When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  John Biever clicks his Nikon and captures the moment for history: Kramer’s block, Starr’s sneak, Mercein’s dive. Vernon Biever is near the bench and gets a shot of Lombardi lifting his hands jubilantly: touchdown. Victory. Dick Schaap knows that he has to change the title of his book. The clock did not run out. Harry Lombardi is whooping and screaming at the television set in Sheepshead Bay. Henry Jordan turns to Phil Bengtson and says in a deadpan, “Whadaya say, Coach. Another day, another dollar, huh?” Mercein is surprised, but not disappointed. He might have scored and been the hero, but he knew that he had done more in that one game than he ever could have dreamed. He was lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time. Bart Starr had been in the right place doing the right things for nine years. With Hornung no longer in uniform, Starr had to be the one to go in for the winning score.

  The coach, it could be said, had nothing to do with that final drive in a game that would be remembered thereafter as the Ice Bowl. Starr called the plays and scored the touchdown, Anderson and Mercein offered helpful advice and made the key runs and catches, Kramer and Bowman threw crucial blocks. Yet to every Packer on the field, and to many of those watching from the sidelines and in the press box, that final drive, more than anything else, was the perfect expression of Vince Lombardi. The conditions were miserable, the pressure enormous, and there were no fumbles, no dropped passes, no mistakes, just a group of determined men moving confidently downfield toward a certain goal. In his speeches Lombardi talked about character in action, and here it was, in real life. “Of all the games I’ve done,” said Ray Scott, “that final drive was the greatest triumph of will over adversity I’d ever seen. It was a thing of beauty.”

  THE LOCKER ROOM was a jangle of cameras and lights when Lombardi got there after the game. He evicted the press and talked to his men alone, telling them how proud he was: for running to win, for persevering and meeting their greatest challenge, winning three straight championships. He barely stifled the tears that came so easily to him, then fell to his knees and led the team in the Lord’s Prayer. When he returned to his dressing room and began taking questions from the press, he could not stop fidgeting in his chair. He rose, sat down, got up again. He claimed with a touch of whimsy that the decision to gamble for the touchdown was dictated largely by the weather. “I didn’t figure those fans in the stands wanted to sit through a sudden death,” he said. “You can’t say I’m without compassion, although I’ve been accused of it.” But the story was “out there, not here,” he told the media, nodding in the direction of the outer locker room from which only minutes before he had evicted these same reporters.

  Glacial tears burned the cheeks of Ray Nitschke. The offense had not let him down, and now he said he felt a deep sense of satisfaction. He was also cold and numb and had frostbite on both feet. He and several teammates were soaking their feet in a bucket of lukewarm water. The hot water in the showers disappeared quickly, and Tom Brown and Willie Wood came yelping out of the shower room when it turned cold. They decided to take their showers at home. Jim Grabowski, who had watched the game from the bench, wishing he could have contributed, now took in the postgame scene with feelings of loneliness and separation as injured players always do, even in the midst of their teammates’ joy. Grabo nonetheless sought out his replacement for congratulations. “Chuck, you just did a great job,” he said to Mercein. “As good a job as I possibly could have done. Better, maybe.”

  Jerry Kramer could not stop talking. As Dick Schaap observed from the edge of the crowd, Kramer told one huddle of reporters after another about the last drive and the block, which CBS replayed in slow motion over and over. It was only then that Schaap was struck by the serendipity of the day’s events. The last play of the biggest game, and his colleague had made the block, and now an enormous television audience was listening to him talk about it, and also about this special team and its uncommon coach. Kramer was the narrator of his diary, but he shared the role of main character with Lombardi, a looming presence in almost every scene. Kramer hated Lombardi and loved Lombardi, but he thought that he and his teammates knew him in a way that no outsider could. Weeks earlier, Esquire had published an article by Leonard Shecter that had portrayed Lombardi as a bully and tyrant. “Many things have been said about Coach,” Kramer now told his TV interviewers. “And he is not always understood by those who quote him. The players understand. This is one beautiful man.”

  Red Blaik was watching the postgame interviews on television, and when he heard Kramer’s remark he picked up the phone and called the Green Bay dressing room, getting through right away, much to his surprise. “Vince,” he said to his former assistant. “A great victory, but greater were the remarks of Kramer, who has stilled those who were skeptical about you as a person.”

  Vince and Vincent drove home together, retracing the route they had taken hours earlier. As Lombardi steered the Pontiac out of the parking lot, he turned to Vincent and sighed. “You’ve just seen me coach my next to last game,” he said. They rode in silence the rest of the way. That evening, in the basement party room at Sunset Circle, “everyone was floating on the ceiling,” according to Jill Lombardi, Vincent’s wife. The Old Man was so excited amid the hubbub of toasts and congratulatory phone calls and New Year’s Eve jollity that he even kissed a few journalists. At one point he put his arm around Marie, and called for quiet and loudly thanked his wife for “making it all possible,” a public declaration that made Marie squirm and shudder with embarrassment. Ed Sabol had been invited to the cocktail party with his son Steve, and entered the basement shouldering a small Bell & Howell camera to capture the scene. Lombardi was taken aback when he saw the lights. “What are you doing?” he barked. Just taking a few shots, Ed Sabol said. A few shots for history.

  A FEW DAYS LATER Chuck Mercein’s parents called him. “Chuck,” said his mother. “Guess who’s on the cover of Sports Illustrated?” Starr, he guessed. No, his mother said. You. Mercein thought back to sitting in the barber’s chair when he was a child in suburban Chicago, reading SI’s “Faces in the Crowd” column and hoping maybe he could get in there someday. Now he was on the cover.

  A few weeks later Jerry Kramer was in New York as a guest at Schaap’s journalism class at Columbia. He was describing his block on the final play of the Ice Bowl and how the television kept showing the play over and over. “Thank God for instant replay,” Kramer said.

  Aha, Schaap thought. There’s our title.

  Instant Replay would become one of the best-selling sports books of all time.

  A few months later the crowd that had gathered in Lombardi’s basement on the night of the game reassembled there, now to watch the highlight film of Green Bay’s championship season produced by Ed and Steve Sabol. They draped a bedsheet against the wall to serve as a makeshift screen, then turned off the lights. The film, titled The Greatest Challenge, was narrated by John Facenda, who was being phased out as a newscaster at Channel 10 in Philadelphia when Ed Sabol asked him to be the voice of NFLFilms. With his deep and melodramatic tone, Facenda became known as “the voice of God.” He read his scripts without ever looking at the pictures that accompanied them.

  At the climax of the film about the 1967 Packers, Jerry Kramer said that he played pro football because of all the men who had been his teammates during the Lombardi era in Green Bay. “I’ll tell you in a nutshell, if you can understand this: I play pro football because of Emlen Tunnell, Bill Quinlan, Dan Currie, Paul Hornung, Fuzzy Thurston, Max McGee, Henry Jordan, Herb Adderley, Ray Nitschke, Dave Robinson, Bart Starr.” Then came Facenda’s voice: deep, reverberating, sentimental. “They will be remembered as the faces of victory,” he said. “They will be remembered for their coach, whose iron discipline was the foundation on which they built a fortress. And most of all, they will be remembered as a group of men who faced the greatest challenge their sport has ever produced—and conquered.”

  When it was over, the room stayed dark and the projector ran on and on, the film flap
ping noisily over the reel. Someone belatedly turned the light switch, and there stood Lombardi. He had been watching football film for decades, and he had run this projector himself, the old pro. But this time he was not grading the blocking technique of his players with ones or twos or zeros. He had a handkerchief out, and he was crying.

  25

  Until Lombardi Loves You

  SUSAN LOMBARDI had suspected something at Christmas, and fretted about it more as she shivered in the stands at the Ice Bowl. Finally, in the middle of January, when her parents were in Florida, she turned to a friendly doctor, the father of a former classmate, who agreed to sneak her into St. Vincent’s Hospital. One of the nurses there, an older nun who seemed gentle and protective, discreetly conducted the test. Susan was twenty, living at home on Sunset Circle, working part-time at H. C. Prange’s and going steady with Paul Bickham, a young man who attended St. Norbert College. When the results came back, the doctor gave her the news that she was pregnant.

  What now? Susan and Paul agreed to get married, but they did not want her parents to know that she was pregnant, at least not yet. Her father often teased her about her infallible sense of timing, how she got into trouble at the worst possible moments, and here was another example. The Packers had just won Super Bowl II, defeating the Oakland Raiders 33 to 14. Lombardi, who had become a national symbol of old-fashioned discipline and moral rectitude, was taking a much-needed rest with Marie in Miami Beach. He was exhausted and pondering his future amid rumors that he would step down as coach. The last news he wanted to hear was that his unwed daughter was pregnant. The young couple decided instead to explain their dilemma to Father William Spalding, a parish priest at the Church of the Resurrection in Allouez. At first he seemed to agree to marry them in secret, but then reconsidered and called back a few hours later saying that in good conscience he could not do it without her parents’ knowledge, even though both Paul and Susan were of legal age. Susan did not want to make the call to Florida. Father Spalding said he would.

  Marie answered the phone at the hotel just as Vince was walking into the room, and when he heard her moan, “Oh, no! Oh, my God!” he demanded to know what was going on. Susie’s pregnant. He took the phone and grilled the priest for details. At first Lombardi was “extremely angry, of course,” according to Spalding, but then calmed down and began drafting a game plan. Later that day he called his daughter and presented it to her. Susan and Paul were to get married as soon as possible, while her parents were still in Florida. It would be a Catholic wedding, blessed by the church, but not in Green Bay. If they applied for a marriage license in Brown County, the story would appear on the front page the next day, and this had to be kept quiet. They should go to Michigan, where it was less likely to draw attention. Father Spalding would work out the details. When they returned, they should say that they had eloped.

  On the morning of January 24, Susan, Paul and the Lombardi’s housekeeper, Lois Mack, drove north in Marie’s Thunderbird to Escanaba in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, carrying marriage papers that Father Spalding had prepared. Mack and the Catholic priest who performed the ceremony were the only witnesses to the concealed marriage at St. Anne’s Church. The trio drove back to Green Bay that afternoon, and Susan and Paul moved into a first-floor flat on Fourth Street in West De Pere, a former bachelor pad with windows painted shut and without a shower, but within walking distance of St. Norbert. As soon as Vince and Marie returned to Green Bay, they paid a visit to the newlyweds. “My father was pretty cool about it,” Susan said later. “He stuck out his hand to Paul and said welcome to the family and asked him about his education and his plans. He wanted to have a party to celebrate. It was my mother who was a basket case. She just glared at me like, What are we going to do with her now? My dad looked around and told her to make sure we had enough furniture.”

  A few days later Lombardi came home from work and prepared to settle into his favorite brown chair. It was time for his late-afternoon off-season ritual: beer, cheddar cheese, slices of an apple and a half hour of belly laughs watching his favorite television show, McHale’s Navy. But the comfortable old chair was gone, replaced by an unfamiliar new model. Marie! Well, she explained, he told her to find Susan decent furniture, so she gave the kids the family room set and bought several new pieces. The Old Man decided he could adjust. That was the least of the changes he faced.

  THE FIRST REPORT of Lombardi’s imminent retirement broke not even twenty-four hours after the dramatic end of the Ice Bowl. On New Year’s Day, Minneapolis sportscaster Hal Scott, the brother of Packers play-by-play man Ray Scott, reported that Lombardi intended to step down as coach after Super Bowl II, but would remain as general manager and anoint Phil Bengtson as his successor. Lombardi had been dropping hints about relinquishing the coaching post since that week in Tulsa a year earlier. In various informal settings, he had told trusted friends, including some journalists, that the two jobs were too much for him. He was not the world’s best keeper of secrets. He had confided to several priests, including Father Burke at St. Norbert and Father Spalding at Resurrection, that this would be his final season. Marie and Vincent knew, as did Red Blaik.

  When Hal Scott came out with his report, the team publicist issued an oblique response. “There were rumors to this effect last year and rumors of the same sort this year,” Chuck Lane said. “But Coach Lombardi has made no official comment about it.” The following day Lombardi issued his own statement with stronger wording. Scott’s report “could be upsetting to everybody in Green Bay,” he said. “It’s completely without verification. I haven’t talked to anyone about any such thing. I repeat: I have no plans either for tomorrow or for the next year. Who knows, I may even be dead by then.”

  In fact he had privately revealed his decision to retire, but did not want it publicized for two reasons. First, he feared it would distract his players as they prepared for the Super Bowl in Miami. He also knew that he might change his mind after the season. As a result, he received Scott’s report crankily, much as he had responded to Ken Hartnett’s equally accurate report on Jim Taylor playing out his contract in 1966. He instructed his assistant, Tom Miller, to find Ray Scott, whom he suspected of leaking the story to his brother. Ray Scott was playing gin at a country club in suburban Minneapolis when Miller reached him, and took offense at Lombardi’s accusation that he had broken a confidence. “Tom, I had nothing to do with the report on television,” he told Miller. “I didn’t see it. I didn’t talk to my brother. And I’ll let Lombardi know how I feel about this directly.” Scott then wrote Lombardi an irate letter noting that over the years there had been “a thousand times” when he could have broken the coach’s confidence, but never did. The two men did not speak for several months thereafter.

  Lombardi’s fear that retirement talk would distract his players from their final mission, winning Super Bowl II, was inconsistent and ultimately misplaced. It was inconsistent because he was the one who kept dropping hints about it, not only to his friends but to the press and even to his players. At the final film session with his team on the Friday before the Raiders game, he choked back tears as he told them, “This may be the last time we’ll be together, so …” Some of the players didn’t get it; they thought he just meant it was the last meeting of that year, but others, including Bart Starr and Jerry Kramer, deduced precisely what he meant. Rather than diminishing the team’s concentration, the possibility that this was Lombardi’s last game helped spur Green Bay to victory. Much like the game against Kansas City the year before, the Packers were relatively unimpressive in the first half, leading Oakland this time by only 16 to 7. It was after Kramer’s halftime exhortation to “win this for the Old Man” that they put the game away, scoring the first seventeen points of the second half.

  Two and a half weeks after that victory, and one week after his daughter’s secret out-of-town wedding, Lombardi hosted an affair at Oneida Golf and Riding Club. The dinner and press conference on the Thursday evening of February 1 was st
aged and scripted by Lombardi. He was uncharacteristically chatty and nervous beforehand, constantly sipping water as though he had an unquenchable thirst. Twice he left the room to pull himself together. Then he sat down next to his top assistant, Phil Bengtson, and read a statement in front of twenty-four microphones, fourteen cameras and more than a hundred newsmen, the largest press delegation ever to assemble at a sports announcement in Green Bay. “What I have to say, gentlemen, is not completely without emotion,” he began. “And a decision arrived at only after a great deal of thought and study.” The statement that followed, on paper, seemed impersonal and devoid of sentiment. He said that because of “the nature of the business and the growth of the business” he had concluded that it was “impractical” for him to serve as both coach and general manager, but he was fortunate to have “a very capable and a very loyal assistant” to succeed him. “Gentlemen,” he concluded, “let me introduce to you now the new head coach of the Green Bay Packers, Mr. Phil Bengtson.”

  There was no poetry or romance about five championships in nine years as coach. Lombardi refrained from calling the roll of players who stayed with him from the opening day win over the Bears in 1959 to the victory in Super Bowl II (nine of them: Starr, Thurston, Skoronski, Jerry Kramer, Gregg, McGee, Jordan, Dowler and Nitschke). He chose not to revisit the glorious moments, from the perfection of the 37 to 0 trouncing of the Giants in the first championship to the block and sneak in the arctic darkness at the Ice Bowl. No rhetoric about pride, character and will. All of that was in the tremor of his voice, but not in the words—and soon after he made it official, turning the attention to the new coach, he left the room to compose himself again.