A LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK
The 1964 NFL championship game Championship Game was played two days after Christmas in Cleveland. The temperatures were near freezing. Furious winds off Lake Erie whipped flags and blew debris. Few outside Cleveland thought the Browns could win. With sandwiches made at home, thermos jugs of hot chocolate, and pocketed whiskey
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bottles and flasks, Browns fans advanced up West Third, Ontario, and East Ninth to Municipal Stadium, a cavernous, double-decked stadium perched on Lake Erie and known for its size and utility rather than any architectural distinction. Red, white, and blue bunting, emblematic of a title game, draped the stadium. The east end zone had bleacher seats and lacked an upper deck. Winds howling from the lake entered the stadium and swirled inside. Of course, the game was a sellout. Though on game day standing-room tickets could still be bought, over 78,000 tickets had been sold. Baltimore fans bought 9,000 tickets. The Colts Marching Band traveled in older coach buses to Cleveland. In the west end zone, one audacious Colt fan, wearing a raccoon coat and a derby hat, paraded a sign that read "Colts 49 Browns 0." To watch on television a blacked-out game, thousands of Browns fans drove to motels in cities at least 75 miles from Cleveland like Toledo and Erie.
To the delight of CBS, which was broadcasting its first NFL title game, and the NFL, whose sport was now challenging baseball as the nation's most popular, this championship game offered the league's two best offenses and the sport's two biggest stars—Baltimore quarterback Johnny Unitas and Cleveland fullback Jim Brown. In the 1958 NFL championship Championship, Unitas became a football legend. He coupled daring play selection and physical toughness with a sense of theater that defined his position—the unflinching field general who willed improbable comeback wins in the cold and the rain, as later dramatized by NFL Films with its stirring words and swelling music. In 1964, Unitas passed for 2,824 yards with 19 touchdowns and only six interceptions, leading Baltimore to its best record ever and its third Western Conference championship. For the second time, Unitas won the NFL's highest individual honor—Most Valuable Player.
Controversial off the field with Hollywood hopes, Cleveland’s Jim Brown was a generational talent. In high school and at Syracuse, he was a star in every sport he played and perhaps the greatest college lacrosse player ever. But it was football where Jim Brown, setting records with prodigious numbers, achieved true stardom. He was often bigger than the linebackers and faster than the defensive halfbacks he faced. He could run with violence, using shoulders and forearms to batter defenders he needed to run over. He often ran holding the football with his left hand to use his right hand and arm as a club. Jim Brown never backed down. He rarely complained. And he never missed a game. In his eight years from his 1957 rookie season through 1964, Brown seven times led the league in rushing and was named first-team All-Pro, and twice was voted the NFL's Most Valuable Player. The 1963 season was his greatest year. Playing with a broken big toe, Jim Brown ran for 1,863 yards—he averaged 6.4 yards per carry and 133 rushing yards per game. In 1964, Brown rushed and caught passes for 1,786 yards; in the voting for the league’s Most Valuable Player, he finished second to Unitas.
Driven by football's two greatest players, the two offenses with overlooked but skilled offensive lines were prolific. In scoring offense, Baltimore led the league, averaging almost 31 points per game, but Cleveland's offense was second with nearly 30 points each game. On offense, Baltimore had star players other than Unitas. Through relentless repetition and study, receiver Raymond Berry at his position was the game’s top student and finest artisan, running his pass routes with unmatched precision. Flanker Jimmy Orr used quickness in his routes to constantly get open, especially on deep patterns. Both receivers almost never dropped a pass. Though in his second year still learning how to play tight end, John Mackey, with a football in the open field, was a bowling ball looking for defenders to run over. And recapturing the magic of his early years and scoring 19 touchdowns, halfback Lenny Moore was the 1964 Comeback Player of the Year.
Vince Lombardi, head coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers, was a man of intense emotions and, with operatic mannerisms, was a master at conveying them. New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, for whom Lombardi worked as an assistant coach, joked that he could hear Lombardi laughing five blocks away. Dallas Cowboys head coach Tom Landry, a coaching colleague in New York, noted Lombardi’s manic swings between elation and depression and caustically called him "Mr. High-Low."
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Lombardi smiled often, flashing the big gap in his front teeth, and laughed boisterously. His players knew his desperate need to win and quick rage—the face distorted, the body shaking in anger, the voice loud and uniquely piercing, and the message biting. But with sudden praise and tight embraces, he inspired those needing encouragement. And he easily became tearful—he openly wept at the ordination to the priesthood of a young man he had coached in high school. During his coaching career, Lombardi had known uncertainty and difficult moments. By his high standards, the Packers’ 1964 season was not a good one. As the new year of 1965 began, the disappointment of 1964 turned darker.
On a frigid February 1959 day at Green Bay’s Hotel Northland, Lombardi, a stocky man of average height with glasses and wavy hair, was formally introduced as the Packers’ head coach. “I want it understood that I’m in complete control,” Lombardi announced with the team’s unwieldy board of directors in attendance. “I expect full cooperation from you people, and you will get full cooperation from me in return.” Exercising total control would mark Lombardi’s years as head coach. “I have never been associated with a loser before,” he added, “and I don’t expect to be now.” Great success followed. In his first year in 1959, the Packers won their season opener at home against their most detested rivals, the Chicago Bears, with players hoisting Lombardi on their shoulders, and Green Bay had its first winning season since 1947. In 1960, Green Bay won the Western Conference but lost the title game to Philadelphia 17-13. It was a game Green Bay should have won. The Packers had nine more first downs, 105 more yards, and two fewer turnovers than the Eagles, but were stopped three times inside Philadelphia’s 10-yard line without scoring points. Lombardi blamed himself for not kicking field goals. After the game, he told his players they would never again lose a championship game.
In 1961 and 1962, with so many star players at the peak of their careers, the Packers became the league’s dominant team and won the championship both years. The 1962 season was historic. The Packers finished the regular season 13-1. They scored 415 points and gave up only 148--Green Bay’s average margin of victory was 19.1 points, the league’s best since Philadelphia’s 19.2-point margin in 1949.
But the 1963 season began with disappointment. In April, the league suspended indefinitely Packer halfback Paul Hornung, Lombardi’s favorite player, for betting on NFL games. The Packers ended that season with an 11-2-1 record, finishing second in the conference behind Chicago, which went 11-1-2 and beat Green Bay twice. After the season, the Packers traded veteran center Jim Ringo to Philadelphia, and linebacker Bill Forester, the team’s defensive captain, retired; both were All-Pro players.
In 1964, Hornung was reinstated, but the Packers with championship expectations struggled, finishing 8-5-1. Guard Jerry Kramer missed the entire season, nearly dying from an intestinal illness caused by a childhood accident and undergoing eight abdominal surgeries. The team’s other guard, Fuzzy Thurston, sat out games because of injury. Returning from his suspension, Hornung faltered as a placekicker, making only 12 of his 38 field-goal attempts. Green Bay lost three of its first six games by a total of five points—one point defeats against Baltimore and Minnesota and then a wrenching three-point loss to Baltimore in which Hornung missed five field goals. Finishing three and a half games behind Baltimore in the Western Conference, Green Bay tied with Minnesota for second place in the West. The Packers played for the second consecutive year in the Playoff Bowl, a postseason exhibition in Miami that pitted the two conference runners-up a week after the NFL championship was played. The match’s true purpose was admirable—to raise money for the players’ pension fund. But it was a contest that Lombardi derided as a game for losers. Green Bay played badly, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals 24-17, a fitting coda to a forgettable season. The Packers managed only 131 net yards on offense. Unhappy about playing in the Playoff Bowl for the second consecutive year, Lombardi was incensed over his team’s performance, telling reporters after the game, "We played the game like we were still in our sleep."
He was rich and powerful, and he considered as his due the special privileges given to those rich and powerful. Unlike the Maras in New York and Art Rooney in Pittsburgh and the other NFL owners for whom their franchise was their fortune and whose lives had been long intertwined with professional football, Carroll Rosenbloom, the owner of the Baltimore Colts, came to the sport later in life, already wealthy and accomplished, and he saw more quickly than others what the game was becoming and how big it could become. Driven to win both on the football field and in NFL owners’ meetings, Rosenbloom was a formidable owner. When he spoke, the voice was sonorous, the enunciation precise, and the message clear. Those who dealt often with Carroll Rosenbloom knew that he was shrewd and very smooth and most of all determined to get what he wanted.
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By birth and upbringing, Rosenbloom was a Baltimorean, but over time, ambition and lifestyle would fray his ties to his native city. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, built a successful textile business making work apparel. At the University of Pennsylvania, Rosenbloom enjoyed sports more than his studies. At Penn, he played football, where his position coach was Bert Bell, a future NFL commissioner. After graduation, Rosenbloom worked in his father’s textile business. Carroll’s father told him to sell a Roanoke, Virginia subsidiary, Blue Ridge Overalls Company, with lagging sales in the early years of the Great Depression. He instead bought it. For Blue Ridge’s denim and khaki clothing, Carroll secured government contracts with the Civilian Conservation Corps and later distribution contracts with retailers like Sears Roebuck and J. C. Penney, turning Blue Ridge into a major success. At age 32, Rosenbloom retired briefly, moving to a large estate on Maryland’s bucolic Eastern Shore. But two years later, when his father died, Rosenbloom returned to the family business, and during World War II, Blue Ridge made a fortune selling khaki uniforms to the United States government. In 1959, he sold Blue Ridge for $7 million in cash and $20 million in stock from the acquiring P & R company where Rosenbloom was named a director.
Rosenbloom’s business interests and associations were many and at times controversial. He owned and directed large holding companies, Philadelphia and Reading Corporation, and Universal Controls. He was the largest investor in Seven Arts Productions, which produced movies and Broadway plays such as Funny Girl. Shortly before Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the Batista regime in Cuba, he and a partner bought a Havana casino in a deal involving organized-crime financier Meyer Lansky. His friends included professional gamblers and a close business partner, Louis Chesler, known for his association with Lansky. He was a long-time friend of Joe Kennedy, the father of a president recently slain and of a former United States attorney general just elected to the United States Senate. In New York, where he stayed at his luxury Central Park South apartment in the Navarro hotel, his golf partners were Bill Paley, the founder and head of CBS and the president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Dan Topping, president of the New York Yankees.
At times Rosenbloom seemed like a character in a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, ready for the next gala at East Egg. With his thinning, black hair slicked back, chiseled face, stylish ties and suits, and still athletic frame, a Sports Illustrated profile suggested that he looked "like a swinger" with "a hint of Hollywood." He was never one to follow convention or rules written by others. His long-time wife, Velma, and their three children lived on the family’s Maryland estate. But for years, Rosenbloom had in south Florida a second family with Georgia Wyler, a Miami television host and nightclub entertainer, and their two children. Wyler met Rosenbloom in 1957 at a Palm Beach party hosted by Joe Kennedy. Married five times previously, she was blond, shapely, and 20 years younger. Awaiting Rosenbloom’s divorce, the two for years intended to marry. Rosenbloom readily admitted that before buying the Colts, he had bet on pro football games. Credible accusations were made, but never conclusively proven, that Rosenbloom, while owner of the team, had bet on and even against the Colts, including a $1 million wager on Baltimore in the 1958 NFL Championship Game.
On an Indian-summer Sunday in October 1959 in a Philadelphia football stadium, an era in professional football ended. On October 11, with minutes left in a game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles at Franklin Field, NFL Commissioner Bert Bell slumped over lifeless in his stadium seat. He had suffered a heart attack and was pronounced dead minutes later as he was rushed into University Hospital three football fields away. Fittingly, at a stadium where he had played and coached, Bell was watching two teams that he had owned, at least in part, and coached. At the time, he was sitting not in a private box with team and league officials, but in an end zone seat surrounded by fans known for their passion. He was 64 years old.
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Bell was a heavyset man who visibly aged during his 14 years as commissioner. For years, his health was poor. In 1954 at Philadelphia’s Racquet Club, he collapsed. His physicians counseled him to work fewer work hours and stop smoking. In early 1959, he had a mild but portentous heart attack. After his health scares, Bell was hoping to retire as commissioner after the 1959 season and buy the Philadelphia Eagles, the team he had started and named. A day after his father's funeral, Bell’s older son learned from a Philadelphia National banker that his father had been days away from buying the Eagles franchise for $950,000 with the intent of eventually passing the team on to his two sons.
Born in 1895, Bell was the product of a different age. His real name, which he loathed and screamed privilege, was de Benneville. His family was prosperous and prominent in a city known for rigid class gradations. His father was a Pennsylvania attorney general and a University of Pennsylvania trustee who declared that for college Bert would go to Penn or go to hell, his mother could trace her ancestors to a time before the American Revolution, and his brother served as a Pennsylvania Supreme Court j ustice. Bert Bell attended the finest private schools, including the prestigious Haverford School outside Philadelphia where he enjoyed playing several sports and found football his favorite. Not wishing to test his father’s beliefs on eternal damnation, Bell entered Penn where he played football. A world war and military service in France interrupted his college years. After leaving Penn as a student in 1920, Bell coached football as an assistant at Penn for nine years, in the beginning under head coach John Heisman, and then at Temple for three years. He also managed the Philadelphia Ritz-Carlton, owned by his family, and worked as a stockbroker. But Bell was a devotee of saloons and racetracks, a noted bon vivant in Philadelphia until his engagement to a beautiful Ziegfeld Follies dancer and actress, Frances Upton. She conditioned her acceptance of Bell’s marriage proposal on his giving up alcohol, a promise he kept.
In the NFL's formative years, the Great Depression and later a second world war challenged franchise survival and threatened financial ruin. From 1933 through 1940, Bell owned the Philadelphia Eagles and for five years was their head coach and general manager. For the next seven years, he and Art Rooney owned the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 1946, the NFL failed to renew Elmer Leahy's contract as commissioner. The league's owners then elected Bell, one of their own, as their new commissioner.
They played football when young for fun and then later for status with classmates and teenage girls. But many who excelled in the sport grew up in a world shaped by a 12-year-long depression and a world war, and in hard regions where a coal miner’s life seemed destiny or on tough streets in big cities where only the moment, not the future, mattered. Football was their escape—a chance to go to college, to leave home, and to chart in life a different path. In late July, NFL and AFL training camps opened. Hundreds of young men reported to small colleges removed from the cities where professional teams played, ending offseason jobs and college studies to make a pro football team roster and prepare for the 1965 season.
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Since 1958, Green Bay held training camp in De Pere, Wisconsin, at St. Norbert College, a small Catholic school run by the Norbertine order. With a population of roughly 12,000, De Pere was a pleasant town on the banks of the Fox River 10 minutes by bus from the Green Bay team facilities where the Packers would practice. On July 21, camp opened with rookies and some veterans reporting.
On the first night with all players present, Vince Lombardi made his traditional comments on team, character, pride, total effort, and of course winning—a chain of platitudes and clichés when given by most speakers but inspiration and powerful injunctions when delivered with Lombardi’s fervor. Packer players saw that the offseason had not diminished Lombardi’s anger over finishing second the last two seasons and especially their play in 1964. Lombardi's need to win bordered on the pathological. His message that the Packers would win in 1965 was an unconditional edict.
For veteran players, the training-camp schedule remained an unpleasant constant: early breakfast, the first of four bus rides to and from Green Bay's practice field, morning practice beginning at 10 with laps and intense calisthenics, a light lunch at St. Norbert, afternoon practice at three with helmets and shoulder pads, a return to De Pere and a hearty dinner, a 7:30 meeting to receive new plays and review film of yesterday’s practice, and then 90 minutes or two hours of free time before curfew at 11. The practices and evening meeting each lasted 90 minutes.
Two dreaded practice routines were the nutcracker drill and the grass drills. Commonly called the Oklahoma drill and popular throughout pro football, the nutcracker drill was an individual test—a defensive player stood in a five-yard space between huge blocking bags and tried to stop a running back led by an offensive lineman. Lombardi’s grass drills were group torture—all players running furiously in place with Lombardi shouting the knees should be higher, dropping to their stomachs when Lombardi yelled "down," and then jumping up and running again when the head coach commanded "up." Though practices were scripted to the minute, the duration of the grass drill and the number of repetitions seemed solely dependent on Lombardi’s mood, which was often surly. At one practice, rookie Bill Curry counted 78 reps. One player heard a coach boast that the record was 164 repetitions. Players threw up breakfast and even fainted. Defensive tackle Hawg Hanner once collapsed and was hospitalized with heat exhaustion. But Vince Lombardi insisted his teams would be the best conditioned. By September, they often were.
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Their names evoked violent collisions on hard fields on wintry Sundays. Fittingly, Packers Jim Taylor and Ray Nitschke played respectively fullback and middle linebacker, positions that demanded and celebrated toughness. Both were known for giving teammates no quarter in training-camp practices. Both came to football from childhoods marred by traumatic times that included a parent’s death.
For the first time in 17 years, the Green Bay Packers would be opening the season on the road. Their opponents were the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team mired in decades of mediocrity and disappointment. Entering the league in 1933, the Steelers, called the Pirates in their first seven years, had a cumulative record of 148-214-16. In 32 seasons, they had never won a championship of any kind and had only eight winning seasons. Two weeks before their first game, the Steelers were looking for a new head coach.
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Pittsburgh’s head coach for eight seasons was Buddy Parker, a laconic and moody Texan. As Detroit’s young head coach in 1952 and 1953, he won league titles. But in August 1957, at the annual preseason "Meet the Lions" banquet before 500 fans and team officials, Parker, the program’s last speaker, walked to the lectern and announced without warning that he was quitting. “Sometime in every football coach’s career, there comes a time when he reaches a situation which he can’t handle. I’ve just arrived at that point. Tonight, I'm getting out of the Detroit Lions’ organization. I’ve had enough.” The resignation shocked the crowd, especially the team president whom Parker on the dais had been sitting next to.
Returning to coaching in Pittsburgh, Parker produced four winning seasons. But the Steelers in 1964 finished 5-9 and had little talent because of their head coach’s penchant for trading away draft picks for aging players. Shortly after the Steelers lost their fourth straight exhibition game, Parker told team owner Art Rooney that he was quitting as head coach. The Steelers promoted assistant Mike Nixon to be their new head coach. Stories circulated that Parker told Rooney, "I can’t win with this bunch of stiffs." In their season opener at home, the Steelers were 14-point underdogs.
On opening day, September 19, a heat wave gripped the eastern United States. Pitt Stadium could have been a football field in South Carolina on a hot August afternoon—the temperature hit 94 degrees, and the humidity was high. Sweat drenched the players in uniform and fans in the stands. The Steelers wore their traditional white pants and black helmets with the distinctive one-sided Steelers logo introduced in 1962.
The first half was surprisingly competitive. Playing hard for their new coach, the Steelers looked inspired and aggressively rushed Bart Starr. After a scoreless first quarter, Pittsburgh kicked two field goals after long drives and took a 6-0 lead. With less than two minutes remaining in the half, Steelers quarterback Bill Nelsen threw a sideline pass intended for Roy Jefferson. Packer cornerback Herb Adderley stepped in front of the Steeler receiver. Intercepting Nelsen’s pass, he ran 34 yards down the right sideline for Green Bay's first score. But Pittsburgh quickly moved the ball 60 yards downfield and kicked its third field goal, ending the half with a 9-7 lead. Braving the heat, 38,000 Steelers fans stood and applauded.
During halftime, Lombardi berated his offensive players for their ineffective play but made few changes. In the second half, Green Bay scored on its first six possessions. O n their first series, the Packers drove 79 yards, and Starr threw a 31-yard touchdown pass to tight end Marv Fleming. Adding two field goals, Green Bay led 20-9 at the end of the third quarter. In the final period, Adderley had his second interception, and Ray Nitschke had his team’s third interception. Green Bay won 41-9. Green Bay had no turnovers, and Pittsburgh had four. In the second half, Pittsburgh had only 64 yards of offense. Starr was outstanding, completing 17 of 23 passes for two touchdowns.
After the game, Lombardi was thankful that the game had two halves. Packer players attributed their second-half comeback to superior conditioning. "The heat? It was like this every day at training camp," exaggerated Herb Adderley. "Coach Lombardi worked us hard in it, and it made us a little mad, but you saw how it paid off today." But the reason for the Packers' surge was superior depth and overall talent. On Tuesday, after reviewing the game "movies," Lombardi offered little praise. Aside from turnovers leading to points, Lombardi said, "We were no ball of fire on defense." He added, "Outside of Bart Starr, who had a good game, we did little on offense." Asked whether Pittsburgh wilted in the second half because of the hot weather, Lombardi responded, "We wilted in the first half."
Age had wizened his face and reduced his frame, but at 70, George Halas, head coach and owner of the Chicago Bears, was still ornery, profane, and fiercely competitive. On the sideline, dressed in a business suit with a hat and dark glasses, Halas was an animated, scowling curmudgeon, barking orders to officials and challenges to opposing players. In the game of professional football, he was there at the beginning and already a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, selected in its inaugural class in 1963.
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Born in Chicago, Halas was the son of Bohemian immigrants. At the University of Illinois, where he studied civil engineering, he was an outstanding athlete, a star in football, baseball, and basketball. Halas played a dozen games for the New York Yankees, but a hip injury and foremost the challenge of hitting a curveball ended his hopes of success in major league baseball. He began playing professional football for the Hammond Pros and the Decatur Staleys.
In 1920, Halas, representing the Staleys, and 15 other team representatives met in Canton, Ohio, at Ralph Hay’s Hup mobile showroom to form the American Professional Football Association. Some sat on running boards. Before leaving, they elected Olympic gold medalist and football star Jim Thorpe as their president. In 1921, Halas moved the Staleys from Decatur to Chicago. A year later, he renamed his team the Bears, and the APFA was rebranded as the National Football League. Playing pro football for 11 years, he owned and coached the Bears for two generations during which he survived the Great Depression and a world war, and saw years of small crowds, competing leagues, and failed franchises. The Bears, Packers, and Cardinals were the only three original teams that would survive. Halas not only played and coached, but also sold tickets and wrote press releases. For years, meeting payroll jostled with winning games as the bigger challenge. Like other front-office executives in his time, he relished his reputation for being miserly and unyielding in contract negotiations. As a league patriarch, Halas expected deference from the league office and game officials, whom in past years he had tried to select for his games.
The Bears were the NFL's most storied franchise. Playing in the Midwest in the country's second-largest city, they had over the years great players—nine Bears were selected for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in its first three years, including Bronko Nagurski, Red Grange, and Sid Luckman. After the Chicago Staleys won the APFA championship in 1921, the Bears won six NFL titles from 1932 to 1946. The 1940 Championship Game proved historic when the Bears embarrassed Washington 73-0. Just three weeks earlier, the Redskins had beaten the Bears 7-3. After the game, Halas complained that on the last play, the officials should have called defensive pass interference against the Redskins. Washington's showman owner, George Preston Marshall, called the Bears "crybabies" and "quitters." But in the championship game, Chicago quarterback Sid Luckman executed perfectly the modern T-formation offense as reconstructed by Clark Shaughnessy. Football coaches across the country adopted the new T-formation with a back in motion as a true receiving target and the center snap to the quarterback who could run, pass, or pitch or hand off to a running back. When Shaughnessy was head coach at the University of Chicago, he began advising George Halas as a Bears consultant. Shaughnessy was an ascetic football innovator with the bearing of an athletic Anglican rector and a weakness for milkshakes. On offense, he prized deception and movement. For inspiration and instruction, Shaughnessy sought lessons from military history and tactics and even had a Chicago professor translate German General Heinz Guderian’s 1937 book on tank warfare, Achtung-Panzer!
In Chicago, the league’s two hottest teams would play on November 7. Baltimore had won its last five games and Chicago its last four, driven by its first-year stars, Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers. The two were competing for Rookie of the Year honors. Offering historical perspective with a fondness for former Bear players, George Halas called Butkus and Sayers "the two best rookies since 1940 when we signed George McAfee and Bulldog Turner." Others in the league thought they were the best first-year players who had ever played.
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On a team known for decades for tough defense, Dick Butkus in his first year became, for many, football’s most feared defender. Like the Packers’ Ray Nitschke, the linebacker to whom he would often be compared, Dick Butkus was Chicago tough—in high school, Butkus was so physically dominant that his coaches would not let him scrimmage against his teammates. At birth, Butkus weighed 13 pounds and six ounces. Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, he was the youngest of eight children and shared a small bedroom with four brothers. His father, a Lithuanian immigrant, worked as an electrician and his mother in a laundry. At Chicago Vocational High School, he played fullback as well as linebacker and one year made 70 percent of his team’s tackles. Playing linebacker and center at Illinois, he was named as a junior the Big 10's Most Valuable Player and finished as a senior third in the Heisman Trophy voting, predictably behind two quarterbacks, Notre Dame’s John Huarte and Tulsa’s Jerry Rhome.
In the 1965 NFL draft, after the Giants and the 49ers picked respectively fullbacks Tucker Frederickson and Ken Willard, Chicago drafted Butkus third. At the 1965 College All-Star Game, the annual event where the country’s best graduating seniors played the defending NFL champions, All-Star coach Otto Graham thought Butkus was the best All-Star player he had seen in his 10 years of coaching the team. Covering the game for Sports Illustrated, Dan Jenkins singled out Butkus: "Though he guessed wrong frequently, he was everywhere, recovering nicely and slamming ballcarriers, even Jim Brown, around like toys." Before playing against Butkus, Vince Lombardi questioned his accolades. "That Butkus guy, number 51, he doesn’t look as good as I've heard," he told his team. "Looks like he’s just a big stiff that will end up as a defensive tackle." Showing his players the film from Green Bay's second game against Chicago, Lombardi highlighted a play where Butkus knocked over two Packer blockers and drove Jimmy Taylor backwards. Stopping the projector, Lombardi confessed, "I was wrong about that guy."
On the field, Butkus was a typhoon. His hulking presence reeked of unchecked fury. At six-foot-three and 245 pounds, he was as big as offensive tackles. In a ritual during warmups before games, to ratchet up his level of hate, Butkus would search for opposing players smiling or joking, and then tell himself they were laughing at him. The helmet seemed too small for Butkus’s head, to be pinching his face, and his upper body too big for stumpy legs. Crowding the line of scrimmage, growling and cursing loudly, his eyes burning with rage, Butkus would explode on the center’s snap, knocking aside offensive linemen as he aimed towards whoever had the football. And Dick Butkus wanted not just to tackle and stop the ball carrier but to physically punish him, launching his shoulders and big torso into the runner's chest and head, and driving him backwards and then into the ground, often with one arm twisting his neck and one hand reaching for the football. He paired remarkable instincts with ferocity. Though not fast, Butkus seemed nearly always at the right place as though he had known the play that had been called.
If his Chicago teammate Dick Butkus captured the game’s primal essence, Gale Sayers epitomized the sport's sublime. Off the field, Sayers was modest, his voice containing a trace of a stammer. The son of an automotive mechanic, he was born in Wichita and raised in Omaha; one brother was a star sprinter. In high school in Omaha, Gale Sayers excelled in football and track and field, setting a Nebraska state record in the long jump. At the University of Kansas, he was named to All-American teams as a junior and senior and won the sobriquet "the Kansas Comet." Though lacking Jim Brown’s strength and Jim Taylor’s lust for contact, Sayers was not a small scatback—he stood six feet and weighed 198 pounds. Football scouts and coaches marveled over his speed, vision, instincts, and body control. He was a rocket with poetic grace. His runs in the open field rivaled George Balanchine’s best work in the New York City Ballet. For a halfback so elusive, he ran not with kinetic escapes from side to side but with a sparseness of movement that was decisive and elegant. His cuts to avoid defenders were made seemingly at full speed. His stops were sudden. His acceleration through narrow creases was explosive. In the open field, with a gliding stride that looked effortless, he pulled away from defensive halfbacks, once confident with the angle they had. Often as he ran towards the goal line, yards ahead of everyone else, he looked backward, not to taunt opponents but to signal to his blockers to relent and not draw an unnecessary penalty.
And Sayers did more than run with the football after handoffs. He caught passes, returned punts and kickoffs, and could even pass. Every time he stepped on a field, he was targeted by defenses and coverage teams, and players who normally rested on the bench crowded the sideline to watch. Every 10 times he touched a football, he scored a touchdown. In 1965, with magic on the field that changed games and permanently engraved the memory of anyone who saw him play, Gale Sayers in his first year was the most exciting player in football.
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Though playing Chicago at Wrigley Field, the Colts opened as two-and-a-half point favorites. By Sunday, the gambling line was even. After their torrid October ending with an easy win over Green Bay, the Bears and their fans were confident. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune ran a playful headline for its game preview: "Bears Try to Stop Colts Today (or Is It Vice Versa?)." As expected, the game would be physical and marked by controversy.
SUDDEN DEATH
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