On September 20, 1964, the Colts traveled to Wisconsin for the second game of the season. The Packers were waiting for them in Green Bay. Under Vince Lombardi’s stern leadership the Pack had gone to three championship games in a row from 1960 to ’62, winning the last two. But in 1963, with Paul Hornung suspended for gambling and quarterback Bart Starr fighting through injuries, they weren’t quite the same team, and they missed the postseason. The commissioner reinstated the Golden Boy for ’64, and with Starr fully convalesced the Pack came roaring back into everyone’s expectations. They were once again heavy favorites to win the West and regain the title.
In the season’s debut, one week before, the Colts lost by ten to the Vikings, who had won just five games in 1963. Meanwhile, Green Bay handily defeated the Bears, the defending champions, 23–12.
By this time the Packers and Colts were bitter rivals. The roots of their feud stretched beyond Green Bay all the way back to New York. It all started with the ’58 championship game, where Unitas, Berry, Moore, and Ameche outplayed and overshadowed Lombardi’s archaic but effective Giants offense.
When Vince moved on to become Green Bay head coach the next year, the rivalry traveled with him. Unitas and Ewbank continued to have his number for quite a while, beating him in four of the first six games they met his Packers. Now the task of trying to beat Green Bay’s great man had fallen to Shula. He also knew Lombardi well. As a young assistant with the Lions, Shula’s Detroit defenses befuddled the Packers. In Shula’s short tenure the Lions played Green Bay as competitively as anyone in the league could. Without much offense Detroit beat Lombardi’s resurgent Packers three out of six games.
Besides standing up to Vince on the field, Shula had the pleasure of playing golf with him.
“I knew him when I was an assistant at Detroit and George Wilson was the head coach,” Shula said. “In the off-season we would have a golf tournament. One year it would be in Green Bay. One year it would be in Cleveland. And one year we would have it in Detroit. From that two or three days of golf and having a few drinks and stuff, we got to know each other a little bit.”
That familiarity didn’t breed much affection. While many found the gregarious Lombardi charming, the young Shula found him overbearing. “[Lombardi] was bombastic,” Shula remembered. “His way was the only way.”
There can be but little debate about Lombardi’s place in history. There is no doubt that he was one of the greatest coaches in the game. He arrived on the scene as a head coach when he was already in his forties and only after being passed over for job after job after job. Many journalists and biographers have noted that a strong anti-Italian bias had kept him out of more than a few top positions. Nevertheless, his skills were tempered as an assistant under Red Blaik at Army, then one of the nation’s premier college football programs. Blaik had a powerful impact on Lombardi, and he was the only man who could rightly be called Lombardi’s mentor. In 1954 Vince left West Point to join Coach Jim Lee Howell’s New York Giants staff. Howell, a huge man and a former marine, managed an odd combination. He was somehow both highly successful and lightly regarded by his peers, players, and the press. His two top assistants, Lombardi on offense and Tom Landry on defense, enjoyed the lion’s share of credit for Howell’s excellent teams and big victories. Not surprisingly, there were deep tensions and rivalries among the three coaches, though they worked together well enough to guide the Giants to the 1956 championship. In 1958 they might’ve won it again had not Ewbank, Unitas, and Berry elevated the level of play briefly beyond even the brilliant comprehension of the Giants triumvirate.
Lombardi came to Green Bay when very few fans were clicking the turnstiles. The team was drawing little more than ten thousand spectators per game. In 1958, the year before Lombardi’s arrival, Green Bay was the worst team in the league, with just a single victory. In 1959, his first season, the new coach famously told his charges, “Gentlemen, I don’t associate with losers.” True to his word, he directed a dramatic improvement, and the Packers finished as winners at 7-5. In 1960 he took it a step further. The Packers won the Western Division, and Green Bay went all the way to the championship game, only to lose to the Eagles. In 1961 the Packers won their first title under his leadership. By 1967 they had won five championships, including three in a row. Among the Packers’ huge victories were the famous Ice Bowl game, played in subzero temperatures, and the first two Super Bowls.
When Lombardi got to Green Bay the city was in danger of losing its team. By the time he resigned just nine years later, that frozen hamlet was famous throughout the States, enviously known as Title Town.
As great as these accomplishments were, however, they have also been mythologized to the point where legend and fact have intersected. It is hard to tell where the flesh-and-blood coach Lombardi has receded and the supernatural Saint Vincent has emerged.
The myth tells us that Lombardi freed the enslaved Packer tribes by parting football’s Red Sea. His miracles seemed to emerge from the hands of God. In fact, there were sound and logical reasons for his success. Unlike Ewbank, who came to the Colts when the team was more or less in a financial and talent bankruptcy, Lombardi walked into a franchise that was oddly primed for success. His first squad, filled almost entirely with inherited players, was overflowing with future All-Pros and Hall of Famers. This spectacular roster wasn’t assembled by Lombardi but was hand chosen for Lombardi’s use by a brilliant young man named Jack Vainisi.
Vainisi was a potbellied, balding, and ordinary-looking man who was conceived in the womb of the enemy. He grew up in Chicago, closely connected to the Halas family. Jack was a boyhood friend and schoolmate of Papa Bear’s own cub, Mugsy Halas. Vainisi played high school football well enough to earn a scholarship to Notre Dame. But he lasted only one season in South Bend before enlisting in the U.S. Army for World War II. He contracted rheumatic fever in the service and permanently damaged his otherwise ample heart.
Gene Ronzani, an associate from Chicago, brought Vainisi to the Packers in 1950. Ronzani had only recently been hired by the Packers himself when he was brought in to succeed Curly Lambeau as the second head coach in Packers history.
In the 1930s and ’40s Lambeau’s Packers were among the premier teams in football. But the ’50s were a lost decade for Green Bay. During the entirety of the era the team was a spectacular failure on the field, rarely finishing above fifth in the standings. In the nine dismal autumns before Lombardi, from 1950 to 1958, the Packers won three games or fewer five times.
Ronzani was only the first in a string of Packer coaches who were rank failures. Yet he would have as much to do with the Packers’ dynasty as anyone, if for no other reason than that he secured the services of Vainisi, which was one of the single greatest hires in league history.
Young Vainisi was initially listed as a Packer scout, but it didn’t take him long to rise to the “position” of de facto general manager. He seized the opportunity and shrewdly assembled the players who would dominate professional football for the next decade.
Peter M. Platten III, a future Packers president, grew up in Green Bay right next door to Vainisi, but reported nothing unusual about him. He said that Vainisi was an ordinary man.
“He was one of the nicest guys you would ever meet in your life,” Platten said. “He was a normal guy; he just knew talent better than anybody I have ever seen.”
That was high praise coming from Platten, who led the Packers organization during Ron Wolf’s successful reign. Platten said Vainisi’s secret was his vast football network.
“[Jack] knew everybody,” Platten said. “People really respected him. He was able to dig down into the ranks of the players and pick out excellent ones. That’s what everybody in personnel is supposed to do, but he did it all the time.”
Vainisi’s “network,” such as it was, wasn’t even constructed of personal contacts. To a large extent it was built of men he had never even met in person. Pat Peppler, an assistant coach at North Carolina State in the 1950s, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he didn’t even really know Vainisi. Yet he provided the Packers’ GM detailed information anyway in exchange for tiny bits of money.
“I’d give Jack scouting reports at the end of the season for $100,” Peppler said.
In an era when many team’s draft-room decisions were still driven by magazine articles, Vainisi kept detailed files of more than four thousand players. Each folder was filled with reliable information. He created his own system for ranking the worth of every single prospect. It obviously worked. Vainisi accumulated talent at an unprecedented level. Even as the team crumbled on the field, his deft drafts yielded Paul Hornung, Bart Starr, Forrest Gregg, Jim Ringo, Jerry Kramer, and Willie Wood. His 1958 draft is still considered the greatest of all time, as he selected linebacker Dan Currie, a future All-Pro; Jim Taylor and Ray Nitschke, future Hall of Famers; and Jerry Kramer, the fundamentally sound guard who delivered the most famous block in league history to end the bitter Ice Bowl.
Vainisi even unearthed Lombardi. Though Vince had been a well-respected NFL assistant for years, he hadn’t yet received a single head-coaching offer in the major college ranks or the pros.
Lombardi and others felt that he was overlooked solely on the basis of his olive skin, inky hair, and exuberant personal manner. Many NFL executives felt that Lombardi simply did not present the right image for their team or program. Prejudice against Italians simply wasn’t an issue for Vainisi; his name also ended with a vowel. Anyway, he wasn’t constrained by nonproductive baggage. In searching to end the Packers’ woes, he only wanted a man who could properly manage the talent he had assembled for the Packers.
George Halas and Paul Brown both recommended Lombardi to Vainisi. Brown, in particular, felt invested in Vince’s success and generously made a list of promising Browns players he’d trade to the Packers. That’s how Lombardi acquired Henry Jordan and Bill Quinlan as well as Willie Davis. Paul may have been far more generous than he intended. His gift to Lombardi included three-quarters of Green Bay’s defensive line for their first two championship seasons under Vince. Those players were also selected to multiple Pro Bowl All-Pro teams. Willie Davis was a future Hall of Famer.
Lombardi was also greatly aided by something that no other coach or organization in the league enjoyed. The Packers were a publicly owned organization, and the people of Green Bay were its stockholders. Unlike the other teams scrimping to make a profit, the Packers were mandated to spend profits to make a successful team. So while Ewbank lost his job and the Colts’ dynasty in Baltimore because he couldn’t sign the very fine players he drafted, the Packers were signing their picks at the highest rate in the NFL.
So Lombardi’s unprecedented success did not come out of the blue. It was in the making for years. In Green Bay his ability to teach and motivate intersected with the hard work of a brilliant personnel man and the star players he unearthed, not to mention the best situation in the league for signing them.
Interestingly, despite his success, Lombardi had an incredibly limited legacy. None of his assistants went on to notable head-coaching careers. Phil Bengston, his handpicked successor in Green Bay, lasted only three seasons and finished with a 20-21-1 record.
Though Lombardi’s offenses and defenses were highly ranked every year of his tenure, and though contemporary league players were unanimous in their belief in the excellence of those Green Bay units, no one followed in the footsteps of his system. His playbook was considered too basic and conservative by other coaches. So while Vince had many admirers, he had but few imitators.
Lombardi himself seemed to hold just one team in high esteem, and that was the Baltimore Colts under Ewbank. Despite some painful losses to Baltimore, he was generous in his praise of Unitas. After a 1959 Colts victory over the Packers, Vince told reporters that Johnny U was “the best quarterback I’ve ever seen.” In 1960, when Lombardi finally beat the Colts for the first time as a head coach, he called it “my greatest day in football.” In 1961, in the midst of his first championship season, he told reporters that Unitas was “the greatest football player in the world.”
Unitas was unimpressed with all the praise. “That and a dime will get you a cup of coffee,” he said.
Despite Lombardi’s ardor, the Packers bid adieu to Weeb by beating Baltimore twice in ’62. In 1963 they rudely welcomed Shula and swept him, too.
In 1964 everything seemed to point to more of the same between Green Bay and Baltimore. But when the Colts’ plane touched down in Wisconsin for an early-season matchup, nothing went as others thought. And in the tiny statistics a fascinating story was told.
Shula’s team was finding the winning balance. Unitas threw the ball just twelve times against the Packers, while Colts runners carried thirty-seven times and gained 123 yards. All of a sudden Green Bay’s swarming pass rushers couldn’t pin their ears back for Johnny U and disrupt his rhythms anymore. They had to hesitate and consider that there was something else that might afflict them. With that tiny advantage Unitas was sacked only once on the day, for 9 yards. Meanwhile, he slung it downfield for 154. He connected with his old target Lenny Moore in the first half for a 52-yard touchdown. According to the Baltimore Sun, Moore was “yards and yards behind the defender,” who was necessarily drawn in to protect against the effective running game. While the suddenly balanced offense was making its mayhem, those old marauders—Marchetti, Pellington, and their henchmen—swallowed Starr whole. The Colts sacked him six times, good for 47 yards of lost ground. Meanwhile, when he could actually stay upright long enough to pass, the results were no better. The Colts’ defenders intercepted Starr three times.
Despite it all, though, Green Bay was in their usual position to win the game at the end. The Pack needed only two points to pull it off when they found themselves in easy field goal range with time ticking off the clock. But Starr inexplicably attempted to pass, and the ball ended up in the hands of Baltimore’s Don Shinnick. That, and a missed extra point by Hornung earlier in the game, ensured the Colts’ 21–20 victory.
The breaks that typically went Green Bay’s way were, for once, in Baltimore’s favor. More than that, the Colts had their old balance back. It seemed that Baltimore could run and pass as well as play incredibly rough defense.
In week three those indicators would all prove true beyond everyone’s imagination when they met another old rival with a legendary coach.
The defending-champion Bears and George Halas came to Baltimore.
The Colts had a long, stormy history with Halas and his Chicago grizzlies. Every game against Papa Bear was a brutal struggle. A Colts victory at Wrigley Field in 1960 bolstered the Unitas legend even while it dashed all hopes for a third straight title under Ewbank. The Colts left Chicago that day leading the West by two games with just four to go. But with seventeen seconds left on the clock, the Bears held a 20–17 lead. Unitas had already been sacked five times on the day. The last of them was a vicious hit by Doug Atkins that split the bridge of Unitas’s nose. Blood was spurting out of the wound and both nostrils. The referee, surveying the gruesome scene, told the quarterback to leave the field. As the legend has it, Johnny U instead ejected the official from his huddle and cauterized the bleeding with mud scooped from the Wrigley turf and shoved into his two nostrils by his teammate Alex Sandusky. Jim Parker later recalled that the sight of the wound and its filthy remedy almost set him to vomiting right on the field. But the patient himself played on as if nothing had happened. Unitas dialed Lenny’s number, and with the mud and the blood streaming down his face he hit the Reading Rocket with a perfectly thrown 37-yard pass in the corner of the end zone. Lenny hauled in the missile, and the referee threw his arms in the air in two parallel lines just as time expired. When asked to explain how it was possible, Unitas missed the point of the question entirely. “I thought Lenny could beat [the cornerback] on that pattern,” he obtusely said.
Unitas bore the scar from that Bear wound on the bridge of his nose for the rest of his life.
Dramatic as that conquest of Halas may have been, it was nothing more than a pyrrhic victory. The game was so brutal, and extracted such an awful physical toll on the Colts, the team lost all four of its remaining games. After the season ended (with a loss to San Francisco), Weeb’s thoughts were still in Chicago. “We won the game but lost the title there,” he said in pity for himself and his hapless and drained men.
Now, in 1964, facing off against the Bears would be unlike any of the previous brutal Chicago experiences. This time the Colts embarrassed and humiliated the Bears, 52–0. It was the worst whipping in the entire history of the old and venerable Chicago franchise. Just as they had against the Packers, the Colts’ runners really poured it on. They lugged the ball forty-one times and scampered for 213 yards against the Monsters of the Midway. Unitas threw only thirteen passes, but those were good enough for 247 yards and three touchdowns.
The rest of the season went much the same way. The running attack enabled the passing attack, and the passing attack featured only the toughest, smartest, and most feared man in football.
The Colts finished 1964 with a 12-2 mark, better than any season under Ewbank and also the NFL’s best record. Shula, in only his second year on the job, found vindication. Regardless of who opposed Shula, or why, everyone had to admit that his fiery leadership and ability to repair the run game had brought the Colts back to their glory days and even restored a little luster to Unitas. The brilliant young coach and his team did it the hard way: They beat Lombardi twice and they beat Halas twice. They scored the most points in the league and gave up the fewest. Shula was named Coach of the Year, and, of course, Johnny U was exactly what his teammates thought he was, the Most Valuable Player.
The Colts were off to the championship game on the road in Cleveland; that they would win it was a foregone conclusion.