MEAN ON SUNDAY

Ray Nitschke

Prairie Oak Press; ISBN: 1879483548

If you were to try and draw a comparison between Stevenson's Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde and any football player who ever lived, the most deserving candidate would be Ray Nitschke, the most beloved, feared and dominant player in Green Bay's long and storied history. Your typical football fan is familiar with Ray's Hyde persona; He was missing his four front teeth, he was totally bald, his eyes were blacked - one season he bled constantly from a cut on the center of his forehead that caused blood to drip down over his face the entire game, "the blood would get mixed in with dirt and grass stains and lime... the opposing quarterback would look across and see Nitschke bleeding under his face-mask and maybe he'd do a little thinking about the next blood shed might be his" - and yeah, Ray Nitschke put the hurt on ball carriers as good as anybody who has ever suited up. What most people don't know is that his off field persona was anything but that of a "madman." He was a devoted husband and family man, who together with his wife Jackie, raised their three adopted children on a ten-acre spread in Fox Valley, just outside of Green Bay.

Much of his autobiography, Mean On Sunday deals with this seemingly unexplainable duality. On the one hand, he was seen as a killer, a thug who was on the field only because of his burning desire to hurt people. On the other, you have a prototypical suburban dad who cared more for his wife and children than anything else. Just before he retired, the majority of the state of Wisconsin held a "Ray Nitschke Day," in honor of the great middle linebacker. Enough money was raised through the sale of "We Love Ray" pins and stickers to establish a Ray Nitschke scholarship fund that allowed needy high school kids the opportunity to go to college. In true Nitschke fashion, the fund is not just for athletes, but for any deserving child.

In Mean On Sunday, Ray begins his story with his childhood in a suburb of Chicago. Both of his parents were dead by the time he was in high school. Luckily for him and Green Bay fans everywhere, a combination of two older brothers, extended family and a football coach named Puplis, allowed Ray to receive a scholarship to play ball at the University of Illinois. It's interesting that he actually was taken as a quarterback, and eventually switched to fullback before the coaches saw what he really was, a hard hitting son-of-a-bitch middle backer. At Illinois is where Ray lost his four front teeth. They were playing Ohio State in 1956 and at the time facemasks were not mandatory. You could show your toughness by going without. A guard hit him on a kickoff and the four teeth were gone. Ray describes it like this, "During a timeout, somebody shoved a wad of cotton in my mouth and I went on with the game, spitting blood all over the field."

When he was initially drafted by the Packers, Ray was a little disappointed. He had always dreamed of playing for the Bears, seeing as how he was from Chicago and had played for Illinois. Like the soft-spoken, hard working man that he is however, Ray took his $500 signing bonus, (Yeah, $500. Rookies today easily get that figure with a few more zeros tacked on the end.) spent $300 of it on a used Pontiac, and drove to Green Bay. By the way, Nitschke took the remaining $200 and gave it to a family whose house he used to have Sunday dinners at while he attended Illinois. As it turned out of course, Ray's becoming a Packer coincided nicely with Vince Lombardi's arrival at Green Bay, where the two of them plus a slew of other future Hall of Famers not only turned Green Bay into a five time Championship team, but into arguably the most dominant sports dynasty in history. Period.

The parts of the book I enjoyed the most were Ray's recounting of Coach Lombardi. Ray's rookie season, 1958, was the worst in Green Bay's history. Lombardi turned all that around in his first year, 1959, when the Packers posted a winning season for the first time in 11 years. For the decade of sixties, the Green Bay Packers were near perennial champs right up until Vince retired after the '67 campaign and the Packer's winning their third straight NFL championship and second consecutive Superbowl. The reverence and awe with which players speak of Coach Lombardi I found to be very humbling. (Not just Nitschke - I recently finished Jerry Kramer's 1967 season diary Instant Replay. He recounts a great story where Nitschke didn't want to go against a rookie player in a practice drill. That is until the rookie called Nitschke a "sonofabitch." Ray then knocked the man unconscious with a single forearm.) In Ray's estimates, Lombardi was more than human, he was almost super natural. Ray recounts some of the jokes that players used to crack about the short Italian guard from Brooklyn.

Or the one about the football player who died and went to heaven. He noticed a team of angels scrimmaging while a short fellow stood on the sidelines who yelled at them, so he asked St. Peter:
"Who's that?"
"Oh, that's God. He thinks he's Vince Lombardi."

and

About the winter night he went to bed and Marie [His wife] said, "God, your feet are cold," and he answered, "Around home, dear, you can call me Vince."

Again and again, Nitschke explains how he accepted and internalized Lombardi's gospel of, "Your religion, your family, and the Green Bay Packers, but not necessarily in that order."

Before Nitschke met and married Jackie, he did have a more Hyde-like off field persona. He claims that he wasn't a heavy drinker, but that one or two drinks were enough to set him off. Mean on Sunday is noticeably short on anecdotes of barroom antics, but from what I could infer, Ray would beat the crap out of anyone who looked at him funny. Looking at photos and movies of Nitschke in action, I personally cannot think of anyone I would rather not get into a "fracas" with. More than anything else though, this book gives you a sense of just how much Ray Nitschke loved the game of Football. How football took him from a miserable and underprivileged childhood and turned him into an upstanding and beloved man, both on and off the field. The book contains plenty of good tough guy stuff, like when Ray broke his arm but stayed in the game only to then break his nose. It also has enough of his quite conservative worldview to make you a little uneasy. Like when Broadway Joe Namath and the upstart New York Jets beat Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts in Superbowl III, "Having any AFL team win would have been bad enough, but I hated to have it done by Namath? No question about it, as a player he's outstanding. But I didn't feel he'd used good judgment in the things he did and said off the field." To quote Abe Simpson, "Look at those side burns! He looks like a girl. Johnny Unitas. Now there's a haircut you could set your watch to."

Still if you like football, you'll enjoy Mean On Sunday. Not only is it a chance to get into the head of in my opinion one of three best middle linebackers (Butkus and Speilman make up my undecided top three) to ever play the game, but you get the inside story on a very transitional period in NFL history. The merging of the NFL and the pass happy AFL, the start of the wholly American institution that is the Superbowl and the effect that television had on changing the game - much to the negative in Nistchke's opinion. (Now a days defenders are barely allowed to touch QBs - Nitschke used to knock 'em flat on their rears.). Not the most intelligent read out there, Mean on Sundays is a fine book written by a great man. Through it the spirit of Nitschke lives on. Go Packers!