George Bozeka - The 1966 Green Bay Packers: Profiles of Vince Lombardis Super Bowl I Champions

Associate Editors
Mark Ford, Denis Crawford and John Maxymuk

GREAT TEAMS IN PRO FOOTBALL HISTORY

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

All photographs are from the Green Bay Packers unless otherwise stated. Photographer credits given when known.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2442-6

2016 Professional Football Research Association. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: MVP quarterback Bart Starr and the Green Bay Packers facing off against the Kansas City Chiefs in the first Super Bowl on January 15, 1967 (Photograph by Vernon Biever)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To Bob Carroll, founder of the Professional Football
Researchers Association and the father of
professional football research

George Bozeka

This book project has been a collaborative effort of the Professional Football Researchers Association. I would like to thank our board of directors and membership for accepting my vision of a Great Teams in Pro Football History book series and making this book about the 1966 Green Bay Packers the initial book in this planned series. Special thanks to Chris Willis and Mark Durr for their helpful guidance through the development and completion of this project.

Thanks to all our contributors for their commitment and for the many hours they spent researching, writing, and rewriting the biographies and features included in this book.

I would like to thank Jon Kendle of the Ralph Wilson, Jr., Pro Football Research and Preservation Center at the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Cliff Christl, the Packers team historian, for their help in providing archived files to our contributors. I would also like to thank Aaron Popkey, the director of public affairs for the Packers, and his public affairs intern Katie Hermsen for their help in compiling head shots from the Packers archives for use in this book. An additional thank you to Steve Raymer and the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting for providing a head shot of broadcasting legend Ray Scott.

Heartfelt thanks to Jim Biever and the Biever family for giving us special access to the extraordinary archives of the late Packers photographer Vernon Biever and for allowing us to use his images in this book. Special thanks to Matt Foss for acting as our liaison to Jim and the Biever family.

I would like to thank Kenneth R. Crippen for organizing interviews of many of the surviving members of the 1966 Packers. Donny Anderson, Zeke Bratkowski, Carroll Dale, Willie Davis, Dave Hathcock, Jerry Kramer, Bob Long, Red Mack, Jim Taylor, Phil Vandersea, Steve Wright, and Packers journalist Bud Lea generously made time in their busy schedules to share their recollections with our contributors. Further thanks to former Packer Bob Hyland and Bob Jeters son Rob, the former head basketball coach at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, for making themselves available for interviews.

Thanks to Rick Schabowski for spending countless hours researching newspaper and video archives for the project and making his detailed work available to our contributors. Thanks also to Tracy Thibeau for the research work he did on Packer Tom Brown.

Finally, thanks to associate editors Denis Crawford, Mark L. Ford, and John Maxymuk for their help during the editing process. Special thanks to Mark for providing additional research materials to many of our contributors, and a very special thank you to John, my right hand throughout this project.

George Bozeka

It is impossible to chronicle professional football in America without huge chapters on Vince Lombardi and his great Green Bay Packers teams of the 1960s. His 1966 squad is key to the narrative as the winners of the first AFL/NFL World Championship Game, ushering in the Super Bowl era of the National Football League. From its rather humble beginning during the 1966 season, the Super Bowl has morphed into the largest carnival in professional sports.

What makes the history of the 1966 team so compelling is not only Lombardi but the great cast of players. From Lionel Aldridge to Tommy Joe Crutcher to Willie Davis to Dave Hathcock to Ray Nitschke to Bart Starr to Willie Wood, the people and their exploits on the field are enlightening, entertaining, and inspirational.

The winning isnt everything, its the only thing mantra attributed to Lombardi and his great Packer teams is only part of the narrative. Striving for excellence is without question the foundation of the Lombardi Packers, but there are other prevalent themes: the importance of team over the individual, the shared love, faith, and respect of the Packer teammates and their coaches, and the color blind culture of the team and their coach.

Lombardi ultimately taught his players life lessons. They were philosophies that served them well on the gridiron and in life after football. Player after player went on to lead accomplished and successful lives after their playing careers were over. They not only won championships on the field, they were also Super Bowl winners in life.

This book project had its beginning in 2012 when I purchased a book at my local Barnes and Noble about the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. It was part of a Memorable Teams in Baseball History series produced by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). That book and series got me thinking that a similar series on football teams would be a great project for the Professional Football Researchers Association (PFRA). The PFRA is a nonprofit corporation that was founded and organized in 1979 in Canton, Ohio, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The purposes of the organization are to foster the study of professional football as a significant cultural and athletic institution; to establish an accurate historical account of professional football; and to disseminate research information. I presented my idea to the PFRA board of directors and membership at the 2014 Biennial Meeting, which was held in Cleveland at the Browns Training Facility and FirstEnergy Stadium. The board and membership generously approved the project and decided that a book about the 1966 Green Bay Packers should be the first in the planned series. The 1966 Packers, winners of the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game (Super Bowl I), seemed an obvious choice, as the PFRA planned to hold its 2016 Biennial Meeting at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Packers Super Bowl victory.

This book offers a complete history of the 1966 Packers, including coach and player biographies, game summaries and statistics, and thematic essays about the Packers ownership structure, training camp and the preseason, the draft, how the team was built, the taxi squad, Lambeau Field, Milwaukee County Stadium, and race and the Packers. Finally, biographies of key media personalities that covered the team, including photographer Vernon Biever, make up the remainder of the book.