Mike Shropshire - The Ice Bowl: The Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys Season of 1967

Diversion Books
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Copyright 1997 by Mike Shropshire
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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First Diversion Books edition September 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-432-5

Last winter a Green Bay football player from the Vince Lombardi era told me (off the record), Every couple of years I go back to a Packers reunion. A lot of those guys cant even remember their ex-wifes first name, but they could tell you what they had for breakfast on the morning of the Ice Bowl game.

In the course of compiling the research for this book, the topic of the players wives, ex or otherwise, never came up. But I was astonished at how vividly the players of both the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys recalled the details of a day and a football game that happened almost thirty years earlier. As a historical episode in American sports culture, the 1967 Green Bay-Dallas NFL championship clash not only withstands the test of time but in the minds of many stands out as the most memorable pro football game ever played.

The bulk of the material in this book was assembled from interviews, some in person but most on the telephone, with a few dozen individuals who were somehow involved with that game.

Other details and quotes were collected from four books: The Crunch, by Pat Toomay, Vince Lombardi on Football, The Packer Scrapbook, by George Flynn, and Vince, by Michael OBrien.

Additional source material previously appeared in Time, Newsweek, and Marketplace magazines, and one quote was taken from an article by Tom Peeler that appeared in D Magazine that he, in turn, had extracted from a book, The Murchisons, by Jane Wolfe. Also, substantial information was collected from the following newspapers: Chicago Tribune, New York Herald-Tribune, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Sacramento Bee, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Milwaukee Journal, Milwaukee Sentinel, Green Bay Press-Gazette, Dallas Morning News, Dallas Times-Herald, Los Angeles Times, and Fort Worth Press.

Finally, a few parts of this book were the product of my own recollections and from several exhibits at the Packer Hall of Fame in Green Bay.

I wish to acknowledge the considerable assistance of personnel at the public libraries in Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Dallas and offer special gratitude to Tex Schramm, Forrest Gregg, Lee Remmel, Bart Starr, and his administrative assistant, Michelle Warren, who were particularly generous with their time. It is important, too, that I thank my wife and personal trainer, Karen G. Shropshire, whose technical American language expertise absolutely blows me away.

A simple declaration of intentionthat I planned to view 1997s Super Bowl XXXI on a big-screen television set from some location in the saloon district of Green Bay, Wisconsinattracted gapes and stares of pure bemusement from colleagues and uninvolved onlookers in Dallas. They would break off eye contact and shake their heads, as if I had announced plans to begin clog-dancing lessons.

Why would anybody venture up there to witness this event when he could experience an on-site viewing down in Nawlins, where the practitioner of hedonist pursuit can experience the titillation of having his billfold lifted on a stroll through the French Quarter?

In a year in which the top sports movie of the year, Jerry Maguire, depicts the story of a sports agent (key line in the movie: Show me the money), that good old Pride of Yankees mentality continues to prevail in Green Bay. Entry into a time warp like this can serve only to resuscitate the jaded soul of the city boy.

My desire to journey to Green Bay in January, on the eastern shore of the No-Frills State, was twofold. First, I felt that I could easily obtain seating, or at least standing room, in the saloon district of Green Bay. Information persisted that the entire community was composed of nothing much other than a saloon district. Some locals themselves describe Green Bay as a drinking town with a football problem. So at least I could get in. The same could not be said for the actual Packers-Patriots game, the Super Bowl in the Super Dome, and in recent years, Ive been told, that the game itself has become a party that is harder and harder to crash.

Reason number two for the Green Bay journey: Now that the Super Bowl annually takes on spiritual implications, the choice seemed aesthetically realistic. Where would you rather encounter the rapture of Easter SundayVatican City or Las Vegas?

Because of the long-awaited Packers appearance in pro footballs winter carnival, the spirit of resurrection reigned rich across the land, or at least in Green Bay, where the holy specter of Vince Lombardi appeared poised to live again. After a twenty-nine-year hiatus, the Pack was returning to the January spectacle that it had inaugurated. Somehow the notion of witnessing something like that emerged as a pageant more meaningful in the lengthening shadows of Lambeau Field than amid the sounds of Dixieland clarinets and the smell of crawfish gumbo.

Beyond that, another and much more profound urge had taken form. For a football fan (well, lets not use the word fankeenly interested observer is closer to the case), a yearning to transfuse the soul with something wholesome was becoming hard to resist.

A stifling soot had settled over life in the football streets of Dallas. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, a man seemingly consumed by a profound measure of hubris, had attained a new negative popularity rating. The nature of the cupidity attached to the attainment of the endorsement contracts with Pepsi and Nike had soured even some Cowboys fans, and this in a city not exactly renowned for begrudging a man trying to make a buck.

So when Michael Irvin was indicted and facing trial after being nailed in a hotel room with a parcel of drugs and two topless dancers, the civic anthem became: Didja hear what Jones told Irvin? He said, No, no, Michael. I said Pepsi and Nike, not coke and nookie. Haw. Haw. Haw. Irvin, alleged national role model and a living end-zone idol in North Texas, presented himself before a grand jury attired in furs and baubles that he appeared to have obtained at a Zsa Zsa Gabor estate sale. One wondered whether the grand jury had leveled its indictment against an alleged drug offender or his fashion statement.

In July, my job for the month was to cover Irvins trial for a Dallas-based sports-talk radio station. Prosecution evidence came delivered daily to the courtroom in a brown paper Food Lion grocery bag. The jury got to see a fair-sized bundle of white powder and some baggies of dope. After Irvin entered a no-contest plea at midtrial, the jury was deprived of the chance to inspect other items in the grocery bagsome sex toys confiscated by the cops on the night of the bust. Notable among the inventory was a vibrator device that could be operated via remote control, a tribute to the cutting-edge technology from Pacific Rim nations.

A member of the battalion of lawyers representing the man known as the Playmaker informed me: Michaels problem isnt drugs. Its women. So finally I told him, Look, Wilt Chamberlain has claimed that he slept with over twenty thousand women. Thats the world record, and not you or anybody else is ever going to break it, so why try? Michael looked disappointed at first and said, Look, man. Im only thirty. Ill say this for Michael, the lawyer went on, hes got a world of pride.