When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Bigness is relative in all things. Robinson thought he had signed a huge contract to play for the Packers, and perhaps he had by the standards of the day. He had been the beneficiary of a bidding war between the Packers and San Diego Chargers of the AFL. The new league would have loved nothing more than to have stolen the first-round pick of the world-champion Packers. But San Diego dropped out when the asking price reached $38,000, and there was talk that the Chargers would sell Robinson’s draft rights to the Buffalo Bills. Robinson’s wife had been intrigued by the prospect of living in the warm California sun, but with the choice narrowed to Green Bay or Buffalo, the sun was no longer a factor, and Robinson quickly signed with the Packers. He agreed to a two-year $45,000 package, including a $15,000 bonus and the use of a new Bonneville convertible from Lombardi’s car dealer friend, Jake Stathas of Brown County Motors.

  A big deal, or so it seemed—so lucrative that Lombardi felt compelled to give Ray Nitschke a raise to match it. Pete Rozelle might have been hell-bent on making the league rich, and the war with the AFL was increasing the cost of top draft choices, but the true salary explosion for football players remained a few years distant. Football was still regarded as a part-time job in 1963, so much so that every player on the Green Bay roster found the off-season employment that he needed to supplement his football income. Willie Davis was a sales representative for Schlitz Brewing Company. Willie Wood taught at a junior high in the District of Columbia. Bob Skoronski was in sales for Josten, the jewelry company that designed the championship rings. Bart Starr managed the Edlo Arcade in Green Bay. Jesse Whittenton ran the King’s X restaurant and bar in Green Bay. Fuzzy Thurston had just opened the Left Guard Steak House in Menasha. And Hawg Hanner worked on the cotton crop control program for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Arkansas. Max McGee was hired by T. E. Mercer Trucking Company in Fort Worth.

  MCGEEWAS COMING BACK, but not his buddy. Dad Braisher hung No. 5 above Hornung’s old locker every day, but old Goat Shoulders would not slip the jersey on that year. How much would the Packers miss Hornung? In terms of talent, the combination of Tom Moore and Elijah Pitts seemed nearly his equal. Moore was just as big with more speed, and both Moore and Pitts could throw the option pass. Taylor was in his prime, the next best fullback to Jim Brown, and Green Bay’s talent at most other positions was deeper than ever. But there was something about Hornung that Lombardi and his veterans knew they would dearly miss. No. 5 had a way of loping onto the field and lifting the confidence of everyone around him. “Hornung was one hundred percent football player. He is a winner and a tremendous leader on the field,” Lombardi said at the Packers stockholders’ meeting in Green Bay that spring. “He was one hundred percent football player even when he was injured. But I believe we can make up the slack somehow, somewhere.”

  How and where was not made immediately clear in the first contest of the year, the annual preseason game at Soldier Field in Chicago between the NFL champions and the college all-stars. On paper, the game was always a mismatch: men against boys, a fluid veteran team against a collection of novice players. The all-stars had Penn State’s Robinson and Bobby Bell of Minnesota on defense, Ed Budde of Michigan State anchoring the offensive line, and the pass-and-catch duo of Ron VanderKelen and Pat Richter of Wisconsin, but it was not the most talented group of college seniors ever assembled. Richter remembered how he and his teammates watched in silent awe as the Packers bus “pulled up across the way and these guys got out—Ron Kramer and Willie Wood and Herb Adderley. Wow!” In the all-star locker room before the game, Dave Robinson sensed that “everybody was nervous, worried about getting blown away,” though as a Packers draftee he considered himself in a no-lose situation. “Hey, if we win, I celebrate with you guys. If the Packers win, I go celebrate with them,” he told his teammates.

  The evening was humid and draining, the Packers were not yet in playing shape, and no one on the Green Bay side seemed engaged until it was too late. VanderKelen, a Green Bay kid from Preble High, hit Richter for a touchdown, giving the collegians a ten-point lead late in the game, and they held on to win 20 to 17. Pat Peppler, Lombardi’s new director of player personnel, had invited the three all-stars who were Green Bay draft choices to attend a team buffet at the Drake Hotel after the game. Tony Liscio of Tulsa and Chuck Morris of Ole Miss showed up, along with Robinson, conquering heroes. They received a decidedly cool reception. “Lombardi wouldn’t even speak to me. He was so mad because of the game he wouldn’t speak with any of us,” Robinson said. “He looked at us, turned and walked away. We were like lepers, sitting all by ourselves. A couple of players came over and said welcome to the team, but they weren’t real happy. They knew we had created havoc and there would be hell to pay next week.”

  Finally Ockie Krueger, the former West Point colonel, came over to ask the rookies about their military draft status, what he could do to help them get into the reserves or National Guard if need be, anything to make their football lives uninterrupted. As Krueger was conducting his interview, a woman approached and said, “Well, you beat us, but you’re part of the team now.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Chuck Morris asked.

  “Young man, if you stay in Green Bay long enough, you’ll find out who I am,” she replied.

  Morris stayed in camp only long enough to find out that it was Marie Lombardi. Soon enough he was cut and sent back to Mississippi.

  Perhaps it was a meaningless game, but Lombardi was deeply embarrassed by the loss. He hated to lose, period. Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing, he was fond of saying. Before the all-star fiasco, his Green Bay teams in fact had won seventeen straight preseason exhibition games, going back to a loss to the Giants in 1959. At his office the day after the game, he broke his usual policy of never talking about games with his secretarial staff and broached the subject with Ruth McKloskey. “I don’t blame the players a single bit,” he told her. “I didn’t impress on them that the all-stars had something to prove and would play hard. It was all my fault.”

  Of course the way he would demonstrate that it was all his fault was by taking it out on his players, just as they suspected. Pat Peppler had warned Dave Robinson about Lombardi time—everything starts fifteen minutes ahead of schedule—so he arrived early for the first team meeting a few days after the game. When he entered the room Lombardi was already there, “and his game face was on.” They were to review film of the all-star debacle. This should be good, Robinson thought. After all, he had excelled, at one point slipping by tight end Ron Kramer to throw Tom Moore for a loss. So there they all were, proud rookie, embarrassed veterans, angry coach, watching the film, and it came to that play and Lombardi stopped the projector and Robinson said to himself, Coach is going to give me a compliment now. And instead Lombardi bellowed, “KRAMER! Look at that rookie get rid of you! That kid probably won’t even make the team that drafted him!” Robinson slouched lower in his seat. Whoa, this is tough. What have I done? he wondered. Didn’t Lombardi even know who he was? Willie Wood, seated next to him, chuckled.

  Practice was hell that week. Every time the players came off the field, Lombardi ran them more, and the vets looked over at the big rookie and said, “Thanks a lot, Robinson!”

  Lombardi was consumed with the idea of winning three NFL championships in a row. It had been on his mind since that windy December evening when he and his Packers had flown home from New York after their second triumph over the Giants. Bill Forester had made a surprise stop at Sunset Circle late that night to say goodbye to the coach before going home to Texas for the off-season, and Lombardi had pulled him aside and said, “Bubba, it’s never been done three times in a row before.” Even aside from the loss of Hornung, Lombardi knew the third time would be more difficult. As he said in his letter to the players and their wives that winter, living with success is more difficult than living with failure: the pressure relentless for more and more. Success, Lombardi told W. C. Heinz in Run to Daylight!, is “like a habit-forming
drug that in victory saps your elation and in defeat deepens your despair. Once you have sampled it, you are hooked.” When you are successful, he thought, everyone else is jealous and every game becomes a grudge match.

  The burden of past success was evident from the first play of the regular season, when J. C. Caroline of Chicago sprinted downfield on kickoff coverage and smacked returner Herb Adderley to the ground before he reached the twenty-yard line. George Halas and his players and hordes of Bears fans who made the traditional journey north by car and train were all in a spirited and vengeful mood. The Packers had beaten them five straight times, the last two in 1962 by humbling scores. Desperate to find an edge, Halas had signed a former Green Bay player during the off-season, linebacker Tom Bettis, who had fallen out with Lombardi and was eager to divulge details of the Packers offense. The Bears also had a new defensive coordinator, George Allen, who had figured out Green Bay’s offensive tendencies and devised a series of novel defenses to thwart them. In an ugly game that saw both teams flailing in the September sun, the Bears prevailed, 10 to 3. Pat Peppler remembered that Lombardi was “beside himself, like a man possessed” after the game.

  He pushed harder, and while his players responded, his body did not. As the Packers launched a winning streak, Lombardi grew increasingly fatigued. He was chain-smoking Salems at a furious pace, three cartons a week. Ruth McKloskey emptied his big round ashtray “at least two or three times a day.” His tongue felt sore and bloated, and he had trouble eating. The team had moved its administrative quarters that year from downtown to a new addition at the stadium, and he had to climb a flight of stairs to reach his office, a trek that at times left him panting. One morning he came in, cast a stern glance at McKloskey and muttered, “Don’t talk to me.” She obeyed, and watched him enter his office and close the door, only to emerge a minute later.

  “I quit smoking last night and I’m not fit to talk to anybody,” Lombardi explained.

  “Oh?”

  He had long talked about quitting. He considered smoking an indication of personal weakness and a bad example for children. But it was fear that made him finally give up cigarettes. “I’ve been getting dizzy spells,” he told McKloskey. At the postgame party in his basement rec room the night before, he had struck a deal with his friend Jack Koeppler to entice them both to quit cold turkey: if either man found the other with a cigarette, the smoker would have to buy dinner. When Red Cochran heard that Vince had quit, he joked with the other assistant coaches, “Vince didn’t quit, he offered them up to God to put an extra strong deal on Him.” The staff kept smoking, Bengtson dragging away on his nonfilter Camels, and they were none too happy that their boss had quit. “He would have to do it during the football season, when we have to put up with him,” Cochran lamented. It was not easy for Lombardi; he quickly gained twenty pounds and yearned for cigarettes for years thereafter, but never smoked again.

  As Lombardi paced the sidelines, dying for a smoke, his hands clasped behind him, fidgeting with two small steel balls, his Packers ran off eight straight wins. They prevailed without Hornung, with Jerry Kramer kicking and Tom Moore and Elijah Pitts running, and finally even with John Roach passing instead of Bart Starr. In the sixth game in St. Louis, Starr was tumbling out-of-bounds when a defensive back hit him and broke his right wrist. Lombardi at first tried to hide the injury, but word leaked out to Al Sampson, a local sportscaster, who shot film of Starr trying to throw with his left hand. That night Sampson received an angry phone call from Marie. “It was the angriest I ever heard Marie. It turns out they were trying to get Zeke Bratkowski as a backup in a trade with the Rams and were afraid the Rams would screw them if they knew how hurt Bart really was,” Sampson recalled. “So Marie called me up at home and said I wasn’t loyal to the Packers.” The trade went through in any case and Bratkowski arrived in Green Bay, but he was unfamiliar with the Packers system and not ready to play. Lombardi faced the ultimate test of his theory that football’s central flaw is that one player, the quarterback, is too important.

  Could the Packers win with a substitute who had thrown only sixteen passes, completing a mere three, in the last two seasons? They beat St. Louis, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Minnesota with Roach at quarterback, backed up by Bratkowski, and approached the rematch in Chicago tied with the Bears, each with 8 wins and 1 loss. The Packers returned to the Drake Hotel, scene of the dreary postmortem after the all-star embarrassment, but there were few signs of concern now. Eight straight wins had restored Lombardi’s men. There was a sense, Max McGee felt, that nothing could stop them—not scandal, not injury, certainly not the Bears. On the eve of the game, a Chicago player strolled through the Drake’s lobby and saw Lombardi smiling hugely, all teeth, exuding confidence, and it upset him so much that he told his teammates about it before the game the next day to fire them up. It didn’t take much; they hated the cocksure Packers. The game drew a sellout crowd, with fans huddling in line overnight for standing-room-only tickets. Illinois residents without tickets flooded across the Wisconsin border to watch the game on television in the bars and bowling alleys of Monroe and New Glarus and Janesville and Kenosha.

  Angry fans spat on Lombardi as he walked under a pedestrian ramp at Wrigley Field to reach the locker room, and the game was equally nasty, if one-sided. The Packers were flat, Roach was no match for George Allen’s shifting defense, and the Bears dominated from the beginning, winning 26 to 7. With the game out of reach, Phil Bengtson inserted Dave Robinson at linebacker in the fourth quarter, giving him his first regular season playing time. Nothing in his football life had prepared Robbie for what he experienced during those last few feeble minutes of the loss against the Bears. He ran onto the field and was stunned by the hubbub and commotion. Even from the sidelines you could not truly hear or feel the explosive verbal intensity near the line of scrimmage: players cursing and screaming at the top of their lungs, the foulest language he had ever heard. And it was all coming from the same team, from his team. They were swearing at each other, even at themselves. Willie Davis cursing a blue streak at Dan Currie. Currie giving it back. Willie Wood chewing out the whole line. Nitschke never shutting up. All of them now swearing at Robinson.

  What was that all about? Robinson asked the defensive coach after the game. Just the way the guys fire up each other, Bengtson told him. He said he would tell Willie Davis not to swear so much at the rookie the next time. But in fact Robinson had seen them at their mildest. They really weren’t up for the Bears game the way they should have been. Broadcaster Ray Scott came into the dressing room after the game just when Bengtson turned to Lombardi and said, “Vince, we were flat out there.” Lombardi “turned on him like a tiger,” as Scott remembered, “and shouted, ‘How could you be flat for a game like this?’ ” It was the only time Scott had seen a Lombardi team that did not seem mentally ready for an important game.

  This was the first time the Packers had flown to Chicago; in past years they had taken the train. The bus ride back to the airport seemed to take longer than any flight, and Lombardi was steaming all the way. He boarded the plane without uttering a word. “Like a man in a trance,” recalled Ruth McKloskey. “He wouldn’t talk. Never talked to Mrs. Lombardi. Nobody said anything. It was real quiet.” Finally, as the plane passed high over the twinkling lights of a city, Lombardi rose from his seat and found McKloskey, who had not flown before. “Look over there, Ruth, isn’t that a beautiful sight, the lights of Milwaukee? How are you enjoying your first flight?”

  “Fine. Just fine,” McKloskey replied. She didn’t dare say what she was thinking: too bad they lost.

  Lombardi returned to his seat and started talking with Marie. Jack Koeppler sat nearby and watched his friend transformed before his eyes. Lombardi had been sullen, uncommunicative, and now he was lighting up. He left his seat again and ambled back to the coach section and got the attention of his players. “I really got outcoached today,” he said. “We all got outplayed, but I got outcoached. Next year, we’ll be ready for t
hem in no uncertain terms.” Then he went back row by row and patted each player on the back, and beers were passed out and the plane was alive with chatter as it left the city lights behind and passed over Lake Winnebago on the way north through the November night.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Koeppler asked Lombardi when he returned to his seat.

  “They’re down enough already,” Lombardi said.

  If he was not sure of it before, Koeppler at that moment realized that “the Old Man was one shrewd psychologist.”

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY was killed five days later. Lombardi was in his office that Friday, making final preparations for the next game against the 49ers in Milwaukee, when news reached him of the assassination. The next game, which had always been the center of his universe, now seemed meaningless. Lombardi was a loud and emotional man, but this report numbed him. His players were just leaving the building after their weekly awards meeting. Many of them were in the parking lot, gathered around car radios. Others wandered back inside to listen together in the training room. Lombardi came down and said a few words—“no big speech, nothing emotional, no tears,” Bob Skoronski remembered—and then left to pray for the fallen president at St. Willebrord, the church where he had first met JFK during the early days of the 1960 Wisconsin primary, when the senator and the coach were beginning their brilliant ascents. Among his most cherished mementos were the telegram Kennedy had sent him on New Year’s Eve 1961 after their first championship victory and the program from the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in Milwaukee on May 12, 1962, when the president was the main speaker and Lombardi was an invited guest. Now he would add another bittersweet memento, a laminated prayer card for John F. Kennedy that he carried thereafter in his Bible.