“Golden Boy” Paul Hornung, Notre Dame's Heisman winner and famed NFL bad boy, dies at 84
Andrew Wolfson | Louisville Courier Journal
November 13, 2020
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Paul Hornung, dubbed the “Golden Boy” for his wavy blond locks and radiant play, who starred for Louisville’s Flaget High School and Notre Dame before helping propel the Green Bay Packers to four NFL titles in six years, has died.
He was 84.
Arguably the second-most famous athlete Louisville ever produced, after Muhammad Ali, Hornung is still the only college player to have won the Heisman Trophy on a losing team.
And in the NFL he won the 1961 Most Valuable Player Award and set a single-season scoring record that stood for 46 years.
Legendary Packers head coach Vince Lombardi called Hornung — who caught, passed and ran for touchdowns, as well as kicked goals and extra points — the most versatile player he’d ever seen and the league’s greatest clutch performer.
But tarnishing his legend, Hornung was suspended indefinitely before the 1963 season for gambling on football.
While NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle reinstated him after one season, finding he’d never bet against the Packers, the transgression kept him out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, for 20 years — long after fellow Packer greats such as Bart Starr and Ray Nitschike had been enshrined.
The NCAA also banned him from calling college football games, saying his image as a playball gambler didn’t personify college football. He sued and won a $1.1 million judgment that was reversed on appeal.
In his prime, Hornung was known as much for his exploits off the field as on. He was seen as the ultimate male fantasy, with a woman on each arm. At 6 foot, 3 inches and 215 pounds, he was likened to every Greek god from Adonis to Zeus.
New York Times columnist Arthur Daley called him a “handsome blond dreamboat” and the “playboy of the western world,” while David Maraniss wrote of Hornung in “When Pride Still Mattered,” his Lombardi biography, that “half the world wanted to be with him, and the other half wanted to be him."
Hornung later said his life was about “games, girls, gambling and gin joints — and not necessarily in that order.” He smoked five packs of Marlboro cigarettes a day, including some in the locker room during halftimes.
Sportswriter Dick Schaap, after spending a week in Green Bay with Hornung, later wrote he had "60 drinks a day, never went to bed before 4 in the morning, never went to bed alone, and never repeated himself.” Horning took exception only to Schaap’s drink count; it was more like 20, he said.
But for all of his excesses, Hornung was never arrested and remained a dutiful son. Each offseason, he returned to Louisville and shared an apartment with his mother, Loretta.
In the foreword to Hornung’s autobiography, “Golden Boy,” subtitled “Girls, Games and Gambling at Green Bay (and Notre Dame, too),” sportswriter Billy Reed wrote Hornung symbolized “a bygone era when many athletes played as hard off the field as on it.”
“He freely admits that he and wide receiver Max McGee led the Packers — and maybe the NFL — in chasing women, hanging out in bars and nightclubs and generally trying to circumvent the strict rules of Vince Lombardi,” Reed said.
It was Hornung’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him that led to the gambling suspension that almost ended his career, sportswriter Red Smith wrote after it was announced.
“Hornung had everything,” Smith said. “But he is also a swinger, a gay man-about-town. He acted as though the rules were not designed for him.”
Forty years later — after he had largely disappeared from the headlines and built a successful business career in Louisville — Hornung made another misstep.
Frustrated by another Notre Dame losing season, he said in a radio interview the university needed to lower its admissions standards so more athletes of color could play there.
“We must get the Black athletes if we're going to compete,” he said
Hornung immediately apologized, saying he should have said the Irish needed “better ballplayers, Black and white.”
His friend and business partner, Lenny Lyles, the Baltimore Colts great who broke the color barrier for scholarship athletes at the University of Louisville, defended him, saying he’d never known Hornung to be racist.
But Notre Dame denounced him: ''We strongly disagree with the thesis of his remarks. They are generally insensitive and specifically insulting to our past and current African-American student-athletes.''
Hornung was also forced to step down as commentator on Irish football radio broadcasts.
"Reading between the lines, I could tell that Notre Dame — or at least some of the trustees — had decided it was more important to curry favor with the politically correct crowd than to stand up for me,” he said bitterly.
AN UNSETTLED UPBRINGING IN LOUISVILLE
Paul Vernon Hornung’s parents had already separated when he was born two days before Christmas in 1935 at Louisville’s St. Anthony’s Hospital.
His father, an executive at Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., had begun a long, downward spiral brought on by excessive drinking and carousing and was later indicted for child abandonment.
Paul and Loretta, a personnel clerk at the Louisville Army Medical Depot, had to live with her parents above a grocery store they ran at 17th and Lytle in the West End. When Loretta's parents died, they had to go off on their own.
“I was very close to my mother,” he later said in the autobiography he wrote with Reed. “She was the only one I had.”
They landed in an apartment at 22nd and Portland Avenue, where Hornung remembered carrying buckets of coal up the stairs to keep the stove going. But he said he had a happy childhood — in part because he was always the best athlete on the block.
Big for his age, as a fifth grader he played for the eighth grade team at St. Patrick’s, where the priest who served as coach let Hornung call the plays because he didn’t know anything about football.
At Flaget, he was elevated to starting quarterback in fall of 1950 as a freshman, after both the first- and second-stringers fumbled on a muddy field. His coach was the legendary Paulie Miller, whom Hornung recalled as "a tough SOB who cared about us but hid it pretty well."
At the all-boys Catholic school, a Times reporter later wrote, Hornung was remembered as a "snarlingly aggressive" quarterback, baseball and basketball player and “the girls, who were tugging at his jersey even then, recall him as a strange mixture of adolescent shyness and arrogance.”
Hornung later said: “From a young age, I liked the girls. Some of them thought I was so cute they called me ‘Cuddles.’” He said he dated 20 girls in high school but never went steady.
As a senior, despite losing three-sport star Howard Schnellenberger to graduation, Hornung led Flaget to a 9-1-1 record, and recruiters crowded his doorstep.
Determined to land him as a Wildcat, University of Kentucky head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant brought Gov. Lawrence Wetherby along to try to seal the deal, and a booster promised Hornung a Cadillac.
But Loretta was a devout Catholic. For her son to play at Notre Dame was “like a gift from God,” he said in “Golden Boy,” his autobiography.
HORNUNG BECOMES THE “GOLDEN BOY”
Hornung didn’t like Notre Dame at first. It was cold, he had no topcoat and the nearest “girls” were a few miles away, at St. Mary’s College.
But in his first spring game, against an alumni team, he threw for three touchdowns and was nicknamed the “Golden Boy” by reporter Tommy Fitzgerald, who was visiting that day from The Courier Journal.
Eventually, a millionaire bachelor friend introduced him to Chicago showgirls and nightspots, along with celebrities such as Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis Jr.
“That was pretty high living for a poor kid from Louisville,” he said later in his autobiography.
The football team floundered, falling to 2-8 in his senior year, its first losing season since 1933 and its worst record ever. But Hornung finished second in the nation in total offense and led the team in rushing, passing, scoring, punting, field-goal kicking and minutes played. He also played defense and was second in tackles.
He competed for the Heisman against Tennessee’s Johnny Majors and Syracuse’s Jim Brown, but neither school was a match for Notre Dame’s publicity machine. At the award ceremony in New York, he said “the really greatest quarterback in the country” was his mother, and he gave her a mink stole for Christmas.
Hornung was invited to play in the East-West Shrine Bowl in San Francisco, where he met another rich businessman, Bernard Maurice Shapero, a casino operator who owned a slot machine company. He would become Hornung’s friend — and his bookie.
JFK STEPS IN SO HORNUNG CAN PLAY
As the first pick in the 1957 NFL draft, Hornung was selected by the Packers and signed to a three-year deal at $16,000 a year. He hated Green Bay — the “Siberia of sports,” he called it, and almost quit.
It was the league’s smallest market and had endured 10 losing seasons in a row.
Hornung played only occasionally his first two years, and the team limped to a 1-10-1 record in his second, prompting Red Smith to write the Packers “overwhelmed one, underwhelmed 10 and whelmed one.”
But the next year the municipally owned team hired Lombardi, and he was determined to make Hornung a star. In only his third season, Hornung led the NFL in scoring, outdoing Pat Summerall and catapulting the Packers to first place.
In one game against the Colts, on Oct. 8, 1961, he accounted for 33 points, scoring four touchdowns and booting 6 extra points and a field goal.
The only drag on his career was part-time Army duty that threatened to force him to miss the championship game that year when his captain at Fort Riley, Kansas, said he wouldn’t give him a weekend pass to play.
Lombardi pulled some strings at the White House, Maraniss writes in “When Pride Still Mattered.”
“This is President Kennedy, and I’m calling on behalf of Paul Hornung,” JFK told the unsuspecting captain.
“And I’m Donald Duck,” responded the captain, who was sure he was talking to an impostor.
Hornung got his pass and led the Packers to a 37-0 pasting of the New York Giants in the 1961 championship. He called it the happiest day of his life.
In a profile the next day, a Times staffer wrote: “In the complex patterns of refined brutality, where every young mastodon is a super-specialist, Paul Vernon Hornung … is something of an anomaly. He can do almost everything — and with record-breaking competence.”
Hornung enjoyed a decidedly love-hate relationship with the legendary Lombardi. Hornung recalled how he and McGee sneaked out of the team dorm the night before an exhibition game to spend it with two women at a Green Bay hotel, only to be caught by Lombardi.
“That SOB always knew where we were and what we were doing," Hornung said. "He had the best spy network in the history of football.”
He said Lombardi screamed at him, “Do you want to be a player or a playboy?"
Hornung screamed back, “A playboy!”
But confrontations aside, “I loved Lombardi. He was the ultimate disciplinarian and I was the ultimate coach’s nightmare. But Lombardi and I understood each other perfectly. He wanted to win more than anybody I’ve ever known. He also knew that no matter where I spent the night before, I would be ready to play on Sunday.”
Marannis said Lombardi also knew that Hornung was a “money player would find a way to score if they got near the goal line, the rare gifted runner who was not too proud to block, a charismatic leader who just wanted to be one of the boys yet lifted the heart of teammates just by being among them.”
The free and easy side of Hornung also held an attraction for Lombardi, who was so different.
“Lombardi needed daily prayer and relentless discipline to make it,” Maraniss wrote. “With Hornung, it seemed effortless.”
A LOVE FOR GAMBLING ENDS IN SUSPENSION
Hornung had loved to gamble since he would sneak into Churchill Downs as a teenager. He said he never bet more than $800 on a game and “always on us to win.”
He also said he never lost more than “one or two grand” a season, which he said was “peanuts” given his off-the-field earnings. By then, he was earning $100,000 in endorsements from Chevrolet alone and another $50,000 from Philip Morris for touting Marlboro.
He was playing golf at Audubon Country Club when the suspension was announced; he ended his game and issued a teary-eyed apology to reporters.
"Football meant so much to me, and I guess I let a lot of people down,” he said.
But later, in “Golden Boy,” he said: “Gambling to me was just another form of fun and entertainment, sort of like chasing girls and going out of the town.”
He accepted the suspension humbly, but when Commissioner Rozelle banned him from investing in Louisville Downs, a harness track that his buddy William King, the boat-show entrepreneur, was starting, Hornung said, “the hell with it and told him to count me in as a silent partner.”
A ROCKY ROAD TO REDEMPTION IN THE NFL
Reinstated in 1964, (along with Detroit Lions defensive tackle Alex Karras, who’d also been kicked out of the league for gambling), Hornung returned with a vengeance.
He ran for 77 yards and kicked a team-record-tying 52-yard field goal in his first game back.
But he had a disappointing season, marred by injuries, and his kicking game deserted him. He earned the dubious distinction of missing 26 field goals in a single season — a performance so bad it was credited with paving the way for full-time placekickers.
After missing five field goals in a single game, an angry fan stuck a gun in his helmet as he was running off the field, Hornung remembered.
"I felt terrible. I put the muzzle up to my head … and Bart Starr came running. ‘Paul! Paul! Put that gun down. Are you crazy?’ Across the room, fullback Jim Taylor looked up from his locker and deadpanned, 'Don’t worry, Bart. He’ll miss.'"
The next year, Lombardi benched Hornung and a rumor surfaced that Lombardi intended to trade him for the Giants’ star receiver, Del Shofner. New York head coach Allie Sherman assured Shofner he wasn’t going anywhere.
“I want you to know, Del, I wouldn’t trade you for Hornung and all his girls,” Sherman announced in Giants locker room.
“Just a minute, Coach,” another player interjected. “Let’s take a vote on that.”
After scoring only three touchdowns all season, Hornung went back into the starting lineup on Dec. 12, 1965, and played his greatest game ever, scoring five touchdowns.
But a pinched nerve kept him from playing and eventually the Packers made him available in the expansion draft.
“Hornung becomes a Saint — a New Orleans Saint, that is,” a headline writer quipped.
OUT OF FOOTBALL, INTO BUSINESS
Hornung never played again. A doctor warned another hit could paralyze him.
The day after his teammates beat the Kansas City Chiefs to win the first Super Bowl in Los Angeles, Hornung did something unthinkable: The man whom Courier Journal sportswriter Lou Younkin said had been linked to “more beautiful women than cold cream,” got married — to model Pat Roeder at The Beverly Hills Hotel.
Hornung later wrote in “Golden Boy” that the marriage had failure written all over it.” The first red flag, he said, was when he brought her home to Louisville after their honeymoon “and she didn’t like it one bit.”
Hornung continued to exploit his playboy image, most famously in a Miller Lite ad in which an announcer asked, “What’s Paul Hornung’s secret with women?”
Wearing a tux, Hornung opened a door to a limo to show a long-legged woman with her short skirt hiked up, as he intoned, “Practice, practice, practice.”
But his friend and former teammate at Flaget and Notre Dame, Sherrill Sipes, said when people talked about how popular Hornung was with women, “what they overlook is how popular he was among men, especially his teammates. … If you were with Paul, you were around the action.”
Packer great Ron Kramer, one of Hornung’s closest friends, told Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden that "people always said he was a playboy because women loved him. That's true, they did. But his friends loved him too. And their wives and kids too. And anybody else who was lucky enough to meet him. He's charming and generous and just a beautiful guy to know."
Retired from football at age 31, Hornung tried to capitalize on his good looks in Hollywood. He had a minor role in the 1968 movie “The Devil’s Brigade,” playing a belligerent lumberjack in a barroom brawl. But The Courier Journal wrote that the movie was “slack and soppy,” and Hornung abandoned his film career.
He did much better in business and the broadcast booth. He worked two years as a sportscaster in Chicago, then 11 calling NFL games as well as his own cable show in Louisville, “Paul Hornung’s Sports Showcase.”
He sold the ads and lined up the guests, including Oscar Robertson, Lou Holtz, Dick Butkus and former Packer teammates like Starr.
Unlike many athletes who squandered their fortune, Hornung invested wisely, thanks to advisers and mentors like Frank Metts, the Louisville developer and state transportation secretary.
Before he died in 1990, Metts brought Hornung into a deal to buy the old Seagram’s Distillery and turn it into Golden Foods, a vegetable and soy oil company that within 10 years was doing $200 million a year in business and counted McDonald's and Frito-Lay among its customers.
From an 11th floor office on Main Street overlooking the Ohio River, Hornung lorded over a business mini-empire that included real estate and restaurants. Being Paul Hornung remained a valuable resource decades after he retired from football, The Courier Journal wrote.
He also scored big with his second marriage, to Angela DiBonaventura Cerelli, who had been the secretary to the Philadelphia Eagle’s head coach. They met after the 1976 Kentucky Derby.
“She was drop-dead gorgeous and I had a great time, so I invited her to meet me in Baltimore for the Preakness,” he said in “Golden Boy.”
They married three years later.
In 2002, he sold his Heisman Trophy for a reported $250,000 to a New York restaurateur, and used the proceeds to benefit Notre Dame students from Louisville.
“The rings, the trophies, I only got a couple of those things left,” he told David Kindred, then at the Sporting News. “They never meant much to me.”
Four years later, a 7-foot-tall statue of the Golden Boy was unveiled outside of Louisville Slugger Field, as he was surrounded by VIPs and former teammates, including fellow rabble-rouser Max McGee, who called him the best football player who ever played (an honor Hornung always said belonged to Jim Brown).
“He could run, throw, kick, block,” McGee said of Hornung. “Paul could do it all. But boy, you should have seen him after the game. He was twice as good.”
By his mid-70s, Hornung had his right knee replaced, and his right hip. His golden locks had given way to flowing gray hair and he had a “prodigious paunch,” as Tim Layden noted when he caught up with him for Sports Illustrated.
“The debauchery is gone — or most of it — but the joie de vivre Hornung never left his home town,” Layden wrote. Hornung ate lunch every day at the Delta Lounge on Market Street, and played poker at Michael Murphy’s, a bar at Second and Broadway.
In his last act, with the Louisville Sports Commission, he created the Paul Hornung Award, to recognize the most versatile player in college football.
But the old Packers were dying off.
McGee in 2007; Ron Kramer, in 2010, Fuzzie Thurston, in 2014. And in 2016, The Courier Journal’s Tim Sullivan disclosed Hornung was battling dementia.
Hornung had few misgivings, he told Reed in “Golden Boy.” He said he was once asked who he could come back as if he could come back as anyone. He said he’d come back as Paul Hornung.
“Sure, I regret that I got caught gambling and had to sit out the season,” he said, “but I don’t regret being a gambler.”
He said he regretted he hadn’t told Lombardi how much he loved him before the coach died in 1970 from cancer.
He said he knows he wasn’t a good role model for young people during his playing days, but he said, “I’d look like an altar boy if I played today.”
“I never beat up a woman, carried a gun, shot somebody or got arrested for disturbing the peace,” he said. “All I did, really, was seek out fun wherever I could find it. Everything was all tied in together — the drinking, the womanizing, the partying, the traveling, the gambling. And of course, football made it possible.
“How could I possibly be bitter about anything?” he asked. “I really have enjoyed a golden life.”
PAUL HORNUNG'S CAREER CAPSULE
Full Name: Paul Vernon Hornung
Height: 6 ft 2 in
Weight: 215 lb
Birthdate: December 23, 1935
Birthplace: Louisville, Kentucky
High School: Flaget (Louisville, KY)
Elected to Pro Football Hall of Fame: January 25, 1986
Enshrined into Pro Football Hall of Fame: August 2, 1986
Presenter: Max McGee, Former Packers teammate
Other Members of Class of 1986: Ken Houston, Willie Lanier, Fran Tarkenton, Doak Walker
Pro Career: 9 seasons, 104 games
Drafted: 1st round (1st player overall) in 1957 by Green Bay Packers
Uniform Number: 5
Teams:
• Green Bay Packers (1957–1966)
• New Orleans Saints (1967)*
*Offseason and/or practice squad member only
CAREER NFL STATISTICS
• Rushing yards: 3,711
• Rushing touchdowns: 50
• Receiving yards: 1,480
• Receiving touchdowns: 12
• Field goals: 66/140 (47.1%)
• Extra points: 190/194 (97.9%)
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS
• Super Bowl champion (I)
• 4× NFL champion (1961, 1962, 1965, 1966)
• 2× Pro Bowl (1959, 1960)
• 2× First-team All-Pro (1960, 1961)
• Second-team All-Pro (1959)
• NFL Most Valuable Player (1961)
• Bert Bell Award (1961)
• NFL rushing touchdowns leader (1960)
• NFL 1960s All-Decade Team
• Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame
• Heisman Trophy (1956)
• 2× First-team All-America (1955, 1956)
PAUL HORNUNG BY THE NUMBERS
1 — Hornung’s selection in the 1957 NFL Draft. It came down to a coin flip between the Chicago Cardinals and Green Bay Packers for the right to choose first. Hornung hoped for Chicago to win the toss because of better business opportunities and night life, but the Packers won – and ultimately, so did Hornung.
4 — Players in Notre Dame history who finished in the top 5 of the Heisman Trophy balloting in back-to-back seasons. John Lujack was third (1946) and first (1947); John Lattner fifth (1952) and first (1953); Hornung fifth (1955) and first (1956) and Brady Quinn fourth (2005) and third (2006).
5 — Touchdowns scored by Hornung in 1965 during a 42-27 victory over the Baltimore Colts in a 1965 regular season game. The career-high effort was overshadowed by Gale Sayers’ six-touchdown effort in a victory at San Francisco that same day. Whenever he saw Sayers afterwards, Hornung jokingly referred to him as “the upstaging SOB.” Sayers passed away this Sept. 23.
6 — Notre Dame football players enshrined in both the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame. The select company features end Wayne Millner (1933-35), lineman/linebacker George Connor (1946-47), quarterback/halfback/kicker Hornung (1954-56), defensive lineman Alan Page (1964-66), tight end Dave Casper (1971-73) and receiver Tim Brown (1984-87).
7 — Different statistical categories Hornung led Notre Dame in during his senior year when he won the Heisman Trophy: rushing, passing, scoring, kickoff returns, punt returns, punting and passes broken up. He also was second in tackles and interceptions, and caught three passes.
31 — Yards per kickoff return averaged by Hornung as a senior (16 for 496 yards) – a Notre Dame single-season record (minimum 1.5 returns per game) that still stands. At No. 2 is Rocket Ismail in 1989 with a 29.5 average (17 for 505) and No. 3 is Tim Brown in 1986 at 28.6 (27 for 773).
176 — Points scored by Hornung during the 1960 NFL regular season – a record that stood 46 years before getting broke by LaDainian Tomlinson. Hornung scored 15 touchdowns, booted 15 field goals and added 41 PATs. Just as amazing is the point total was accomplished when the NFL was playing just a 12-game regular season.
1,337 — Total offense yards produced by Hornung as a Notre Dame senior, finishing second nationally to Stanford’s John Brodie. As a junior, Hornung finished fifth in the same category with 1,215 yards.
