It was the game they almost postponed. It was the game in which referees' whistles froze and lips stuck to tubas and the halftime show was canceled and players ran with their hands stuffed in their pants for warmth. It was the game played on tundra and decided on an all-or-nothing third-down call. It was the game that became part of folklore, the game that became known as the Ice Bowl.
The Ice Bowl was one of the two greatest football games ever played, the other being the 1958 NFL championship between the Colts and Giants. The Ice Bowl was the 1967 NFL championship game between the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers in frozen Green Bay, and it produced one of the most unforgettable contests in all of sports.As the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys prepared this week for today's NFC championship, many recalled the game between these same teams 28 years ago. It pitted two great teams against each other and the elements in a game that wasn't decided until the bitter cold end.
The official temperature at kickoff was 13 degrees below zero - and 19 below when the game finally ended.
Lance Rentzel, the Dallas Cowboys wide receiver, recalls the wakeup call he received from the operator at the Green Bay Holiday Inn the morning of the game: "Good morning, Mr. Rentzel. It's 8 a.m. It's 15 below zero, and there's a 20-mile-per-hour wind coming out of the northwest. Have a nice day."
When teammate John Niland tried to leave his hotel room to board the team bus for the ride to the stadium, he found that his door was frozen shut. He could not escape until a hotel worker broke down the door.
According to then-Dallas coach Tom Landry, coaches from both sides "made a request to (then-NFL commissioner) Pete Rozelle to postpone the game because it was just too cold to play. But Pete was down in California where it was warm and he just said, `Go ahead. We've never called off a game yet, so we're not going to call off this one."'
The pea in referee Norm Schachter's whistle froze before the opening kickoff. Another official, Joe Connell, blew the whistle for the opening kickoff and his lips split. After which, Schachter announced that referees would no longer use their whistles. Instead, for the rest of the game, they shouted instructions to the players: "Hold up!" "He's down!"
The halftime show was canceled when band members discovered blood on their mouthpieces. Their lips were freezing to their instruments and splitting when they pulled them off.
Dallas's star wide receiver, Bob Hayes, ran pass routes with his hands in his pants to keep them warm (which might explain why he didn't catch a pass in the second half). But not one player from either side wore gloves that day.
The Packers took a 14-0 lead on two touchdown passes from Bart Starr to Boyd Dowler, but they wouldn't score again until the game's final seconds. By halftime Dallas had cut the lead to 14-10, the big play being George Andrie's return of a Starr fumble for a touchdown. Eight seconds into the fourth quarter, halfback Dan Reeves threw a 50-yard option pass to Lance Rentzel to put the Cowboys ahead 17-14.
The game finally came down to this: Green Bay with the ball, trailing 17-14, 4:50 left, 68 yards to go.
On their previous 10 possessions, the Packers had been unable to mount a drive of more than 14 yards. "OK, guys, let's go to work," quarterback Bart Starr announced in the huddle, and that was it. "Then for the rest of the drive nobody said another word, just Bart calling the plays," recalls halfback Donny Anderson. "Nobody had to say anything because nine years of Vince Lombardi was in that huddle with us."
The Packers used 12 plays to march to the goal line, and 27 of the final 30 yards were gained by Chuck Mercein, a 225-pound rookie from Yale who had been acquired that year from a semipro league. The Packers decided to use Mercein because Starr reasoned the rookie was so heavy and slow that he was the only ballcarrier who wouldn't slip on the ice. Mercein took a short pass 19 yards to the Dallas 11, then ran 8 yards to the 3.
Anderson made two plunges into the line, and players on both sides later said that he crossed the goal line on the second try. But the referees saw it differently.
Now it was third down at the one-yard line, 16 seconds to go. Lombardi decided to go for the touchdown, rather than the tying field goal, even though the Packers had no remaining timeouts and it was highly unlikely they would have time to set up a field goal attempt.
Players from both sides dug their cleats into the ice to get their footing. The play was supposed to be another handoff to Anderson, but when Starr took the center snap he didn't turn for the handoff. Without telling anyone, he had decided to keep the ball, fearing that Anderson would not have enough footing on the ice to hit the hole on time. Starr slid between the blocks of center Ken Bowman and right guard Jerry Kramer and fell into the end zone for the touchdown.
For the Cowboys, it was yet another crushing loss to their rivals. A year earlier, they had lost to the Packers in the NFL championship game after failing to score on four plays from the two-yard line in the final two minutes.
As it turned out, Starr's touchdown marked the end of the Packers. Their Super Bowl victory over Oakland two weeks later was anticlimactic. Lombardi retired, and Green Bay finished with a losing record the following year. Three years later Lombardi was dead of cancer. By then many of the old Packers had retired. It was the end of an era.