When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Six weeks after the first inquiry about a football diarist, the publisher called again, asking Schaap to find out if Kramer was interested. Kramer said he was, as long as Schaap would help him. The next day Kramer flew to New York to meet with his co-author and a literary agent, Sterling Lord. As the three men were walking down a street in midtown Manhattan after lunch, a stranger yelled out “Jerry Kramer!” The stunning realization that an offensive lineman for a team in Green Bay was recognizable in New York City, Schaap would say later, “raised the contract price of the book.” Now he needed a similar exclamation point for an ending to raise the sales of the book.

  THE THIRD QUARTER was nothing but frustration. Neither team scored. Bill Schliebaum, the line judge, had his whistle freeze to his lips and lost a layer of skin yanking it loose. Jim Huxford, working the chains, had to pull off his ski mask after part of it froze to his mouth. Ray Nitschke refused to go near the blowers—he had a tradition of kneeling on one knee near the coach when the defense was off the field—and now he was starting to get frostbite in his toes. Chuck Mercein’s left tricep felt numb after a tough hit in the second quarter. Steve Sabol, stationed on the ledge above the end zone stands, and shivering in his cowboy boots, discovered that his camera had broken, the focus wheel on his telephoto lens frozen at a thirty-yard distance. Pat Summerall, whose assignment for the second half was to work the Green Bay sideline, was getting blistered every time he went near Lombardi. The fact that he had once played for the coach in New York made no difference. “Get the hell away from my bench,” Lombardi barked. “This is my office!”

  The press box had its own share of discontent. Reporters stationed in the front row found that their portable typewriters were freezing on the ledge. The game was down there somewhere, but the writers and broadcasters were having an increasingly hard time seeing it through the big picture windows, which were either too steamed or too frosted. Writers took to scraping small patches of visibility in the window with their credit cards. Chuck Lane had zipped across the street at halftime to buy some deicer at the service station, and one press box attendant was squirting deicer on the windows like lighter fluid while another used a squeegee to clear away the condensation. Every time someone opened the side door letting in a blast of cold air, Bud Lea called out, “Holy God, shut the door!” Ray Scott, calling the game for CBS with Jack Buck and Frank Gifford, insisted on having a window open in their booth. “You don’t have the feel of the game, otherwise,” he said. Gifford was losing his feel for anything. “I think I’ll take another bite of my coffee,” he muttered famously on the air.

  As the third quarter ended, Dallas had possession at midfield. The Cowboys were now dominating the game. Twice in the third quarter, they had threatened to score, but one drive was thwarted when Lee Roy Caffey made Meredith fumble on the Green Bay thirteen, and another ended with a missed field goal attempt. The Packers seemed hapless, having gained only ten yards in the quarter. On the first play of the fourth quarter, Dan Reeves took the handoff from Meredith and ran wide to the left. Green Bay’s defensive backfield played it as a run, and by the time they realized it was an option and Reeves was passing, receiver Lance Rentzel had slipped behind everyone, and Tom Brown could only chase him into the end zone. Dallas held the lead, 17 to 14.

  Over the next ten minutes Green Bay got the ball twice but failed to score. Their one chance to tie the game fizzled when Don Chandler missed a field goal from the forty, wide to the left. Dallas picked up two first downs on its next possession and held the ball for nearly five minutes before they were forced to punt. Willie Wood thought of nothing but catching the ball this time. He cradled it safely at his twenty-three then burst nine yards upfield. The Packers were on their thirty-two, first down, sixty-eight yards to go for the winning touchdown, four minutes and fifty seconds remaining in the game.

  Ray Scott had left the broadcast booth to work his way to the winner’s dressing room. The quickest way to get there was to walk down through the stands to the field. He reached the Green Bay sideline just after Wood was tackled. The return team was running off the field and the offense was heading out to the huddle. Ray Nitschke, the emotional leader of the defense and special teams, had lost his voice. His toes were numb. Scott watched him as he rumbled off the field this one last time, his fist clenched, and yelled hoarsely but fiercely to the offense, “Don’t let me down! Don’t let me down!”

  Dick Schaap had also left the press box with five minutes left, following a crowd of reporters to the field. He figured the game was over. Kramer had told him about one of Lombardi’s favorite sayings: The Packers never lose, but sometimes the clock runs out. That’s what would happen now, Schaap thought. At long last the clock would run out on the Packers. Run out for this championship game, but also for the whole incredible run the team had been on since Lombardi came to Green Bay. The game was changing, these Packers were old, time was moving on. That was it, Schaap thought. He had the title for the book: The Year the Clock Ran Out. Great title, he said to himself as he walked down the aisle, through the primordial scene in the stands, the huge buffalo herd, fifty thousand puffs of breath, fifty thousand fans warmed by four quarters of brandy, bourbon and beer. Still buzzing. Didn’t they realize this was over?

  Vincent realized it and had begun inching toward the dressing room a few minutes earlier. For most of the game he had been with the doctors, trainers and priests on the far right end of the bench, freezing in his green and yellow Packer jacket. Now he was on the far left end, near the end zone and the tunnel. He could not wait to warm up in the locker room. His sister, Susan, was also pessimistic. When Wood fielded the punt, she turned to her boyfriend, Paul Bickham, and said, “We’re not going to win this!” Out in Sheepshead Bay, Harry and Matty were watching on television in the living room of the original Izzo homestead on East Sixteenth Street, now the home of Matty’s younger sister Millie. Harry and Matty had moved back from Englewood and taken an apartment across the street, restored to the embrace of the vast Izzo family. Ten or twelve of them were here now, watching Vince’s team. Harry was almost deaf; the volume was turned all the way up. “We were all scared to death,” said Matty’s niece Clara Parvin. “Especially Uncle Harry.” He had survived two heart attacks, but these final five minutes were intolerable.

  On the sideline at Lambeau Field, Doc Brusky was called over to help Jim Huxford on the chains crew. Huxford was recovering from a heart attack and the tension was getting to him. He needed another nitroglycerin pill. Ockie Krueger left his seat next to Marie Lombardi and started for the exit. He had driven Marie to the game in her car and wanted to make sure that it would start and be warmed up for her when the game ended. Paul Mazzoleni, after his busy morning jump-starting stalled cars, had watched the game from a seat in the south end zone, sharing a thermos of brandy with four guys from Kenosha. He, too, was heading for the exit, preparing for another long night of work ahead. Steve Sabol, his camera completely useless now, came down from his end zone perch to take a position near the Packers bench, as close to Lombardi as he could get. Sabol worshiped pro football and considered Lombardi the game’s patron saint, the main character in the romantic story that he and his father were telling. The young filmmaker was among those who believed. He thought he was in a great spot to witness football history.

  Before trotting onto the field, Starr had talked to Lombardi about what they would try to do. They had decided not to go for the quick score, but rather “just try to keep moving the ball.” In the huddle, Starr seemed inordinately calm. “This is it,” he said, looking directly at his teammates. “We’re going in.” Bob Skoronski had struggled all day to keep George Andrie out of the backfield. Earlier in the game Lombardi had lit into him on the bench, accusing him of falling asleep during this critical game. But now Starr’s demeanor had a transformational effect. Ski was fully awake and confident. He looked at Starr and saw Lombardi, the reminder of everything they had learned in nine seasons with their coach. All of Lombardi’s schooling
was for precisely this moment, all the hundreds of times that he had run them through the sweep, convincing them that they could respond to anything, that no matter what the defense tried, they had the answer. There is nothing they can do to stop us, Skoronski thought to himself.

  Chuck Mercein, the fullback, had played only six games with the Packers, yet he felt the same way. “The feeling I had was that we are going to score. I felt calm. I felt that everyone in the huddle was calm. I didn’t sense any anxiety or desperation. Determination, yes, but not desperation. Bart just said a few words, ‘We’re going in,’ but he had this tremendous presence. He was the on-field personification of Lombardi.” Donny Anderson, the halfback, was more composed than any of his teammates had seen him before. He had tried to present himself as a latter-day Hornung, but before now the similarity had been most noticeable in his playboy persona off the field. Now it seemed as though he had grown up in one long cold afternoon. “If you dump me the ball, I can get eight or ten yards every play,” he told Starr. The play had been there all afternoon, but as important as the sagacity of his observation was its fearless message: with the game on the line, he wanted the ball, just like the Golden Boy once had.

  On first down it worked: Starr dumped a little pass to Anderson good for six yards. Then Mercein ran around right end for seven more and Starr hit Dowler for thirteen, and with those three successful plays the Packers had taken the ball into Dallas territory, forty-two yards from the end zone. Anderson lost nine on the next play, caught in the backfield by Willie Townes on a busted sweep, but he came back with two consecutive little gems, taking dump passes from Starr and picking his way cautiously down the ice-slicked field, eluding the linebackers for twelve yards and then nine more. The clock was down to two minutes. Mercein had noticed something during those plays and felt confident enough to bring it up with Starr. “I’m open on the left side if you need me.” The ball was on the Dallas thirty, only one minute and thirty-five seconds left. Starr went back to pass, Mercein swung to his left, Starr looked for Dowler and Anderson, then saw Mercein in the clear and went to him, the ball floating in the wind, behind Mercein and high, but he snared it on the run and slipped by the linebacker and was moving past the cornerback, nineteen yards and out-of-bounds at the Dallas eleven. Gil Brandt, the Dallas personnel man, called that catch a killer, one of the best he had ever seen, considering the conditions.

  Then came what Starr considered the best call of the game. All week Lombardi had told him to look for the perfect spot and use it only when he really needed it. Now was the time. It was known as GIVE 54, an influence play. It looked like a variation of the Green Bay sweep, run from what was called the Brown formation, with the fullback lined up directly behind the quarterback, instead of Lombardi’s preferred red formation, in which the halfback and fullback were spread. On the sweep from this formation, the left guard pulled and the fullback was assigned to block the guard’s man, which in this case would be Dallas’s Hall of Fame tackle Bob Lilly. Lilly was so quick and smart that he could shoot through the hole and bring down the runner from behind before the sweep unfolded.

  The GIVE 54 was designed to take advantage of Lilly’s aggressiveness. Starr would fake the sweep and hand the ball to Mercein, who would run through the hole vacated by Lilly. It could be a dangerous play. If Lilly held his ground there was no one to block him. But when the guard pulled, Lilly followed, and Mercein came busting through. Skoronski made a clean block on the left end, sealing an alley, and a linebacker went the wrong way, and as Mercein came through he saw “a helluva great hole there.” He thought that if he could only get behind Forrest Gregg for one more block he might take it in, but the field was almost all ice down in the shadows of the scoreboard, no footing at all, “like a marble tabletop,” according to Starr. Mercein picked up eight crucial yards. “I can still hear the sound of his feet clicking on that ice,” linesman Jim Huxford said three decades later. “You could hear it on the ice. He was slipping but he kept going.” All the way to the three, where he stumbled into Gregg and fell to the ground.

  On the next play Anderson barely picks up the one yard needed for a first down. The Packers are one yard from the goal line. Anderson again, no gain. Twenty seconds left. Timeout. Anderson again. This time he slips on the ice as Starr hands him the ball, almost fumbling. Again, no gain. Green Bay calls its last timeout with sixteen seconds remaining, and Starr jogs to the sideline to talk to Lombardi.

  A field goal would tie the game and send it into sudden death overtime, but bringing in the field goal team is not even discussed. Nothing needs to be said about a field goal. After playing for Lombardi for nine seasons, Starr knows exactly what his coach is thinking. He is conservative, he goes by the book, but he’s a winner. Run to win. Lombardi had been preaching that motto to his team all through the final difficult weeks of this season, quoting St. Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians: All the runners at the stadium are trying to win, but only one of them gets the prize. You must run in the same way, run to win.” Also, Lombardi is freezing his tail off, like everybody else in the place.

  Hornung, in his street clothes standing near the coach, thinks they should try a rollout pass; that way even if it falls incomplete the clock stops and they can get in another play. He wonders whether Lombardi knows there are no timeouts left. Lombardi doesn’t seem to be listening. Starr says he wants to go with the wedge play, where the runner pounds between the center and guard, but he wants to be certain that Jerry Kramer, who has to make a key block, can get good footing. It looks like an ice rink down there at the one. Watching films of the Cowboys earlier that week, they had noticed that Kramer’s man, Dallas tackle Jethro Pugh, stood the highest in goal line situations, making him the easiest defender to cut down. Mercein is out on the field, he can’t hear the discussion, but he’s thinking the same thing, “one hundred percent certain” that they’re going to give him the ball on the wedge, the simplest play in football.

  “Run it!” Lombardi says. “And let’s get the hell out of here.” Starr trots back to the huddle.

  Pat Peppler rarely stands anywhere near Lombardi during a game, but now he can’t help himself. He moves closer to the coach and asks, “What’s he gonna call?”

  “Damned if I know,” Lombardi says.

  Starr asks Kramer if he can get good footing.

  “Hell, yes,” Kramer says.

  “Huddle up,” Starr says. He calls the play. Brown right. 31 wedge. That’s the 3 back (fullback) through the 1 hole (between center and guard). Mercein hears it and thinks, This is it. I’m going to score. But as Starr is calling the play, a thought flashes through the quarterback’s mind: No matter how good the block is, if Mercein should slip, he won’t be able to reach the hole in time. Starr remembers a game against the 49ers in Milwaukee in 1966: an icy field, at the end of a long drive, he called the wedge, then kept the ball himself and scored on a sneak. The Packers didn’t even have a quarterback sneak in their playbook. Never practiced it. But the improvisation had worked once, why not now? I can just hug the block in there, just get one step and go right in, Starr thinks to himself. He doesn’t tell anyone. All his teammates think Mercein is getting the ball.

  The Packers break from the huddle. The Doomsday linemen—Lilly, Pugh, Townes and Andrie—are kicking the ice at the goal line, desperate to find a patch of unfrozen turf so they can get a quick start off the ball. Jerry Kramer takes his position next to center Ken Bowman—and there it is, a soft spot in the ground, just for him. He digs in with his right foot, certain that he can cut Pugh at the snap. On the Packers bench, Willie Davis is “thinking of all the possibilities, a bad snap or whatever.” Aw, hell, he says to himself, and turns his head away. He can’t watch. Willie Wood puts his head down. Looks hard at the ground. “Sometimes you don’t want to see bad things,” he explains later. Lombardi wonders whether they’ll have enough time to bring in the field goal team if they don’t make it.

  Vincent has worked his way back down the field to this e
nd, standing in the shadows. Steve Sabol is nearby, thinking to himself, Here I am watching history. Ockie Krueger never made it to Marie’s car; he’s standing atop a seat down near the field, shouting like everyone around him. Paul Mazzoleni is in a crowd that has jammed one of the exit ramps, on his tiptoes trying to get a better view. Dick Schaap is still on the far end of the field, nearly a hundred yards away. He has no clue that his co-author is expected to make the crucial block on the season’s most important play. Vernon Biever, the Packers’ official photographer, has been standing behind the end zone with his son John, his fifteen-year-old assistant. It makes no sense for them both to be shooting from the same spot, so he says to John, “You stay here. I’ll change film and go to the bench area, so if they score I’ll get the emotion over there.” John Biever stays in the end zone and lifts his Nikon motorized camera, anticipating the final play coming his way.

  One year earlier, in Dallas, the Cowboys were down near the goal line, threatening to score in the final seconds, and one of their offensive linemen was penalized for moving before the snap. Now the Packers are in the same situation, and Kramer is coming off the ball fast and hard, and Jethro Pugh thinks it is too fast, that Kramer is offside, but no call is made, and Kramer cuts Pugh off his feet and then Kenny Bowman knocks him back into a linebacker and Pugh falls on top of Kramer, and the wedge opening is there. Mercein gets a good start, no slips. “I’m psyched, I want this thing to go right,” Mercein recalled later. “I’m taking off and—lo and behold, Bart’s not giving me the ball. He’s kept it and he’s in the end zone.” Mercein is coming right behind him, and he doesn’t want the officials to think he’s pushing Starr forward, which would be a penalty, so he throws his hands above his head, trying to say, see, I’m not assisting him, and it looks as though Mercein is signaling the touchdown in midair.