The First America's Team. Bob Berghaus
the end it was one of the worst defeats in Bears history.
“They were just too good for us,” Halas told reporters following the game. “That’s about all you can say. The Packers were just a great team out there today.”
A week earlier, when asked by a Los Angeles writer about his rivals to the north, Halas said, “The Packers do not yet walk upon water.”
Following the game he wouldn’t take the bait when asked how this Green Bay team stacked up against others in the history of the league.
“I never compare teams,” he said.
Lombardi was gracious in victory and careful not to say anything that would appear to demean Halas and the Bears.
“We’ve played good ball games before but everything seemed to work today,” he said. “Everything we tried worked.”
The only story that wasn’t related to the Packers-Bears game on the front of the Press-Gazette the next day was a story about the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, who were preparing to start a best-of-three series to decide the National League pennant. The Giants went on to win the pennant but lose the World Series to the New York Yankees, losing Game seven 1–0. Before he began his professional football career as a player-coach, Halas appeared to be a promising baseball player. He was promoted to the New York Yankees and played right field for twelve games before suffering an injury. A popular myth is that Babe Ruth replaced him in the lineup, but that’s not true. Ruth actually replaced Sammy Vick.
Lombardi was working with author W.C. Heinz on Run to Daylight, the classic book chronicling the 1962 season. The book came out in 1963, and in it Lombardi wrote that several hours after the game against the Bears, he woke up in the middle of the night, bothered by the whipping his team had inflicted on Halas’s club.
All week long there builds up inside of you a competitive animosity toward that other man, that counterpart across the field. All week long he is the symbol, the epitome, of what you must defeat and then, when it is over, when you have looked up to that man for as long as I have looked up to George Halas, you cannot help but be disturbed by a score like this. You know he brought a team in here hurt by key injuries and that this was just one of those days, but you can’t apologize. You can’t apologize for a score. It is up there on that board, and nothing can change it now. I can just hope, lying here awake in the middle of the night, that after all those years he has had in this league—and he had forty-two of them—these things no longer affect him as they still affect me. I can just hope that I am making more of this than he is, and now I see myself, unable to find him in the crowd and walking up that ramp and into our dressing room, now searching instead for something that will bring my own team back to earth.”
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