[msb-alumni] Paul Hornung, 84, Football Standout For Notre Dame and Green Bay, Dies on November 13, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2020 10:26:42 -0500
BlankPaul Hornung, 84, Football Standout For Notre Dame and Green Bay, Dies. By
Richard
Goldstein.
His dazzling play at Notre Dame, a Hall of Fame Career with the Green Bay
Packers,
matinee-idol looks and a playboy image made him a national celebrity in the
'50s and '60s.
Paul Hornung, one of the most versatile and glamorous football stars of the
modern game, the
"Golden Boy" quarterback from Notre Dame who won championships as a running
back with Vince
Lombardi's Green Bay Packers but whose image was tarnished by gambling and
carousing, died
on Friday in Louisville, Ky. He was 84 . His wife and only immediate survivor,
Angela
Hornung, said that the cause was dementia and that he died at a senior living
facility.
Hornung filed a lawsuit in July 2016 seeking damages against Riddell, the
longtime supplier
of helmets to the N.F.L., saying he was suffering from 'dementia and other
neurodegenerative
disease(s) caused by repetitive head trauma' as a result of Riddell's failure
to inform
players that it knew its helmets could not prevent concussions. The suit said
he had
incurred numerous concussions while wearing Riddell helmets as a Packer. His
case was later
consolidated with many others filed by former N.F.L. players against Riddell
and was in
federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Hornung, who won the 1956 Heisman Trophy with Notre Dame, could run, throw
passes and catch
them, block, place-kick and punt, and he returned kicks and played defense too.
In nine professional seasons he helped propel the Packers to four National
Football League
championships and led the N.F.L. in scoring from 1959 to 1961.
Hornung was the fourth Hall of Fame Packer from the Lombardi era to die this
year. The
others were safety Willie Wood (in February), defensive end Willie Davis (in
April) and
cornerback Herb Adderley (in October).
Hornung scored a record 176 points in the 12-game 1960 season on 15 touchdowns,
41 extra
points and 15 field goals. He also passed for two touchdowns that year. Hornung
was the
league's most valuable player in 1961, when he scored a championship-game
record 19 points
(on a rushing touchdown, four extra points and three field goals) in the
Packers' 37-0
victory over the Giants.
All the while he pursued a robust night life of women and drink that seemed to
have little
effect on his on-field performance. His movie-star looks certainly had
something to do with
the attention: He was blond and handsome, 6 feet 2 inches and 215 pounds. He
wore No. 5 in
honor of his boyhood idol, Joe DiMaggio. But Hornung's career was marred when
the N.F.L.
commissioner, Pete Rozelle, suspended him indefinitely in the spring of 1963
for gambling on
pro football, including Packer games, over several seasons.
Hornung said he had bet on Green Bay only to win, and the league found no
evidence to the
contrary, but he remained suspended for the entire season.
The ban was an outgrowth of an N.F.L. drive against gambling by players that
also brought a
one-year suspension for Alex Karras, the Detroit Lions' star defensive tackle.
The Packers also won the N.F.L. championship in 1962 but did not repeat in
1963. Hornung had
to wait until 1986, his 15th time on the ballot, to be selected to the Pro
Football Hall of
Fame, evidently because of his suspension.
"I don't see this as Paul Hornung being vindicated," he told The Associated
Press when he
was finally elected to the hall, in Canton, Ohio. "I never considered myself a
villain, but
obviously some people did."
When Hornung was inducted, his Packer Hall of Fame teammates marveled at his
accomplishments.
"I've never seen a guy more effective inside the 20-yard line," the former
Green Bay
offensive tackle Forrest Gregg told The A.P. "You could hand off to him or
throw a pass to
him and somehow he would get the ball in the end zone."
Bart Starr, the Packer quarterback, called him "one of the best clutch players
ever."
Paul Vernon Hornung was born in Louisville on Dec. 23, 1935, and raised there
by his
divorced mother, Loretta Hornung. He was recruited out of high school by Bear
Bryant, then
the head coach at the University of Kentucky, but chose Notre Dame to please
his mother, who
was a devout Roman Catholic. In his junior year at Notre Dame, Hornung was
primarily a
running back and a safety. As a senior, switching to quarterback, he ran or
passed for 1,337
yards and continued to excel in the defensive secondary. He became the first
player to win
the Heisman Trophy with a losing team: Notre Dame had a 2-8 record in 1956.
Hornung was
chosen by the Packers as the No. 1 overall pick in the 1957 N.F.L. draft. The
Packers,
having floundered for many years, continued to struggle in Hornung's first two
pro seasons,
but everything began to change in 1959, when Lombardi, formerly the Giants'
offensive coach,
was named head coach at Green Bay. Lombardi preached discipline, but Hornung,
free-spirited
as he was, became one of his favorites, and he installed him at left halfback,
the key man
in what became Green Bay's signature play, the Packer sweep. The offensive
linemen -- Jim
Ringo at center, Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston at guard, Bob Skoronski and
Gregg at
tackle, and Ron Kramer or Gary Knafelc at tight end -- along with fullback Jim
Taylor, a
superb runner in his own right -- supplied the blocking. Hornung would run
wide, then look
for a hole, but he might also throw to receivers like Boyd Dowler and Max
McGee, who was
often his pal on the nightclub scene. The Packers defeated the American
Football League's
Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, in the first Super Bowl, played at the Los Angeles
Coliseum in
January 1967, but by then Hornung had reached the end of his career. Hampered
by arm and
knee injuries, he didn't play in the game. The New Orleans Saints selected him
in the 1967
expansion draft, but he retired because of injury problems. Playing his entire
pro career in
Packers' green and gold, Hornung scored 760 points on 62 touchdowns, 190
points-after and 66
field goals. He gained 3,711 yards rushing and 1,480 yards on pass receptions.
He later
invested in real estate and other business ventures, became a popular figure in
Miller Lite
beer commercials and broadcast college and pro football. He created a stir in a
March 2004
interview with a Detroit radio station when he said that Notre Dame needed to
ease its
academic standards to 'get the Black athlete. A spokesman for Notre Dame called
the remark
'insulting. Although Hornung expressed regret for the comment, he discontinued
his
broadcasts of his alma mater's games for Westwood One radio, saying that 'Notre
Dame does
not want me there. His wife, Angela (Cervilli) Hornung, also sued Riddell in
2016, citing
the loss of Hornung's companionship because of his disabilities. His first
marriage, to
Patricia Roeder, ended in divorce. He had no children from either marriage and
no siblings.
In his autobiography, 'Golden Boy' (2004, with William F. Reed), Hornung
alternated accounts
of his football feats with tales of his amorous conquests and his drinking. He
said that his
playboy reputation had caught the attention of the syndicated gossip columnist
Walter
Winchell, who wrote in an early 1964 item: 'Myrna Loy is being rushed by Paul
Hornung, the
football glamour boy. He long distances the one-time Hollywood star from his
Old Kentucky
Home. Hornung told a reporter who inquired about the item that he had never
even spoken to
Ms. Loy and that Winchell might have confused her with an aspiring actress
named Myrna Ross,
with whom he had one date. Hornung expressed few regrets about his nightlife.
'I'm sure that
during my playing days I wasn't considered a good role model for the nation's
youth,' he
wrote in his memoir. 'But the way times have changed, I'd look like an altar
boy if I played
today. I never beat up a woman, carried a gun or a knife, shot somebody, or got
arrested for
disturbing the peace. I never even experimented with drugs during the season.
'All I did,
really,' he went on, 'was seek out fun wherever I could find it. Everything was
all tied in
together -- the drinking, the womanizing, the partying, the traveling, the
gambling. And, of
course, football made it all possible.
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