means to an end, paying the price. The Giants played ferociously and the Packers held on with their will: Ringo playing through the numbness in his arm, Whittenton with his rib cage bruised in the first quarter, Jordan hobbling on a sprained ankle, Taylor bleeding. They lost Willie Wood in the third quarter when he was ejected for bumping a referee—unintentionally, the game films indicate—while protesting a pass interference call. Hornung, his knee banged again, limped from the lineup soon thereafter.
Their kicking situation was a mess. Boyd Dowler could not punt, so Lombardi told Max McGee to return to his old job. “Jesus Christ, thanks a lot, Coach!” he muttered to himself. The winds made punting a horrible chore, as McGee later described his predicament. “You either had to lay the ball on your foot or throw it hard at your foot. If you dropped it to your foot like you normally did, the wind would blow it off path.” He never had a punt blocked in his life until the third quarter of that game. The Packers were ahead 10 to 0 when McGee stood at his end zone and took the snap. Usually, he would look to see if someone was coming, but this time he stared down at his foot as he threw the ball at his shoe and began his kicking motion . . . and there was Erich Barnes, the swift Giants defensive back, on top of him, thump, and the ball was rolling on the hard parking lot of a playing field toward the end zone and Jim Collier was falling on it for a touchdown.
It was the lone New York score, less than the output of Green Bay’s unorthodox scoring machine, Jerry Kramer, the placekicking right guard. Since Hornung’s bad knee forced him to stop kicking after the fifth game of the year, Kramer had substituted for him with equal parts efficiency and good humor. He had missed only one extra point and two field goals during the last nine games of the season, though every kick was an adventure. He was a lock-legged straight-ahead kicker, as they all were in that era, but Kramer’s signature was that he had no follow-through with his right leg. His teammates did a locker room routine—“Sports quiz! Who’s this? Boink.” That was the description of Kramer’s kick. Boink. He boinked three field goals and one extra point against the Giants. “I was a little nervous about kicking in Yankee Stadium,” Kramer said later. “What you do when kicking is keep your head down. The first one, when I looked up, it looked like the ball was outside the goalposts, yet the official was going like this [good], and I was saying, ‘What the … what did…?’ and Bart Starr [the holder] said, ‘Shut up and get off the field.’ ”
The last boink came from thirty yards out with less than two minutes left in the game. It made the score 16 to 7, clinching the win. As Kramer gazed in stunned disbelief at his glorious achievement, the pigskin knuckleballing through the damp air up and over the crossbar and through the uprights, his partner at guard, Fuzzy Thurston, wrapped him in a bear hug, and the two big lugs, No. 64 and No. 63, four-legged it off the field in a giddy embrace, Kramer still shaking his head as he reached the sidelines and vanished in a huddle of backslapping Packers.
THE MOOD in the locker room after the victory had a sharp edge. Lombardi was Mr. High-Low: Hugging Jimmy and Ray and Jerry; then snarling at a reporter for asking about the violence of the game, then taking Pete Rozelle into a corner and yelling at him briefly (the subject no one could remember—the Friday press conference snafu? the Giants’ dirty play?), then not recognizing one of his old New Jersey friends and booting him from the locker room, then smiling again in the embrace of his gritty players.
The press upset him because they were asking questions that had nothing to do with what he was feeling. He could not fully express it himself yet. It would take a few days before he could address a New Year’s letter to his players and their wives. He would tell them that the victory in the championship game “was particularly pleasing” because of his old connections with New York and the “very trying conditions” the team had endured. The Giants had tried to intimidate them physically, but had failed because “in the final analysis, we were mentally tougher than they were and that same mental toughness made them crack. Character is the perfectly disciplined will, and you are men of character.” In his letter he would also reflect on the burden of success. “I believe you realize now that success is much more difficult to live with than failure. I don’t think anyone realizes, except ourselves, the obstacles we had to face week after week.” And he would sign off with the motto he had learned from General MacArthur. “Best wishes to you both and remember, ‘There is no substitute for victory.’ ”
Back to the locker room. The official who had ejected Willie Wood came in and said that he might have reacted too abruptly, maybe it was an accident. Ray Scott made his way through the room, deicing from his frosty broadcast perch. He was shocked to see Taylor’s stripped body—“all black and blue and purple and yellow.” Nitschke was dressed. With his turtleneck sweater and sport coat and bald head and horn-rimmed glasses, the ravaging middle linebacker known as Wildman departed in the professorial disguise that made it possible for him—what a different world it was then—to be named the game’s most valuable player and yet appear on the television quiz show What’s My Line? afterwards and not immediately be recognized by the panelists.
Hornung said he had never seen “a team up so high” as the Giants were that day. “Man, that first series of plays, that leather was really poppin’,” he said. “They were really up. We just had a better football team, that’s all.” Ed Sabol heard someone in the locker room mutter, “Boy, this is the longest day I’ve ever played football.” Sabol had just seen the war movie by that name, and the phrase clicked. He had the title for the championship film. “We’re going to call this ‘Pro Football’s Longest Day,’ ” he told his son Steve. (After six weeks of editing, they premiered it at Toots Shor’s on West Fifty-second Street, setting up a projector amid the cocktail tables—there was no cable sports network then to run it, not even a half-hour pregame show. The premiere viewing was interrupted when a waiter tripped over the cord and knocked the projector from its stand.
Ken Kavanaugh, a Giants assistant who had worked alongside Lombardi during his New York days, eventually left his bone-tired colleagues and went over to congratulate the winners. As he was walking underneath the stadium, he ran into Marie and Susan, who were waiting outside the visitors’ dressing room. Susan had endured another rough day. Marie by habit never left her seat, but at halftime she had retreated under the stands to escape the bitter wind. Susan asked to use the ladies’ room, but got lost on her way out and wandered through the stadium until she found her mother. Now they were waiting for Lombardi. Kavanaugh went inside. The place was cleared out. Where’s Green Bay? he asked an attendant. Gone. On the way to the airport. “I had the coach’s wife and she was supposed to be
with him,” Kavanaugh said later. “Vince had just gone off and forgot about her. Just flat forgot.” Marie and Susan took a cab and arrived in plenty of time, the flight delayed anyway by the weather.
The winds were still blowing strong, but as Paul Hornung said, “We were young and happy and we’d had a few bottles of champagne and we wanted to get out of there, and we did.” And that was it—the end of something. They rolled down the long runway, champagne corks popping, the plane shaking and bumping and rising uneasily and dipping and rising again into the whirling winter dusk, and they were headed home to Green Bay, Lombardi and his family and his Packers, champions once more, best ever, and none of them knew at that moment how much could be lost so soon, a president and a Golden Boy and even a way of life. Perhaps the past was not so innocent, but it seemed that way once it was gone, and it was gone the moment that plane left the ground.
19
Foot of the Cross
NOT LONG AFTER the Packers returned to Green Bay with their second consecutive NFL championship, Max McGee was contacted by investigators and asked to report to their Chicago office for questioning. He had a notion about the general subject. Rumors had been spreading for months, and bits of the story were now breaking in the press in these first days of 1963. Pete Rozelle had brought in a team of sixteen former FBI agents to investigate reports that some players had associated with gamblers and bet on games. The same leads were being pursued by federal gumshoes working for Senator John McClellan’s investigations subcommittee. Were games being thrown? Were players missing tackles or fumbling the ball on purpose to meet point spreads? Were they betting against their own teams? Troubling questions. But of the few names mentioned in accounts so far, McGee’s had not been among them, and no Packers at all. He wondered, Why the hell do they want me?
Then it hit him. The punt! He had never had a punt blocked in his career until the third quarter of the Giants game. “We’re ahead ten to nothing and the betting line is six and a half and I get one blocked and it goes under the point spread. Maybe they think I had something to do with it.” It was a stretch to make that case, of course. The punt was blocked because Erich Barnes was fast and had a clear path to the ball and McGee had been so concerned about the wind that he was not looking at the rush. And Jerry Kramer’s final field goal pushed the score above the point spread anyway. But that is what McGee decided the investigators wanted to quiz him about, and even though the punt was a hapless flub he went into the meeting with some measure of trepidation. As he said later, “Somebody says FBI and it kind of scares the shit out of you.”
As it turned out, they were not interested in the blocked punt at all, nor anything specifically involving McGee. They only asked him questions about Paul Hornung: what telephone calls Hornung got, when the calls came, what the conversations were about. They wanted to talk to McGee because he was Hornung’s roommate. The session was quick, tense, but not hostile. “They already had Paul on tape,” McGee said. He told them little, and nothing that they did not already know.
Hornung’s other roommate, Ron Kramer, was interviewed by investigators in Detroit, who ushered suspected players in and out of interrogation rooms at a motel near the Willow Run Airport. They asked him about a Las Vegas bettor named Barney Shapiro, and Kramer said, “Yeah, I know him, what about it?” And little more. Kramer had grown up in East Detroit. He knew a lot of characters whom law enforcement officials might call unsavory. “I came from this life,” Kramer said later. “I learned how to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Even if I do know. ‘I don’t know.’ If they asked something, I’d say, ‘Why do you want to know this?’ I’m not some kid on a street corner. You tell me why you want to know this and I’ll tell you. But if you don’t have any explanation for your question, I ain’t telling you. I had some very dear friends who were the best lawyers in town. They said, ‘Tell the truth, but don’t add anything to it.’ As far as I was concerned, I didn’t do anything.”
The investigation seemed petty and political to Kramer. Truth be told, the guys had placed a few bets on football, but they had wagered more money on one race at the Kentucky Derby than they had on any game. And almost everybody bet, he believed, one way or another. “What about the owners? Carroll Rosenbloom of the Colts never bet? Wasn’t the Maras’ old man a bookie?” Even the Coach liked gambling, in his own way. Not on football, but Lombardi enjoyed the racetracks and he went to the gambling parlors in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and put in his five-dollar ante for the cribbage tournament at training camp every summer and exchanged cash in gin games at the country club.
The Big Oof did not intend to take the rap, and he urged Hornung not to, either. “I said, ‘Horn, I don’t know what you’re going to do.’ It wasn’t like he was betting four million dollars and throwing a game. I told him, ‘Jesus Christ! Don’t say nothin’! Don’t say nothin’!’ ”
But Hornung did say something. “Why he did, I don’t know,” Kramer said later. “I guess because he’s an honorable man.”
THE STORY of how Paul Hornung reached this tenuous position began six years earlier, at the end of his senior season at Notre Dame. The Golden Boy was in San Francisco to play in one of the annual showcase bowls for future pros, the East-West Shrine Game. At dinner one night on the coast, he was introduced to Bernard “Barney” Shapiro, a big, suave man in his early thirties. They became “fast friends” that week, and saw each other every year thereafter when the Packers went to San Francisco on their December swing. Shapiro split his time between San Francisco and Las Vegas, where he owned United Coin Machine, a pinball and slot company. He had a stake in a Vegas hotel and made large profits from the patent on a blackjack slot. He often encouraged Hornung to go into real estate with him, but Hornung never did. Instead, Shapiro used Hornung for his betting. Once or twice a week during the football season, he would place a call to the house on the west side of Green Bay for a chat with the star halfback.
One of his questions was always the same: How do you think the Packers will do this week? There was no deception in the query and Shapiro was breaking no laws. He wanted to know how he should place his legal bets. “I knew he bet and he knew I knew,” Hornung said later. “I would tell Barney to bet on us, what the hell.” Perhaps it was inside information, but Hornung did not think of it that way. The Packers were so good that they consistently beat the point spread. The nature of their telephone conversations had changed back in 1959, coincidentally Lombardi’s first year in Green Bay. Along with making recommendations to Shapiro, Hornung began asking the gambler to place bets for him. Barney became his betting angel. He’d say, “Barney, bet me three hundred dollars” or “Barney, bet me five hundred.” His first bet was on an exhibition game, and from then on he bet on college and pro games, often on the Packers. “Not once did I ever bet against us,” he said. “But if I chose not to place a bet on us one week, there was a reason why. Just too tough a game or something.”
Hornung had grown up around gambling and bettors. In Louisville, home of Churchill Downs and its Kentucky Derby, the local customs and idioms were shaped by the culture of betting. Even decades after the 1963 investigation, Hornung would walk into a lunchroom on Walnut Street and casually introduce an out-of-town visitor to his bookie. But if betting was in his blood, football was his livelihood, and he understood then that he was living dangerously, even though he was using Shapiro, not a bookie, to place his bets, and doing it in Las Vegas, where betting was legal. The standard NFL player contract specifically prohibited betting on league games, with penalty of suspension. Hornung also seemed to appreciate the larger dangers of betting. As he later acknowledged, there were times when he was on the field late in Packers games and would consciously “think about the action”—meaning the point spread and whether it had been met. “I’d know we weren’t leading by enough points to make my bet a winner.” There was a possibility in that situation that he might try something foolish to fatten the margin; or that through losing bets he could fall into debt and do something reckless
. Nothing of either sort happened, by all accounts, but Hornung was aware of how he could have been made vulnerable.
Late in the summer of 1962, Commissioner Rozelle toured the league to warn each team that betting was strictly forbidden. He met with the Packers at the dining room of the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee on the eve of a preseason game at County Stadium. There would be severe penalties for anyone caught gambling, Rozelle said that day. The severest penalty was banishment from the sport. Hornung left the meeting saying to himself, I’ve placed my last bet. Not that he thought betting was wrong, but it “was silly to risk a pro career for it.”
Rozelle in fact had been receiving reports on the Golden Boy’s behavior since the previous spring, and though he did not have proof yet, he was concerned enough to look into them. Hornung had not been one of the players mentioned during early press accounts, but he was always at the center of the investigation. Lombardi appeared mildly concerned, but not obsessed with the issue. He stopped visiting a restaurant in Green Bay that he feared might have gambling connections and placed it off limits to his players. He asked Hornung once whether he bet, and Hornung strongly denied that he did. Lombardi maintained his normal policy of believing what his players told him unless presented with incontrovertible proof to the contrary. His Packers were professionals, winners, men of character, and Paul was his boy.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 49