That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory

by John Eisenberg

  But what Green Bay had going for it above all—what made it different from the many other American cities of its modest size—were the Packers.

  Pro football teams had sprouted in many such towns during the sport's pioneer days after World War I, but the others, all of them, had long ago been elbowed out of business by big-city teams such as the New York Giants and Chicago Bears. The Packers had survived, primarily because of their community's support. They were the local secular religion, affording Green Bay the right to call itself major league in at least one respect.

  The bond between the team and town was especially intense. The Packers weren't owned by some wealthy entrepreneur or old-money scion, as many other pro sports teams were, but by the very fans cursing them on this dank Monday. In an arrangement unlike any other in sports, Green Bay Packers Inc., a nonprofit corporation with more than sixteen hundred stockholders, owned the team and oversaw its operations. The stockholders ranged from mill owners to mill workers owning anywhere from three hundred shares to just one, but no matter their stake, they had a say in the Packers' fortunes. They elected from their ranks a forty-five-member board of directors which, in turn, selected from its ranks a thirteen-person executive committee that ran the team, making all decisions, from hiring a coach to choosing the ad campaign.

  The thirteen executive-committee slots were filled by Green Bay's business and political leaders, people trusted to run important institutions. In 1958 Dominic Olejniczak, a realtor who had recently served five terms as mayor, headed the committee with the title of team president. Dick Bourguignon, also a realtor, was vice president. John Torinus, publisher of the Press- Gazette, was secretary. The treasurer was a lawyer, Fred Trowbridge. Other committee members included Jerry Atkinson, chairman of the H. C. Prange department store; Tony Canadeo, a popular former star halfback for the Packers; Fred Leicht, head of a transportation company; and Bernard "Boob" Darling, a lineman on the Packers' Depression-era championship teams.

  Prosperous and controlling, these men were heavily involved in the Packers' day-to-day business. It wasn't unusual to see them watching practice or traveling with the team to road games. In 1957, as the Packers' season fell apart, some met privately with players to hear gripes, undermining Coach Lisle Blackbourn.

  After Blackbourn, tired of the meddling, resigned at the end of the season, the committee searched for a replacement in January 1958. Then-president Russell Bogda was dying of cancer and Olejniczak had agreed to fill in temporarily. (He took the job permanently months later.) Amid the uncertainty, the committee elected not to chase boldly after a big-name college coach, not that any seemed to want to take on the lowly Packers. Scooter McLean eventually was hired over Lou Rymkus, another assistant under Blackbourn.

  Scooter was initially excited, telling reporters during training camp that he thought the Packers would have a winning season. But now, months later, his optimism was in tatters. On the day after the 56–0 loss, he and his assistants were at work by 8 a.m., reviewing films of the debacle on the second floor of the Downtowner Motel on Washington Street, where the Packers had their business offices. The films were a horror show; sitting in a dark room as the projector whirred, Scooter saw that, as he suspected, some players had simply quit.

  At noon Scooter hunched into his heavy coat and walked over to the Northland Hotel for his weekly Monday lunch with the executive committee, which always met with the head coach on the day after a game. To a man, the committee members liked Scooter and had played golf with him, but they came down hard on him now, second-guessing his play calls and personnel moves. Like everyone else in town, they wondered what in the hell was going on.

  Scooter was tired of sticking up for his friends in uniform. He wasn't getting the same loyalty in return. Pressed by the committee, he admitted some veterans were going through the motions and just picking up paychecks. Such criticism normally stayed private, but Scooter also told newsman Art Daley as much later that day. Lackadaisical veterans were "bad roots," and "they're getting to be a problem because they're starting to affect the rest of the team." When Daley asked if changes were coming, Scooter replied, "I'm not cutting anybody right now but we'll be watching things real close before and after Sunday's game in Chicago."

  After those comments appeared in Tuesday's Press-Gazette under the headline "Defeatist Veterans Must Go, Coach Says," fifty fans showed up to watch practice, thinking they might see a veteran get cut. (Packer practices were open to the public.) But the day contained no fireworks. Olejniczak came over from his real estate office and addressed the players, reminding them of the Packers' winning past. The speech had no impact.

  Some coaches would have balked at having to deal with such involved owners, who in most cases had never played football. But after almost a decade in Green Bay, Scooter understood that dealing with the executive committee was part of his job. The Packers' ownership arrangement was unusual but immutable, dating to the franchise's origins in 1919. Local business leaders had always run the Packers, so it was best, Scooter believed, just to acknowledge that they were in charge.

  The franchise traced to, of all things, a young man from Green Bay coming down with an ill-timed sore throat. Earl Lambeau, a handsome fullback nicknamed Curly for the shock of dark curls that flounced above his forehead, starred at East High School and then went to Notre Dame and played as a freshman in 1918 under a new Irish coach named Knute Rockne. But Lambeau came home that Christmas with a severe sore throat his doctors diagnosed as tonsillitis. The tonsils couldn't be removed until a lingering virus dissipated, so Lambeau stayed in Green Bay instead of returning to school for the spring semester. He took a $250-a-month job as a shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Company.

  He liked getting a paycheck so much that he gave up on college, but he sorely missed playing football. Walking downtown one day, he ran into George Calhoun, sports editor of the Press-Gazette, who had covered his high school exploits. Lambeau expressed how much he missed the game, and Calhoun suggested he put a team together. Lambeau talked the Indian Packing Company into donating money for jerseys and letting the team practice on its grounds, which had a playing field—hence the team name Packers. In August 1919 a group of potential players met in the Press-Gazette newsroom, answering an ad. Some really wanted to play football and others were just looking to brawl, but the cornerstone of a team formed.

  College football was enormously popular in the aftermath of the Great War, its games drawing vast crowds and dominating newspaper headlines despite the opposition of many school presidents, aghast at its violent nature. In the Midwest, Illinois, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Wisconsin, and Minnesota fielded top teams and played before crowds of seventy-five thousand or more.

  Against that backdrop, the Green Bay Packers lurched to life in the fall of 1919, playing athletic clubs, American Legion squads, and other ragtag outfits at Hagemeister Park on the east side of town. The Packers won ten games and lost one before sparse crowds. The game was called pro football and a hat was passed to collect money for the players. It was a meager enterprise.

  In 1921 Lambeau's team joined the American Professional Football Association, a forerunner of the NFL, which featured, among many short-lived organizations, the Dayton (Ohio) Triangles, Canton (Ohio) Bulldogs, and Rock Island (Illinois) Independents. The Packers were promptly kicked out for using college players under assumed names. They had to pay twenty-five hundred dollars to rejoin, and Lambeau didn't have the money. But the people of Green Bay liked having a team and stepped in to help. One fan sold his car and gave the proceeds to the Packers in exchange for one minute of playing time.

  Seeing how popular the team was, Andrew Turnbull, publisher of the Press-Gazette, conceived of the idea of turning it into a nonprofit entity. Four hundred people attended a start-up meeting at an Elks Club lodge and combined to purchase one thousand shares of stock at five dollars apiece. The Packers were saved.

  The early NFL was a loose coalition of small-town teams such as the Packers, Triang
les, Frankford (Pennsylvania) Yellow Jackets, and Pottsville (Pennsylvania) Maroons, with a few big-city teams such as the Bears and Giants mixed in. Seldom passing, the squads brawled in front of boozed-up fans and occasionally scored touchdowns. Gambling pervaded the stands and locker rooms.

  Franchises came and went, but the fast-talking Lambeau put together a winning squad that Green Bay fans enjoyed. In 1925 the Packers moved into City Stadium, a wooden structure with slatted bleachers at East High School. By the late 1920s games against the Bears were drawing crowds of seven thousand spectators. Sports fans elsewhere believed pro football was a circus act more than a legitimate sport; the game itself was so closely associated with the college experience that playing it for money was deemed unseemly. But Green Bay didn't have a major college team and liked its hometown boys.

  The Packers' star player was Johnny McNally, a handsome runner who drank, gambled, and womanized. The Hornung of his day, he had been kicked out of Notre Dame for playing semipro ball, and now played for the Packers under an assumed name, Johnny Blood. His blockers included "Iron Mike" Michalske, a rugged two-way player, and Cal Hubbard, a gentle giant who demanded a trade from the New York Giants because he preferred the small-town environment.

  With Lambeau now strictly in the role of coach, the Packers went unbeaten in 1929, allowing just twenty-two points in thirteen games. After clinching their first NFL title with a win over the Bears in Chicago, they were met at the Green Bay train station by ten thousand screaming fans. The city's bars never closed that night as people toasted their team. The next year, the forward-thinking Lambeau, who loved passing the ball, stumbled onto a star thrower when he gave a tryout to one of the team's towel boys, a Green Bay native named Arnie Herber. The Packers won two more titles in 1930 and 1931 with Herber heaving passes downfield to open receivers.

  When fourteen thousand fans crammed into City Stadium to watch the Packers beat the Bears in 1931, the team seemed on solid financial ground. But then a fan fell out of the stands, sued, and won, forcing another stock sale that raised fifteen thousand dollars, just enough to keep the Packers from suffering the same sad fate as the NFL's other small-town teams, which folded as the Depression squeezed their wallets and they faced the grim reality of trying to beat better-funded teams from New York and Chicago.

  The Packers' fortunes improved dramatically when Lambeau signed Don Hutson, a lanky receiver from the University of Alabama who would become the franchise's greatest player. The NFL was deemed so second-rate in the South, where college football ruled, that Hutson believed his playing career was over after he scored two touchdowns in the 1935 Rose Bowl. But a bidding war for his services erupted between Lambeau and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Hutson signed with both teams, but Lambeau's contract reached the league offices an hour earlier, making Hutson a Packer.

  Arriving shortly after several rules were changed to encourage passing, Hutson, known as the Alabama Antelope, was a devastating weapon, running nifty routes and catching tosses from Herber and his successor, Cecil Isbell. The Packers won titles in 1936 and 1939, and in 1941 Hutson became the first receiver to catch fifty passes in a season. The Packers were in their heyday. The U-shaped bleachers that surrounded the City Stadium field on three sides were filled on Sundays. A glassed-in press box was considered the best in the business. Packer games were the high point of Green Bay's social life. Friends held Sunday-morning parties and went to the stadium together, the men wearing suits, the women dressed in hats, high heels, and furs. They promenaded before kickoff and dined at supper clubs after the game.

  Truthfully, City Stadium was still minor league in many respects. Kids snuck through the turnstiles and sat behind the end zone. The Packers dressed in a dark, cramped locker room under the stands, and since there was no visiting locker room, players on opposing teams got ready for games in their rooms at the Northland Hotel. Fathers and sons gathered in the hotel lobby on Sunday mornings to watch the massive players step off the elevators in their shimmering uniforms, cleats and helmets in hand.

  Fans rooted desperately for victories, and even when the Packers lost, the invasion of teams from Chicago and New York made everyone's shoulders feel broad. But after carrying the Packers for eleven seasons and leading them to yet another title in 1944, Hutson retired in 1945, and the team immediately declined. Pro football, though still not as popular as the college game, was strictly a big-city enterprise now, and a rival league, the All-America Football Conference, started up, creating a free-for-all talent market that led to higher player salaries. The Packers lost players to better-funded big-city teams, posted a 3–9 record in 1948, and went 2–10 in 1949. Suddenly, they were an anachronism, the last link to the NFL's romantic early years. Their opponents played in Yankee Stadium and the Los Angeles Coliseum, and they played at East High School. It became a struggle for them just to stay competitive. In 1949 they staged a Thanksgiving Day doubleheader featuring an intra-squad game and an old-timers' game just to raise enough money to pay their bills.

  Fans tired of Lambeau, who, twice divorced and still handsome, spent the off-season in California frolicking with movie stars. His relationship with the Packer board of directors soured as the losses mounted. The board took away some of his power, putting new committees in charge of negotiating contracts and other important tasks. Few tears were shed in 1949 when Lambeau resigned from the team he had started three decades earlier to coach the Chicago Cardinals.

  The executive committee became more involved with Lambeau gone, adding more committees and holding another stock sale that raised $118,000 in 1950. Fans still felt a tug for the team despite its recent struggles. One woman came to the team's offices with $25 in quarters and bought a single share of stock.

  To replace Lambeau, the executive committee hired Gene Ronzani, a burly former Bears fullback, as both general manager and head coach. He won just fourteen of forty-six games before resigning in 1953. The committee then divided up his job, hiring the scholarly Blackbourn as head coach (he had been a winning high school and college coach in Milwaukee) and Verne Lewellen, a lawyer who had played halfback for the Packers in the 1920s and 1930s, as GM. A brief revival ensued. With quarterback Tobin Rote throwing touchdowns to the speedy Howton, the team went .500 in 1955, splitting twelve games.

  But Blackbourn couldn't sustain the improvement and the Packers fell back again, losing seventeen of twenty-four games in Blackbourn's last two seasons. They were at a dangerous crossroads. Television, its popularity and influence growing exponentially, was now broadcasting NFL games into millions of homes across the country. Fans were becoming hooked on the skill, drama, and violence they saw on Sundays. Attendance was skyrocketing. After decades on the fringes of the sports scene, pro football was taking off. But it was doing so without the Packers, who played before seventy-five thousand fans in Los Angeles, fifty-nine thousand in San Francisco, and fifty-four thousand in Detroit, but barely drew ten thousand paying customers to games at City Stadium.

  Their reputation was so dismal that other teams dealt with unhappy players by threatening to trade them to Green Bay, the "Siberia of the NFL." The Packers were a cheap, second-rate outfit. They held training camp in remote Stevens Point, Wisconsin, on a high school field with dim lights; punts disappeared into the sky during evening scrimmages. Other teams stayed at first-class hotels and gave players a per diem when they traveled, but the Packers frequented out-of-the-way bargain motels and ate sandwiches that management handed out. Other teams flew on newer planes, but the Packers crammed into a pair of DC-3 turboprops, with half of the team's quarterbacks, runners, blockers, linebackers, and safeties on one plane and half on the other, a precaution taken so the starting lineup wouldn't be entirely wiped out if one of the rickety planes went down.

  When receiver Gary Knafelc joined the Packers in 1954, he was shocked to find facilities not up to the standards he had known at the University of Colorado or, for that matter, at his high school in Pueblo, Colorado, shortly after World War II. Packer players we
ighed themselves on a meat scale and soaked their aches in a whirlpool that was little more than a bathtub with a hose. Their shoulder pads were stored under the City Stadium stands in an open-air enclosure with a dirt floor and chicken-wire walls. Knafelc took one look at the worn pads, called his father, and asked for the pads he had worn in a college all-star game.

  The cost cutting reached a nadir in 1955 when the Packers took a train instead of flying to California to play the Rams and 49ers. Blackbourn tried to keep the players fresh by having them run through plays during a stopover at the Great Salt Lake, but after three days of nonstop eating, drinking, and playing cards, they were stale when they arrived and lost badly.

  Playing for a small-town team had a few advantages. During his rookie season in 1952, Bobby Dillon lived at the YMCA for eight dollars a week. But players who yearned for more nightlife bemoaned their fate. Green Bay had few available women, and between that and the cold, snow, darkness, and losing, a young man could get depressed. When lineman John Sandusky was traded to the Packers from the powerful Cleveland Browns in 1956, he looked around on his drive in from the airport and sighed, "Ah, Green Bay, end of the earth." The wife of Packers tackle Norm Masters, a Detroit native, wept when he told her their hometown Lions had traded him to Green Bay.

  Making matters worse, the players lived among many glory-years Packers who had married local girls and settled down in Green Bay. The police chief had played on the 1919 team. The fire chief had played with Johnny Blood. Two dozen former players lived nearby and attended games. Reminders of better times were everywhere.

  The situation was so bad by the mid-1950s, it was whispered the league might move the Packers to Milwaukee, a larger city experiencing a sports boom. It had a new stadium that seated fifty-four thousand and had attracted a major-league baseball franchise, the Braves, who had moved from Boston in 1953 and set attendance records, won two National League pennants, and captured a World Series. The Packers played two "home" games a year in Milwaukee, hoping to build a second-city audience, and while they didn't draw nearly as well as the Braves, they might if they moved permanently, focused on selling themselves to the larger market, and started winning again.