Lance Rentzel, Dallas Cowboys wide receiver: The phone rings in my hotel room, and the voice on the other end says, "Good morning, Mr. Rentzel. It's 8 AM. It's 15 degrees below zero outside, and there's a 30 mile-an-hour wind. Have a nice day."
Narrator: It is called "Russian Winter." The kind of cold that made Napoleon and Hitler flee in terror from the doorstep of Moscow. But, in Green Bay, it is known as "Packer Weather."
That was the opening narration to a short film on the game known as "The Ice Bowl," for NFL Films' special The NFL's Greatest Games.
I don't know who the narrator was -- the Internet has failed me in this regard -- but the film was made in 1987, in time for the game's 20th Anniversary, so it wasn't John Facenda, the voice of NFL Films from 1966 until his death in 1984. Let the record show that Facenda never actually spoke the words "the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field." ESPN's Chris Berman, imitating Facenda, made that up.
The 1967 NFL Championship Game wasn't the 1st event to be nicknamed the Ice Bowl. Ironically, given who the Packers' opponents were in that game, the name was first given to an event in Dallas, the 1947 Cotton Bowl. A storm had dumped rain, sleet and snow on North Texas, and the Louisiana State players put oil drums filled with charcoal on their sideline, to use as makeshift heaters. In front of 38,000 chilled customers, LSU played the University of Arkansas to a 0-0 tie.
After 1967, the 1977 Grey Cup, the championship of the Canadian Football League, was also called the Ice Bowl. The Olympic Stadium in Montreal was supposed to have a retractable roof, but it wasn't yet in place, and the Montreal Alouettes, playing on their home field, pounded the Edmonton Eskimos 41-6. The Esks shouldn't have been too fazed, though, as (if you count the CFL as "major league") no major league sports team in North America is further north.
There have been a few football games known as the Snow Bowl: The 1950 Michigan-Ohio State game, a 1984 game between the Packers and the Denver Broncos, a 1985 game between the Packers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the 1996 Grey Cup between the Eskimos and the Toronto Argonauts, the 2000 Independence Bowl between Mississippi State and Texas A&M, the 2002 "Tuck Rule Game" between the New England Patriots and the Oakland Raiders, and a game this season between the Buffalo Bills and the Indianapolis Colts.
Oddly, that 1984 Green Bay-Denver game was played on October 15, very early for snow, even in those cities. It was in Denver, but neither that nor the location should have bothered the Packers. But, uncharacteristically, they couldn't handle it, fumbling away their 1st 2 possessions deep in their own territory, and the Broncos took a quick 14-0 lead, and held off a Pack comeback to win 17-14.
The Ice Bowl isn't even the coldest game in NFL history anymore. The 1981 AFC Championship Game, played at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati on January 10, 1982, was 9 degrees below zero without the wind chill factor, and 37 below with it. The San Diego Chargers, used to warm weather, had played one of the hottest games in NFL history just 8 days earlier, against the Miami Dolphins at the Orange Bowl, and were totally unused to this kind of cold. The Bengals won, 27-7. This one is known as the Freezer Bowl.
This is what the world was like on December 31, 1967:
The Packers were the only team playing in the same stadium then as they are now. This is sort of true for the Los Angeles Rams, but they left and returned. There was an NFL team in Baltimore, but it was the Colts, not the Ravens. There was an AFL team in Houston, but it was the Oilers, not the Texans.
The Packers were looking to succeed themselves as World Champions. The other titleholders at the time were the St. Louis Cardinals, the Philadelphia 76ers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Heavyweight Championship of the World was officially vacant, as Muhammad Ali had been stripped of the title on the preceding April 29, for refusing to be inducted into the U.S. Army.
Such now-iconic franchises as the Dallas Cowboys, the Miami Dolphins, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Oakland Raiders, the San Francisco 49ers, the Denver Broncos and the New England (then "Boston") Patriots had yet to win their 1st titles.
The defining players of my youth? Mean Joe Greene, Larry Csonka, O.J. Simpson and Terry Bradshaw were in college. Lyle Alzado, Joe Thiesmann, Ron Jaworski and Randy White were in high school. Tony Dorsett and Walter Payton were 13 years old. Earl Campbell was 12. Joe Montana was 11. Lawrence Taylor was 8. John Elway was 7. Dan Marino was 6. Jerry Rice was 5.
Current Packers coach Mike McCarthy was 4. So was current Jets coach Todd Bowles. Current Cowboys coach Jason Garrett was a year and a half old. Current Giants coach Ben McAdoo wasn't born yet.
The Olympics have
since been held in America 4 times; Canada 3 times; twice each in France, Japan
and Russia; and once each in Mexico, Germany, Austria, Bosnia, Korea, Spain,
Norway, Australia, Greece, Italy, China, Britain and Brazil. The World Cup has
since been held twice each in Mexico and Germany, and once each in America,
Argentina, Spain, Italy, France, Japan, Korea, South Africa and Brazil.
The President of the United States was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Former Presidents
Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and their wives, were still alive.
Richard Nixon was preparing his 2nd run for the Presidency. Gerald Ford was
House Minority Leader. Jimmy Carter was preparing his 2nd run for the
Governorship of Georgia. Ronald Reagan was in his 1st year as Governor of
California. George H.W. Bush was a Congressman from Texas, and his son was at
Yale University. Bill Clinton was at Georgetown University. Barack Obama was 6
years old. Donald Trump was at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School
of Business, getting both medical and collegiate deferments to keep him out of
serving in the Vietnam War.
The Prime Minister of Canada was Lester Pearson, for whom Toronto's airport is
now named; and of Britain, Harold Wilson. Queen Elizabeth II was Britain's
monarch -- that hasn't changed. The titleholders of England's Football League were
Manchester United, and the holders of the FA Cup, Tottenham Hotspur of North
London. The European Cup was held by Celtic of Glasgow, Scotland, the 1st British team to win it.
The Governor of Wisconsin was Warren Knowles; of Texas, John Connally; of New York, Nelson Rockefeller; and of New Jersey, Richard J. Hughes. The Mayor of Green Bay was Donald Tilleman; of Dallas, J. Erik Johnsson; and of New York, John Lindsay.
The current
holders of those offices? Respectively: Tony Evers was in high school, Eric
Greitens wasn't born yet, Andrew Cuomo was 10, Chris Christie was 5, Jim
Schmitt was 9, Mike Rawlings was 13, and Bill de Blasio was 6.
The Nobel Committee did not award a Peace Prize for 1967 -- and didn't for 1966,
either -- so the 1965 honoree was still the holder: UNICEF, the United Nations
Children's Fund.
The Pope was Paul VI. The current Pope, Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was teaching literature and psychology at a university in Buenos Aires. There have since been 10 Presidents of the United States, 9 Prime Ministers of Britain, and 5 Popes.
Major novels of 1967 included The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron.
In non-fiction, Desmond Morris published The Naked Ape, and Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore published a book about the effects of mass media: Trading on McLuhan's earlier saying, "The medium is the message," they titled it The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. William Manchester released his study of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, The Death of a President. JFK's brother, Robert F. Kennedy, published To Seek a Newer World, and Martin Luther King wrote Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Major films debuting in the Autumn and early Winter of 1967 included I Am Curious, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Far from the Madding Crowd, the animated version of The Jungle Book, Camelot, Cool Hand Luke, Tony Rome, The Producers, Bedazzled, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In Cold Blood, Valley of the Dolls, Doctor Dolittle, and The Graduate.
Color television had recently debuted in France, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in America. Sean Connery was appearing in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, and Patrick Troughton was playing The Doctor. Bob Holiday had recently starred in the Broadway musical It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman, and Adam West was playing Batman.
The Fugitive had recently become the 1st TV
show to come to a planned finale episode, and it set a new record for
most-watched series episode in the history of American television. Cult
classics Get Smart and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour were
still on the air. The Carol Burnett Show, Mannix, Ironside, The Flying Nun,
a cartoon version of Spider-Man (introducing the "does
whatever a spider can" theme song) and The Prisoner had
recently debuted. Laugh-In was
a few days away.
No one had yet heard of Hawkeye Pierce, Lieutenant Columbo, Michael Corleone,
HAL 900, Scooby-Doo, Big Bird, Monty Python, Mary Richards, Archie Bunker,
Dirty Harry, John Shaft, The Fonz, Rocky Balboa, Luke Skywalker, J.R. Ewing,
Hannibal Lecter, Marty McFly, Jon Snow, Harry Potter, Jed Bartlet, Tony
Soprano, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Lisbeth Salander, Katniss Everdeen, Richard Castle,
Leslie Knope, Jane "Eleven" Hopper or Maggie Bell.
The Number 1 song in America was "I'm a Believer," performed by The Monkees,
and written by Neil Diamond. The Beatles were rewriting the rules of rock and
roll album-making, as they had recording Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band. But they had also just had their 1st flop, the TV-movie Magical Mystery Tour. Separate from the
others, John Lennon appeared in the World War II-themed film How I Won the War.
The Doors were about to release their self-titled debut album, including "Light My Fire" and the even more controversial "The End." Lead singer Jim Morrison didn't actually say the F-word on the album, but he sure as hell implied it. On December 9, onstage at the New Haven Arena, he became the 1st rock star ever arrested onstage, for obscenity. The charges did not stick.
The Velvet
Underground released The Velvet Underground & Nico, with its
cover of a banana painted by their patron, Andy Warhol. It introduced the world
not just to Nico, the German chanteuse, but also the voice, guitar, and, most
importantly, lyrics of Lou Reed, including "Waiting for the Man" and
"Heroin." As Brian Eno later said, "Not very many people
bought The Velvet Underground & Nico. But, of everybody who
did, nearly everybody went out and formed a band."
Jimi Hendrix, with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, released the album Axis: Bold As Love. The Jefferson
Airplane released Surrealistic Pillow, which included "Somebody
to Love" and "White Rabbit." The Grateful Dead released their
self-titled debut album, which was mostly covers of blues songs. The
Youngbloods released their self-titled debut album, which included "Get
Together."
Otis Redding and Carla Thomas released King & Queen, which included
"Tramp." Aretha Franklin released I Never Loved a Man the Way
I Love You, which included the title track and Otis' song
"Respect."
Laura Nyro released her debut album, More Than a New Discovery,
which included "Wedding Bell Blues" (later a Number 1 hit for the 5th
Dimension), "And When I Die" (later a hit for Blood, Sweat &
Tears) and "Stoney End" (later a hit for Barbra Streisand). Dolly
Parton released her debut album, Hello, I'm Dolly. Tom Jones went
country with The Green, Green Grass of Home, including the
already-known title track.
The Turtles released Happy Together. The 5th Dimension
released Up, Up and Away. David Bowie released his self-titled
debut album, although it gave no hint as to the innovation and shock value that
would come later.
Elvis Presley married his longtime girlfriend Priscillia Beaulieu. He was still
making weak music and weaker movies, including the recently-released Clambake. He really needed a change of
direction. Within a year, he would get it, and remind everyone just who
was King around here, anyway. The Jackson 5 had begun performing on "the
chitlin circuit," and would soon debut at New York's Apollo Theater.
There were still
living veterans of America's "Indian Wars" of the 19th Century, the
Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and the British Army from the Battle of
Omdurman.
Inflation was such that what $1.00 bought then, $7.34 would buy now. A postage
stamps cost 5 cents, and a New York Subway ride was 20 cents. The average
prices of a gallon of gas was 33 cents, a cup of coffee 38 cents, a McDonald's
meal (cheeseburger, fries, shake -- the Big Mac was introduced the next year)
75 cents, a movie ticket $1.25, a new car $2,750, and a new house $14,250.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the preceding Friday at 835.13.
Computers were huge, and most certainly did not fit on top of a desk, never
mind a lap, or in a pocket. Cars were available with telephones, but a cordless
phone was still something seen in science fiction. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and
Tim Berners-Lee were 12 years old.
The Moon landing program had stalled as a result of the Apollo 1 fire,
earlier in the year. Man had not yet broken Earth orbit, and there was
considerable doubt as to whether NASA would meet President John F. Kennedy's
1961 "goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon, and
returning him safely to the Earth." The Soviets had their own
space-program problems, with Vladimir Komarov unable to open the parachute
of Soyuz 1, and crashing, becoming the 1st person to die as the
result of a spaceflight.
There were artificial kidneys, but no artificial
hearts. Transplanting a kidney or a lung was possible, and doing it with a
heart and a liver had each just happened for the 1st time. There
were birth control pills, but no Viagra.
Toward the end of 1967, the near-civil war between Greece and Cyprus broke out. Fed up with the military control of his country, King Constantine II launched a coup. When it failed, he and the royal family fled to London. He had been on the throne for 3 years. He has now lived in exile for 50 years.
Pakistan
moved its capital from Karachi to Islamabad. Floods in the Portuguese capital
of Lisbon killed 462 people. The People's Republic of South Yemen, which was
north of Yemen, declared independence from Britain. Nicolae Ceausescu was named
dictator of Romania by the country's State Council. The Concorde was unveiled
in Toulouse, France. And Prime Minister Harold Holt of Australia disappeared
while swimming. His body was never found. And Hyundai Motor was founded in
Korea.
In America, the nation's population passed the 200 million mark. Carl Stokes was elected Mayor of Cleveland, the 1st black person elected Mayor of a large American city. The Silver Bridge over the Ohio River, connecting Gallipolis, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed, killing 46 people. (It was replaced 2 years later.) Soul singer Otis Redding, and all but 1 member of his band, The Bar-Kays, were killed in a plane crash in Wisconsion.
And on New Year's Eve, the same day as the Ice Bowl, motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel tried his 1st major jump, over the fountains at Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip. He failed, and was badly hurt.
John Nance Garner, and Bert Lahr, and Paul Whiteman died. Jamie Foxx, and Boris Becker, and Tino Martinez were born.
That's what the world was like on December 31, 1967, when the game that became known as the Ice Bowl was played.
Many NFL Championship Games, nearly all played in December to that point, had been plagued by cold weather. The 1934 game at the Polo Grounds in New York became known as "The Sneaker Game," when the Giants switched from cleats to sneakers, and got a better footing than the Chicago Bears, whose undefeated season went down the drain. This would now be an illegal change of equipment.
It was bitterly cold, with frozen fields, at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in 1950, at Yankee Stadium in 1956 and 1962, at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium in 1959, at Wrigley Field in 1963, and at Green Bay's Lambeau Field (then still named City Stadium, as was its predecessor) in 1961, and snowing to boot, when the Packers beat the Giants 37-0. And the Lambeau Field grass had to get the snow plowed off it for the 1965 NFL Championship Game -- the 1st to be played in January, on January 2, 1966.
Packer coach Vince Lombardi was born and raised in Brooklyn, played at Fordham University in The Bronx, and had spent his entire coaching career in the New York Tri-State Area before going to Green Bay: Head coach at the now-defunct St. Cecilia's High School in Kearny, an assistant coach at West Point, and what we would now call the offensive coordinator at the Giants -- while what we would now call their defensive coordinator was Tom Landry.
So Lombardi could handle cold weather. But from having coached in the title games of 1956, 1959, 1961, 1962 and 1965, he knew that cold weather could be a problem for football. Fortunately, since the Packers' unusual ownership structure, and his role as both head coach and general manager, left him a virtual dictator, he had the field torn up, and heating coils placed under the field. When resodded, the idea was that the coils would keep the field from freezing. It became known as "Lombardi's Electric Blanket."
Lombardi and Landry were opposites: Landry was a great stone face, never showing emotion during the game; while Lombardi was, in the words of his All-Pro guard Jerry Kramer, "a raving Italian lunatic!"
But the teams were the other way around: The Cowboys -- not yet the dominant team that they would become -- were braggarts, while the Packers let their performance do the talking for them. The exception was Hall of Fame running back Paul Hornung, but he was retired by this point.
Cowboy quarterback Don Meredith posed for a picture with some of his teammates, holding their hands out, saying, "Easy money!" This flew in the face of the fact that they were going on the road -- the Eastern Division and Western Division Champions alternated hosting in those days -- and the fact that, on January 1, 1967, the Packers went into the Cotton Bowl and beat the Cowboys 34-27 for the 1966 NFL Championship.
That was the 1st time the Cowboy franchise, begun in 1960, had gotten that far. The Packers were going for their 5th NFL Championship in 7 years, which included ending the previous season by winning "The AFL-NFL World Championship Game," retroactively named "Super Bowl I."
The Las Vegas oddsmakers installed the Packers as 6 1/2-point favorites. Given their experience, including winning the previous year's title game on the road, and the home-field advantage, which is traditionally said in football to be worth 3 points, this should not have surprised anyone, then or now.
The day before the game, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle made some phone calls, and was told that the game-time temperature would be about 5 degrees above zero. (All temperatures mentioned in this post will be in degrees Fahrenheit.)
Rozelle didn't like that, and began to consider postponing the game to the next day, Monday, New Year's Day 1968, despite the fact that it would compete for TV ratings with the college bowl games. But he was told that the oncoming cold front would make it even colder on Monday. So, already in Green Bay, he called Lombardi at his house, and Landry at his hotel, and told them the game would go on as scheduled.
But the cold front arrived sooner, and was worse than expected. As Cowboy receiver Rentzel reported, he was told that it was 15 degrees below zero. The official NFL Films record of the game shows a rotating bank clock backing that up, reading "-15°."
That film shows Hall of Fame defensive end Willie Davis walking into Lambeau Field wearing a heavy coat, a fur-lined hat, earmuffs, a big scarf, and a big smile, as if he expected the Cowboys to be affected by it far more than the Packers.
What it doesn't show is how much trouble Hall of Fame safety Willie Wood had getting there, because he later said his car wouldn't start. When the service-station guy came to help him get it started, Wood told him, "It's just too cold to play. They're going to call this game off."
When Lombardi got to Lambeau Field, he discovered that it was so cold (This was before comedians began doing things like, "How cold was it?"), the mechanism for the heating coils broke. The field was frozen. To make matters worse, when the tarp was taken off the field, it had left moisture on it, which froze. The field was an ice rink. The Chicago Blackhawks were hosting the Oakland Seals at Chicago Stadium that night (and won 3-0), and could have moved the game to Lambeau Field, 205 miles to the north, and played on it.
(That same day, the Rangers hosted the Toronto Maple Leafs, in one of the last events at the old Madison Square Garden, and won 4-0. The Knicks were not scheduled. Nor were the New Jersey Americans, forerunners of the Brooklyn Nets. The Islanders and Devils did not yet exist. And, of course, the Yankees, the Mets, the Giants and the Jets were not scheduled.)
The marching band of the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse (not the main campus, in Madison) was scheduled to perform the pregame and halftime shows. But during -- pardon the choice of words -- the warmups, the spit inside their woodwind instruments froze, rendering them impossible to play. The mouthpieces of brass instruments stuck to their players' lips. Seven members were taken to the hospital for hypothermia.
Frank Gifford, the Hall of Fame running back for the Giants who was serving as one of the CBS announcers for the game, said, on the air, "I'm going to take a bite of my coffee."
The game did affect the Cowboys more than the Packers. The film shows Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke running onto the field in short sleeves, with no gloves. He was from Chicago. He could handle it.
But Meredith's face froze, to the point where he couldn't make his words understood in the huddle unless he pressed on his cheeks. Bob Hayes, the Olympic sprinting champion who'd hauled in so many of Meredith's passes, had to run with his hands tucked in a hole cut in his jersey.
The Packers opened the game with a 9-minute drive that ended with a touchdown pass from Bart Starr to Boyd Dowler. Starr connected with Dowler again in the 2nd quarter, giving the Packers a 14-0 lead. It would then have been very easy to guess that the Cowboys were finished.
They weren't. They showed a tremendous amount of courage, and came back. They didn't get a single 1st down in the 2nd quarter, but fumbles by Starr and of a punt return by Wood led to Cowboy scores, making it 14-10 Green Bay at the half.
In the 3rd quarter, the Packers stopped a Cowboy drive with a fumble, and ended another that resulted in a missed field goal by Danny Villanueva. At the start of the 4th quarter, Landry gambled, and called an option pass for Dan Reeves -- later to coach the Denver Broncos, the Giants and the Atlanta Falcons -- to Rentzel. It went for 50 yards and a touchdown.
Despite seemingly everything going against them, the Cowboys led 17-14. The Packers' Don Chandler missed a field goal, and it looked like the Packers would be dethroned.
With 4 minutes and 50 seconds left, the Packers took over on their own 32-yard line. Since the goalposts would be on the goal line until the 1974 season, but Chandler had already missed a 40-yard attempt, this meant that they probably needed to get the ball to the Dallas 30-yard line for a field goal -- but that would only have tied it, and sent this already-miserable experience to overtime.
Starr advanced the Packers with short passes to Dowler and Donny Anderson. But a hit knocked Dowler down, and his head hit the frozen turf. Even with the protection of a football helmet, he was knocked unconscious. As with the Super Bowl nearly a year earlier, Max McGee came in to replace him. Unlike that Super Bowl, McGee would not turn out to be the hero this time.
Lombardi's most famous play was the "power sweep": Both guards, Kramer and Fred "Fuzzy" Thurston, would pull out of the line at the snap, and run in the same direction (either left or right), and Starr would pitch to a running back, who would then run behind the guards. This had worked so many times with Hornung and Jim Taylor, and now with Anderson and Elijah Pitts.
This time, Lombardi had a trick up his sleeve, a play known in the Packer playbook as "54-Give." He called it the "sucker play": It was a fake power sweep, with Gale Gillingham, having replaced Thurston, pulling to the right. This caught the attention of the Cowboys' Hall of Fame defensive tackle, Bob Lilly, and he followed. This left a hole up the middle, and running back Chuck Mercein got to the 3-yard line.
The Packers then needed to get to the 1-yard line for a 1st down, and did. Some of the Cowboys thought Anderson had scored. Had there been a rule at the time, allowing a coach to challenge a call via instant replay, what happened next might not have happened, and Anderson would have been the big hero of the game. But the officials didn't see the ball cross the plane of the goal line, and so it was 1st and goal on the 1.
It was getting late. Lambeau Field did have lights, so darkness was not going to be an issue. But a lack of sunlight was. To make matters worse, the action was now at the south end of the field, where the shadow of the scoreboard loomed, making it even colder. I've seen sources say that, with the wind chill factor (on the old scale), it was as low as 48, or even 55, degrees below zero.
The Packers went on to beat the AFL Champion Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II. Lombardi retired as head coach after that game, but stayed on as general manager. As with the 1964-65 Yankees, the team seemed to get old all at once, and the dynasty collapsed. The team wouldn't reach the title game again for 29 years, winning Super Bowl XXXI in the 1996-97 season.
After the 1968 season, Lombardi accepted Edward Bennett Williams' offer to be head coach and general manager of the Washington Redskins, and began to rebuild them in 1969. But he developed colon cancer -- much more easily treatable now, but fatal then. He died on September 3, 1970, only 57 years old. The Redskins hired George Allen away from the Los Angeles Rams, and reached Super Bowl VII 3 seasons later.
The Cowboys got tagged as a team that "can't win the big one." They reached Super Bowl V, but lost to the Baltimore Colts. Finally, they came to dominate the NFC in the 1970s, reaching 5 Super Bowls, winning Super Bowls VI and XII. They began calling themselves "America's Team." They were featured on TV so much that people joked that CBS stood for "Cowboys Broadcasting System." Landry remained head coach until 1989, and died in 2000.
Of the Cowboys' starting lineup: Receiver Bob Hayes died in 2002, quarterback Don Meredith in 2010; defensive tackle Jethro Pugh, safety Mike Gaechter, and placekicker-punter Danny Villanueva in 2015; guard Leon Donohue and linebacker Dave Edwards in 2016, and offensive tackle Tony Liscio and defensive end Willie Townes both died earlier this year.
Still alive: Center Mike Connelly is 82 years old, linebacker Chuck Howley is 81, running back Don Perkins is 79, defensive tackle Bob Lilly is 78, tight end Pettis Norman is about to turn 78, defensive end George Andrie and cornerback Cornell Green are 77, linebacker Lee Roy Jordan and safety Mel Renfro are 76, offensive tackle Ralph Neely and cornerback Mike Johnson are 74, running back Dan Reeves is about to turn 74, and guard John Niland is 73.
Of the Packers' starting lineup: Defensive tackle Henry Jordan died in 1977, defensive tackle Ron Kostelnik in 1993, linebacker Lee Roy Caffey in 1994; running back Elijah Pitts, defensive end Lionel Aldridge and linebacker Ray Nitschke in 1998; receiver Max McGee in 2007, cornerback Bob Jeter in 2008; guard Gale Gillingham and placekicker and punter Don Chandler in 2011, and guard Fred "Fuzzy" Thurston in 2014.
* Still alive: Offensive tackle Forrest Gregg is 84, quarterback Bart Starr is about to turn 84, offensive tackle Bob Skoronski and defensive end Willie Davis are 83; guard Jerry Kramer is about to turn 82; safety Willie Wood is 81; receiver Boyd Dowler is 80, tight end Carroll Dale is 79, cornerback Herb Adderley is 78; safety Tom Brown is 77, linebacker Dave Robinson is 76; tight end Marv Fleming is about to turn 76, center Ken Bowman is 75, running back Donny Anderson is 74.
So that's 27 men -- 14 Packers and 13 Cowboys -- still alive who played in the Ice Bowl.
Referee Norm Schachter, who had also officiated at Super Bowl I, would also officiate at the 1st Monday Night Football game in 1970, and at Super Bowls V and X, after which he retired. He lived until 2004.
Of the broadcasters: Ray Scott, long the voice of the Packers, announced the 1st half for CBS, and lived until 1998. Jack Buck, the voice of baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, announced the 2nd half, and lived until 2002. Frank Gifford was the color commentator throughout, and lived until 2015. The sideline reporters were Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier, who became CBS' top NFL unit in 1974, until 1980, with John Madden taking over as Summerall's color commentator and Brookshier being moved to play-by-play on their Number 2 team. Brookshier lived until 2010, Summerall until 2013.
Lambeau Field still stands. Along with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (which the Rams will leave after the 2019 season for a new stadium) and the Oakland Coliseum (which the Raiders will leave, probably after the 2018 season, for Las Vegas), it is the only stadium in the combined NFL and AFL of 1967 that is being used here in the 2017 NFL season.
The Ice Bowl lives on in sports memory. It still gives chills, even to people like me who weren't even born yet.
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