On April 17, 1963, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle walked into a room full of reporters in New York and delivered a decision that made front-page news from coast to coast. He suspended Green Bay Packers star Paul Hornung and Detroit Lions defensive tackle Alex Karras indefinitely for gambling on NFL games. The punishment, described as the most severe short of banishment for life, ended both men’s seasons before a single down was played. Rozelle was careful to state what his investigation had not found.
He said there was no evidence any player had given less than his best on the field, no evidence anyone had bet against his own team, and no evidence any player had sold information to gamblers. What the league did find, he explained, was clear evidence that some players knowingly carried on undesirable associations that led to betting on their own teams to win and other league games. The case marked the first gambling-related suspension in NFL history. It came just three years into Rozelle’s tenure as commissioner, a job he won on the 23rd ballot after owners deadlocked on bigger names.
With no precedent to guide him, his decision would define his leadership. The league’s urgency was shaped by the college basketball point-shaving scandals of the previous decade, which had badly damaged the credibility of that sport. Hornung was the NFL’s biggest star at the time. He won the Heisman Trophy in 1956, was the league’s MVP in 1961, and set a single-season scoring record of 176 points in 1960 that stood for nearly half a century.
Coach Vince Lombardi treated him like a son, once saying there was no one better he had ever coached on the goal line. His stature reached the White House in 1961, when a military call-up threatened to keep him out of the championship game. A call from Lombardi to President Kennedy reportedly led to his release so he could play, and he scored 19 points in the win. Karras was Hornung’s opposite in style and career path.
A two-time All-American at Iowa, he became the league’s most feared defensive tackle, widely considered the best in the game. The two men had already crossed paths in November 1962, when Detroit led Green Bay 7-6 with seconds left. A Lions interception set up Hornung’s game-winning field goal. In the Detroit locker room afterward, Karras allegedly hurled his helmet at quarterback Milt Plum and narrowly missed.
The investigation that led to the suspensions began with Karras’s off-field business interests. He owned a one-third stake in the Lindell AC, a Detroit sports bar run by two Greek brothers he had befriended. The bar was popular and well-known, and it attracted professional gamblers comfortable mixing with athletes. In August 1962, two known gamblers chartered a bus painted in Lions colors to take players to an exhibition game in Cleveland.
Karras and teammate John Gordy rode back on the bus, cleared in advance by head coach George Wilson, while an FBI surveillance car followed. The next morning, the Lions’ general manager told Karras the FBI had reported the ride to Detroit’s police commissioner. By Karras’s own later account, his response was two words: “So, what? ”
Five months later, the police commissioner told the league the bus owners were known gamblers, one previously convicted of bribing a police officer.
The league told Karras to sell his stake in the bar. He refused, saying it was all he had, and made clear he would retire before giving up a $45,000 investment over a rumor. Rozelle’s investigators spent three and a half months conducting 52 interviews across eight teams. They found no fixed games, but they found a pattern of betting.
Hornung had bet $500 at a time on NFL games, including his own, from 1959 through 1961. Karras bet $50 and $100 a game. Both men had been warned repeatedly that betting violated league rules posted in every clubhouse. Both kept doing it anyway.
Before going public, Rozelle summoned Lombardi to New York and laid out the evidence. According to Sports Illustrated’s account of the meeting, Lombardi asked what he was going to do. Told a full-season suspension was coming, Lombardi asked, “You have no choice, do you? ” Rozelle said he didn’t think so and suggested they go get a drink.
Rozelle called Hornung personally to tell him. He later described it as the hardest decision he would ever have to make. At the press conference, Rozelle suspended Hornung and Karras indefinitely. Five other Lions players were fined $2,000 each for a single bet on the 1962 championship game, and the Lions organization itself was fined $2,000 for ignoring warning signs.
Hornung’s response was immediate contrition. He said he made a terrible mistake and was truly sorry. Karras went the opposite direction, telling reporters he hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of and wasn’t guilty of anything. The two men lived very different suspensions.
Hornung’s public life was tightly controlled. He couldn’t attend the Kentucky Derby, an annual tradition in his hometown of Louisville, without clearing it with the league office, and he couldn’t write a magazine article without asking permission. Karras did the opposite. Before the suspension was even announced, he had agreed to a professional wrestling match against Dick the Bruiser, scheduled for late April 1963 at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium.
Six days before the match, Dick the Bruiser walked into the Lindell AC and the two men fought on the spot, leaving windows shattered, patrons scattered, and the wrestler needing five stitches. Karras still appeared at the wrestling match days later and lost, pinned in 11 minutes. He later said the payday made up for it. “For that one night’s work, I made $17,000,” he said, $4,000 more than he made with the Lions.
The loss of Karras devastated Detroit. The 1962 Lions defense is considered by many the best in franchise history, featuring five future Hall of Famers. In November 1962, with Karras healthy, Detroit buried Packers quarterback Bart Starr and won 26-14. Less than a year later, without Karras, the same two teams met again.
Sports Illustrated noted that the best defensive tackle in pro football was serving out his suspension. Green Bay crushed the Lions 31-10 and looked like champions again. By the end of 1963, the numbers told the difference. Green Bay, missing Hornung, still finished second in the league.
Detroit, missing Karras, collapsed from 11-3 the year before to five wins, eight losses, and a tie. In December 1963, Karras finally sold his interest in the Lindell AC. Lions owner William Clay Ford called it the only hope to pull at Rozelle’s heartstrings, adding that Karras had been miserable the entire time. “Sometimes I wanted to cry,” Ford said.
On March 16, 1964, Rozelle reinstated both men. The price of reinstatement was not the same for each. Hornung, by his own account decades later, believed Lombardi’s constant, quiet lobbying of Rozelle got him back. In exchange, Hornung agreed to have nothing more to do with gambling: no more Las Vegas, no more Kentucky Derby.
When Hornung learned his suspension was lifted, he suggested reporting for spring training in May, after the Derby one more time. Lombardi said no, April 15th. Hornung was there April 15th. Karras was barred from gambling of any kind in the NFL’s eyes, and he wore the restriction with the same defiance he had worn the suspension.
That season, an official summoned him to midfield for the coin toss. Karras said he wasn’t permitted to gamble, so he wouldn’t call heads or tails. Both men came back diminished at first. Hornung struggled with kicking, making just 12 of 38 field goals.
Karras had dropped 20 pounds. But both returned to form. Karras had an All-Pro season the following year and later made the NFL’s All-Decade Team of the 1960s. Hornung played two more championship seasons under Lombardi, delivering five touchdowns in one afternoon against Baltimore in a decisive 1965 win.
In 1967, New Orleans took Hornung in the expansion draft, but he never played a down for the Saints. A pinched nerve kept him on the bench for Super Bowl I, the only Packer in that locker room who didn’t play in the team’s 35-10 win. He retired that summer instead of reporting to a team that wasn’t the one he had built his career with. In 1986, he reached the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Karras never apologized to Rozelle, not that year, not ever. He criticized the commissioner publicly for the rest of his life. For decades, many in football believed that grudge, as much as the suspension itself, was why the Hall of Fame passed him over year after year. Karras built a second career in television and film.
He co-starred in “Paper Lion,” appeared in “Blazing Saddles,” became a fixture on Monday Night Football, and played George Papadopoulos on the sitcom “Webster” for six seasons in the 1980s. He wrote his autobiography, titled “Even Big Guys Cry. ” He died in October 2012, still waiting on the Hall of Fame. His widow Carolyn kept pushing after his death, tracking down voters one by one to make sure they knew his case.
In the NFL’s Centennial Class of 2020, eight years after his death, the Hall finally voted him in. His family accepted the honor for him. The case worked for Rozelle. The untested, compromise candidate who needed 23 ballots went on to run the NFL for 29 years.
The suspensions proved decisive, public, and survivable. Lombardi had no leverage over the decision, only a year of quiet pressure that eventually worked. And the cost of getting back was never equal. Karras gave up a bar, kept his defiance, and waited past his own death for forgiveness.
Hornung gave up Las Vegas, the Kentucky Derby, and eventually the team he had spent his whole career with, and lived to see his own forgiveness arrive in 1986, in person, at a podium.