Dr. Norbert Sander remembers a cold game 45 years ago
This Sunday night in Green Bay, Wisconsin the NY Giants will take on the Packers. It is 45 years since they last met in a playoff but the temperature at game time will be about the same: frigid. I recall very well the last time they met at Yankee Stadium for the Championship on December 30, 1962. I was actually there. It was so cold you couldn’t sit down and had to jog in place. The wind bore down on the Bronx off the East River with an arctic blast. The half time show, a far stretch from the present Super Bowl extravaganza, was a high-school marching band from New Jersey. I remember they wore blue and white with flapping skirts, cowboy hats pulled up halfway and flags bellowing in the vicious wind. More than that, I remember seeing the bravest, coldest band I’d ever seen somehow keeping their formation as they were pushed to and fro by the elements up and down the field.
That Giant-Packer game actually connected to my running days in college. Both Wellington Mara, the Giant owner and Vince Lombardi, the Packer coach, were also Fordham graduates. The Giants actually held their annual pre-season training camp on the buccolic Bronx campus of Fordham jointly with the only Fordham team on campus at the time: Cross-Country. We’d finish the morning run and head to the cafeteria getting in line with the biggest men we’d ever seen: Robustelli, Sam Huff, Roosevelt Brown and Rosey Grier each carrying on their trays what seemed like four meals piled high. Their thick squat necks stood out as at least as wide as our distance running thighs, their bellies at least as generous as Santa Claus himself. They were however heros. The Giants were great then, especially on defense. They were tough and particularly hard hitting. We shared the Fordham trainer, Johnny Zeigal with the Giants but Zeigals’s approach to running injures was that if you didn’t have a broken bone you weren’t hurt. Track Coach Artie O’Connor, an excellent half mile coach who knew little about distance had us wearing white tennis shoes for practice, gave us the summer’s off and put the team through twice daily workouts during the a hurried two week camp. Virtually all of us wound up injured next to Frank Gifford, Y.A. Tittle or Huff in Zeigal’s cramped trainers room long on treatment tables but very short on sympathy.
I got my tickets to the big game from fellow Fordham teammate Jim Dahme. He was a man of incredible optimism who temporarily separated from his comfortable Westchester family to work nights at the 42nd Street Post Office while pursuing a life as a folk singer in Greenwich Village. I remember picking him up at dawn in my 1950 Austin Convertible, that I had recently bought for $89. He threw his well worn bag in the back seat with a full length of liverwurst. “It’s all I’m taking,” he said. Dalme dropped out of Fordham and never ran again for the team. He stayed in touch and paid his way 2 years later earning a full degree.
In any case he came to my room on the campus that Christmas and said “I don’t care how long it takes, I’ll stand in line at Yankee Stadium”. He did just that on a cold mean night from midnight on and we found ourselves at the stadium that Sunday in 1962 when the star-studded New York Giants took on Vince Lombardi’s ferocious warriors from Wisconsin. It was New York and its glitz, New York and its elegant passing game, handsome Frank Gifford at half back who would run, catch and throw, New York and it’s famed defense, the best there was, up against….a team, Green Bay, that Vince Lombardi, one of Fordham’s “blocks of granite,” tougher than the very tough, said would never lose a Championship game again, never.
The flow of the game was decided early on. Tittle couldn’t throw into the wind, Gifford couldn’t run. Green Bay wore them down. They knew cold frozen fields. It was like the Russians who savor, embrace and taste cold winter air and rollick in it. Yard upon yard the Packers marched. Inch by inch until it was 7-10-13 and 16 points and the Giants only 7 from a lonely blocked punt in the end zone. All those New Yorkers who had gone to New Jersey because the game had been blacked out in New York were on their way back on the Jersey turnpike. A sad gloom descended over the Metropolis.
We had at least been there, Dahme and I. And years later when callers harp on the radio why the Giants can’t win more frequently I’m tempted to call in that winning like this is not always easy. But on this coming Sunday you can bet that Lombardi’s name will come up in the Green Bay locker room before they take the field at Lambeau Stadium. And in the Giants, I hope they mention Robustelli, Brown, Y.A. Tittle and Gifford. I sort of wish I could be there with them to tell them about the skinny Cross-Country runners that stood on line one time with the Giants at the Fordham cafeteria. I’d like to tell the Giants they can really win just like 4 of us on that line did that April in 1963.
Just a few months later we went down to Franklin Field and won the Penn Relays four mile relay for Fordham, breaking the meet record by close to 30 seconds. No one gave us a chance, including even our own coach, but still we did it. Jim Dahme was there too in the stands rooting us on.