QB dove forever into fans' hearts
It is early summer, and from the press box high atop Lambeau Field, it appears a bunch of children are running around down on the grass.
In fact, they are mostly adults, and they are on an official tour of the facility — but this is the highlight.
It’s one thing to see the Hall of Fame and the Packers locker room, but this is what many of them have been dreaming of doing.
The gaggle of kids and grown-ups gathers at the south end of the stadium, clustering around the goal-line area.
And then, one by one, they step up.
They take a football on an imaginary step from center, hesitate only briefly, then dive into the end zone.
Some just lie there and think about it.
“They are getting to be Bart Starr for a few seconds,” a Green Bay team official explained.
“Some say later that they were trying to think what that must have been like with a wind chill of minus-48 degrees.”
THAT IS the part you can’t recapture.
It was so cold that several members of the Dallas Cowboys suffered frostbite on their toes.
That famous play — Starr jamming himself into the end zone behind Jerry Kramer’s block to win the Ice Bowl on Jan. 31, 1967 — might well be the NFL’s signature moment.
The Packers had led 14-0, but then Dallas took command. The Cowboys sacked Starr eight times.
Bart’s wife, Cherry, recalled being shocked after the game to see her husband’s face, bright red and terribly swollen.
Cherry later said she feared the Packers wouldn’t make it on that last-ditch drive, the one that ended with a winning score just 14 seconds from the merciful end.
Even rugged coach Vince Lombardi, the only person Starr told he would keep the ball instead of handing off to fullback Chuck Mercein, had replied: “Then run it and let’s get the hell out of here.”
The Packers had tried handing the ball off twice with no luck.
“The running backs couldn’t get any traction. It was too slick at that end of the stadium because it had been in shade all day,” Starr said.
Cowboys defensive tackle George Andrie lamented that Dallas staffers hadn’t used that timeout to gouge some ice away at the goal line to give them some better footing.
ONE ODD thing about the play was that Mercein, who thought he was going to carry the ball, threw his arms in the air as though signaling for a touchdown on Starr’s dive.
Instead, Mercein had wanted to show the officials that he hadn’t pushed Starr into the end zone.
Football fans are recalling that play this week, just days after Starr died at age 85 after suffering strokes, dementia and other ailments.
It’s unique to Green Bay, perhaps, that the Packer quarterback who was a failure later as the team’s head coach (52-76-3), received a hero’s welcome when he defied his doctors and made it back to Lambeau when Brett Favre’s No. 4 was retired in 2015.
Starr, who always claimed that Favre and Aaron Rodgers were Green Bay’s two greatest quarterbacks, made that trip much as he led the Packers’ drive in the Ice Bowl — against miserable odds.
Starr had always managed to do it that way — drafted No. 200 off an Alabama team that went 0-10, he became the first NFL quarterback to win five titles, and remains the only QB to win three in a row.
What’s more, he handled it all with class and dignity.
He called himself “the luckiest quarterback in the world.”
That’s backwards.
Instead, the game was lucky to have Bart Starr.
Steve Cameron is the author of “The Packers!: Seventy Five Seasons of Memories and Mystique in Green Bay,” a book published in 1993 commemorating the team’s 75th anniversary. Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Steve also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball once monthly during the offseason.
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