The man who’d saved Davis from football oblivion was Vince Lombardi, who had taken over as Green Bay’s head coach one year earlier with little fanfare and some novel theories about talent. The turnaround had come quickly. In Davis’s first season, the Packers narrowly lost the NFL Championship Game. They went on to win the next two. After a dip in form in 1964, Lombardi defied the racism of the day by rebuilding the Packers with undervalued black players. In 1965, he took the strategy a step further by making Davis the team’s defensive captain, one of the first African Americans to hold that
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