The classroom was at the end of a short, wide hallway, on the right-hand side. That much I remember.
But was I in sixth grade or seventh? Was the teacher named Kline? Adams? Something else? A half-century has clouded my memory of that long-ago English class, and my weathered Milton Hershey School yearbook offers only scant clues. What I do know is that the assignment one day was an essay. Our choice.
I picked the Ice Bowl.
The 1967 NFL Championship Game between the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, played only a year or two earlier in the Arctic conditions of Green Bay’s Lambeau Field, was already well on its way to becoming the stuff of legend. So I wrote about it in the overwrought way an adolescent male would write about such things — about Packers quarterback Bart Starr barking signals into the “cool, crisp air” (groan) before he followed Jerry Kramer into the end zone for the winning touchdown with 13 seconds left, and so on and so forth.
Then I had to stand up before my classmates and read it. And a strange thing happened. They clapped.
It’s entirely possible I would have embarked on the same career path I ultimately chose, had that not happened. But certainly that reinforced the idea that writing might be a viable alternative. I mean, picture yourself at that age. Everybody is seeking direction, validation. And in my case, there it was. I’ve never forgotten it, and I never will. Indeed, I never want to.
Moral of the story, then: Starr was capable of inspiring people well beyond the city limits of Green Bay, Wis.
He died Sunday at age 85, and by all accounts was a good and decent man, in addition to being one of the pillars of those Vince Lombardi-coached teams of the 1960s. They won five championships in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls, and Starr was the MVP of each of the latter two games.
He would go on to coach the team (though not successfully), and in his later years became a keeper of the flame, a touchstone to the franchise’s golden era. Brett Favre revered him. So too did Aaron Rodgers. And in the wake of his passing many others came forward with warm memories of Starr, including Fran Tarkenton and Troy Aikman. Andrew Brandt, who served in the Packers’ front office well after Starr’s career ended, tweeted that he “left a trail of happiness.”
His own trail had been considerably more difficult. As related by ESPN’s Ian O’Connor, Starr was ridden hard in his youth by his father, a former Air Force master sergeant. Bart also lost a brother to tetanus and, years later, a son to drug addiction. As for his NFL career, he began it inauspiciously, as a 17th-round draft pick in 1956, and didn’t gain traction until his fourth year, when Lombardi, a former New York Giants assistant, arrived.
Starr has often told the story about Lombardi’s first team meeting; I heard him tell it myself in the days before Super Bowl 40, when all of the MVPs from the previous Supes were invited to Detroit, site of that year’s game, between Pittsburgh and Seattle. Sitting on a riser in a hotel ballroom with a handful of reporters before him, he clearly relished the memory of Lombardi saying that the Packers were going to “relentlessly chase perfection,” knowing full well they could not attain it. Along the way, however, they would catch excellence.
That turned out to be spot on, and Starr was as big a reason as anyone. Named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977, he was known for his accuracy and leadership, and his ability to find common ground with the head coach. He frequently related another story over the years, about approaching Lombardi to tell him that while he didn’t mind being chewed out, his leadership would be compromised if the fiery coach continued to do so in front of the team. So Lombardi agreed to keep those exchanges behind closed doors.
The result was a Brady-Belichick-like collaboration. Which brings us back to the Ice Bowl, and one final memory. With Green Bay on the Dallas 1 and 16 seconds left, Starr called the Packers’ last timeout. At the sideline he told Lombardi the playcall — a run called “31 Wedge” — was fine, but that the backs kept slipping on the icy turf as they approached the line of scrimmage. Starr suggested that if he kept the ball himself he could shuffle into the end zone behind Kramer, the right guard.
Lombardi’s response?
“Run it, and let’s get the hell outta here.”
So Starr did. And the repercussions were felt far and wide. Even a year or two later, in a classroom in Hershey, Pa.