On September 1, 1960, a 1,000-pound steel coaching tower blew over in a gust of wind during a Green Bay Packers practice and landed directly on Ray Nitschke. Vince Lombardi sprinted across the field. When he was told who was underneath, he stopped running. “He’ll be fine,” Lombardi said.
“Get back to work. ”
The helmet, with a spike driven through it, remains on display in Green Bay. Most people who know that story believe it tells you everything about Nitschke. It doesn’t.
The part nobody tells is what happened two years earlier, when Lombardi came within one vote of cutting him entirely—and what he did instead that nobody on that roster saw coming. Ray Nitschke was born in Elmwood Park, Illinois, in 1936. When he was three years old, his father was killed in a car-trolley collision on his way home from a union meeting. Ray would not remember him.
When Ray was thirteen, his mother died of a blood clot from untreated internal bleeding. His two older brothers raised him. “All of a sudden, everything fell apart,” Nitschke would say for the rest of his life. “I was an orphan at 13.
” There was nobody to set boundaries, nobody to ask where he had been. The rage went into everything: fights, grades, drinking. He was declared academically ineligible his sophomore year of high school. He got his grades up, kept playing, and by his senior year was an all-state quarterback.
At the University of Illinois, it got worse. He drank heavily, fought at the drop of a hat, and ignored his professors. In a 1956 game against Ohio State, an opposing player’s helmet knocked out four of his front teeth on the opening kickoff. Nitschke never wore a face mask.
He played the rest of the game. He described himself without self-pity. “I didn’t have a chip on my shoulder, I had a 2 by 8 plank on my shoulder,” he said. “I wanted to fight everyone.
” By his senior year, Paul Brown called him the best linebacker in college football. The Green Bay Packers drafted him in the third round of the 1958 NFL draft. He had hoped the Bears would take him. He had to find Green Bay on a map.
In January 1959, Vince Lombardi arrived in Green Bay to coach a franchise that had won just one game the previous season. He assessed his roster and saw Nitschke, 22 years old, physically gifted but emotionally ungovernable. He tried moving him to fullback before the season opener. That experiment lasted one week.
He moved him back to linebacker as a backup behind Tom Bettis. The assistant coaches wrote their evaluations of the roster. For Nitschke, they wrote: “Has physical ability, but cannot think. Will never be able to play for us.
” Hall of Fame halfback Paul Hornung later described the frustration. “Nitschke called himself the judge because he was always on the bench,” Hornung said. “He was frustrated in the way that only a man who knows what he is capable of and is not being used can be frustrated. ”
Lombardi watched and said very little, because he saw something nobody else on that staff had seen.
A middle linebacker in his defensive system needed to be the most aggressive man on the field at all times—not disciplined into calm, but aimed with precision. Nitschke’s rage, the same rage that made him impossible to manage off the field, was exactly what would make him impossible to stop on it. Lombardi did not tell Nitschke this. He simply kept him in the way a man keeps something dangerous when he knows precisely what it is for.
But in 1960, after Nitschke finally earned his way into the starting lineup near the end of the regular season, he came within one decision of losing everything. He was found drinking in the same bar as the coaching staff—a direct violation of one of Lombardi’s cardinal rules. For any other player, that conversation would have had one outcome. Lombardi had already traded and cut players for far less visible violations.
Instead, he did something nobody on the roster had seen him do before: he left it to a vote. Every player on the Green Bay Packers roster was asked whether Ray Nitschke should remain on the team. Nitschke prevailed unanimously. Every single man voted to keep him—not because they liked him, but because they had seen in practice, film sessions, and games exactly what he was capable of when pointed at something.
Lombardi had seen it first. He let the team confirm it. What followed was not a reformation. Lombardi did not soften Nitschke or ask him to be different.
He aimed him. When Nitschke screamed at coaches on the practice field, Lombardi screamed back. When Nitschke pushed against the limits, Lombardi pushed back without moving them. In his 1963 book “Run to Daylight,” Lombardi wrote: “When you are flat, you’re always looking for that big play or that big man who will bring you out of it.
Ray Nitschke has a lot of this on the defense for us. ” Lombardi even threatened to send Nitschke to another team, saying he might kill somebody on the field. He said it to scare him into focus. Then he kept him anyway.
The results were visible to the entire league. On December 30, 1962, at Yankee Stadium, the Packers played the New York Giants for the NFL Championship on a field that was frozen concrete, with a wind chill that made the 34-degree temperature feel far worse. Nitschke recovered two fumbles and deflected a pass that was intercepted. The Packers won 16 to 7 in one of the most defensively dominant performances in championship game history.
Nitschke was named MVP of the 1962 NFL Championship game, accepting a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette as his prize. That same evening, he appeared on the television program “What’s My Line? ” He sat at the table, prematurely bald, wearing black horn-rimmed glasses and a three-button suit, and stumped the panel completely. Nobody identified him as a professional football player.
Off the field, the last piece fell into place in 1961. Nitschke met Jackie Forchette at a restaurant in early 1960, and they married on June 26 of that year. Because Jackie was unable to have children, they adopted three: John in 1963, Richard in 1966, and Amy in 1972. Lombardi later gave partial credit for Nitschke’s sustained excellence to Jackie’s influence, saying her calming presence allowed him to channel everything that was already there without destroying himself in the process.
The players who faced him paid tribute in stark terms. Mike Ditka said: “The toughest guy I ever played against was Ray Nitschke. He was a physical tough guy and he was a great football player. ” Bears center Mike Pyle was more specific: “I can say playing against Ray Nitschke shortened my career dramatically.
”
Packers teammate Dave Robinson said: “Pound for pound, there’s never been a linebacker that’s come close to Ray Nitschke. ” George Allen added: “When I was with the Bears, we named one of our defenses ’47 Nitschke’ because it was copied from the way Ray played a certain situation. Naming a defense after a player is a pretty high compliment in my book. ”
The rage had found its proper home.
Over 15 seasons and 190 games, Nitschke won five NFL championships and two Super Bowls, recording 25 interceptions. In Super Bowl I, he had six tackles and a sack. In Super Bowl II, he led Green Bay’s defense with nine tackles. A panel of his peers named him the greatest middle linebacker in the history of the game, ranking him first or near first in strength, quickness, speed, toughness, and leadership.
In 1978, at age 41, Ray Nitschke stood at the podium in Canton, Ohio, to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He had been retired for five years. Lombardi had been dead for eight. He said what he had been saying in private since the day Lombardi arrived in Green Bay and refused to cut him: “Words cannot really demonstrate how I felt about Vince Lombardi.
I loved him very dearly and he inspired me immensely and gave me a lot of different ways of values that I needed. I needed to be motivated. Coach Vince Lombardi really motivated me. I owe a lot to Vince Lombardi.
”
That was the whole speech on the subject—one paragraph, no elaboration needed. Ray Nitschke spent the rest of his life in Green Bay. He kept his phone number and home address listed in the local phone book for years after retiring, because people called and he answered. He named his dog Butkus, after his fiercest rival at the position.
He worked with children’s charities, and was known in his later years for how gentle he had become. He died on March 8, 1998, of a heart attack on his way to visit a friend. He was 61 years old. His daughter Amy was with him.
The helmet with the spike through it, from the day a 1,000-pound tower fell on him and Lombardi told the team to get back to work, is still on display at the Packers Hall of Fame in Green Bay. Right next to it hangs his jersey, number 66. Lombardi saw a Hall of Famer in a man every other coach had already written off—and he left the decision to a vote.
Every single man in that room already knew the answer.