vince lombardi

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The Giants and the Packers, two of the N.F.L.’s oldest franchises, have played each other 54 times since 1928, but Sunday’s National Football Conference championship game was only the second of the matchups in Green Bay, Wis., with a title at stake.
The first was on Dec. 31, 1961, when a vibrant cast of characters representing the league’s smallest and largest cities met for the N.F.L. championship.

Red Smith, then a sports columnist for The New York Herald Tribune, referred to Green Bay as the toilet paper capital of the world. Smith, who was reared on the east side of town, could get away with that because he knew what the paper mills on the Fox River produced.

Leaders of local commerce had decreed that Green Bay be known as Titletown U.S.A., but signs bearing that slogan displeased the seething but silent Vince Lombardi, the Packers’ coach.

Lombardi, a Brooklyn-raised New Yorker, gave a warm welcome when the Giants party rolled into the Northland Hotel the Friday before the game.

“My writers are here,” he shouted, referring to the New York press corps representing a dozen newspapers and wire services. Lombardi embraced Arthur Daley, a columnist for The New York Times, who was a longtime Giants enthusiast and fellow Fordham alumnus.

The night before the game, Lombardi took his Fordham classmate Wellington Mara out for dinner at a restaurant 25 miles away in Appleton, to get away from the small-town nosiness of Green Bay. Mara, who ran the Giants’ football operations, hired Lombardi as an assistant in 1954 and had encouraged him to take the Green Bay appointment in 1959.

They had a pleasant dinner. Then Lombardi suddenly signed the check and left, telling Mara to find his own way back to the hotel. Mara was shocked.

“It was a long cab ride,” he told the Lombardi biographer Michael O’Brien years later.

The New York press corps knew nothing of this.

At the time, I was covering the Giants for The Herald Tribune and, like everyone else, quoted Lombardi’s candid prediction, “If the field is right, we should win.”

There was the predictable weather conjecture. A field kept free of frost and dry by tons of hay would favor the power running of the home team, led by halfback Paul Hornung, then an Army private. A weekend player that season, Hornung had gained a two-week leave from Fort Riley in Kansas through the intervention, it was said, of President John F. Kennedy.

That Sunday, the field was dry and fast, the temperature a manageable 21 degrees and the Packers won, 37-0, after taking a 24-0 halftime lead. It was the first of five N.F.L. championships won by Lombardi’s Packer teams.

Not all of the $10 tickets were sold and there were empty seats in the four-year-old City Stadium, but a capacity crowd of 39,029 was announced. (In 1965 the stadium was renamed Lambeau Field, after Curly Lambeau, the Packers’ founder and first coach.).

Hornung, who scored a touchdown and kicked three field goals, won a Corvette as the most valuable player by a press box vote; he said he would give the car to his mother in Louisville, Ky. Later, Hornung said it should have been given to Ron Kramer, the 6-foot-3, 230-pound tight end who ravaged the Giants’ acclaimed defense and scored two touchdowns.

The harassed Giants quarterback Y. A. Tittle completed 6 of 20 pass attempts and had four intercepted before Charlie Conerly relieved him. Pat Summerall never attempted a field goal in his final game.

The next morning, I went to the airport with Don Smith, the Giants’ publicity director, for a North Central Airlines flight to Chicago, then on to New York. We were told that the flight, in a Convair 240 with about 30 seats, would be delayed for a few minutes because of a freight weight problem. Called to the check-in counter, we were then told we had been bumped from the flight but could make the next one in three hours.

Then we started musing. Why us out of the 30 passengers? We went back to the counter and asked the clerk.

He looked at us seriously. Then he said, “Well, you’re from New York, aren’t you?”