Mel Bashore

Gene:    I'm loyal to my time.  Much like you.  You're interested in football before a given time.  I'm loyal to that time.  I feel that I sometimes need to say something when somebody asks a question in that respect.  My only problem at this time is that — and I think that might be part of my problem — is that I have a bad ear.  Actually it was acquired initially by professional football when I lost part of an ear and it was put back on.  I remember that well.   I guess I'm reminded of that every day because of the problems I have with that ear and the carotid gland on that side which had popped out.   I had to have surgery on that.

Mel:    Did that happen because of football?

Gene:    Yes, it did.  Somebody for some reason decided to take a swipe at my head and my helmet came off.  It also took part of my ear lobe with it.  I remember waking up on the field.  I think it's the only time that I ever remember passing out because when I was standing there with the doctors and trainer, I noticed all the blood on my uniform and I thought about cleaning that, but I seemed to be OK.  Then the trainer said, "Well, what shall we do with his ear?"  The doctor said, "Well, we'll just sew it right back on."  When I heard that, I passed out.  That was in an exhibition game against either the Eagles or the Redskins.  It was an exhibition game at Raleigh, North Carolina.  I believe it was in the stadium where I believe North Carolina played at that time.  I don't remember, but I think it was North Carolina.  It was the school that had Choo Choo Justice played for them.  I don't know if Choo Choo did much in pro ball at all.  I don't remember that.  I do remember him in college.  Well, what do you want me to talk about?

Mel:    I'm interested when you first started playing sports in your youth.

Gene:    OK.  I lived just outside the town of Beloit, Wisconsin, where I grew up. My folks had their home and then there was a big field and my grandparent's home and a small barn.  They had some land there.  They were not farmers, but they had a lot of land around in that particular area.  I used to get a kick out of the tall grass that was in that field in the summer time.  I used to like the smell of it.  I used to like to lay in it and hide.  I could lay down in it and somebody could go by on the road there.  They wouldn't see me or anything.  The sunshine would come down and I'd do a lot of dreaming.  I sure did a lot of dreaming about — gee, it would be great to play football some day or whatever.  Fly airplanes.  An airplane would go over and I would see an airplane.  I kind of dreamed about those things.  So I thought, Boy, it's going to be great when I get a chance to play football.  At that time, you couldn't play football in my hometown until you got into the ninth grade or in the middle school — seventh, eighth, and ninth.  It was difficult to play anywhere until you got to be in ninth grade.  I went to get my physical for playing at that time and I flunked my physical.  The doctor said that I had a little bit of high blood pressure and I had a heart murmur.  He took my form and rejected me and then gave me my form back.  On the way home, I thought, Well.  I sat down and I think I started to cry because I was so disappointed that I wouldn't be able to play football.  Then I did I guess what most young, red-blooded American kids would do that wanted to do something very bad.  I just threw the damn form away.  I remember carrying it up and putting it in a trash can some place.  When I went home, my folks didn't know the difference because the form had been mailed to me.  I got to the first practice and was in the locker room.  I'd been issued a uniform and I was putting that on.  I see the our ninth grade coach coming with a clipboard and all these permission doctor's slips on that clipboard.  He came up to me and said, "Gene, I need your physical form."  I looked right at him and I lied to him.  I said, "I already gave it to you."  He kind of hesitated I remember.  He kind of thumbed through those and he must have thought, Well I've got it some place but I've forgot it and he went on.  Obviously he never checked them anymore because I played that whole year.  I remember that most about my freshman year or first year of football.  I was thirteen years old at that time.  I know when I went to high school I was fourteen as a sophomore. [Gets a drink] I do have an ear and a throat problem and some medication that I take that makes me awful dry.  From that time forward, I turned out to play fairly well as a ninth grader and the coaches were looking forward to me coming to high school at Beloit.  The physicals were handled in the gymnasium at the school.  They found out in a hurry that I had a little high blood pressure.  The heart murmur seemed to have passed or at least the doctors didn't pick it up when all of us guys were getting examined by about two or three doctors that would give their time to come over and give all the football prospects a physical in the gym.  All three years, they’d take me in a room that was a wrestling room with wrestling mats and tell me to lay down.  I’d lay down on the mats and it would be very dark in there.  They’d say, “Just wait here, Gene.  Just rest for awhile.”  So I’d lay there and then somebody would come in there.  Then he’d ask me to sit up and they took my blood pressure in there so they could put down an honest reading that was within the limits.  For three years in high school, that’s how I passed my physical.  I have blood pressure problems now.  I take medication for it.  While I was playing football, I always had a hard time.  They had some medication at that time that they were introducing.  It was kind of a tranquilizer type of thing.  I managed to get ahold of that and I’d take one of those pills before the physical and I could pass my blood pressure test.  That’s how I managed to pass my physicals in college by taking one of those little pills.  After I finished football, I flew airplanes.  I loved to fly.  That was always a problem.  So I always had those available.  So every time I took my medical for flying, I would take them.  By that time, they had a few things out that were on the market that were prescribed.  I had some.  I didn’t make that a habit at all, but when it came time to take your physical, . . . .  I never had any eye sight problems.  I always flirted with a little bit of high blood pressure so that’s what I did at that time.  My dream was coming true.  I was playing football.  I played well in high school and had several opportunities to go to different schools even in those days.  They recruited more by alumni and things of that nature.  I did visit some campuses.  I guess I had opportunities, as I remember, like fourteen or sixteen different colleges even in those days.  That would have been in’48, ’49.  I graduated in spring of ’50 so my first year in college football was my freshman year at Michigan.  I was seventeen years old at that time when I went to Michigan.  During that freshman year, I would have turned eighteen in November.  I decided on Michigan actually because I was recruited by Wisconsin.  I had been contacted by Michigan, but I thought that was a long ways away.  But Wisconsin, when I was a junior in [high school] made a mistake.  They had me up to the University of Wisconsin to sit on the bench and watch the ball game.  They were kind of doing their little bit of recruiting type thing.  I went up there.  Michigan was playing Wisconsin that day that I was there.   I was never so damn impressed with a football team in my life!  I loved the Michigan helmet and I loved the way they played football!  Then I’d heard from them and so actually Wisconsin’s recruiting got me interested in Michigan.  After I think I’d been to Michigan a couple times.   I went to one ball game my senior year when they played over at Northwestern.  An alumnus from Racine, Wisconsin, came over and drove me down to the ball game at Evanston.  I had a chance to be in the locker room and I was again very impressed with Michigan.  At that time, the head coach was Bennie Oosterbaan.  I knew all about Bennie Oosterbaan.  He seemed like a nice guy.  The school was certainly a great academic institution along with athletics and, I think, still is.  So I turned down offers to go to Wisconsin, Marquette, Indiana, Wyoming, Miami of Florida, and several other schools.  They don’t come to my mind right now.  Notre Dame was one.  I would have kind of liked to have gone to Notre Dame, I think.  But I was not a Catholic boy.  At that time, I didn’t feel right going to a school and taking a religion course.  A lot of my good friends are Catholic, but I decided, I think, over them for Michigan.  That’s how I ended up going to the school in Ann Arbor.  I’ll tell you, those were four of the greatest years in my life!  Not only playing football, but going to school there.  Those people that I met and the friends that I’ve had over the years because of that.  Not only that, but the people that I played ball with in high school.  Then I got to the Packers.  They drafted me.  It would have been the 1954 draft.  My last year in college was ’53.  I was the 10th round draft choice of the Packers back then.  That’s equivalent today of about a round three because at that time there were just twelve NFL teams and only thirty-three players per team.  It was a much more limited game and a limited opportunity for ball players because there weren’t that many teams.  Now they’ve got thirty-two teams and the player limit, I think, is fifty-two or fifty-four.  So there are a lot more pro football players today than there was then.  That’s why I say it was harder then to make a football team than it is now.  I think it was pretty damn easy, if I was growing up today and if I was the same kind of kid, I think I would find it easy to play pro football there’s so damn many teams and so many players if I’d have been in the program that there is today.  I would say that’s true of all guys that were in the NFL in those days.  Although they didn’t play football like they do today.  Well, they actually did in many ways.  They still had to block and tackle and the football field is still, I think, a hundred yards long and the same width —fifty-three yards.  I’m loyal to that time.  I think the guys were maybe a little different, but yet again, I think they would have been able to play today just as well as they played back then if they were growing up at this time.  Because they were tough and fast.  We didn’t throw the pass as much as they do today, but we threw it quite a bit.  I know they’re impressed with the guys that tackle today, but I think I knew some guys that could do that same thing.  That’s why I always remain loyal to pre-‘59ers which we’re referred to.  I’ve been involved with the NFL Alumni.  I’ve been a director.  In fact, I was the assistant chairman of the board of the NFL Alumni out of Fort Lauderdale and also a member of the Retired Players Association.  A lot of those guys I got to know that I used to just remember from under a helmet with a number on them.  Most all of them are pretty damn good guys.  There are a few that are not so nice, but in general it’s a great group of guys.  I never really knew a dumb football player.  Honestly.  I played with a lot of them.  I never ever played with one that I thought was a dumb guy at all.  At Michigan, I believe our whole squad had a grade point average of 3.0.  I think that’s still a B average on a 4-point system.  But anyway, that’s in general how I feel about the times I played.  No matter how you refer to them—as iron men, or whatever.  The football was fun, but yet it was damaging to the individuals.  The life expectancy of a pro football player in those days was not very good and it still isn’t very good.  But I managed to exceed that.  I’m seventy-four years old.  I’ll be seventy-five in November.  I feel the aches and the pains of those days.  I do.  I can say that honestly with fourteen surgeries since that time.

Mel:    Were they all football related?

 

Gene:    All but one that I know of.  I’ve had surgery on my neck and head to my back, to my knees.  The only thing I can think of that’s been taken out of me at surgery that was just basic was a gall bladder.  But everything else was corrective and was probably due to the result of football.  Yes.  I would say so.  I guess I could list the surgeries, but I don’t really care to go into all that.  They are a corrective type surgery.  I had a lot of trouble with my mouth.  I’m not talking about root canals or stuff like that.  I’m talking about replacement of bone tissue and tissue in the mouth.  The first year that I was in the NFL in 1954 was the first year that required that every NFL player had to wear a face mask.  Up to that time, none of us ever wore really a face mask.  Very few guys ever wear a mouth guard.  I never did wear a mouth guard.  Ever.  We always thought that a face mask hindered your view and a mouth piece didn’t let you breathe like you wanted to breathe.  I think that was, in general, the way we felt.  I would say the Marine Corps —and I never was shot at or anything, I never had to be in a fox hole, but I played with several guys that have been in fox holes.  I remember one of them so clearly one day when we were in exhibition season or in training.  We trained at that time in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, at a small college —Stevens Point College.  The Packers did.  I remember that one fellow there was sitting at dinner had been shot at was Clarence Self.  We were sitting there at a training table eating.  I remember Clarence Self.  He was a defensive back.  He played at University of Wisconsin.  Then was in the service in the Korean War.  He was back with the Packers.  We were talking about the stuff that went on in the morning, like how many fights there were.  When you’re sitting where they’re going to cut down to thirty-three players within so many weeks in the NFL in those days.  We had, I believe, forty-four veterans in camp.  They had been traded and come out of retirement or had come down from the Canadian League.  So there isn’t much of a chance of a rookie making the team or a guy out of college when there are that many veterans.  Although some of those guys would drop off.  Anyway, the activity among the ballplayers as far as how they acted and how they treated each other was something really different.  But Clarence Self said, “Next to being shot at in a fox hole, this has to be the damnedest, toughest place to be.”  Is in a pro football training camp.  So I always remembered what Clarence said.  I kind of agree with him.  It was a total war.  How the guys treated guys and how they acted and how they up and left.  You never knew when somebody was going to break into a fist fight.  We had a lot of them.  I remember laying in my bed, a bunk in the dormitory there, at Stevens Point, with my roommate.  We’d be talking about the day and we’d be laughing about it.  About the damn things that went on, what one coach might have done and what one player might have done and whatever.  And who got into hell and all these problems and stuff.  I used to say to them, “Write this stuff down.”  Well I never did keep a diary, but a couple years after I left there, Jerry Kramer came to the Packers.  Jerry Kramer laid in a bed just like I did.  I think Jerry Kramer is an Idaho boy.  Jerry Kramer.  He was smarter than I was.  What he did, he realized this, so he had a recorder and he taped and made all these records of what happened in the day on this recorder.  He did every day from start to finish as far as the season was concerned.  Then they put it into a book called Instant Replay.  It became one of the best sellers in sports history at one time.  The stuff that went on was just unbelievable.  You have to go through it.  Am I glad that I went through it?  I guess so.  Did it make me a better guy?  Maybe.  I know that I can handle things better because of that.  I don’t think that I have found myself in any position that I didn’t feel I could handle.  I’ve never had a real fear of anything that I know of.  I have fears now because of illness and getting older.  I have a fear of not being around too much longer.  It’s not that I’m afraid of dying at all.  You don’t want to leave your family.  I have some good kids and I have a nice wife.  I’ve had a good life.  I don’t think I’ve ever been confronted by anybody that I don’t think it bothered me.  In business or whatever.  I worked most of my life with ex-ballplayers and coaches.  I was involved with Ara Parseghian of Notre Dame.  I guess there were about six of us guys who were ex-ballplayers and we had a financial institution type business.  A profit-making type thing, service type programs and so forth.  We were quite successful at that.  I found it funny —and so did a lot of people —that a Michigan guy was involved with so many Notre Dame guys.  It was basically because I lived in South Bend, Indiana.  Where I live right now, it’s about twenty-five minutes from here.  I live in southwestern Michigan.  That’s my general feeling.  Is there anything else?

Mel:    Who were you close to on the Packers?  Who were your best friends?

Gene:    I was close to a fellow by the name of Jim Temp who played for Wisconsin and then came to the Packers.  He lives in Green Bay.  He’s on the executive board of the Packers right now.  That’s probably as high as you could get except the director of the executives.  They call all the shots.  It’s a very small board, a very exclusive board.  The stockholders they have to report to is the people of Green Bay because it is a public company.  Gary Knafelc.  Gary played at Colorado.  He’s from Pueblo, Colorado.  He was my second roommate for a couple of years on the road and at training camp.  My first roommate was a fellow who had been traded from Cleveland by the name of Jerry Helluin.  He was a big tackle, about three hundred plus pound tackle.  I haven’t heard from Jerry for years.  I think he was from Louisiana or some place like that as I remember.  Gary Knafelc and Jim Kemp were probably as close as anybody.  The first year, we lived in an upstairs house in Green Bay.  I lived with Dave “Hog” Hanner who played for, I think, Arkansas.  Another guy by the name of Buddy Brown, who is now dead.  Buddy was a guard.  I think he also played for Arkansas.  A fellow by the name of Joe Johnson who was a halfback from Boston College.  We had a frequent roomer there, but he never paid the rent, but he was there all the time.  That was Max McGee.  My first year was Max McGee’s first year.  Jerry and a couple of those guys liked to play cards so well.  That’s about the only thing outside of practicing football that they did.  They’d play cards.  Our kitchen table upstairs was the card table.  Max loved to play cards.  I guess that’s why he was there all the time.  I know he slept there several times.  I don’t remember him helping with the rent at all, but I guess he lived some place else.  I don’t know.  Jim Ringo was there.  Bob Skoronski and Forrest Gregg.  Bart Starr.  My last year was Bart Starr’s first year.  I couldn’t play any more.  I was so banged up.  I would have loved to play, but I couldn’t do that.  Another good friend of mine and who I played with in college was Roger Zatkoff who I thought was one of the best linebackers that ever came along.  We played together.  We were the inside linebackers at Michigan together.  I played one inside and Roger played the other.  I played two years there with him and then I played three years with him at Green Bay and then he went to Detroit.  I think anybody that knew Roger Zatkoff at that time and is still around would say there isn’t anybody that could hit any harder than Roger.  I know I played with him and beside him.  I thought I could hit hard once in awhile, but I’ll tell you, Roger could do it like no one else could.  He could unload on somebody.  I guess I probably had too many injuries and therefore I wasn’t unloading as much as maybe I could or should.  I was getting the job done.  Up until I was a sophomore in college, I could let it all go.  Then I got hurt.  I cracked three ribs and I got two of them broke pretty good.  I continued to play with them and learned to play a little different ball game.  You can’t really punish somebody if you hurt so bad when you hit yourself.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t play as long as I should or as good as I should.  I could play with them.  I could make the team.  I was also handicapped from the fact that it kind of hurts.  When we’d play in California and be on a plane that far, after the ball game, I would hurt so bad that I’d have to go back to the end of the airplane.  It made a lot of stewardesses mad.  But I’d have to back to the end of the airplane and lay down on the floor because I couldn’t breathe unless I’d lay down.  It bothered me for a few hours always.  It continued to bother me for a few years, but then it finally went away.  I thought I was having a heart attack all the time.  But it was just something that happened in there.  It just really hurt me.  It was the ribs and the lungs and whatever.  They’d take some punishment.  They were kind of, I guess, rebelling or something.  But it hurt.  My football would have been a lot longer and a lot better if it hadn’t been for a couple of injuries I had.  I tore up a knee bad and continued with it.  I hurt those ribs.  They always hurt.  I was a little more of a finesse player than a punishing player.  I really got some prominence and was wanted by colleges because I was a kid that could punish.  That kind of went away and I became a finesse player, but I could play.  But I never played as good as I wanted to or thought I could, but I played hard with what I had.  I have a lot of good friends in college that I still have contact with.  As far as well known ballplayers, it would have to be Zatkoff.  I played with a Lowell Perry.  He played for Pittsburgh after Michigan.  He was a fine offensive end.  Most of the guys that I played in college with were pretty good academically.  If they didn’t go into the service and fly airplanes, they went to professional schools and became a lawyer or a doctor.  A lot of the guys I played with are M.D.’s or attorneys.  A lot of them are no longer with us.

Mel:    Who was the coach that you worked under the most with the Packers?

 

Gene:    Lou Rymkus was basically the line coach.  He kind of coached offensively and defensively.  My defensive coach was named Red Herdon.  He came from St. Norbert’s College.  He was a friend of Lisle Blackbourn who was at Marquette.  Red — his real name is Tom.  Tom Herdon.  That’s who was my defensive coach.

Mel:    How did Blackbourn compare as a coach with Bennie Oosterbaan?

Gene:    Entirely different.  I think Lisle Blackbourn was well schooled.  I think Lisle Blackbourn was extremely knowledgeable and worked very hard, but he didn’t know how to handle guys.  He’d spent so long in high school football and then college football.  He was at Wisconsin and then the Marquette head coach.  It wasn’t long after he left Marquette that Marquette discontinued football.  Lisle Blackbourn didn’t know how to handle older guys in football.  He had trouble with that.  Our quarterback at that time was Tobin Rote and then Bart Starr was behind him.  He didn’t have to tell Tobin Rote how to take the ball from the center or how to throw the damn football.  If you’re there and you’re playing, you know how to do it better than most of your coaches ever would because there were some coaches who had played a lot, but most of your coaches never played a lot of football.  They were around it and some of them did.  I don’t know where Lisle Blackbourn played football, but he didn’t need to tell or show Tobin Rote how to take the football from center or how to drop back in a short drop or longer drop or roll out or whatever.  He didn’t have to coach them.  He’d have to tell them, “This is what I want you to do.”  That’s the problem he had because he had the same guys Lombardi had.  A lot of them.  The guys could play football.  We would beat the Detroit Lions, who was the world champs, on Thanksgiving, but yet we would lose other ball games.  So there was some talent there.  Blackbourn didn’t know how to handle a player that was married, who had children.  He had that problem.  Lombardi didn’t have that problem.  He’d been in pro football as a backfield coach with the Giants.  He understood that.  He played a psychological game.  He played to those wifes.  Basically that was the difference.  Hornung and McGee and Starr and Ringo and Gregg and Skoronski were all there when Lombardi came.  Oosterbaan was kind of an overall tutor type guy.  He was all Michigan, all tradition, that it was a privilege to play for Michigan.  If I heard him say it one time, I heard him say it a thousand times, “You’re given a privilege this afternoon to go out in that stadium and there’s going to be 97,000 people there and they’re expecting you to do a job.  They’re trusting that of you.”  He had a million different ways.  He was Michigan all the way.  He kind of coached that way.  He was not a hands-on.  He was an observer.  He let his assistants do the coaching.  He made the game plan and tried to rally his ballplayers.  Entirely different between Blackbourn and Oosterbaan.

Mel:    Were you in the Marines in 1955?

Gene:    I went in the Marine Corps in ‘54 right after college got out, in June or so.  Then my knees were so bad.  I had gone to Parris Island for boot camp while I was in college.  They would give a physical once in awhile.  They’d look at my knees.  One day I got word from the company commander, they were mustering me out on an honorable discharge with a medical.  They said, “Your knees are too bad.  You can’t be a platoon leader with those kind of knees.”  And so practice had started at Green Bay in ‘54.  It had just got under way when I went to Green Bay.  I went to Stevens Point.  I left the Marine Corps and got on a plane in Washington, D.C. and made one phone call to Stevens Point.  I made arrangements and got in there a day later.  Then I started practice with them.  My knees were OK if they could be taped up.  They were taped every day for every practice.  I’ve had more damn tape on me.  Maybe that’s what — I’m allergic to tape.  Then I played all ‘54 and then ‘55 I really destroyed a knee.  I was on the roster, but I wasn’t playing in ‘55.  Then I played in ‘56 again.  I had a contract for ‘57, but I could hardly walk at that time.  It just wasn’t worth it.  I’m probably glad that I did that although I kind of wonder what might have happened otherwise that will never be.