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

by John Eisenberg

  Lombardi knew McHan because the Giants and Cardinals, as Eastern Division rivals, had played twice a year. The Giants usually won, but Lombardi was always impressed with McHan's toughness and natural ability. Life on a losing team wasn't easy. McHan had thrown fifty touchdowns and seventy-seven interceptions while winning just eighteen games in five seasons. He had been beaten up and humiliated, his leadership questioned. He had never put everything together. But he had natural talent, more experience than the Packers' quarterbacks, and several years of good football left.

  Walter Wolfner, the Cardinals' owner and general manager, was rebuilding. He had just shipped running back Ollie Matson to the Rams for nine players, a stunning move. A year earlier, he had drafted another quarterback, Rice's King Hill, in the first round. He had decided McHan wasn't a quarterback around whom a winner could be built. McHan was amiable enough, Wolfner thought, but he sulked when criticized and complained about dropped passes. In a bizarre incident in 1956, he had ignored his coaches during a midseason game after asking not to play because of nerves, and then walked off the practice field the next day. Wolfner levied a three-thousand-dollar fine, the largest in NFL history, and briefly booted McHan off the team, but revoked both penalties when McHan apologized.

  When Lombardi proposed a deal for McHan, Wolfner asked for a high draft pick in return. Lombardi refused, knowing Wolfner would never trade the young man to another Eastern Division team, fearing losing to him twice a year, and therefore had few suitors. They haggled until Lombardi agreed to take McHan on a conditional basis. If McHan made the team and played, the Packers would give the Cardinals a third-round draft pick. If McHan didn't make the team, the Packers would just send him back, as if a deal had never been made.

  News of the trade surprised some Packers but didn't disappoint them. McHan probably made their team better, they figured. Gary Knafelc, who had played with McHan in Chicago before coming to Green Bay, knew McHan could be cranky but had considerable physical gifts. He would beat out Starr and Parilli, Knafelc guessed.

  Lombardi was pleased, believing he had found a number one quarterback. He knew McHan could be a pain but "he's the best athlete in the league," Lombardi said, "and we have nothing to lose. We're getting a free look at a good prospect."

  Starr shrugged when he heard about the deal. He didn't expect Lombardi to hand him the starting job; he hadn't played well enough. And he was accustomed to the Packers doubting him. They had chosen quarterbacks with their first pick in two of the past three drafts. Starr didn't blink at having to compete for a job with players whom the Packers liked more. He figured he would be fine if he worked hard.

  Lombardi was anxious to get started now that McHan was on board, but training camp didn't start for another two months. Finding ways to fill time, he played golf, spoke at several coaching clinics, and dispatched Red Cochran to Louisiana to help Jim Taylor learn the offense. Vainisi had told him about Taylor's struggles with Scooter's playbook, and Lombardi wanted to give the young fullback a head start. Lombardi's offense wasn't as complicated, but he wasn't leaving anything to chance.

  Many of Lombardi's golf outings took place at the Oneida Golf and Riding Club. Golf's popularity had soared in the United States during the 1950s (President Dwight Eisenhower loved the game so much he was jokingly called Duffer in Chief), and Lombardi, like many men, played it with a passion. He quickly became part of a regular game with Jack Koeppler, an insurance man he met on the first tee at Oneida. Lombardi was a long driver and adept enough around the greens to shoot in the low eighties, a respectable level. But he was frustrated that he couldn't score better, and his temper gave him fits. He couldn't intimidate a golf course like he could a football player.

  Many charities and clubs in Green Bay sponsored springtime golf events, and Packer players and coaches often participated. Jesse Whittenton, the defensive back, was a superb golfer. So was Parilli. At one event Parilli and Lombardi were paired together. They hadn't met, and when they smiled and shook hands on the first tee, they agreed to bet a dollar. Lombardi played his usual up-and-down game, became frustrated, and handed Parilli a bill at the end of the round.

  Parilli would later wonder if he should have just let his new coach win.

  Finally, in late June, it was time for the quarterback camp. Lombardi invited McHan, Starr, Parilli, Francis, and rookies Boyd Dowler and Bob Webb, the latter a low draft pick. Starr was excited as he traveled from Alabama to Green Bay. Lombardi had told him to prepare for a week of blackboard study. That was Starr's specialty. He loved the geometry of play design, the science of breaking down defenses, the varying philosophies of different systems—football's scholarly qualities.

  The players reported to the Packers' Washington Street offices at 9 A.M. on the last Monday in June. They shook hands and made small talk, and then posed for a Press-Gazette photographer before getting down to work. In the picture, Lombardi wears a wide grin and holds a ball aloft as the players watch. McHan and Starr are the only players smiling in the photograph. McHan stands by Lombardi in the forefront, assuming the prominent role he expected to play. Starr stands in the back with a broad smile.

  After the photographer left, Lombardi led the players to a meeting room. A portable blackboard was wheeled in and the players sat down in chairs. Lombardi picked up a piece of chalk and began to speak.

  "Gentlemen," he said, "we have a great deal of ground to cover. We're going to do things a lot differently than they've been done here before."

  Starr glanced around the room. Six quarterbacks were in attendance, but only three would make the team. Starr recognized the challenge he faced. McHan had more experience than the rest of these quarterbacks combined. McHan and Francis were terrific athletes. Parilli might finally put things together. Starr pledged to study hard, work on fundamentals, and polish his technique. His career was on the line.

  He stared, mesmerized, as Lombardi moved out from the blackboard to within a foot of the players. The coach could have reached out and touched Starr.

  "Gentlemen," he said, "we're going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because, in the process, we will catch excellence."

  He paused and stared, his eyes moving from player to player. The room was silent.

  "I'm not remotely interested in being just good," he said with an intensity that startled them all.

  When the group took a break after an hour, Starr raced downstairs, found a phone, and called Cherry in Alabama.

  "Honey, we're going to start to win," he said breathlessly. The guy talked about perfection!

  Lombardi paced the room for the rest of the morning, discussing his philosophy and detailing his offense. The change from Scooter's system would be subtle in some ways, profound in others. Under Scooter, every play call had included a number for the ball carrier, a number for the hole he was supposed to hit, and blocking calls for the linemen. An end sweep was "forty-nine oh grace pop"—four for the left halfback, nine for the right end of the line, and the subsequent sounds representing blocking assignments. Lombardi used the same numbers but didn't include the blocking calls. The end sweep was just "forty-nine." The linemen called their own blocks at the line.

  Starr loved the simplicity. Passing play-calls were similarly culled of much of their wordiness and complexity.

  "What we're doing," Lombardi explained, "is throwing out the garbage."

  As for the offense itself, Lombardi's was built on a power running game rather than a heavy passing load. He wanted to establish the run, forcing defenses to fortify their fronts, and then mix in passes. He recognized the passing game's importance and quick-strike potential, he said, but when a coach was too enamored of it, the offense suffered.

  "More than half the passes attempted in the league last year resulted in incompletions," he said. "That's too many plays on which the ball doesn't move forward. You can move it more consistently with the run, maintai
n possession longer, and keep the other offense off the field. A good running game has many positive effects and also stresses the importance of being physically superior on the field."

  His playbook would be staggeringly simple, one-fourth the size of Scooter's, totaling around forty plays. And the plays were as basic as white bread—runs off tackle, up the middle, and around end, passes to receivers over the middle, toward the sideline, and out of the backfield. The alignment wouldn't change from play to play. The Packers would have five interior linemen, a tight end, and a backfield of two halfbacks and a fullback behind the quarterback, with one halfback lined up wide in the "slot" position. A split end would line up on the other side. There would be no "man in motion" before the snap (some teams were experimenting with that) and two receivers would never line up on the same side.

  "If you block well, execute, and eliminate mistakes, this is all you need," Lombardi said. "It doesn't matter that the other team knows what is coming."

  Later that day he explained his system for changing plays at the line. The Packers had seldom done that under Scooter, but in Lombardi's system these "audible" calls were easy to execute. Having set a "snap count" (the varying signal, such as "hut one," on which the center was supposed to hike the ball) in the huddle, the quarterback signaled that he was changing the play simply by barking out that snap count when he started to shout at the line. The next number he called would be the new play. For instance, if in the huddle he had called for the ball to be snapped on "hut one," he could change the play to a sweep at the line simply by shouting "one, forty-nine."

  Again, Starr marveled at the simplicity. The quarterback had time to approach the line, study the defense, and make changes without the defense having any idea what was going on.

  Lombardi spent the whole day lecturing. Starr loved every minute. Lombardi would demand much more of the players. They would be fit, smart, and disciplined from now on, or they wouldn't remain on the team.

  The next day, Lombardi again lectured all morning but took the players to the practice field by City Stadium in the afternoon. He ordered Dowler to line up at receiver and catch passes from the others. Dowler shrugged; that was fine with him. He was six five, all arms and legs, an angular, speedy, all-around athlete who had played both ways at Colorado. Vainisi had drafted him not knowing what role he would play, but thinking he might be an effective receiver. Dowler dropped several balls during this first practice but Lombardi liked his rangy athleticism.

  On Wednesday there was more lecturing in the morning and another afternoon practice. By the end of the camp, the players had the basics down. Starr was ready for the season to begin. He was more excited about football than at any time since his high school days. Alabama had gone 4-15-2 in his last two seasons, and Green Bay had gone 10-25-1 since he arrived. Starr was weary of losing. He couldn't wait to memorize his playbook, study as much film as he could, throw passes until his arm was sore. When the Packers started to win, he wanted to be around. McHan's arrival meant he had to compete harder for a job, but Starr wasn't concerned about his chances. He was stirred by the challenge. And he wanted to play for Vince Lombardi.

  8

  AS TRAINING CAMP neared, Jack Vainisi received a surprising phone call.

  "I'm not coming back. I'm through," Bobby Dillon said.

  The announcement was surprising because Dillon was just twenty-nine and had plenty of good football left. A five-time Pro Bowl selection (out of seven years in the league), he had played safety with supreme confidence the year before, grabbing six interceptions and making first-team All-Pro while the rest of the Packers stumbled. He had signed a two-year, thirty-six-thousand-dollar contract before the 1958 season, and Lombardi had counted on him to bolster the pass defense.

  But Dillon had gone home to central Texas after the 1958 season and taken a promising sales job with a start-up manufacturing company. He was ready to put the losing Packers behind him and get on with his life.

  Not knowing Lombardi, he spoke to Vainisi and Verne Lewellen about his decision.

  "We'll miss you but that's fine," Lewellen said.

  Lombardi didn't try to talk Dillon out of quitting. He focused on finding a replacement. The Packers' defensive backfield had been sliced up during the 1958 season even with Dillon at safety; it would get absolutely humiliated now unless Lombardi found help.

  He called the Giants about Emlen Tunnell, a mainstay of their secondary for the past decade. An African American, Tunnell played safety like a jazz trumpeter's song, gracefully darting here and there to steal passes. He had played in every Pro Bowl from 1951 to 1957, but his skills declined so noticeably in 1958 that the Giants believed he was done. Tunnell, thirty-four, had a hard time arguing. He had been one of Lombardi's favorite Giants, smart, resourceful, positive—a winner. He might not be good enough for them now, but he certainly could play in Green Bay, Lombardi thought. The Giants offered to trade him for a small amount of cash. Lombardi just had to talk Tunnell into moving from a winning team to a loser, and from the Big Apple to little Green Bay.

  "Emlen, come on out here and help me get the Packers going," Lombardi said when they spoke by phone.

  "I don't know, Coach," Tunnell replied.

  Green Bay's population was almost entirely white, as opposed to New York's stew of ethnicities. And the Giants always seemed to suit up three or four black players, including All-Pros Tunnell and offensive tackle Roosevelt Brown, while the Packers' record with blacks was short. Bob Mann, a receiver, had been the first black Packer, catching passes for four seasons in the early 1950s. A quarterback, Charley Brackins, took a few snaps in 1955 before being cut for missing a curfew before a game. Nate Borden, the starting defensive end, had been the only black player on the team for the past few seasons.

  Most NFL teams had stopped excluding blacks in the late 1940s, shortly after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, and black stars such as Marion Motley, Lenny Moore, and Ollie Matson had become headliners. But black players still experienced difficulties. Some white players from the South didn't want them as teammates, making life uncomfortable at best. And many black players believed an unwritten quota existed—teams just wouldn't suit up too many blacks at once, fearful of offending fans. The Redskins, owned by George Preston Marshall, a virulent racist, had never suited up a black player. The Packers had moved cautiously.

  Lombardi was determined to use more black players in Green Bay. Loyal to the league, he wouldn't overtly challenge any of its operational tenets, even unwritten quotas, but having been on the receiving end of his share of taunts and slights as an Italian American growing up in New York, he was disgusted by intolerance and in favor of increased integration. He also knew from his Giants experience what black players in general, and Tunnell in particular, could bring to his team.

  Tunnell had been the first black man to play for the Giants. After starring in football, basketball, and baseball as a youngster living near Philadelphia, he joined the Coast Guard and saw action in the Pacific during World War II. (A broken neck suffered in a football game kept him out of the military.) After the war, he played football at the University of Iowa and semipro baseball during the summers. In 1948 he hitchhiked to New York and asked the still-segregated Giants if he could try out, thinking the door might open in the wake of Jackie Robinson's rookie season with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Tim Mara, Wellington's brother, gave him a tryout because he had the guts to ask. The first time Tunnell wore a Giants uniform, he intercepted four passes in an exhibition game against the Packers. Management worried about what southerners on the Giants would think, but he was embraced because of his sunny nature and because he was so good.

  Now, a decade later, he could help the Packers, Lombardi felt, by mentoring younger black players, injecting his winning attitude into the locker room culture, and playing anywhere close to the level he did in New York. But Tunnell continued to express reservations about Lombardi's offer. There were no jazz clubs and few available black women in Green B
ay, he said. And Borden, he knew, had experienced problems. The Packers had some southern players who didn't care for blacks. (Bart Starr, on the other hand, brought Borden home for meals and made sure he was included in team activities.) And Borden, a family man, had been unable to secure decent housing, ending up in what Tunnell later described as a rundown hovel on the outskirts of town that "you wouldn't keep your dog in."

  Lombardi worked on convincing Tunnell to join the Packers, suggesting life would be better in Green Bay than he thought. He could find women and jazz in Chicago, which wasn't far away. And as for a place to live, Lombardi offered to put him up all season at the Northland Hotel, the nicest place in town. The Packers would pick up his entire tab, Lombardi said.

  Tunnell finally agreed. He wanted to keep playing and hopefully end his career on a better note. And he was curious to see the intense Lombardi as a head coach. It would be good theater if nothing else, Tunnell thought.

  "Three laps around the goalposts!"

  Shouting those words on July 24, 1959, at 10 A.M., Lombardi opened training camp. Thirty-nine players dressed in gray shorts and white T-shirts started running across the Packers' practice field next to City Stadium. The morning was overcast and hot. Lombardi wore long khaki pants, a white T-shirt, and a dark green baseball cap. His mood was buoyant, his booming voice ricocheting across the field. After a decade under Earl Blaik and Jim Lee Howell, he finally had his own team.

  During the 1950s the Packers had held camp in out-of-the-way places such as Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and Stevens Point, where rental prices for fields and dorms were cheap and players couldn't get into much trouble. (Some tried, climbing through windows after curfew to drink and chase girls.) Once City Stadium and its adjacent practice field opened, though, the front office saw no need to train elsewhere. That put the team in full view of its hometown fans, so everyone in Green Bay heard Scooter McLean predict the Packers would have a "terrific" season in 1958—an ill-advised forecast that ultimately added to the perception that he didn't have a clue. But Lombardi liked the camp setup Scooter had arranged. The team would practice twice daily, in the mornings and afternoons, and the players would sleep, eat, and meet at St. Norbert College in De Pere, six miles south of town. With its dorms, cafeteria, classrooms, morning mass services, and leafy campus, St. Norbert had everything Lombardi wanted.