The First America's Team. Bob Berghaus
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the New York Giants since 1954.
Lombardi was a tough-as-nails guard at Fordham, playing on the legendary “Seven Blocks of Granite” offensive line. After college he became a high school teacher and coach. He returned to Fordham to coach the freshman football team, and then moved on to West Point as an assistant to the legendary Red Blaik. With the Giants, Lombardi became known in NFL circles as a top-flight coordinator, but when head coaching jobs came up he was passed over until he finally got his chance with the Packers at age forty-five.
The Packers won their first three games under Lombardi before losing five in a row to end any hopes of a dramatic worst-to-first turnaround. Struggling at 3–5, the Packers seemed destined to have another losing season. Remarkably, they turned around during the last third of the season, winning their final four games for a 7–5 record and their first winning season in twelve years.
During those four games the Packers outscored their opponents 119–51, scoring almost as many points as the 129 totaled during the first eight games. The defense, by giving up an average of just under 13 points in those final four games, also showed remarkable improvement after allowing an average of 31.8 points per game during the losing streak.
The Packers entered 1960 with thoughts of achieving more than a winning record. They had talent up and down the roster with most of the starters in their mid-twenties. Green Bay won all five of its exhibition games and appeared to have momentum going into the season opener against the Chicago Bears.
Instead, they lost at home to the team coached by legendary George Halas, but then reeled off four straight wins, putting themselves in position to unseat the Baltimore Colts, who had won the last two NFL titles, as champions of the Western Division.
That goal wasn’t going to come easily. The Packers won just once during their next four games, falling to 5–4 following a 23–10 loss to the Lions in the traditional Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit, when the Packers looked flat on offense, totaling just 181 yards.
The fortunes of the Green Bay Packers changed dramatically when Vince Lombardi took the head-coaching job.
They were still in the title race but likely needed to sweep the final three games. Ten days after the loss to Detroit they traveled to Chicago for a rematch with the Bears and beat their archrivals by 28 points, setting up a first-place showdown with the San Francisco 49ers, who, like Green Bay, had a 6–4 record. The Colts also were 6–4, but that day they dropped a game back after losing to the Rams. In San Francisco, the Packers defense pitched a shutout, fullback Jim Taylor rushed for 161 yards, and halfback Paul Hornung provided all the scoring in a 13–0 win.
The following week the Packers closed out the season with a 35–21 win in Los Angeles against the Rams. Quarterback Bart Starr completed touchdown passes of 91 yards to Boyd Dowler and 57 yards to Max McGee. The win put the Packers in the championship game for the first time since 1944.
They faced the Philadelphia Eagles, trying to win their first title since 1949. The Packers had a 13–10 lead early in the fourth quarter but a long kickoff return by Ted Dean set up a winning touchdown, and the Packers lost 17–13. After that defeat, Lombardi told his players they’d never lose another championship game.
The title game appearance in 1960 wasn’t a fluke. The next year, Green Bay cruised to the Western Conference title and hosted the Giants in the 1961 championship game at City Stadium. Lombardi was fond of the Mara family, which owned the Giants. He had attended Fordham University with Wellington, the son of Tim, who founded the Giants in 1925.
When it came time for the game on December 31, Lombardi forgot about friendship for an afternoon. After a scoreless first quarter, his Packers blocked and tackled considerably better than the big-city team, scoring 24 points in the second quarter on the way to a 37–0 victory. It could have been worse—much worse.
“I was mad at Vince,” Paul Hornung said years later. “We could have scored 70 against them but he pulled the starters out early. He liked the Maras and didn’t want to rub it in. We had a tremendous team and we played a tremendous game.” Hornung had scored 19 points in the game by himself.
Football was much different in the 1960s than it is today, when people all over the country have television access to every game that is played. With rare exceptions, there were only three NFL games televised nationally during a season: the championship game; the Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit; and the exhibition game between the reigning NFL champions and college all-stars. Nevertheless, despite the lack of TV exposure nationwide, America was getting to know the Green Bay Packers.
Lombardi was receiving mail from throughout the country from people who started Packer fan clubs. People were finding out about the team from the little town through newspaper and magazine stories.
Hornung and Taylor were piling up yards on Lombardi’s famed Power Sweep, which was making his offensive line famous, especially the guards. Center Jim Ringo, guards Fuzzy Thurston and Jerry Kramer, and tackles Forrest Gregg and Bob Skoronski, who alternated at left tackle with Norm Masters, formed a unit that was second to none. The defense was led by linemen Willie Davis and Henry Jordan. Middle linebacker Ray Nitschke was beginning to make a name for himself as were Willie Wood and Herb Adderley, who made the Packers’ secondary one to fear for opposing quarterbacks.
And of course there was Starr, a seventeenth-round draft pick out of the University of Alabama in 1956. He was in charge of Lombardi’s offense. All of the above, with the exception of Kramer, Thurston, Masters, and Skoronski, would wind up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“Think of the names that were playing up there,” said Tom Matte, a former halfback for the Baltimore Colts. “It was just a fantastic time for football. The Orioles were a good baseball team but Baltimore was a football town. Green Bay was a good football town, the Cleveland Browns at the time, and the New York Giants, played in good football towns.
“Look what the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants did for football in 1958 and ’59. Then Lombardi came to Green Bay. It was a time when people were looking for a national sport. Baseball had always been that, but to be honest with you, baseball fans are just not as enthusiastic as football fans. They’re just crazy. They love the game; they love the contact.”
The Packers were loved throughout Wisconsin. They played part of their home schedule in Milwaukee, one hundred miles to the south, halfway between Chicago and Green Bay, which became known as Titletown when the Packers won the 1961 championship.
Milwaukee had the Braves, who had moved to the city from Boston before the 1953 season. While the Packers of the fifties struggled to win, the Braves were popular and set a National League attendance record, drawing 1.8 million fans. They eventually gave Wisconsin baseball fans a winner, beating the New York Yankees in seven games in the 1957 World Series. Led by the home run duo of Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews, the Braves returned to the Fall Classic the following year but lost game seven to the Yankees in Milwaukee. The Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers tied for the National League title in 1959, but the Dodgers won a playoff and went to the World Series. The Braves started to decline in 1960, and within a few years ownership was looking to relocate the club. The team moved to Atlanta following the 1965 season, leaving Milwaukee without baseball until 1970, when a group led by Bud Selig, then owner of an automobile dealership, bought the Seattle Pilots and made them the Brewers. Years later Selig would become commissioner of Major League Baseball.
County Stadium, the home of the Braves, also was a part-time home for the Packers, who began playing at least one game a year in Milwaukee beginning in 1953. When the baseball park was built, the Packers played two games a season there through 1960. When the NFL expanded from a twelve- to a fourteen-game schedule in 1961, Milwaukee picked up another home game.
Green Bay fans didn’t like sharing their team, but by 1962, the Milwaukee stadium could pack in over 46,000 fans, 7,000 more than Green Bay’s City Stadium held. Playing in Milwaukee was good for business, and it also helped the team create a bond with the entire state.
The Packers’ success from 1961 carried over into 1962 as they