December 26, 1960—The National Football League’s past met its future—and, for once, the past won. On their home turf at Franklin Field, the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Green Bay Packers, 17-13.
The Eagles, winning their third NFL championship, had reached the summit--and a couple of people associated with the team, perhaps sensing it, decided to leave while they were on top. Head coach Buck Shaw and quarterback Norm Van Brocklin, the league’s MVP, both announced afterward that they were retiring. And though he would stay another two seasons, Chuck Bednarik, the team’s versatile center-linebacker, would be the league’s last “two-way man.” By the 1962 season, age and injuries would send the Eagles hurtling down to last place.
The cellar was where the Packers had long resided, but everything was different now under head coach Vince Lombardi (in the image accompanying this post, of course). The team, posting only a 1-10-1 record under predecessor Ray “Scooter” McLean in 1958, had responded to the constant prodding of Lombardi—previously, an assistant coach for the New York Giants and, further back, head coach at my high school, St. Cecilia’s of Englewood, N.J.—with their first winning record in 12 seasons the next year (7-5). Then, in 1960, they won their first division title in 16 years.
In a December 26, 1960 preview of the championship game, Sports Illustrated writer Tex Maule, noting that the Packers were “a sound football team,” still accurately predicted that they would have trouble with “Van Brocklin’s keen, probing aerial game.” And so it came to be—but not, however, before The Pack gave Eagles fans some serious heart palpitations.
The Packers actually outgained their veteran opponents and bested them in time of possession. Two Eagle turnovers early in the going gave the Packers terrific opportunities, but all they could come away with were three points.
It turned out, then, that a 13-10 Packer lead late in the game turned out to be too precarious to maintain. A 58-yard Ted Dean kickoff return put the Eagles deep in Packer territory, giving “The Dutchman” Van Brocklin time to pick apart the Packer defense. Seven plays later, Dean made it into the end zone on a five-yard sweep.
One minute and twenty seconds remained on the clock as the Packers’ QB, Bart Starr—hailed by Maule as “the smartest (academically speaking) quarterback in the business”—tried to engineer his own drive. He almost pulled it off, too, marching the team down the field until the final dramatic play of the game.
The Packers were on the Eagles’ 22-yard line when Starr, noticing that everyone else was covered, threw a swing pass to rugged fullback Jim Taylor. You can see the action without benefit of highlight films through the words of the peerless Red Smith: “That wonderful running back ducked his head like a charging bull, bolted like an enraged beer truck into Philadelphia‘s congested secondary, twisted, staggered, bucked and wrestled one step at a time.”
Taylor managed to get to the nine-yard line and would have made it into the end zone but for Bednarik. The latter, 35 years old, pressed into service by Coach Shaw to play both sides of the line because of injuries, had already played 58 minutes of the game when he had his appointment with destiny.
A Bednarik hit earlier that year, on Frank Gifford, was so ferocious that the Giant running back was out of commission for 18 months. But his tackle now, against Taylor, was more significant.
"The tackle I made on (Jim) Taylor was the greatest play I ever made," Bednarik later remembered (in an interview posted on the Eagles' Web site). "When I saw him swing out of the backfield I took off. After catching the (Bart Starr) pass I tackled him to the ground and started watching the clock: four... three ... two ... One.”
At last, hearing the gun go off, Bednarik relented: "Taylor, you can get up now. This ****** game is over!"
A dejected Taylor lay on the ground for a full half-minute before rising from the turf. As David Maraniss relates the scene in his great biography of Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, his injured backfield teammate, Paul Hornung (whom I wrote about last week), came over to console him when Bednarik wrapped his arms around the two younger men, saying “they had a helluva football team and would be back in the championship the next year.”
Lombardi--and his team--felt the same way. In the somber lockerroom afterward, the coach abandoned the barking tones his players had gotten used to for the last two seasons and addressed them quietly and matter-of-factly. At the start of the game, he said, they might not have felt confident against a veteran team, but now they knew they could hold their own. “This will never happen again,” he assured them. “You will never lose another championship.”
And that’s how it turned out throughout the rest of Lombardi’s tenure as head coach of the team, which eventually won five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls. In 1971, the year after his death, Lombardi was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, followed by nine of his players from that 1960 youthful dynasty-in-the-making: Taylor, Starr, Hornung, Forrest Gregg, Ray Nitschke, Willie Davis, Jim Ringo, Willie Wood, and Henry Jordan.
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