Bart Starr sat in a Green Bay Packers locker room in December 1958. He was the quarterback of the worst team in professional football. His time was nearly up. He had spent three seasons in Green Bay.
He had watched coaches come and go. He had watched the team lose again and again. He had thrown passes in meaningless games for a team nobody believed in, in a city that had stopped expecting anything. Through it all, he waited for someone to tell him what he could not prove on his own.
No one did. The Packers finished that season with one win and eleven losses. Their new head coach had not yet been hired. What Starr did not know was that the man about to arrive had been watching his game footage for weeks.
He had already reached a conclusion nobody else in the building shared. Starr, born Brian Bartlett Starr on January 9, 1934, in Montgomery, Alabama, was the oldest son of a master sergeant in the Army Air Forces. His father, Ben Starr, ran the home like a military unit. Discipline, order, and a strictness that his quiet, introverted oldest son struggled to match.
When Starr was 12, his younger brother Hilton, known as Bubba and favored by his father, stepped on a dog bone while playing in the yard. He died of tetanus three days later. From that day forward, the father directed all his attention toward his remaining son. Grief turned into pressure.
“My father was the toughest man I ever knew in my life,” Starr said decades later. “He intimidated me. He was like my top sergeant. ”
Starr was undersized and reserved.
He played football to please his father. He was good enough to start at the University of Alabama. His sophomore coach called him the greatest passer, the game had ever seen at Alabama. Then a back injury disrupted his junior year, and a new coach in his senior year kept him on the bench for most of the season.
Alabama won four games in three years before Starr was dismissed. No pro scout was watching Bart Starr. Johnny Dee, the head basketball coach at Alabama, called his friend Jack Vainisi, the personnel director of the Green Bay Packers, and told him Starr was worth a look. No one else called.
In the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, with the 200th overall pick, the Packers selected Bart Starr. The team offered $6,500. Starr accepted on the condition that he receive $1,000 in advance. That summer, he moved in with his wife Cherry’s family in Jackson, Alabama.
He built a wooden A-frame in the backyard and threw footballs through it for hours while Cherry retrieved them. He had made the roster. He had done everything right to get to Green Bay. What he could not do yet was convince anyone there that he deserved more than a roster spot.
That problem would follow him for three years. He was still dealing with it in December 1958 in a locker room that had stopped paying attention to him. The following two seasons were more of the same, or worse. Tobin Rote was traded away.
Babe Parilli, a quarterback who had coached Starr as a teenager years earlier, became the starter. Starr became the backup. In 1957, he started 11 games and threw for 1,489 yards with eight touchdowns and ten interceptions. In 1958, he started seven games and threw for 875 yards with three touchdowns and 12 interceptions.
The numbers were not good, but the context mattered. He was playing in a broken system for a franchise going nowhere, without anyone seriously investing in his development. The criticism was always the same: his arm was weak, he was too passive, he lacked the presence a championship quarterback needed. Coach Lisle Blackbourn was fired after the 1957 season.
Ray McLean took over. The Packers won one game in 1958, the worst record in the NFL for a franchise that had not won a title in 14 years. During that season, coaches stopped calling on Starr in meetings. He sat in film sessions where the offense was discussed without anyone looking at him.
He was a backup who had become invisible. The warning signs were everywhere. Starr admitted later, “I wasn’t exactly brilliant out there. ”
McLean was also fired.
The Packers began searching for someone nobody in Green Bay had heard of. What Starr did not know was that the man about to be hired was already sitting in a film room in New York, watching game footage of every quarterback on the roster. He was about to reach a conclusion nobody else in the building shared. On February 4, 1959, Vince Lombardi was named head coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers.
He was 45 years old. He had spent five years as offensive coordinator of the New York Giants, the most dominant team of the late 1950s, without landing a head coaching job. When the Packers called, one member of the search committee in Green Bay was so unconvinced by the recommendation that he asked, “Who the hell is Vince Lombardi? ”
Lombardi had spent the weeks before his first meeting with the team in the film room.
He watched every game from the previous season. He watched all four quarterbacks: Starr, Parilli, Joe Francis, and Lamar McHan. He was looking for something specific. A quarterback who studied the game, who understood what he was doing and why, whose mistakes came from circumstances rather than ignorance.
What he found in Bart Starr surprised him. Lombardi realized, before anyone else bothered to notice, that Starr had studied the playbook more carefully than his competitors. That his footwork was sound. That his decisions with the ball were mostly correct.
That the team had not given him enough plays to prove what he could do with a proper plan. Lombardi told his assistant coaches that Starr would compete for the starting job. Nobody agreed with him. On the first day Vince Lombardi addressed the full roster, Bart Starr sat near the back of the room.
He had heard coaches give speeches before. He had heard about winning, commitment, and sacrifice. He was 24 years old and had heard those speeches for three seasons while the team lost. Lombardi walked to the front of the room and said, “Gentlemen, we are going to have a football team.
We are going to win some games. You want to know why? Because you are going to have confidence in me and my system. By being alert, you are going to make fewer mistakes than your opponents.
By working harder, you are going to outexecute, outblock, outtackle every team you face. ”
Starr later wrote in a magazine that the room changed in that moment. He watched players who had stopped believing in anything straighten up in their seats. The man at the front of the room was different from anyone who had stood there before.
After that, Lombardi sought Starr out privately. He did not tell Starr he was good. He told him what was expected of him. “Coach Lombardi showed me that by hard work and using my mind I could overcome my weaknesses enough to become one of the best,” Starr later said.
That sentence contained the difference between a compliment and a demand. Lombardi had placed a demand in front of him. In 1959, Lombardi’s first season, the Packers finished with seven wins and five losses. It was Green Bay’s first winning season in 12 years.
Starr won the starting job after four preseason games. Lombardi had told the press exactly what he was doing: “We wanted to get a good look at the others. Now Starr will have a chance to get ready. ”
In his first full season as an uncontested starter, Starr completed 57 percent of his passes.
The league noticed. Lombardi noticed something else: Starr’s quiet focus and unassuming manner provided the perfect balance to his own volatile temperament. Where Lombardi raged, Starr absorbed. Where Lombardi demanded, Starr executed.
The most intense coach in professional football had found the quarterback whose personality was calibrated to channel that intensity without being crushed by it. Norm Van Brocklin, one of the great quarterbacks of the era, had watched Starr for years and finally said plainly, “There was a time when the Packers had to carry Starr. ” Now Starr was carrying the Packers. What followed is the part everyone knows.
Five NFL championships. Two Super Bowls. The 1961 championship, the 1962 championship, the 1965 championship, and the Ice Bowl on December 31, 1967, at 15 degrees below zero at Lambeau Field, the coldest championship game ever played. Dallas led 17-14 with 16 seconds left, third down and goal at the one-yard line.
No timeouts left. Starr went to the sideline and told Lombardi he could keep the ball himself and run a quarterback sneak without risking a fumbled exchange in those conditions. He told Lombardi the footing would be secure because center Ken Bowman and guard Jerry Kramer would create a gap. Lombardi said, “Run it, and let’s get the hell out of here.
”
Starr took the snap and scored. The Packers won the NFL championship for the third consecutive year, then won Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II against the Kansas City Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders. Starr was named MVP both times. No quarterback had ever won back-to-back Super Bowl MVP awards.
No quarterback has done it since. Lombardi said in February 1970, only months before his death, “Johnny Unitas was a great, great quarterback, but Starr is the one who won in the sixties. And that is the name of the game, winning. ”
Lombardi left after the 1967 season to coach the Washington franchise.
He was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 1970. He died on September 3, 1970, at age 57. Starr was one of the honorary pallbearers at the funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
Three thousand people attended. A thousand more waited on Fifth Avenue. On the morning Lombardi died, Starr told his wife before leaving the house, “I told Cherry it was like losing a father. I had very strong feelings for him.
The fellows who had the honor of playing for him became better people because of it. ”
Eleven years earlier, Starr had been told not that he was good, but that he was expected to be good. That difference made all the change. “Everything I am as a man and a football player I owe to Vince Lombardi,” Starr said.
“He’s the man who taught me everything I know about football, leadership, and life. ”
Lombardi had watched footage no one else had watched and found something no one else had found. He made one phone call. He said nothing publicly about it.
Then he spent nine years giving Bart Starr the one thing Starr had been waiting for since the day a famous basketball coach made a phone call on his behalf: not a compliment, but an expectation. That was enough.