Run to Daylight! by Vince Lombardi

Author:Vince Lombardi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

8:55 A.M.

When I turn onto Oneida Avenue the deserted practice fields to the left are like a lush, damp pasture under the low, gray skies, and the gray, canvas-padded seven-man and two-man blocking sleds, standing there alone, look like lonely forgotten cattle.

The boys are here early, though. There are more than a dozen cars already parked outside the dressing rooms—a good sign on a Thursday that they are starting to come up for a game—and among them is Dave Hanner’s green and white pickup truck.

Dave Hanner’s real name is Joel but his nickname is Dave and they call him Hawg. He is our left defensive tackle. He was born in Arkansas and lives there in West Memphis, where he is a soil conservationist in the off-season. The Packers drafted him out of Arkansas University eleven years ago. He is thirty-two now and it is going to be a sad day in Green Bay when the years get him because he has not only been All-Pro five times but there is nobody on this squad who is better-liked than big, easygoing, quiet Dave with that chaw of tobacco in his right cheek and his constant weight problem.

“What do you weigh?” I say to him each year when he arrives in camp in his truck.

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” big, blond Dave says, with that slow smile.

“So what do you weigh?” I say, slapping his stomach. “You look like you’ve got a lot of it here.”

“Oh,” he says, with that smile again, “about 270.”

“That’s too much,” I say.

“I was 266 coming in last year,” he says. “I’ll get it off.”

“You’ll have to,” I say.

I know he’ll get it off. I know he’ll be down to 260 again when we’re ready to go, but it is more of a struggle for him each year, and it is something to watch.

He grew up, Dave did, as a farmboy and he still keeps farm hours and I guess he always will. Breakfast in camp is at seven-thirty, but Dave is up at six-thirty and you know he will always be in bed by ten. He is in and out of that dining room before anyone else, because he watches his diet, and on the practice field, wearing that old, dark blue baseball cap to protect that fair head and forehead from the hot sun, he really sweats. I remember, too, when one Wednesday in 1961 he had his appendix out and he played eleven days later.

“When I was drafted by the Packers,” Jim Ringo said once, “I had to go get an atlas to find out where Green Bay is.”

“That’s nothin’,” Dave said. “I didn’t know where it was either, but I came up with another boy and we took a plane from Chicago. The plane stopped and we heard the stewardess say something about Green Bay so we got off. After the plane left we found out she was sayin’, ‘Oshkosh. Next stop Green Bay.’ So we had to take a train up from there.

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