The Packers and Vince Lombardi were featured on the cover of TIME Magazine in December of 1962, before the NFL championship game in which they defeated the New York Giants 16-7. Following are some excerpts from that article:
"Nowhere does the game generate more excitement than in Green Bay, Wis., a city of 63,000 that has been hooked on pro football since 1919, when only sissies wore helmets and the mark of a player was the gap between his front teeth. Green Bay has much to be proud of. It has its Neville Public Museum, its Service League, and its 65-piece symphony orchestra. Its paper napkins wipe the mouths of 93 million Americans. Its citizens are kind to animals and hospitable to strangers; they even manage a polite chuckle when visitors joke about the city's 139 bars and its unsavory reputation as a gangster hangout during Prohibition. But on two subjects the town has no tolerance: the Green Bay Packers are the best football team in the world, and Vince Lombardi. 49, is the world's greatest football coach."
"Few rah-rah college towns can match the unbridled devotion of Green Bay for Lombardi and his doughty athletes. There has not been an empty seat in City Stadium (capacity: 38.663) since 1959; the only way anyone gets to see a game is by buying a season ticket — and even that, like joining a country club, takes years of waiting. Green Bay's youngsters save their pennies in kiddy banks in the shape of green-and-gold-suited Packers. Portraits of Packer players hang on soda fountain walls; restaurant diners eat their soup off "Know-Your-Packers" doilies. The pastors of some Green Bay churches end their sermons with a short, earnest prayer "for our Packers," and the police force feels the same way. "The only crime here." says Chief Elmer Madson, "is when the Packers lose."
"The Packers are the current wonder team of football, a group of superstars romantically molded out of a gang of has-beens. Four years ago, they were the lowest of the low; now they are world champions."
"As of last week it was certain — barring a last-game loss to the last-place Rams — that the Packers were heading for one of those classic challenges of sport: a return engagement with the New York Giants, in the title playoff Dec. 30. Last year, it was the Packers who were on the way up, feeling mean and hungry; they had lost the 1960 playoff to the Philadelphia Eagles. This year it is the Giants who yearn for revenge— for last year's crushing 37-0 defeat."
"Last year Lombardi also had the impressive services of Paul Hornung. a wondrous halfback who, in the day of the specialist, can run, pass, kick or block — and proved it by scoring a record 176 points in 1960. This year Hornung wrenched his knee badly, sat it out on the bench half the season — when he was not posing for ads. The loss would cripple almost any other team. Yet, filling in for Hornung at halfback. Tom Moore scored seven touchdowns, averaged 3.1 yds. every time he carried the ball. Handling Hornung's place-kicking chores, Guard Jerry Kramer booted nine field goals, 36 straight extra points."
"With that kind of trained talent, Lombardi can go easy on the extra razzle-dazzle. His game is disconcertingly simple. Or so it appears. ''We always hit them at their strongest point," he says. "We attack their best men in an effort to break their morale. If you can bring down their best men, it's all over." Opponents respect the tactic. On defense, explains Philadelphia Linebacker Chuck Bednarik, "the Packers just hand you the ball and say, 'Here it is, see what you can do with it.' " On offense, says Pittsburgh Quarterback Bobby Layne, "everybody knows what's coming, but the point is that you can't stop it anyway.' "
"Back in 1959 — in desperation — the Packers turned to Vince Lombardi, a bristling, brooding bear of a man who was supposed to know football but had never held a major head coaching job before. He seemed hardly the type to coach in a bumptious, boisterous north woods town. He was a city man, an Easterner born and bred in Brooklyn and fiercely proud of it. Until he was 20, Vincent Thomas Lombardi had never even been west of the Hudson."
"Lombardi hit Green Bay so hard the grass is still quivering. He demanded absolute authority — the power to hire and fire, to set salaries, even to design Packer uniforms. Once the whip was in his hand, he set it singing. "This is a violent sport," he told the Packers, "To play in this league, you've got to be tough —physically tough and mentally tough." He chased grandstand kibitzers off the training field, declared the rowdier Green Bay taverns off-limits, slapped $25 fines on players who showed up as little as one minute late for practice, $50 fines on those who broke his 11 p.m. training-camp curfew. He ordered injured Packers to run in practice ("You're preparing yourselves mentally"), and slackers found themselves heading out of town on the evening train. "Don't cross me," Lombardi warned Quarterback Bart Starr. "If you cross me a second time, you're gone." Self-pity provoked only scorn. "When Lombardi came," recalls Center Jim Ringo, "I told him I wanted out. I said I wanted to play on a winning team. He looked at me and said, 'This is going to be a winning team.' You know his voice. You know his eyes. If he said so, I knew it must be true."
"Vince Lombardi, the architect of it all, gets an estimated $50,000 a year in salary. He lives in a comfortable $35,000 home whose den is filled with trophies won by Daughter Susan, 15, an accomplished horsewoman, and Son Vince, 20, a 195-lb. fullback for Minnesota's College of St. Thomas. If anybody in Green Bay had a $1,000,000 house, Lombardi would be that man. When he walks down the street, people greet him as some sort of demigod. After home games. Vince and his wife Marie eat dinner at Mancie's restaurant — in ''the Lombardi Room," of course. The hottest selling item in Green Bay bars is Macnish V.L. Scotch. Everywhere else, the V.L. stands for "Very Light," but in Green Bay it stands for Vince Lombardi. And the worst rumor that can sweep Green Bay is that Coach Lombardi might not stay on forever, that he might some day move on to another city and another club."
"No one, least of all Lombardi, wants to predict how long the Green Bay Packers will stay on top of their brutally tough sport. "We're tired," he says. "Jim Taylor's down to 204 Ibs., and he should weigh 220. Everybody's feeling the strain." If the weary Packers win their way into the N.F.L. playoff, they will face a New York Giants team, coached by canny Allie Sherman, that is far stronger and far fresher than the squad they trounced last time around."
