When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Most sporting events were canceled that weekend, but not the seven games of the NFL. Commissioner Rozelle issued a statement defending his decision to proceed. “It has been traditional in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy,” Rozelle claimed. “Football was Mr. Kennedy’s game. He thrived on competition.” At eight-thirty Saturday morning, Lombardi and his team boarded the North Western train in Green Bay for the trip to Milwaukee. On the way down, the players talked mostly about the assassination. Five of the Packers were from Dallas, ashamed of what had happened in their city. The game seemed to be the last thing on their minds. Lombardi tried to focus on football, calling his coaches together to analyze the upcoming college draft. The next day’s game was an eerily contained and somber affair. There was no pregame introduction of the starting lineups. There were no commercial announcements on the scoreboard. The television booth was shut down; the only broadcast was on radio. The only music was the national anthem. No halftime band. The players were equally subdued. The normally raucous Willie Davis played in dazed silence at his defensive end position, no swearing that day. Davis said that “the whole team was lackluster” and he played “the worst game” of his career, but San Francisco was worse and the Packers won easily.

  It was the sort of sloppy win that normally sent Lombardi into a rage, but instead he “hardly said a word” afterwards, according to Davis. “He did not chew us out.”

  The year was essentially over. Starr had returned to the lineup, only to see Nitschke break his arm in the Thanksgiving Day game against Detroit, a 13 to 13 tie. The middle linebacker had been the MVP of the previous year’s championship game, but there was no doubt that Lombardi’s axiom was correct—his quarterback was always most valuable, and the Packers did not lose again that season. Still, it was no use. The Bears never lost again either, and though they were tied twice, the Chicago club finished first, a half-game ahead of the Packers. Second place. It might have seemed sweet back in 1959, but not now. There were no wildcard teams in the playoffs, only the winners of the two conferences playing for the world championship. The league had instituted a Playoff Bowl in Miami for the runners-up, but Lombardi viewed it largely as an exhibition, a place to experiment by trying defensive backs at wide receiver. The game presented him with a psychological conflict. On the one hand, he believed that you could not win the runner-up bowl and call yourself a winner. On the other hand, winning was not a sometime thing. The Packers played to win and beat the Cleveland Browns 40 to 23.

  Lombardi later would place the 1963 squad in a special category when he thought back on his career. He had lost Hornung that year, and then Starr, and then Nitschke, and his friend the president was killed, and there was no third consecutive championship, yet the team persisted and nearly prevailed. “As far as the Packers are concerned, as someone once said, ‘We are not slain, just wounded. Let me lay awhile and bleed a little and I will rise to fight again.’ So will the Packers,” Lombardi declared during a speech to the First Friday Club after the season. “While this has been a very frustrating season, for many reasons, this team will always have a soft spot in my heart because of the many adversities and the many frustrations it had to meet. The one big lesson it had to learn, which we all have to learn, is that a team, like men, must be brought to its knees before it can rise again.”

  • •

  PAUL HORNUNG, on his knees for a year, at the foot of the cross, was on vacation in Miami Beach in early March 1964 when he was summoned to New York again to see Commissioner Rozelle. They met for an hour; Rozelle talked, Hornung mostly listened. Hornung was reminded of the troubles that could result from keeping the wrong company and told to be more careful in the future. At the end of the lecture Rozelle asked him if he had any questions. “Yes, I have one,” Hornung said. “Am I going to be reinstated?” Rozelle declined to answer, but Hornung left the meeting convinced that he would get another chance. One week later, on the morning of March 16, the league office released a five-paragraph statement announcing that both Hornung and Karras had been reinstated. Headlines throughout the country proclaimed “The Return of the Golden Boy.” Hornung was so eager to return to the field that he called Lombardi and volunteered to report to Green Bay immediately after the Kentucky Derby in early May, two months before training camp. He was ten pounds above his playing weight and wanted to begin a strenuous off-season exercise program under the coach’s direction.

  There had been rumors all year that Lombardi was disillusioned with Hornung. Their father-son bond had been broken by Paul’s betrayal, it was said, and Lombardi would remove him from the team for good as soon as possible. Stories circulated about Hornung being traded to Pittsburgh or New York, or being released to play in the AFL. Lombardi had rarely hesitated to rid the team of players he thought would undermine him. Billy Howton and Howie Ferguson were sent packing when they challenged him before the first training camp. Bill Quinlan was traded after the 1962 championship, when Lombardi concluded that his on-field talents were not worth his erratic off-field behavior. One could argue that Hornung did more to hurt the team than anyone else by behaving so recklessly that he lost a full season of play, but Lombardi did not view it that way. He was disappointed, but not willing to give up on his favorite player. Every time he was asked, he said no, he did not intend to trade Hornung, he wanted him back. And now he said it again. When Hornung told him that he intended to come to Green Bay in early May to start getting in shape, Lombardi revealed how much he still needed him with the eager reply, “Mid-April would be better.” And so they “compromised,” as Hornung later joked, and the Golden Boy reported in mid-April.

  Bart Starr and Boyd Dowler were in Green Bay that spring and worked out with Hornung. They ran wind sprints—four at one hundred yards and then four at fifty yards, over and over. Then Hornung, alone, jogged up the stadium steps, again and again. “There are sixty steps, in case you’re interested. I’ve counted them a few times,” he told Dick Young, the sports columnist for the New York Daily News. “I think I’m in great shape. I pulled a groin muscle the other day, but that’s nothing. What is important is that my right knee, the one I hurt in ’62, was given a year’s rest. It feels better than ever. I want to have a great year.”

  No sooner did Lombardi welcome back his prodigal son than he sent another of his key players away, trading Jim Ringo (and fullback Earl Gros) to the Philadelphia Eagles for linebacker Lee Roy Caffey and a first-round draft choice. The manner of Ringo’s departure later became one of the familiar fables of the Lombardi mythology. As the story would be told through the years, Ringo visited Lombardi’s office that spring seeking a substantial raise, and to help negotiate he brought along a newfangled creature in the sporting world, a player agent. Ringo had been a Green Bay stalwart, a perennial all-pro who had not missed a game in ten seasons, captain of the offense, smart and swift, his blocking agility essential to the success of their signature play, the Packer sweep. Lombardi knew all of that and admired Ringo, but was insulted by the presence of the agent. He could not tolerate anything or anyone getting between him and his players, making the process seem mercenary, less personal. The presence of an agent made it harder for him to get up from his desk and rub the player’s head and get him to relent, as he had done with Bob Skoronski. It interfered with his concept of team, the subordination of individual desire for the greater good of the group. And so, as the story went, when Ringo and his agent demanded a raise, Lombardi excused himself, went into the next room and returned a few minutes later saying, “Go talk to the Eagles about it. Mr. Ringo has been traded to Philadelphia.”

  The story became ever more popular in later years when agents emerged as central figures in the sports world and the public grew increasingly disillusioned with multimillionaire athletes. Lombardi never would have put up with that stuff. Remember what he did to Ringo? Traded him as soon as he walked in with an agent. But it did not happen that way. Ringo did have an agent that year, and he demanded a $25,000 salary, but th
e negotiating was done with Pat Peppler, the personnel director, not Lombardi. And both the player and coach had other motives. Ringo was interested in moving back to the Philadelphia area, his home. Lombardi had spent weeks studying his team’s strengths and weaknesses, and concluded that Ringo was slowing down and that he needed another young linebacker and more draft choices. (He used the Eagles pick to draft Donny Anderson, the running back from Texas Tech who would not be eligible to play professionally for another year.) It was not an impulsive act, but a carefully calculated maneuver. “Vince had been thinking about this and working on it quietly for a long time,” Peppler recalled. “Most of the story was not true. It was all done on the telephone.” It did happen suddenly enough, however, that Lombardi had to scramble for a center. Within minutes of trading Ringo, Lombardi was in the locker room with Bob Skoronski, working him on the snap, knowing that he would have to use his left tackle at center until an untested rookie came along.

  The apocryphal story of Ringo’s quick exit was perpetuated largely because Lombardi wanted it to be believed. Rather than correct the tale, he spread it himself, Peppler said, in the hope that it might discourage players from hiring agents or making difficult contract demands. His bark, for the most part, was worse than his bite, and like all general managers, Lombardi out of necessity found himself dealing with agents and lawyers during the latter half of the sixties.

  IF THERE WAS anything in Lombardi’s life that approached his obsession with football during his time in Green Bay, it was golf. He attended mass every morning out of a combination of habit and spiritual need, but he would have played golf 365 days a year if it had been possible, wholly out of love. He kept several of his gift putters at work and at odd hours dropped a few balls on the floor and practiced putting them at one of those light aluminum golf-hole contraptions with the clinking hinges. Marie often caught him doing the same at home, lagging balls at a plastic tumbler. The golf season was cruelly short in northeastern Wisconsin, but he and his cronies hit the Oneida links at the first sign of survivable weather: he and Ray Antil once played two days after Christmas, wearing long underwear and warmers and flap-eared hats, although the club did not officially open until April 1. “My father’s life was golf,” Susan reflected. “He loved golf. My mother hated to go to some vacation spots like Bermuda and Puerto Rico and the Bahamas with him because she knew he just wanted to golf.”

  His off-season schedule was arranged around golf opportunities. First there was a late-winter trip with Marie, but not Susan, who spent most of her teens home alone with a babysitter on her birthday, February 13. That trip often coincided with a league meeting set in a warm golf course-rich locale. Then came a stag holiday with Harry Masse, Ockie Krueger and Jack Koeppler, a four-day southern swing every March to Gulfport, Biloxi and New Orleans, or once, Hot Springs. Lombardi fed his golfing addiction by insisting that they play on the afternoon they arrived and the morning they left, and gambling was fit into the trip as well. Krueger’s lasting memory is of Lombardi heading straight for the craps table—the game he had learned long ago from his Izzo uncles on the green felt of the pool table in the basement at the family homestead in Sheepshead Bay. “He’d sit at the craps table and, Christ, everyone stopped in the casino because he was making so much noise, shouting ‘C’mon! C’mon!’ ” Krueger recalled. Marie tolerated that trip, barely, rationalizing that her husband needed it to relieve the stress, but she always held it against Koeppler for taking her husband away from her. Finally there was a two-day outing in May in which the Green Bay coaches played against their counterparts from Detroit and Cleveland, rotating cities and country clubs every year.

  From April through the opening of training camp in mid-July, Lombardi golfed three or four times a week, including Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, a welcome relief for his overworked assistants, who would create “a traffic jam on the steps getting out of the office” as soon as Lombardi left, according to Pat Peppler. Lombardi reduced his trips to the golf course once the football season began, but continued playing, slipping out to Oneida after the morning practice on Saturdays when the team was at home the next day. “It was a form of relaxation for him,” said team physician Eugene Brusky, perhaps Oneida’s longest driver. If Lombardi relaxed on the course, his body language failed to show it. There was nothing graceful about his game. He had a bulky frame with little suppleness. His swing was stiff and jerky, and he had a short follow-through, the golfing equivalent, perhaps, of Jerry Kramer’s placekicking. “He looked ugly out there,” said Max McGee, who played with him occasionally on Mondays, when the players were allowed on Oneida. “You’d play a round with him and think he’d shot a hundred and ten.” But in fact he was far better. Bob Milward, the pro at Oneida, who gave Lombardi lessons, called him “a pretty straight shooter” whose average was in the mid-80s.

  It seemed that Lombardi willed the ball, or sought to intimidate it, into the cup. He was “an intense competitor,” said Koeppler, a regular in Lombardi’s foursome. Koeppler, who carried a three-handicap, ten strokes better than Lombardi, enjoyed being the coach’s partner in best-ball contests, where a team played the superior shot hit by either player. “It was amazing how well he could play if I happened to miss a shot. If I was playing well, he would just play along. But if I happened to knock it somewhere not as good as it should be, he could just focus on making that thing do what he wanted it to do. Some guys go the other way. When playing with a low-handicap player, and that guy gets stuck somewhere, they get it stuck worse. Vince may hit only three or four good shots a round, but they were the ones that saved us. Of course we would win quite a few matches before they started; the other team would be three or four down before they got over the fact that they were playing against Vince Lombardi.”

  When Lombardi was playing golf, it rarely could be kept secret. He brought his booming voice and volcanic temper with him. “You could hear him anywhere on the course when he missed a shot,” said Tom Hallion, who occasionally caddied for him at Oneida. “It was very R-rated and guttural—‘Goddamn it! Sonofabitch!’ Several Oneida golfers would later tell variations of a story of Lombardi furiously tossing his putter into Duck Creek as he walked across the bridge at the fourth hole. Bob Maahs, another teenage caddy at Oneida during that era, said he was carrying Lombardi’s bags one day when the foursome got stuck behind a group of slow-playing women, including the wife of the owner of Nicolet Sporting Goods. “He would scream obscenities and hit the ball; he was hitting when she was marking her scorecard on the green,” Maahs said. “Everyone was afraid of him.” Once Lombardi got back in the clubhouse, the young caddy noticed, “he was all smiles and grins, just like you would see on TV. His whole personality would change.”

  If golf was a needed outlet for Lombardi, a place to smack a ball around and curse and hang out with his cronies, it also revealed a deeper insight into his personality as a leader. He once told Mitch Fromstein, a Milwaukee businessman, that “the toughest single battle he had in life was his golf game.” Fromstein thought he was joking. “But Vince said, ‘I’m going to tell you why. Because I have the toughest opponent in my golf game. ME. I’m trying to improve my score, and it’s just me. I’m always fighting to get better against myself. That is tough.’ ”

  Lombardi understood that he was not the perfect vessel for the sporting life. He was short, stocky, slow, color-blind, awkward, injury-prone and emotional. He could not excel at any athletic endeavor that depended on his own primary skills, whether it was running or blocking or hitting a baseball or shooting a basketball or craps or playing hands of gin or rounds of golf. All were difficult for him. He could make himself better, but never the best. But he had a sharp mind, keen memory and overpowering will. He knew what perfection looked like and what was required to approach it; all he needed was the material with which to work. In football, as a coach, he had it—in the arm of Bart Starr, the agility of Willie Wood, the fluid grace of Paul Hornung and Herb Adderley, the muscled abandon of Jimmy Taylor and Ray
Nitschke, the rugged perseverance of Forrest Gregg and Henry Jordan, the savvy of his captains, Bob Skoronski and Willie Davis. They provided the talent that he lacked; he provided the will and the way, pushing them to levels of performance that he knew were possible for them but that he could never attain himself, closing the gap between the hugeness of his desire and the smallness of reality.

  ON THE FIRST DAY of 1964 training camp, Paul Hornung unpacked his suitcase on the brown-blanketed bed in Room 120 at Sensenbrenner Hall at St. Norbert College. It was the same compact dorm room that he used to stay in, with the same old wisecracking roommate. “I don’t know if I should be rooming with you,” Max McGee said upon greeting him. “I’m not supposed to associate with gamblers.” The Golden Boy’s comeback had begun, and it seemed as though half the sports journalists in America were on hand to chronicle it. Articles on Hornung were commissioned by magazines ranging from Sports Illustrated to Parade. Sport ran two pieces, one by Dick Schaap and another by New York Journal American writer Dave Anderson (“His name isn’t Paul Hornung this season. It’s Paul Hornung Returning from a Suspension for Gambling,” Anderson began). W. C. Heinz also wrote a piece for Life while he was back in town to ease the way for the production of a television documentary version of Run to Daylight!

  The documentary borrowed the name of the book more than the dramatic concept. It did not follow the coach’s life hour by hour and day by day through a week leading up to a game, but rather took the viewer on a tour of training camp, beginning with a juxtaposition of the profane and divine: dark and chaotic frames of violent contact at the line of scrimmage followed by a bright and bucolic scene of Lombardi strolling down the sidewalk outside Sensenbrenner Hall on a July morning, birds chirping, sun shining through the trees, the first day of camp.