put on a good football team. They had Bobby Mitchell and Jim Brown, but we ran around like we were playing a high school team.”
The Packers won that game 49–17 as Jim Taylor rushed for 158 yards and 4 scores. The Green Bay defense limited the great Jim Brown—who would go on to win the rushing title with 1,408 yards—to 72 yards.
That kind of domination was expected to be commonplace in 1962 because the Packers had talent and they had Lombardi, who was not going to let his team get big-headed after winning one world championship.
The Packers reported to camp in mid-July, earlier than most teams. As the reigning champion, they would open the season on national TV against the college all-stars at Soldier’s Field in Chicago. The tradition of the NFL champion playing a team of college all-stars from the previous season began in 1934. Following the game, most of the all-stars would leave Chicago and report to teams in either the NFL or the American Football League.
Fullback Earl Gros and guard Ed Blaine, both drafted by the Packers, played with the collegians, whose quarterbacks included future Hall of Famers Roman Gabriel and John Hadl. The game was close through three quarters before the Packers outscored the all-stars 21–20 to put the finishing touches on a 42–20 win. Starr threw 5 touchdown passes, an all-star game record—two each to Dowler and Max McGee and one to Ron Kramer.
“He’s a great passer, one of the most underrated in the league,” said Otto Graham, who was a pretty fair slinger in his day.
The all-stars came into the game shorthanded at running back. Ronnie Bull, who would play with the Bears, had a high fever and missed the game. Also absent was another player who was watching the game from a hospital room in Cleveland. Ernie Davis, a running back from Syracuse who after the 1961 season became the first black player to win the Heisman Trophy, had been practicing with the all-stars when he started having problems physically. He was hospitalized and later moved to a hospital in Cleveland. He was eventually diagnosed with leukemia.
He had been drafted by the Washington Redskins but was soon traded to the Cleveland Browns, who signed him to a three-year, $200,000 contract. He watched the game with several Browns players, including All-Pro fullback Jim Brown, who also played at Syracuse.
Davis was optimistic he’d make a return to the football field.
“I hope I don’t waste too much time,” he said in a wire service story that appeared around the country the day after the game between the Packers and collegians. “I’m studying every day. That’s all I can do.”
In Chicago the Packers surprised Graham by giving him the game ball so he could present it to Davis.
“I always have had a lot of respect for the Packer organization and more so tonight,” he told reporters. “That’s being professional.”
Davis never played a game for the Browns, although he suited up for an exhibition game and was introduced before the game at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. He died the following spring at the age of twenty-three.
Two days before the Packers left for Chicago, Don Hutson, considered at the time the greatest Packer of all time, spent a day with his old team. Hutson played for the Packers from 1935 to 1945 and was the first great pass receiver in the NFL. He led the team in scoring five times and in receiving for eight of the eleven years he played. In 1963 he was a member of the first class in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Coach Vince Lombardi runs the projector as he and his coaches review films in their offices at new City Stadium in May 1962. From left are assistants Bill Austin, Red Cochran, Norb Hecker, Phil Bengtson, and Tom Fears.
As he watched practice he said he was impressed with Starr’s accuracy and said the present Packers team had much more overall talent than the best squads in his day.
“We only had twelve or thirteen real good football players, but this team has thirty-six,” he said in a story that appeared in the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
Lombardi rode the Packers hard in training camp and offered little praise during preseason wins, calling a performance against Dallas “listless.” Never mind that the Pack won all six of their preseason games, extending their streak to nineteen consecutive wins in exhibition contests. He stayed on them because he didn’t want his players getting soft.
“He was already thinking about winning three straight championships,” Paul Hornung recalled.
Defensive end Willie Davis remembered one of Lombardi’s pet phrases as he looked back almost fifty years on that 1962 season. “Once you win a championship you have a target on your back,” Davis said. “He’d say it’s harder to attain than to maintain.”
A Golden Day
Packers 34, Vikings 7
September 16, 1962, City Stadium
Paul Hornung knew how to light up a scoreboard.
In 1960 he ran and kicked his way to 176 points during a twelve-game season, establishing a record that stood until San Diego running back LaDainian Tomlinson scored 31 touchdowns for a 186-point season in 2006.
The following year the schedule was expanded to fourteen games and Hornung again was the league’s top scorer despite missing two games because of military obligations. He scored 146 points and was named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player. He earned another MVP award in the championship, scoring a playoff-record 19 points on 1 touchdown, 4 extra points, and 3 field goals in the Packers’ 37–0 win over the Giants.
That was the game Hornung didn’t expect to play. He was serving a tour stateside in the Army and a week before the game called Lombardi, telling him he didn’t think he’d get a weekend pass to be able to play. Lombardi called in a favor to the one man who could get his left halfback back to Green Bay in time for the game. The coach had struck up a friendship with John F. Kennedy, who was in his first year as the country’s thirty-fifth president. Kennedy was a huge football fan and an admirer of Lombardi. At one point he had given the coach his private number, telling him to call if he ever needed anything.
There are varying accounts of what happened for Hornung to leave Fort Riley to play in the game, but enough proof exists to suggest that the young president did have a hand in making that happen.
In the book When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, author David Maraniss writes about a letter from Lombardi to Kenneth O’Donnell, a special assistant to Kennedy. He states that Lombardi expressed his gratitude: “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your help in obtaining leave for Paul Hornung so he could participate in the Championship game.”
Before Lombardi arrived, it seemed as if Hornung would never live up to the big-game reputation he earned at Notre Dame, enabling him to win the Heisman Trophy in 1956 and to be the overall first pick in the 1957 NFL draft. During his first two seasons with the Packers, he showed flashes of brilliance but earned a reputation as a player who cared more about what he accomplished off the field rather than on it. He gained a total 629 yards in his first twenty-four games.
“I was ready to quit after fifty-eight and do something else,” Hornung said. “I hated losing.”
Lombardi came in and made Hornung his left halfback, telling the Golden Boy he was going to be used in the same fashion Frank Gifford was used in New York when Lombardi was offensive coordinator for the Giants.
Hornung
