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MagicMtnDan
12-31-2003, 10:59 AM
The Day Green Bay Froze Over
By JOHN WIEBUSCH
'The Ice Bowl'
There is no place anywhere like Lambeau Field and no fans anywhere like Green Bay fans and no energy any place on earth like the two come together for an afternoon of fun and games. And if the Packer team is a good one and if the game is an important one and if the weather is inhospitable to all but the locals -- because Lord knows they can handle anything -- then you have the makings of epic outdoor theater.
On December 31, 1967 -- in the memory of the mind variously yesterday and a third of a century ago -- the Team of Tomorrow, the Dallas Cowboys, were in Wisconsin to play the Team of Yesterday, the Green Bay Packers, for the championship of the National Football League.
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The evening before, the two coaches, Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry, got together for a drink at LombardiÂ’s house. It was that kind of league then. Imagine the two Super Bowl coaches getting together for a drink the Saturday night before the game now. (YouÂ’re right: ItÂ’s not even imaginable.)
Lombardi and Landry had worked together on the New York GiantsÂ’ staff a decade earlier. They talked about those days. They talked about the NFL Championship Game a year ago (the Packers had held off the Cowboys 34-27 in Dallas, then defended the honor of the league against the AFL in the first World Championship Game). They talked about their game tomorrow and they agreed they thought it would be another great one. They wished each other good luck. They embraced.
It was 20 degrees above zero, cold but tolerable for the last week of December. Besides, Lombardi recently had had a state-of-the-art heating system installed in the Lambeau turf. Even if the air were cold, the field would be warm, the grass playing surface soft and normal.
Lombardi had more concerns about whether his aging team would have what was needed against the younger Cowboys. The Packers were seeking an unprecedented third consecutive NFL title and fifth in seven years but this team was an echo of Packers past.
To cite two examples, halfback Paul Hornung was retired and fullback Jim Taylor now played in New Orleans, and their roles were filled by Donny Anderson and Chuck Mercein. Hornung and Taylor were headed for the Hall of Fame; Anderson and Mercein were not. Other key talent either had left, or was thinking rocking chair.
The Packers had looked vulnerable in a 9-4-1 regular season, but Lombardi still had a handful of superstars who had helped deliver championships in 1961, 1962, 1965, and 1966, including—and most important—quarterback Bart Starr, a week away from his thirty-fourth birthday but still the peerless leader.
“All week long Coach Lombardi had pointed out how good the Cowboys were,” Starr says, “and what respect he had for them. We had a great game plan going in…and of course we knew it was going to be a special game. Of course, we had no idea just how special it would be.”
The weather forecast for Green Bay -- the lead story on the 10 p.m. news on all the local stations the night before -- called for a low of 12 degrees that night and a high of 25 degrees for the big game at Lambeau. Skies would be sunny and clear. On the last day of 1967, perfect football weather.
During the night, the fates -- and a cold front whipped by fierce northerly winds -- made mockery of the meteorologists.
When Dallas quarterback Don Meredith got an 8 a.m. wake-up call, he was told the temperature was 19 below zero. “Y’all are kidding, right?” he gasped. The man on the other end of the line said he wished he were. See, he was going to the game, too.
Lombardi was as shocked as anyone when he stepped outside his home to drive to Lambeau. “This will be some test for the heating system,” he told his wife, Marie. “Feel sorry for me freezing in the box,” she said, shivering.
The groundskeepers at Lambeau had some bad news for Lombardi when he walked out of the tunnel. They had turned on the heating system at 9 a.m., and it seemed to work briefly. Then something happened -- who knew what? -- and the field had frozen solid in minutes.
Lombardi muttered an expletive, then huddled briefly with NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm. There was no question: The show would go on. The commitment to CBS was too big to think about a postponement.
At game time, the temperature had risen to 13 below zero but the wind chill was a positively Siberian 38 below. It was the biggest game day chill in NFL history and most frigid December 31 even Green Bay had experienced.
Chuck Mercein, a Yale graduate who had been picked up from the Giants for the $100 waiver fee early in the season, said of the field, “Astroturf was like a pillow compared to this. This was like jagged concrete.”
Every one of Lambeau’s 50,861 seats was filled with Packer faithful, the vapor from their collective breaths hanging over the stands. For much of the game, a good share of the crowd, which was as loud and boisterous as a mitten-clad crowd could be, was obscured by its own breath condensation. “It was surreal,” said Frank Gifford, a member of the CBS crew.
“Those people were tough to stay out there and watch that game,” said Dallas cornerback Cornell Green. “There are some tough and loyal fans in Green Bay.”
Packers center Ken Bowman said, “When you’re down on the field you’re moving around, building up some heat. To sit in the stands had to be sheer torture.”
Norm Schachter was the referee. He tested his whistle an hour before the game. Ten minutes later it had frozen up. Schachter had to use shouts instead of whistles during the game.
In the press box, writers in the first row were given scrapers to periodically remove ice from the inside of the box windows. The tiny space heaters were virtually useless. Cups of coffee froze within minutes, and even some typewriters were challenged.
On the sidelines, many photographersÂ’ cameras froze, not to mention many photographersÂ’ fingers.
Marie Lombardi was in the owners’ box, but the conditions there were as primitive as they were in the press box. “It was miserable,” she said later. “But I stuck it out like everyone else.”
In those days, the NFL Championship Game rotated annually between the Eastern and Western Conference winners, and in 1967 it was the Western Conference winnerÂ’s turn to play host. The crowd and the weather should have given the home team major advantages and it worked that way for the better part of 15 minutes.
Green Bay held a 14-0 lead early in the second quarter on two touchdown passes from Starr to split end Boyd Dowler.
But the Cowboys took advantage of a pair of Packer fumbles -- one by Starr that defensive end George Andre converted into a touchdown -- to score 10 points and cut the Green Bay lead to 14-10 at halftime.
Cowboys defensive tackle Bob Lilly remembers, “There were icicles hanging from our noses as we headed to the locker room at halftime. The field was just total solid ice. I think we were all in shock.”
There was no halftime show. Most of the instruments -- including all of the horns and reeds -- had frozen.
Packers guard Jerry Kramer says he remembers thinking to himself at the start of the second half: “There are two ways you can approach the rest of this game: If you think about the weather and how cold and miserable it is, you are going to lose. If you think of the game and your job and focus on that, then you can overcome the elements.”
On the first play of the fourth quarter, Landry reached into his bag of tricks for a little razzle-dazzle. Halfback Dan Reeves (who later would win 200 games as a coach) combined with wide receiver Lance Rentzel on a 50-yard touchdown pass. Dallas led 17-14.
“What everyone forgets about now,” Starr says, “and even to a degree then, is how extraordinarily well the Cowboys played. For a team from another climate zone, they played their hearts out.”
After StarrÂ’s two touchdown passes, Green Bay went more than 37 frozen minutes without scoring.
But with 5:04 left to play, the Packers took over on their own 32: sixty-eight yards of manifest destiny away from the CowboysÂ’ end zone.
Starr remembers it as if it were yesterday. Barely a week away from his 70th birthday and living in Montgomery, Alabama, he says, “I didn’t have to say a thing in the huddle when that drive began. The resolve was so strong and so firm on the faces of the linemen…of everyone. We knew what we had to do.”
And they did it. Piece by piece, play by play, yard by yard, and ultimately inch by inchÂ…one of the great drives in the history of football.
Starr was literal perfection when the pressure was tightest, completing all five of his passes for 59 yards -- three to Donny Anderson and one each to Mercein and Dowler. Mercein had runs of 7 and 8 yards, the latter to the CowboysÂ’ 3-yard-line with 1:11 left to play.
It was second-and-two from the 3, and the crowd howled.
“Because everyone was so bundled, the crowd noise was all vocal,” Starr says, “but was it ever loud! And when we ran Donny Anderson on our Wedge play for the first down to the one, it got even louder.”
The Packers then tried the same play two more times: Anderson was stopped for no gain on first downÂ…and Anderson slipped at the one for no gain on second down.
On third down, Starr called the PackersÂ’ final time out and went to the sideline to talk with Lombardi. There were 20 seconds left to play.
“I told Coach Lombardi I thought we should run the same Wedge play again,” Starr says. “Only this time I should keep the ball because our running backs weren’t getting any traction on the hard surface. Coach nodded and said, ‘Then run it and let’s get the hell out of here.’”
Starr was the ultimate quarterback as game strategist and he loves to ruminate on the long ago afternoon. “We had noticed in preparation -- and had exploited it earlier in the game—that Jethro Pugh, the Cowboys’ great tackle, was so big that he couldn’t get all the way down when he lined up, so blockers could get under him.”
Right guard Kramer and center Ken Bowman lifted Pugh back, and Starr rose up and slipped between them into the end zone. There were 16 seconds on the clock. Green Bay had won 21-17 in the game that would forever be known as the Ice Bowl.
“It was a thrill to last a lifetime,” Starr says of the play that gave the Packers their third consecutive NFL title and sent them to Super Bowl II in Miami (and a victory over Oakland in what would be Lombardi’s final game as Green Bay coach).
In the locker room, Lombardi was asked about the decision to go for the touchdown instead of a game-tying field goal and overtime.
“Why not?” he said. “Hadn’t those brave fans suffered enough in this weather? I wanted the touchdown so everyone could go home and get warm. I am a man of compassion, you know.”

Blown 472
12-31-2003, 11:04 AM
No need to remember, it gets relived every ****ing day here.:rolleyes:

MagicMtnDan
12-31-2003, 11:09 AM
Originally posted by Blown 472
No need to remember, it gets relived every ****ing day here.:rolleyes:
Where is "here?"

Blown 472
12-31-2003, 11:23 AM
Wisconsin