The First America's Team. Bob Berghaus
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and magazines continued to travel to Green Bay to tell their readers about the magic that was happening in the little town of 63,000 people. Before the 1962 title game, Time magazine put Lombardi on its cover, which proclaimed football “The sport of the ’60s.” The story referred to Lombardi as “the world’s greatest football coach.” His sport was overtaking baseball as the national pastime, and Lombardi’s Packers had become the face of the NFL.
During those first ten games in 1962, Lombardi’s men scored 34 or more points in six of those contests and recorded three shutouts. Their ninth win was a 49–0 whitewash of the Philadelphia Eagles, the team that had beaten them in the 1960 NFL championship game 17–13. The Packers had 37 first downs while setting a team record with 628 yards and holding the Eagles to 3 first downs and 54 yards.
The Packers finally suffered a loss when the Detroit Lions sacked Starr eleven times during a 26–14 win in the annual Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit. But they came back and won their final three games, although they struggled on the West Coast swing. They trailed the San Francisco 49ers 21–10 at Kezar Stadium before rallying with 21 second-half points for a 31–21 win. The following week at the Los Angeles Coliseum, they were pushed to the brink by the one-win Rams before escaping with a 20–17 triumph to complete the thirteen-win regular season.
The Packers were not the only football team being talked about in Wisconsin that year. The University of Wisconsin, the state’s entry in the Big Ten Conference, also was having a special season. The Badgers won their first four games before losing to Ohio State in Columbus, 14–7. The Badgers bounced back and continued to win. In their seventh game they administered a 37–6 whipping on unbeaten and top-ranked Northwestern, which was coached by Ara Parseghian, who in two years would be coaching at Notre Dame.
The Badgers finished the regular season 8–1 and ranked No. 2 in the country behind Southern Cal. Those teams met in the Rose Bowl and put on a wild show. The Trojans led 42–14 early in the fourth quarter before the Badgers made a furious rally that fell just short, 42–37.
Pat Richter, an All-American tight end for Wisconsin who would go on to have an eight-year NFL career with the Washington Redskins, said there was a strong bond between the Packers and Badgers. Richter, who was from Madison and also played basketball and baseball for Wisconsin, got to know many of the Packers at athletic banquets during and after that season because he shared the dais with them. In that classic game against Southern California, Richter set a Rose Bowl record with 11 catches for 163 yards. The Badgers wouldn’t return to the Rose Bowl for another thirty-one years, but they did it with the help of Richter, who, as Wisconsin’s athletic director, hired Barry Alvarez, a forty-three-year-old assistant coach from Notre Dame. Alvarez would lead the Badgers to three Rose Bowl championships.
“Milt Bruin, our coach, had a good relationship with Lombardi, who reached out to the state, and Milt took it upon himself to go up there and learn as much as he could,” said Richter, who played for Lombardi in 1969 during the coach’s one season with Washington. “Milt and his staff went to Green Bay and learned their offense. We actually installed the sweep type of offense, which was fairly innovative at that time. They didn’t have a big laundry list of plays. It was simple, but what you were taught you had to do well.”
The Giants didn’t start as fast as the Packers in 1962. They lost their first game in and were 3–2 and in second place in the Eastern Division before hitting their stride. Led by quarterback Y.A. Tittle, the Giants won their final nine games and finished the regular season with a 12–2 record for their fourth division title in five years. They clinched the title in the twelfth week of the season with a 26–24 win over the Chicago Bears.
Tittle directed a pass-first offense that was all about the big play. He threw for 3,224 yards and 33 touchdown passes. His favorite target was split end Del Shofner, who caught 12 touchdown strikes and finished the regular season with 53 balls for 1,133 yards, a staggering 21.4 yards per catch.
Frank Gifford, Lombardi’s left halfback when the coach was an assistant with the Giants, was now a flanker. Gifford sustained a serious head injury in 1960 after a violent collision with Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik, forcing him to retire for a season. Though not touching the ball nearly as much as he did when he was a ball carrier, Gifford was still productive in the regular season, catching 39 passes, including seven for touchdowns. Like Shofner, when he made a catch it was for big yards, as Gifford averaged 20.2 yards per play. The Giants could be explosive. They scored 398 points, and four times during their final eight games, they torched opposing teams for 41 or more points.
The Giants had last won an NFL title in 1956. They lost to the Colts in the 1958 game, the famous one that went to sudden death, and again to the Colts in 1959. From 1958 through 1962 they were one of the NFL’s most consistent teams with an overall record of 47–14–3, but the three bridesmaid finishes gave the team a reputation for not being able to win the truly big game. And the third of those championship losses, in 1961, was just plain embarrassing.
That game was played on a cold, relatively calm day in Green Bay. The temperature was 17 degrees, and the winds blew at ten miles per hour. Tittle struggled to throw, and the Giants squandered two early scoring opportunities before the Packers exploded for 24 points in the second quarter.
“We depended on the forward pass,” Tittle said. “We didn’t get the good weather, and it hurt us a lot.”
In 1962, the Packers were looking to repeat as champions; the Giants were looking to avenge one of the worst losses many players on the team had experienced.
The Packers had two weeks to prepare for the 1962 championship game, which was beneficial because they were a beat-up team. Among those hurting was Jim Ringo, who had a nerve problem in his right arm that caused it to go numb. Ironically, Ringo’s injury worsened in practice. In Nitschke, a biography of the Packers’ middle linebacker, Ray Nitschke said Lombardi pulled him aside leading up to the title game and instructed him to go after the Green Bay offense like it was the Giants’ offense. Lombardi was fearful his team lacked intensity leading up to the game, and he thought Nitschke could change that.
One day the middle linebacker hit Ringo so hard that it left the center with a pinched muscle in his neck. The pain ran down to his arm and became a serious problem in the days leading up to the game.
Following a workout at Yankee Stadium two days before the game, Lombardi asked Ringo how he felt. Ringo told the coach he couldn’t feel his arm and that he didn’t think he’d be able to play.
The exchange was witnessed by Dave Klein, a reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. According to Nitschke, Lombardi lost his temper at the reporter for being there. Ringo was more diplomatic, telling Klein that if the Giants knew about his problem they’d go after his arm. He promised the reporter an exclusive interview following the game if he didn’t report on the injury. Klein agreed.
Hornung was playing, despite being mostly inactive since injuring his knee in the fifth game. Outside linebacker Dan Currie had missed three games with a bad knee, although he returned for the final game against the Rams.
The week before the game, Lombardi had a sign installed above the door leading to the Packers’ locker room: “Home of the GREEN BAY PACKERS ‘The Yankees of Football.’”
The sign served as motivation, but it may have also been a psychological move to get the Packers thinking of where the championship game was going to be played. Yankee Stadium was the sporting arena of the era. The house that Ruth built; the home of the team that had dominated major league baseball since the 1920s. Yankee Stadium also was the site of several historic college football games between Army and Notre Dame and also home to some of the biggest heavyweight title fights of all time. In 1927 Jack Dempsey came from behind to beat Jack Sharkey there. In 1936 German Max Schmeling knocked out unbeaten Joe Louis in the twelfth round at Yankee Stadium. They had a rematch two years later at the same venue, and Louis knocked out the German in the first round to win the title.
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