Vinnie, Vidi, Vici
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In A.D. 248, Emperor Philip lured 45,000 howling Romans to the Colosseum with a show that featured 60 lions, 30 leopards, 10 tigers, a rhinoceros, and 2,000 gladiators resolved to battle to the death. Today in the U.S., the beasts are all in zoos and the only gladiators around are the extras in Spartacus. But every Sunday from September through December, before their TV sets and in stadiums from coast to coast, some 40 million Americans are enraptured by a modern-day spectacle that even the Romans would enjoy. The game is professional football, now established as the spectator sport of the '60s.
Football, as the pros go at it, is a game of special brilliance, played by brilliant specialists. A great golfer strives for versatility: to master the controlled hook, the chip-and-run, the wedge pitch, to learn a dozen uses for each of the 14 clubs in his bag--and gnaws his nails in frustration. But a good offensive tackle knows a dozen devastating ways to accomplish just one mission--block. He even went to college to learn that. In pro football, nothing is left to chance: a single play may have 100 variations, each fashioned as meticulously as a fine Swiss watch. Nothing is what it seems: the quarterback fades back, cocks his arm, looks downfield--but what's this?--the fullback is already in the secondary, with the ball tucked neatly under his arm. And when the quarterback does have the ball, there he stands, cool and detached, facing the onrushing horde until at the last instant--zingo! There it goes, delicately arcing 40 yds. for a touchdown.
"I Like It." So precise is the teamwork that a single mistake by one man can destroy the handiwork of ten. So many are the complexities that connoisseurs argue endlessly in a mysterious lingo over slotbacks, stunters and buttonhooks. Even the innocent are mesmerized. Action piles upon action, thrill upon guaranteed thrill, and all with such bewildering speed that at the end the fans are literally limp. At New York's Yankee Stadium, where 63,000 hardy souls braved sleet to watch the Giants edge Cleveland 17-13, a man turned fondly to his wildly cheering wife. "Honey," he said gently, "do you understand anything about this game?" "Not a thing," she smiled, "except that I like it."
No other sport offers so much to so many. Boxing's heroes are papier-mache champions. Hockey is gang warfare, basketball is for gamblers, and Australia is too far to travel to see a decent tennis match. Even baseball, the sportswriters' "national pastime," can be a slow-motion bore: finger resin bag, touch cap, look for sign, shake head, shake again, check first, big sigh, wind up, finally pitch. Crack! Foul ball--and the fans could be halfway to Chicago by jet. Even a good thing palls when the games go on day after day for six months. Football's pros are shrewder: they perform just once a week, 14 times a season, and it is often standing room only. Last year the National Football League filled 76% of the seats in its stadiums (v. big-league baseball's 34%), and this year the N.F.L. sold half its seats before the first whistle blew. The income: upward of $20 million.
Home of the Champions. Nowhere does the game generate more excitement than in Green Bay, Wis., a city of 63,000 that has been hooked on pro football since 1919, when only sissies wore helmets and the mark of a player was the gap between his front teeth. Green Bay has much to be proud of. It has its Neville Public Museum, its Service League, and its 65-piece symphony orchestra. Its paper napkins wipe the mouths of 93 million Americans. Its citizens are kind to animals and hospitable to strangers; they even manage a polite chuckle when visitors joke about the city's 139 bars and its unsavory reputation as a gangster hangout during Prohibition. But on two subjects the town has no tolerance: the Green Bay Packers are the best football team in the world, and Vince Lombardi. 49, is the world's greatest football coach.
Few rah-rah college towns can match the unbridled devotion of Green Bay for Lombardi and his doughty athletes. There has not been an empty seat in City Stadium (capacity: 38.663) since 1959; the only way anyone gets to see a game is by buying a season ticket--and even that, like joining a country club, takes years of waiting. Green Bay's youngsters save their pennies in kiddy banks in the shape of green-and-gold-suited Packers. Portraits of Packer players hang on soda fountain walls; restaurant diners eat their soup off "Know-Your-Packers" doilies. The pastors of some Green Bay churches end their sermons with a short, earnest prayer "for our Packers," and the police force feels the same way. "The only crime here." says Chief Elmer Madson, "is when the Packers lose."
Romantic Superstars. And why not?
The Packers are the current wonder team of football, a group of superstars romantically molded out of a gang of has-beens. Four years ago, they were the lowest of the low; now they are world champions.
This season, they started out by winning ten games in a row, by scores that ranged from the redemptive (9-7 over Detroit. 17-13 over Baltimore) to the ridiculous (49-0 over Chicago. 49-0 over Philadelphia). But in this league of experts, it is an article of faith that on a given Sunday any team can beat any other. Everyone was gunning for the Packers, giving it the old college try. Finally, on Thanksgiving Day in Detroit, the gung-ho Lions took the Packers apart, pad by pad. In the first half, Detroit's massive linemen smothered Green Bay Quarterback Bart Starr for losses that totaled 79 yds.; the Lions built up a 23-0 lead and held on to win, 26-14.
Furious with defeat, the Packers rebounded, flaying the Los Angeles Rams 41-10, and the San Francisco Forty-Niners 31-21. As of last week it was certain--barring a last-game loss to the last-place Rams--that the Packers were heading for one of those classic challenges of sport: a return engagement with the New York Giants, in the title playoff Dec. 30. Last year, it was the Packers who were on the way up, feeling mean and hungry; they had lost the 1960 playoff to the Philadelphia Eagles. This year it is the Giants who yearn for revenge--for last year's crushing 37-0 defeat.
Two Little Things. "Some people try to find things in this game that don't exist," sniffs Packer Coach Lombardi. "Football is two things. It's blocking and tackling. You block and tackle better than the team you're playing, you win." To do his blocking. Lombard! has the quickest and one of the heaviest (239 Ibs. per man) offensive lines in pro football. To do his tackling, he has a sturdy, stingy defensive team that has permitted its opponents an average of only 102 yds. rushing. 127 yds. passing and 10 points a game. To spearhead the awesome (30 points per game) Packer attack. Lombardi boasts the league's most accurate passer. Quarterback Starr, who has completed 64f'f of his passes this season. He has the N.F.L.'s top ground gainer (1.318 yds.) in Jim Taylor, an oak-ribbed fullback who never runs around a defender when he can run over him and is a strong candidate for 1962--3 Most Valuable Player.
Breaking Their Morale. Last year Lombardi also had the impressive services of Paul Hornung. a wondrous halfback who, in the day of the specialist, can run, pass, kick or block--and proved it by scoring a record 176 points in 1960. This year Hornung wrenched his knee badly. sat it out on the bench half the season--when he was not posing for ads. The loss would cripple almost any other team. Yet, filling in for Hornung at halfback. Tom Moore scored seven touchdowns, averaged 3.1 yds. every time he carried the ball. Handling Hornung's place-kicking chores. Guard Jerry Kramer booted nine field goals, 36 straight extra points.
With that kind of trained talent, Lombardi can go easy on the extra razzle-dazzle. His game is disconcertingly simple. Or so it appears. ''We always hit them at their strongest point." he says. "We attack their best men in an effort to break their morale. If you can bring down their best men, it's all over." Opponents respect the tactic. On defense, explains Philadelphia Linebacker Chuck Bednarik. "the Packers just hand you the ball and say. 'Here it is, see what you can do with it.' " On offense, says Pittsburgh Quarterback Bobby Layne. "everybody knows what's coming, but the point is that you can't stop it any way.':
Reluctant Donation. Had it not been for a sore throat, Green Bay might still be just the paper napkin capital of the U.S. In 1918, Earl Louis Lambeau, a tousleheaded Notre Dame fullback and a disciple of Knute Rockne, came home to Green Bay to have his tonsils removed, stayed on as a $250-a-month shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Co. "Curly" Lambeau liked his job, but he still pined to play football. Within the year, he scraped up $500 to start a professional team. By naming his motley squad the Packers, Curly persuaded his reluctant employers to donate the money for jerseys and stockings--a transaction for which the Indian Packing Co. might be eternally grateful if it had not gone out of business in 1920. Lambeau's Packers started strong: they won their first ten games, shellacking Sheboygan 87-0 and walloping Racine 76-6. Green Bay was all set to claim the championship of the world (or at least Wisconsin) when the Packers lost to Beloit, 6-0, in their last game of the season.
Those were the days when football was a ground game--four yards and a choking cloud of dust. Lambeau's Packers played it like basketball. ''Other teams passed in desperation. We threw on first down," he recalls. But nobody complained. Lambeau. after all, was the coach as well as the ace passer, and besides. the Packers almost always won. In 1921, looking for new worlds to conquer. Lambeau and his friends recklessly spent $50 for a franchise in the embryo National Football League (today's cost, including players: $550.000). and in 1929 the Packers won their first N.F.L. championship, trouncing the imperious (and previously undefeated) New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. 20-6.
Over the next 15 years, they won five more titles, with a baffling, devil-may-care attack that was built around a succession of well-remembered stars: John ("Johnny Blood") McNally, a vagabond halfback from Notre Dame; Arnie Herber and Cecil Isbell, both astoundingly accurate, threadneedle passers; Clarke Hinkle. a pile-driving fullback; and Don Hutson. a glue-fingered end who was probably the best pass receiver of all time. In 1935, on his first play in Green Bay, Hutson gathered in a Herber pass and raced 83 yds. against the hated Chicago Bears for the only touchdown of the game.
There is a page in the N.F.L. record book entitled simply "Records Held by Don Hutson.'' Among them: most touchdown passes caught (101). most yards gained catching passes (5,010), most touchdowns scored (105).
No Turnstiles, No Seats. Green Bay loved a winner, but it was next to impossible for such a small town to support one. At first, the Packers played their home games at Hagemcister Park, an open field that belonged to the Hagemeister brewery. The ''park" had no fences, no turnstiles, no seats. Fans wandered in and out at will, and a sportswriter named George Calhoun walked up and down the sidelines passing his hat. At the end of their first season, the Packers divvied up the spoils. pocketed $16.75 Per man-Even after the city built a stadium and fans filled every seat, the costs had a way of outrunning the receipts. Other pro teams popped up in such backwater towns as Rock Island. Ill., and Pottsville. Pa., only to die of poverty. But the Green Bay Packers somehow held for clowns.
Once Curly Lambeau cajoled a fan into selling his cream-colored Marmon roadster (for $1,500) to bail the team out of hock; in repayment, Lambeau allowed his benefactor to play one minute of one Packer game. Another year, a spectator tumbled from the Packer grandstand, sued, won a $5,000 verdict, and forced the team into receivership; Green Bay businessmen chipped in $15,000 to save the franchise. Again, in 1949, after two miserable seasons (Lambeau's last as coach), the Packers floundered financially.
This time the team's boosters reorganized the Packers as a nonprofit corporation (which they were anyway), peddled $125,000 worth of nondividend stock at $25 a share. "All we got was a certificate with some fancy lacework around the edge.'' says one shareholder, "and the best football team in the world." Today the Green Bay Packers Inc. has 1,698 stockholders, and its annual meeting is a major event on Green Bay's social calendar.
The stock sale eased Green Bay's finances, but now the Packers suffered from another, more obstinate ailment: anemia on the football field. Feeding on heftier bankrolls, the big-city teams--the New York Giants. Los Angeles Rams. Cleveland Browns. Detroit Lions--ruled the league. Starting in 1948. the small-town Packers went eleven years without a winning season. In 1958. they won only one game Tout of twelve). Things got so bad that Green Bay youngsters tore up their autograph books and Packer coaches wisely left their telephones off the hook. "A small town." says Coach Harland Svare of the Rams, "is the best place in the world to be if you're on a winning team--and the worst if you're losing." Recalls one Packer veteran: "Green Bay was like Siberia. Other coaches used to threaten to send their players here."
The Man from Brooklyn. In desperation the Packers turned to Vince Lombardi. a bristling, brooding bear of a man who was supposed to know football but had never held a major head coaching job before. He seemed hardly the type to coach in a bumptious, boisterous north woods town. He was a city man. an Easterner born and bred in Brooklyn and fiercely proud of it. Until he was 20, Vincent Thomas Lombardi had never even been west of the Hudson.
The son of an immigrant Italian butcher, Lombardi started out studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood. "But the Greek got him," says his father, and then there was football. He was an all-star fullback at Brooklyn's St. Francis Prep, went to Fordham University, where he switched to guard and quickly earned a reputation as a short-fused scrapper whose violent charge made him seem twice as big. "Vince never got above 182," recalls a Fordham teammate. "But when he hit you, it felt like 250." One day a brawny assistant coach caught Vince napping with a blind-side block that knocked him hip pads over helmet. "Try that again." Lombardi snarled--and sent the coach sprawling. Frank Leahy picked himself up. "O.K., kid." he said, "you'll do."
In 1935 and 1936. Fordham lost only two games, and Vince Lombardi helped bulwark the best-remembered line in college football history. Wrote Columnist Dan Parker:
Hindy's well-known front wall Took a million troops to man it, Whereas Fordham has but seven In its famous Wall of Granite.
When Fordham played powerhouse Pittsburgh to a 0-0 standoff in 1936. Lombardi put on a tremendous one-man show: he helped stop Pitt's deepest drive with a key tackle at the Fordham four, and his crashing blocks punched holes in the massive Pittsburgh line. "We had a play on which I was supposed to trap the Pitt tackle." recalls Lombardi. "It worked fine, so our quarterback kept calling it.
But every time I trapped that guy, he jabbed me right in the teeth with his elbow." At game's end a surgeon took 30 stitches inside Lombardi's mouth.
Eagles & Cadets. After graduation.
Lombardi worked days as an insurance investigator, studied nights at Fordham Law ("because my Dad wanted it"), played weekend football for a minor-league pro team that called itself the Brooklyn Eagles. In 1939, he took his first coaching job -- as an assistant football coach at tiny (600 students) St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, NJ. His HALFBACK HORNUNG
$25,000 of frosting.
duties also included teaching physics, chemistry, algebra and Latin, and his salary was $1,700 a year. Three years later. Lombardi was head football, basketball and baseball coach; his 1945 basketball team won the New Jersey parochial school championship, and his football teams won 36 games in a row. On the strength of that record. Lombardi bounced back to Fordham in 1947--hoping some day to be named head football coach. But he stayed only two years. Fordham football was already on the skids; in 1954 the school gave up the game.
"A university without football," says Lombardi in disgust, "is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall." Lombardi's next stop--Army--was in no such peril. Head Coach Earl ("Red") Blaik was college football's reigning genius, and besides Lombardi. his staff included such whiz kids as Murray War-math and Paul Dietzel. For five years Lombardi ran the cadets' fast-striking offense--and by West Point standards, most of them were lean years. Army's great All-Americas, Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard, graduated in 1947, and 37 players were expelled when a cribbing scandal rocked the campus in 1951. "We had very few talented football players." recalls Blaik. "We had to dig into our B squad to field a team, and our job was to teach what we had the best we could. Lombardi was a driver. Not all the boys liked him. but he brought out the best in each of them."
Neither were the New York Giants exactly wild about Lombardi when he arrived in 1954 to put some offensive muscle on a team that scored only 179 points and lost nine games the season before. "Vinnie didn't understand our game when he came here," says Halfback Frank Gifford. "He wasn't too bright about it. At first, we players were showing him how it went. By the end of the year, though, he was showing us." In Lombardi's first season the Giants scored 293 points, won seven of twelve games; two years later, they won their only N.F.L. championship since 1938. Still Lombardi could not make the big time. Whenever a head coach job was up for grabs--at Southern California, at Washington, at Stanford, at the Air Force Academy--Lombardi's name was mentioned, but, says Vince, "nothing ever happened." Then Green Bay came along. "I knew it was time to make a move," says Lombardi, "if I was ever going to make one."
"Don't Cross Me." Lombardi hit Green Bay so hard the grass is still quivering. He demanded absolute authority--the power to hire and fire, to set salaries, even to design Packer uniforms. Once the whip was in his hand, he set it singing. "This is a violent sport," he told the Packers. "To play in this league, you've got to be tough --physically tough and mentally tough." He chased grandstand kibitzers off the training field, declared the rowdier Green Bay taverns off-limits, slapped $25 fines on players who showed up as little as one minute late for practice, $50 fines on those who broke his 11 p.m. training-camp curfew. He ordered injured Packers to run in practice ("You're preparing yourselves mentally"), and slackers found themselves heading out of town on the evening train. "Don't cross me," Lombardi warned Quarterback Bart Starr. "If you cross me a second time, you're gone." Self-pity provoked only scorn. "When Lombardi came," recalls Center Jim Ringo, "I told him I wanted out. I said I wanted to play on a winning team. He looked at me and said, 'This is going to be a winning team.' You know his voice. You know his eyes. If he said so, I knew it must be true."
Methodically, relentlessly, Lombardi set out to build his winner. He traded boldly and shrewdly; from Cleveland alone, he got four of this year's Packer stars: Halfback Lew Carpenter, Tackle Henry Jordan, Defensive Ends Bill Quinlan and Willie Davis--two of the fiercest pass rushers in pro ball. Safetyman Willie Wood, an agile opportunist who leads the N.F.L. with nine pass interceptions this year, was signed as a free agent--nobody else wanted him--and All-League Guard Fred Thurston was a three-time loser (Chicago. Philadelphia. Baltimore) when Lombardi rescued him from obscurity in a trade with the Colts. About 50% of today's Packers were already on the roster, but nobody would have known it: Jim Taylor was a second-string fullback; Paul Hornung was a sometime quarterback, sometime halfback, sometime fullback, who spent most of his time in a state of total confusion. "Before Lombardi arrived. I was a jumping jack." says Hornung. ''When he came, everything changed. He said. 'You're going to be my left halfback, period. The only way you can get out of it is to get killed.' Having a coach's backing was like coming out of the dark."
"Bring Back a Victory." Lombardi studied so many movies of old Green Bay games that his eyes were constantly bloodshot. He yelled so loud at practice that he lost his voice. ''I've never taught so much football in my life," he sighed wearily to his wife. "Mistakes decide ball games." he told the Packers, and any player who missed a block or dropped a pass instantly felt the sting of his acid tongue. In pre-game pep talks. Lombardi's speeches were like something out of the Spirit of Notre Dame. Once he got down on his knees in the locker room and led the team in the Lord's Prayer. ''You wouldn't think a pro coach could get away with that stuff." says a player. "But he did." "I'll never forget the speech he made before the first league game in 1959, his first year," says Linebacker Bill Forester. "He ended it by yelling 'Go through that door and bring back a victory!' I jumped up and hit my arm on my locker. That was my worst injury of the year.''
That first year. Lombardi's adrenaline-filled Packers won seven of twelve games --including, admits Hornung. "a fistful that we had no business winning." In 1960. they won the Western Conference championship with an 8-4 record, dropped a 17-13 squeaker to Philadelphia in the X.F.L. championship playoff. Last year the Packers went all the way--and the title game, praise be, was at Green Bay. Nothing like it has ever been seen, before or since. Wrote New York Herald Tribune Columnist Red Smith, after the Giants were demolished: ''The poisonous polish of the Packers was equaled only by the fortitude of the natives, who turtled down into their mackinaws and buffalo robes and parkas, and stayed on into the bitter dusk, yelping and bawling for blood."
The Winner's Share. Today, with the TY money rolling in. the standing-room crowds when the team plays home games at Milwaukee's 45,000-seat County Stadium, and the Packers' share of the full house on their away games. Green Bay can afford to be generous with its champions. Packers' salaries are among the highest in the league: raw rookies get $8.000; half a dozen players are in the $20.000 bracket. And there is plenty of frosting on the cake. Last year's championship playoff was worth $5,500 to each man on the Packer squad; this year the winner's share will probably hit $7,000. The Packers get free life insurance (minimum policy: $10.000) and a free medical plan that pays 80 of their families' ordinary doctors' bills, more in emergencies. Defensive Halfback Jesse Whittenton owns the King's (X). a supper club in Green Bay: End Gary Knafelc is vice president of a school supply company, and Bart Starr manages a downtown business building. Paul Hornung, who draws $25,000 in salary, makes another $25,000 or so each year modeling sports clothes for Jantzen. puffing Marlboros and falling asleep in front of his Zenith TV.
Vince Lombardi. the architect of it all. gets an estimated $50.000 a year in salary. He lives in a comfortable $35,000 home whose den is filled with trophies won by Daughter Susan. 15. an accomplished horsewoman, and Son Vince. 20, a 195-lb. fullback for Minnesota's College of St. Thomas. If anybody in Green Bay had a $1.000.000 house, Lombardi would be that man. When he walks down the street, people greet him as some sort of demigod. After home games. Vince and his wife Marie eat dinner at Mancie's restaurant--in ''the Lombardi Room." of course. The hottest selling item in Green Bay bars is Macnish V.L. Scotch. Everywhere else, the V.L. stands for "Very Light," but in Green Bay it stands for Vince Lombardi. And the worst rumor that can sweep Green Bay is that Coach Lombardi might not stay on forever, that he might some day move on to another city and another club.
Offers Galore. There are times when Lombardi admits to a loneliness and a yearning for tall buildings. ''I'm a city man." he says. "I still go back to New York by myself now and then, just to take a room at the Waldorf and sit--surrounded by the city." Any time Lombardi wants to quit, he can take his pick of offers from half a dozen other pro teams. The latest, from the last-place Los Angeles Rams: $100,000 in cash, $100,000 worth of life insurance, title to a furnished house, and, natch, a piece of an oil well. Says N.F.L. Commissioner Pete Rozelle dryly: "Another club offered Vince a whole oil well."
But Lombardi's contract still has three years to run at Green Bay. And neither the adulation nor the covetous eyes of other clubs have changed his ways. He is still precisely punctual, expects the same of everybody else. Smart Packers keep their watches set ten minutes ahead of time--"Lombardi time.'' they call it. He still works 70 hours a week, still gets so wrapped up in his football thoughts that he sometimes misses his street on the drive home from the stadium and winds up on the highway to Milwaukee. "I don't think Vince was ever a child," says Marie Lombardi. "I think he was born conscientious.'' On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, while he is absorbed in the task of preparing the Packers for their next game, ''we don't talk," she says. On Thursday, when practice tapers off, "we say hello." On Friday "he is civil"; on Saturday "he is downright pleasant." And then on Sunday, says Marie, "Vince feels the game is in the boys' hands. He has done all he can. Sometimes you have to poke him to keep him awake in the car, driving to the game."
"We're Tired." No one, least of all Lombardi, wants to predict how long the Green Bay Packers will stay on top of their brutally tough sport. "We're tired," he says. "Jim Taylor's down to 204 Ibs., and he should weigh 220. Everybody's feeling the strain." If the weary Packers win their way into the N.F.L. playoff, they will face a New York Giants team, coached by canny Allie Sherman, that is far stronger and far fresher than the squad they trounced last time around. Giant Quarterback Y. A. ("Yat") Tittle is this year's master of the long pass, the touchdown "bomb," has thrown more scores (27) than any other pro. Giant Halfback Frank Gifford is riding the crest of a spectacular comeback after a year's retirement, and Tittle's favorite receiver, Del Shofner, is the league's best end, so surehanded and deceptive that even with an ulcer (which put him in the hospital for a rest last week) he makes sieves out of most pass defenses.
Even so, the experts' early line established the Packers as a 7-point favorite in a championship game. If it is humanly possible, Lombardi intends to make the odds stand up. "To be successful," he says fervently, "you must believe in what you do"--and Lombardi believes in his Packers. In the dressing room he tells his players: "The only thing that can beat you is yourself. Think about this: the Green Bay Packers are you! Remember it! The Green Bay Packers are you!" His voice grows silken, almost hypnotic. "Look, I've said it all before, but I'll say it again. If we are going to win the championship, we are going to win it ourselves. We can't count on anybody falling down for us. We've come a long way, and this is the end of the road. This is our year and our championship. Let's win it the way a champion should."
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