Paul Hornung Talks Heisman, Lombardi, and the Good Ol' Days

Paul Hornung, the Heisman Trophy winning former Notra Dame quarterback and Hall of Fame professional football star for the Green Bay Packers, wakes up at 5:30 every morning and tunes into the Fox Business Network to see how Ford’s stock is doing.
 
“Then I smile, and then you all come on at six,” Hornung said, and confessed he has been a fan of Imus in the Morning for some time. “The camaraderie is fantastic.” If that’s what you want to call it.
 
Horning, a Kentucky resident, was in New York to attend this past weekend’s Heisman Trophy award ceremony Saturday night, where Auburn Quarterback Cam Newton was awarded the coveted prize.
 
“He is unbelievably big,” Hornung, no slouch himself at six-feet, two-and-a-half inches tall, said of the six-foot, six-and-a-half-inch Newton. “The people who are going to be tackling this man—they’re going to have some problems.”
 
The year he won the Heisman, Notre Dame’s record was just 2-8. “It was the only time in history that a player has won on a losing record,” he said. “We weren’t worth a damn.”
 
In those days, which were the early 1950s, players played both offense and defense, and Hornung did both well. After the Green Bay Packers drafted him in 1957, Hornung had expected to play quarterback, as he had in college. But Lombardi had other plans.
 
“I found out I really couldn’t throw on the level as a pro quarterback, but I could run,” he said. “So when Lombardi came, he straightened me all out…Vince said, ‘Hornung, you’re going to be my left halfback. You’re going to play in the mode like I had Frank Gifford in New York. If you can’t make it as a halfback, you can go back, get in the real estate business, and have yourself a time.’”
 
Needless to say, Hornung made it as a halfback, and also as a kicker, leading his team to four league championships and the first ever Super Bowl in 1967. As for what made Lombardi so special, Hornung said, “He motivated you each and every day. He made believers out of us. We believed in him.”
 
In 1963, Hornung was suspended by NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle for betting on football games, an experience he described as “I made a couple of 500 dollar bets.” He harbors no ill-will toward Rozelle, however, and suspects that professional football “would be a little different today” had the commissioner not acted accordingly. “He saved it,” Hornung said of the sport. “He really did.”
 
Hornung went last night to see the Broadway play “Lombardi,” based on the life of the football coaching legend. “I’m 75 years old, I’ve been through a lot, I don’t get upset too much,” Hornung said. “I broke up.”
 
Hornung is also portrayed in the show, and the actor playing the part actually traveled to Louisville to spend some time with Hornung earlier this year. “He asked me about the girls,” Hornung, formerly known for his wild ways, said. “I told him the truth: I was single, running around as a professional football player, taking advantage of the good times!”
 
Known as the “Golden Boy” during his career, Hornung was outrageously social, cavorting with fellow football players and other types.  He famously scored five touchdowns in one game against the Indianapolis Colts, and told Imus today why he was as surprised as anyone else at that astonishing feat.
 
“I hadn’t been playing, I was out, I was hurt, I banged up my shoulder,” Hornung recalled. The game, which was for the Western division championship, was played in Washington, DC, not far from where Hornung’s friend Rick Casares, also a football player, lived. “He called up, he said, ‘I’ve got a real pretty lady, would you like to have dinner with her?’ I said, ‘Hell, yeah!’”
 
Convinced he wouldn’t be playing in the game, Hornung stayed out all night, returning to the team’s hotel around 7 o’clock the next morning, just in time for breakfast, where Lombardi found him and asked how he was feeling.
 
“I said, ‘Oh hell, I feel great!’” Hornung said. “He said, ‘Well, I’m starting you today, and I want to see a good game out of you.’”
 
To this day, Hornung is not sure how he was able to perform so fantastically in that game, but Imus had some ideas. “I’d like to meet the woman you were with that night,” he joked. Though, as Hornung pointed out, neither he nor the I-Man could handle a woman like that nowadays.
 
-Julie Kanfer