When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi

Chapter 24
Chapter 24: Ice
Ed Sabol could not sleep the night before a title game. He and his son Steve had been working pro football championships for NFL Films since 1962, and every year he was nervous, as if he had never done this before. Were his cameras in the right locations? Would there be a dramatic story line? Would the weather create problems again? By seven on the morning of December 31, 1967, he already had been awake for two hours, and now he was standing at the window of his hotel room, staring out into the northern darkness. Friday seemed unforgiving in Green Bay, with heavy snow and a fierce wind, but on Saturday there was a brilliant winter sun and the temperature had soared toward thirty. Local forecasters had predicted more of the same for today's one o'clock game.
The telephone rang. Steve, who had been asleep in the other bed, fumbled for the receiver.
"Good morning, Mr. Sabol."
The wake-up message came in a gentle singsong voice.
"It is sixteen degrees below zero and the wind is out of the north. Now have a nice day."
"Dad," Steve said. "You're not going to believe this!"
The same words of disbelief were being uttered all over town. The phone at Paul's Standard station on South Broadway had started ringing at five that morning, and the overnight man couldn't handle it, so Paul Mazzoleni went in himself and took to the streets with his tow truck and jumper cables. One of his first stops was at Willie Wood's. The free safety was standing next to his dead car, shivering, convinced that even when Mazzoleni brought his frozen battery back to life he was not going anywhere. "It's just too cold to play," Wood said. "They're gonna call this game off. They're not going to play in this." Chuck Mercein, the new man on the Packers, brought in at midseason to help fortify the depleted backfield, was alone in his apartment, semiconscious; his clock radio had just gone off. Had he really just heard someone say it was thirteen below? He must have misunderstood. Wasn't it near thirty when he went to bed? He called the airport weather station to see if he had been dreaming. "You heard it right. It's thirteen below and it may get colder."
Lee Remmel of the Press-Gazette had arranged a ride to the stadium with a cityside writer, one of eleven reporters the home paper had assigned to the game. His colleague called at seven with the question, "Lee, do you know what the temperature is?" Remmel guessed twenty. No. Twenty-five? Go look at the thermometer. "I was aghast," he recalled. "The weatherman had been predicting twenty." Chuck Lane, the Packers' young publicist, had grown up in Minnesota and was familiar with the telltale sounds of severe winter in the northland. As soon as he stepped out of his downtown apartment on Washington Street, he knew this was serious. "You can tell when it's cold by the sound of your foot in the snow. I could tell by the first stride that this was damn cold. The sound has got a different crunch to it." By his second stride he could feel something else -- "the fuzz in your nose froze up."
Dick Schaap led a foursome of New Yorkers out to Green Bay for the big game, which he hoped would provide a narrative climax for the book he was writing with Jerry Kramer. As he and his editor, Bob Gutwillig, and their wives were driving downtown for breakfast, Schaap noticed the temperature reading on the side of a bank. It was -13. "Look, it's broken," he said. He had never before seen a negative temperature and assumed that the bank got it wrong. Dave Robinson was in his kitchen, eating his traditional pregame meal: scrambled eggs, the filet of a twenty-ounce T-bone steak, toast, tea with honey. His little twin boys hovered in the next room, waiting for their dad to leave so they could eat the rest of the steak. His wife came in and gave him a kiss. "It's twenty below out there," she said. "Twenty above, you mean," Robinson said. "Can't be twenty below."
There was a full house at Sunset Circle. Susan lived at home again after a short and unhappy stint at a Dominican-run secretarial school in Boca Raton. Vincent and Jill came down from St. Paul, and now they had two boys, Vincent II and John. Vincent was working days and going to law school at night. The father-son relationship had developed another odd twist. Vince rarely had time to watch Vincent play in college, but now he insisted that Vincent attend as many Packers games as possible. Lombardi the family man? Partly, no doubt, but there was also a measure of superstition involved. The Packers had won a key game the year before when Vincent was there, and ever since the Old Man thought of him as a talisman. Vincent loved football, he had grown up standing on the sidelines, but sometimes this good-luck business seemed more for his dad's benefit than his own.
At his father's request, he had once boarded a flight in St. Paul during a heavy storm to attend a game in Green Bay. The plane was diverted to Milwaukee and he ended up studying his law books and watching the Packers on television at the airport. Another time he brought Jill along for a preseason game in Milwaukee. They had left the boys with a babysitter and were excited about having a night alone at the Pfister Hotel. At dinner after the game, Vincent and Jill were startled to hear the Old Man suddenly announce "We're going home!"
"Jeez, Dad, it's kind of late," Vincent pleaded.
"I'll drive halfway and you drive halfway," Lombardi said, and that was that. Vincent and Jill packed up, and soon they were in the car with Vince and Marie, heading north to Green Bay. Five miles up the highway, Lombardi pulled over. "My knees are killing me," he said to Vincent. "You drive."
Maybe it had all done some good. The Packers had finished in first place again. They had finished first in the newfangled Central Division of the Western Conference with a 9-4-1 record, and then whipped the Los Angeles Rams in the playoff game for the western title. Critics were saying that the Packers were too old and slow aside from their one breathtaking rookie, Travis Williams, known as The Roadrunner, a return specialist who had run four kickoffs back for touchdowns, including two against the Browns in one game. Yet here they were, back in the championship, playing for their record third straight NFL title against the Dallas Cowboys. If standing on the sideline in subzero weather this afternoon could help them win one more time, Vincent was game.
Not much was said about the temperature in the Lombardi house. There was little talking about the game at all that morning. "Everybody was very uptight," Susan recalled. Vincent II had been up all night with a fever, distracting everyone, including the coach, who patted his grandson on the head before leaving for church. The cars were in the heated garage; Vince's Pontiac started right up. Silence on the way to mass. The priest prayed for the Packers. All quiet on the way back. Then Vince and Vincent left, driving clockwise south to the bridge crossing the Fox in downtown De Pere, then west to Highway 41, north to the Highland Avenue exit and east to Lambeau Field.
The Sabols were already there, positioning eleven cameramen around the stadium. They sent a technician up to the scoreboard to place a microphone near a camera that peeked through one of the number holes. When it came time for a pregame group meeting, one member of the crew was missing. What happened? He had brought a flask with him and had taken a few shots of bourbon to stay warm -- a few too many, it seemed. He had passed out cold and might have frozen to death behind the scoreboard had they not gone looking for him. The parking lots were starting to fill up by 11 a.m., two hours before game time, with many Packers fans insisting on going through their pregame rituals as though it was just another winter day in paradise. Not as many tailgaters as usual, but they were still out there. Folding chairs, card tables, brats and beer. One concession to the weather: more of them than usual were huddled around fires. Jim Irwin, a local TV sports director, arrived at the press box two hours before kickoff, and looked out and saw hundreds of people already stationed at their seats. "They didn't have to be in the stands," he noted. "They had reserved tickets. They chose to be out there when it was thirteen below."
Chuck Lane was heading out from the locker room to check the field when he met a group of assistants coming the other way. They had a message for the coach, an unwelcome one, the sort of news they would rather have Lane tell him. "Tell Lombardi that his field is frozen," one said. Tell Lombardi that his field was frozen? That, Lane thought, would be like "telling him that his wife had been unfaithful or that his dog couldn't hunt." But that was his job, so he turned around and found Lombardi, who was leaving the locker room to check the field himself when Lane intercepted him. Lombardi seemed crestfallen, then angry and disbelieving. "What the hell are you talking about?" he thundered.
The field could not be frozen. The previous spring, in his role as general manager, Lombardi had paid $80,000 for a gigantic electric blanket devised by General Electric. He had bought it from George S. Halas, Papa Bear's nephew, who was the central district sales representative for GE's wiring services department. The fact that the Bears did not have an electric blanket themselves, even though young Halas was also a Bears scout, did not make Lombardi suspicious; it just showed that he was less tight with his team's money than old George. Lombardi loved modern inventions, and this electric blanket seemed to mean more to him than any play he had ever devised. Only the day before, he had taken a group of writers on a science field trip of sorts, first giving them a lecture on the underground magic, telling them how electric coils were laid in a grid the length of the turf, six inches below the surface and a foot apart, with another six inches of pea gravel below the coils and a drain below that. Then he led them back to a tiny control room off the tunnel below the stands.
Bud Lea of the Milwaukee Sentinel was in the group. "He goes in that little room and all these lights are blinking, and he's like a mad scientist in there, showing these writers from New York and Dallas how it all works," Lea recalled. "All these bulbs are going on and off, and I don't think Lombardi understood one thing about it, but, by God, he thought it was working."
It seemed to be working on Saturday when the grounds crew pulled the tarp off the field to let the Cowboys practice. Puffs of steam came out like a low rolling fog. The ground was cool but not cold, the turf soft but not soggy. Lombardi had been so satisfied then that he yelled over to the project engineer and gave him the okay sign with his thumb and forefinger. Even Tom Landry, the skeptical Dallas coach, who hated to play in Green Bay, had deemed the field "excellent" though a little damp. No dampness now. Parts of the field were frozen "as hard as a rock," reported Jim Tunney, the alternate referee. It seemed that the coil system had malfunctioned. Heat might rise here and there and thaw parts of the field, drawing out moisture, but then the turf would quickly freeze again. George S. Halas insisted afterwards that there was nothing wrong with the system, but the controls had been mishandled. In any case, those who paced the sidelines that day were struck by the juxtaposition of a wide patch of frozen turf next to a sign warning: THIS FIELD IS ELECTRIFIED.
In the locker room, Willie Wood took off his street clothes slowly, reluctantly, still convinced that the game would be canceled. "Man, it's too damn cold," he said to his teammates. "They ain't going to play in this shit." The room was full of smoke, cigarettes burning from the built-in ashtrays on almost every locker. Dad Braisher passed out long underwear to everybody, even Lombardi. Coach said it was okay to wear it today, but he didn't want them stuffing too much underneath the uniforms; he had a thing about players feeling loose and easy. Lee Roy Caffey and Tom Brown wanted to wear gloves, but Lombardi vetoed that request. Linemen could wear them, but no gloves for anyone who handled the ball. Dave Robinson walked over to the equipment man as soon as Lombardi left the room. "Give me a pair of those brown gloves and he'll never know the difference. I'm the only linebacker with brown hands anyway." Braisher agreed to the conspiracy, and Robinson wore gloves the rest of the day.
When the players took the field for warmups, most of them kept their hands tucked inside their pants. Every deep breath was an arrow shooting into their lungs. Donny Anderson, a Texan, had never played in weather like this before, but he had no choice because Elijah Pitts, the other halfback, was out for the year. Pitts had been enjoying his best season until the game in Baltimore, when he suffered a severe ankle injury. Jim Grabowski had been hurt during that same game when Bobby Boyd smacked him in the right knee. Grabo was making his way back and thought he might play against the Cowboys; the knee had felt good all week in practice. Then, during warmups, he went out on a pass pattern, a little fullback hook, and he planted his right foot and felt something pop, and his comeback was over before it started. Chuck Mercein would get most of the action at fullback.
Of all the major characters in this game, Mercein was the unlikeliest. The former Yale star had begun the year feeling "humiliated, embarrassed" when Allie Sherman, coach of the New York Giants, had cut him from his squad. He practiced several weeks with the semipro Westchester Bulls, then was recalled by the Giants and cut again. After a tryout in Washington, Redskins coach Otto Graham agreed to sign him, and Mercein returned to Scarsdale and told his wife to start packing for Washington. Then, as they were loading the car that Sunday night, Giants owner Wellington Mara called. "Listen, Chuck, if you haven't signed yet, I've been on the phone with Vince Lombardi and he inquired about your availability," Mara said. Mara and Lombardi talked every Sunday night during the season; they'd been doing it for seven years. "I've recommended you to Lombardi, Chuck. Stay by the phone."
A few seconds later Lombardi rang him. "Chuck, I understand you're available," Lombardi said, according to Mercein's recollection. "I want you to come out here and play for me. I don't want you to play for the Redskins. We're going to the Super Bowl, Chuck. You're going to help us get the world championship. You're going to be part of this team. We need you. We want you. If you want to be part of a championship, come out here and play for us." That was it. "Absolutely, instinctively and intuitively I knew this was where I was going to play," Mercein recounted. "I said, 'Yes, sir. I'll be on the next flight.' I hung up the phone and turned to my wife and said, 'Unpack the car.' She said, 'What?' 'Yeah, I'm going to the Packers.' It was great. I was thrilled. Playing for the great Vince Lombardi!" He took the flight of the Blue Goose to Green Bay that Monday, and personnel man Pat Peppler picked him up at the airport. And now, with Grabowski hurting again, here he was starting in the NFL Championship Game.
When the team returned to the locker room after warmups, the reality finally hit Willie Wood. "Well, it looks like we are going to play this game," he said to Bob Jeter. Then came another thought. If we're gonna play, we gotta make sure we're gonna win. We don't want to come out in these kinds of conditions and lose a damn ball game. Lombardi was of a similar mind, of course. He never wanted to lose any game, but especially not a game to Landry and the Cowboys. He had a thing about the Cowboys, according to Willie Davis. "Even in preseason he didn't want Dallas to beat us." Lombardi had always stayed one step ahead of his old Giants colleague and rival. He became a head coach in 1959, Landry in 1960. He turned a losing team around in one year, it took Landry six years before he could get his expansion Cowboys to a winning record. But now the Cowboys were being cited as the team of the future, with the flex and the Doomsday Defense and multiple offense, their flashy uniforms and speedy receivers.
In his heart of hearts, Max McGee thought Dallas had the better team. "Not that they could beat us," McGee said. "We had their number. Lombardi had the hex on Landry."

Gary Knafelc, the old tight end, was in the press box that day. His playing career done, he could not stay away and signed on as Lambeau Field's public address announcer. Looking out from his perspective atop the stadium, he was overwhelmed by the panorama. The players were the story, perhaps, and as the game went along they would rivet his and everyone else's attention, but at first it was hard to take one's eyes off the crowd in the stands. "There was this incredible haze of breath, tens of thousands of puffs coming out. Like seeing big buffaloes in an enormous herd on the winter plains. It was prehistoric."
To many fans, attending this game was a test of their resourcefulness. Carol Schmidt and her husband, who worked in the oil business, sat in Section 24 near the twenty-yard line, where they snuggled inside a makeshift double sleeping bag made from the heavy mill felt used at the local paper mills. To warm their feet they turned a three-pound coffee can upside down, punched holes in the top and placed a large candle inside on a pie plate. Bob Kaminsky arrived from Two Rivers with his wife's twin brothers and took his seat in the end zone, oblivious of the weather. "This is what I wore," he reported. "Longjohns. Work shoes. Over the work shoes I put those heavy gray woolen socks that came over the knees. Pair of galoshes over that. Flannel pajamas over the longjohns. Work overalls. A T-shirt. Flannel shirt. Insulated sweatsuit. Heavy parka. Face mask with holes for mouth and eyes. Wool tassel cap. And then I climbed into a sleeping bag. I had foam on the ground and seat for my feet and butt. I was not cold."
Lombardi's golfing pal Jack Koeppler and his son wore deer hunting outfits (red and black in that era, not yet the glaring orange). Two layers warmed their hands, first deer hunting gloves, then huge mittens. At their seats near the forty-yard line they zipped two sleeping bags together and slipped inside for the extra warmth generated by two bodies. Jerry Van, owner of the Downtowner Motel, where Hornung and McGee once lived, wore "two of everything." He cut up several thick cardboard boxes into twelve-inch squares and put three layers on the concrete floor to keep his feet warm. Lois Bourguignon, the wife of Packers executive board member Dick Bourguignon, wore a plastic garment bag under her winter coat to keep the heat in. Red Cochran, the former assistant coach who had quit the year before, watched the title game in the stands with his six-year-old son, both wearing bulky snowmobile suits. Teenager Gary Van Ness, who had come to the stadium planning to sneak in, was given a ticket near midfield by a doctor who had decided to leave, and found himself amid a group of rich folks; he had never before seen so many fur coats.
Fur coats? They were plentiful at Lambeau Field, even in arctic weather. The games were the social events of the year in Green Bay. Many women bought their fall and winter wardrobes with Sunday football games in mind and wore different outfits to every game. Mary Turek, Lombardi's dentist's wife, sat in prestigious Section 20, just above the players' wives, in her heavy fur coat with fur-lined stadium boots that extended over her calves. Around her she saw women in less practical attire, many of them exposing their legs to the weather in nylons and high heels. They tended not to last long. Tom Olejniczak, the team president's son, took a date to the game who left for the women's room midway through the first quarter and didn't come back until the game was over. Lorraine Keck, Lombardi's assistant secretary, got stuck in a restroom for more than a quarter, the door blocked by paramedics treating a girl who had passed out. Throughout the game bathrooms and passageways underneath the stands were jammed with people trying to get warm. When Red Cochran took his young son to the men's room, they got stuck in the human flow. It "was so mobbed," he said, "you had to go with the crowd, wherever it took you."
The temperature on the field as kickoff approached was thirteen below, with an estimated wind chill of minus forty-six. The leather ball felt heavy and airless. The field had already been rendered more dangerous from the warmups. Players said it was as if someone had taken a stucco wall and laid it on the ground. Clumps of mud had coagulated and stuck to the rock-hard ground. Blowers on both sides of the field shot warm air in the direction of the benches, but you had to be right next to one to feel it. Some players huddled in makeshift dugouts constructed from wood and canvas, like duck blinds. Lombardi paced the sidelines in his long winter coat and black fuzzy hat with muffs. No matter how cold the Packers felt, one look across to the other side made them feel superior. The Cowboys, said Chuck Mercein, "looked like earthmen on Mars. The outfits they wore. Most of them had hooded sweatshirts on underneath their helmets, which looked silly as hell. And a kind of scarf thing around their faces with their eyes cut out. They looked like monsters in a grade B movie."
For the first quarter and most of the second, the Cowboys played like anything but monsters. Their main receiving threat, Bob Hayes, known as the world's fastest human, also seemed to be the world's coldest, and unwittingly gave away every offensive play. If it was a run, he tucked his frigid hands into his pants as he lined up; if Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith called a pass play, Hayes pulled out his hands. "You can't catch a pass with your hands in your pants," said Tom Brown, the Packers strong safety. "We played eleven guys against ten whenever he did that. He was just stone cold."