Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).

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When Pride Still Mattered

Simon & Schuster

Chapter 24: Ice

Ed Sabol could not sleep the night before a title game. He and his son Steve had been working pro football championships for NFL Films since 1962, and every year he was nervous, as if he had never done this before. Were his cameras in the right locations? Would there be a dramatic story line? Would the weather create problems again? By seven on the morning of December 31, 1967, he already had been awake for two hours, and now he was standing at the window of his hotel room, staring out into the northern darkness. Friday seemed unforgiving in Green Bay, with heavy snow and a fierce wind, but on Saturday there was a brilliant winter sun and the temperature had soared toward thirty. Local forecasters had predicted more of the same for today's one o'clock game.

The telephone rang. Steve, who had been asleep in the other bed, fumbled for the receiver.

"Good morning, Mr. Sabol."

The wake-up message came in a gentle singsong voice.

"It is sixteen degrees below zero and the wind is out of the north. Now have a nice day."

"Dad," Steve said. "You're not going to believe this!"

The same words of disbelief were being uttered all over town. The phone at Paul's Standard station on South Broadway had started ringing at five that morning, and the overnight man couldn't handle it, so Paul Mazzoleni went in himself and took to the streets with his tow truck and jumper cables. One of his first stops was at Willie Wood's. The free safety was standing next to his dead car, shivering, convinced that even when Mazzoleni brought his frozen battery back to life he was not going anywhere. "It's just too cold to play," Wood said. "They're gonna call this game off. They're not going to play in this." Chuck Mercein, the new man on the Packers, brought in at midseason to help fortify the depleted backfield, was alone in his apartment, semiconscious; his clock radio had just gone off. Had he really just heard someone say it was thirteen below? He must have misunderstood. Wasn't it near thirty when he went to bed? He called the airport weather station to see if he had been dreaming. "You heard it right. It's thirteen below and it may get colder."

Lee Remmel of the Press-Gazette had arranged a ride to the stadium with a cityside writer, one of eleven reporters the home paper had assigned to the game. His colleague called at seven with the question, "Lee, do you know what the temperature is?" Remmel guessed twenty. No. Twenty-five? Go look at the thermometer. "I was aghast," he recalled. "The weatherman had been predicting twenty." Chuck Lane, the Packers' young publicist, had grown up in Minnesota and was familiar with the telltale sounds of severe winter in the northland. As soon as he stepped out of his downtown apartment on Washington Street, he knew this was serious. "You can tell when it's cold by the sound of your foot in the snow. I could tell by the first stride that this was damn cold. The sound has got a different crunch to it." By his second stride he could feel something else -- "the fuzz in your nose froze up."

Dick Schaap led a foursome of New Yorkers out to Green Bay for the big game, which he hoped would provide a narrative climax for the book he was writing with Jerry Kramer. As he and his editor, Bob Gutwillig, and their wives were driving downtown for breakfast, Schaap noticed the temperature reading on the side of a bank. It was -13. "Look, it's broken," he said. He had never before seen a negative temperature and assumed that the bank got it wrong. Dave Robinson was in his kitchen, eating his traditional pregame meal: scrambled eggs, the filet of a twenty-ounce T-bone steak, toast, tea with honey. His little twin boys hovered in the next room, waiting for their dad to leave so they could eat the rest of the steak. His wife came in and gave him a kiss. "It's twenty below out there," she said. "Twenty above, you mean," Robinson said. "Can't be twenty below."

There was a full house at Sunset Circle. Susan lived at home again after a short and unhappy stint at a Dominican-run secretarial school in Boca Raton. Vincent and Jill came down from St. Paul, and now they had two boys, Vincent II and John. Vincent was working days and going to law school at night. The father-son relationship had developed another odd twist. Vince rarely had time to watch Vincent play in college, but now he insisted that Vincent attend as many Packers games as possible. Lombardi the family man? Partly, no doubt, but there was also a measure of superstition involved. The Packers had won a key game the year before when Vincent was there, and ever since the Old Man thought of him as a talisman. Vincent loved football, he had grown up standing on the sidelines, but sometimes this good-luck business seemed more for his dad's benefit than his own.

At his father's request, he had once boarded a flight in St. Paul during a heavy storm to attend a game in Green Bay. The plane was diverted to Milwaukee and he ended up studying his law books and watching the Packers on television at the airport. Another time he brought Jill along for a preseason game in Milwaukee. They had left the boys with a babysitter and were excited about having a night alone at the Pfister Hotel. At dinner after the game, Vincent and Jill were startled to hear the Old Man suddenly announce "We're going home!"

"Jeez, Dad, it's kind of late," Vincent pleaded.

"I'll drive halfway and you drive halfway," Lombardi said, and that was that. Vincent and Jill packed up, and soon they were in the car with Vince and Marie, heading north to Green Bay. Five miles up the highway, Lombardi pulled over. "My knees are killing me," he said to Vincent. "You drive."

Maybe it had all done some good. The Packers had finished in first place again. They had finished first in the newfangled Central Division of the Western Conference with a 9-4-1 record, and then whipped the Los Angeles Rams in the playoff game for the western title. Critics were saying that the Packers were too old and slow aside from their one breathtaking rookie, Travis Williams, known as The Roadrunner, a return specialist who had run four kickoffs back for touchdowns, including two against the Browns in one game. Yet here they were, back in the championship, playing for their record third straight NFL title against the Dallas Cowboys. If standing on the sideline in subzero weather this afternoon could help them win one more time, Vincent was game.

Not much was said about the temperature in the Lombardi house. There was little talking about the game at all that morning. "Everybody was very uptight," Susan recalled. Vincent II had been up all night with a fever, distracting everyone, including the coach, who patted his grandson on the head before leaving for church. The cars were in the heated garage; Vince's Pontiac started right up. Silence on the way to mass. The priest prayed for the Packers. All quiet on the way back. Then Vince and Vincent left, driving clockwise south to the bridge crossing the Fox in downtown De Pere, then west to Highway 41, north to the Highland Avenue exit and east to Lambeau Field.

The Sabols were already there, positioning eleven cameramen around the stadium. They sent a technician up to the scoreboard to place a microphone near a camera that peeked through one of the number holes. When it came time for a pregame group meeting, one member of the crew was missing. What happened? He had brought a flask with him and had taken a few shots of...