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Out of the Icebox, Packers and Giants Made the N.F.L. Hot
By BILL PENNINGTON
Published: January 16, 2008, NY Times
It was the day before New Year’s Eve, and New Yorkers were leaving the city in droves. Not to escape Times Square celebrations, but to watch the N.F.L. championship game.
Roughly 45 years ago, on Dec. 30, 1962, the Yankee Stadium championship rematch between the Giants and the Green Bay Packers was blacked out on local television sets. Enterprising fans fled to southern New Jersey, searching for the broadcast from Philadelphia, or to the north to receive the signal from Hartford.
Those who succeeded watched a pivotal piece of American sports history. The N.F.L. might have first grabbed the public’s attention in the late 1950s, but it needed celebrity, personality and recurring characters for its Sunday gridiron theater.
The 1961 and 1962 N.F.L. championship games, each ending with a Green Bay victory over the Giants, had it all. Born on those afternoons was pro football’s first televised dynasty with Vince Lombardi as king, Paul Hornung as prince and Bart Starr as trusted knight. And although the Giants were twice defeated, by 37-0 in 1961 and by 16-7 the next year, they were the franchise that brought an eminence to the clashes. The Giants were established N.F.L. royalty, having played for the championship three times in the previous five years. They would play for it again in 1963.
“Those games really were signature moments at the most critical time in the league’s history,” Willie Davis, an All-Pro defensive tackle for Green Bay in the 1960s, said in a telephone interview Monday. “We were these nobodies from little old Wisconsin, and they were the Giants from big and sophisticated New York. And they were a recognized great team with lots of stars.
“But we had Lombardi, we were determined and we were ready to show it.”
While the Giants and the Packers have not played in the postseason since 1962, they were regular rivals in the earliest years of the N.F.L. who played for the championship for the first time in 1938. The Giants won at the Polo Grounds across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium, 23-17.
By 1961, each franchise had won several championships, but both teams entered that year’s clash looking for redemption. The Packers had lost the championship to the Eagles in Philadelphia the previous season, and the Giants were hoping to expunge the memory of consecutive title game losses to the Baltimore Colts, in 1958 and 1959.
“We had a flashy, explosive team,” said Y. A. Tittle, the quarterback and passing wizard acquired by the Giants in 1961 from San Francisco. “We had a hard-nosed defense, and we were primarily a passing team. We moved that ball down the field pretty good.”
The Giants, starting seven Pro Bowl players and five future Hall of Famers, also had a defense that was, by reputation and statistics, the N.F.L.’s best. Directed by middle linebacker Sam Huff and defensive end Andy Robustelli, the defense was a seasoned group backed by a nimble secondary that had led the team to 33 interceptions.
Green Bay, which would dress 11 future Hall of Fame members, led the league in rushing behind the complementary backfield of Hornung — the stylish, gifted and Heisman Trophy-winning halfback — and Jim Taylor, a punishing and irascible fullback who would chase down defensive backs in the secondary so he could run over them.
“Those two guys were something,” Robustelli said Monday. “In the old days, we diagramed strategies to stop the other team’s top weapons just like they do now. But just like today, sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the other players are great players.”
On the eve of the 1961 championship game, Lombardi, a former Giants assistant, had dinner with several former associates and the co-owner Wellington Mara, who was Lombardi’s former classmate at Fordham University. It was by all accounts a jovial affair, but the Green Bay players knew how serious the game was to their coach.
“After we lost the championship to the Eagles, Coach Lombardi got us together and told us we would never lose another championship game,” Davis said. “And now, here were the Giants, his Giants, right in front of us.”
The weather for the first championship game in Green Bay was, fittingly, cold and blustery. For years afterward, Hornung told the story that he and Taylor emerged for pregame warm-ups wearing short-sleeve T-shirts to taunt the Giants, who were bundled against the freezing temperature. Whether the tactic worked is uncertain, although the game was a mismatch almost from the start, with Hornung and Taylor running wild behind classic Packers sweeps.
Days earlier, Lombardi had pulled some strings to get Hornung released from his Army duties at Fort Riley in Kansas; Lombardi had a personal relationship with President Kennedy and used it to free Hornung for the game. Hornung was on his way to becoming the game’s most valuable player.
After a scoreless first quarter, Hornung ran for a 6-yard touchdown, the first of 24 unanswered Packers points before the half. Hornung would kick three field goals, four extra points and dash for 89 rushing yards. Green Bay’s defense made four interceptions, and the Giants’ offense picked up only six first downs, one by penalty.
Nearly 46 years later, Tittle has a simple appraisal of the game.
“I just think the Packers were the cream of the league that year,” he said. “Now the next year, in 1962, we were the better team.”
The 1962 Giants had an added threat, Frank Gifford, who rejoined the team after retiring before the 1961 season. Gifford played a new position, flanker, and Tittle now had a versatile group of receivers that included the downfield threat Del Shofner, who caught 12 touchdown passes, and the back Alex Webster. The Giants won 12 of 14 regular-season games. The Packers had lost only once.
As the teams prepared for their rematch at Yankee Stadium, the national news media were drawn to the drama and the multiple story lines.
Lombardi, the Brooklyn native who might have someday been the Giants’ coach, was slowly building his legend as a hidden football mastermind who carved a juggernaut out of the frozen Wisconsin countryside. And he kept his New York roots. Lombardi erected a sign in his locker room approaching the 1962 game: “Home of the Green Bay Packers, the Yankees of Football.”
The Giants, meanwhile, were a team of stars. Well before Joe Namath, the Giants had an urban flamboyance and were treated as pop icons in Manhattan’s restaurant and saloon scene. But it had been six years since the last Giants N.F.L. championship, and the roster was aging.
“There was a sense that we had to make up for last year,” Tittle said. “We were confident. Then I woke up the next day and saw that the weather had completely changed.”
With the temperature in the teens and an icy wind estimated at 30 miles an hour or more, Yankee Stadium became an icebox for the players and 64,892 fans. Many players said it was the coldest they had ever been in a game, including the celebrated Ice Bowl in Green Bay five years later. Both teams came out with cleatless, rubber-soled shoes, trying to combat a field likened to a frozen parking lot.
“I remember the first pass Y. A. threw me; it was a simple square out,” Gifford said Tuesday. “The wind took it, and the ball sailed way over my head. Y. A. was a great, precise passer. One of the Packers, I don’t remember who, turned to me and said, ‘It’s going to be a long day, Frank.’ ”
Tittle added: “We were a passing team, and they were a running team and they had the advantage. That ice storm was a very unlucky thing for us.”
The game became a riveting, if primitive, hand-to-hand, facemask-to-facemask struggle, with Taylor pushing forward for 85 critical rushing yards. Gifford said the Giants tried to alter their game plan, but without success. Tittle’s deep passing game was useless. Packers linebacker Ray Nitschke deflected one Tittle pass that became an interception and recovered two fumbles. Starr was steady as usual, and Packers guard Jerry Kramer kicked three field goals, replacing Hornung, who had injured his foot. The Giants scored their only touchdown on a blocked punt in the Green Bay end zone.
In the end, the Packers endured and Lombardi’s gap-toothed grin filled the screen on America’s television sets yet again.
The Giants would return to the N.F.L. championship for a third successive year the next winter, losing in Chicago, 14-10. The team would not return to the playoffs for 18 years. The 1964 season was the last for Tittle, Gifford, Robustelli and Webster.
“We had some terrific seasons, and those championship games were so intense it made American sports fans stop and notice the N.F.L.,” Robustelli said. “They were like heavyweight fights.”
Davis recalled the flight back to Green Bay from New York.
“We knew no one could call our 1961 win a fluke, and we felt we were building something special,” he said of the Packers, who went on to win three more N.F.L. championships in the decade and two Super Bowls. “The Giants were a marker, a model team for the league, and beating them twice put us on the sports map, literally. People had to go look where Green Bay was.
“So we sat back on that plane, and we thought about what we accomplished. It was a great feeling. I can remember it as if it was yesterday.”
Lest anyone think otherwise, old rivalries still die hard. Asked if he would be watching the first Packers-Giants playoff game in 45-plus years on Sunday, Tittle answered, “Yes, and it’s about time for the Giants to beat the Packers.”
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