That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory

by John Eisenberg

They had played eighteen games at County Stadium since it opened in 1953, with the average attendance a disappointing 23,038. Sports fans in Milwaukee were more excited about their own winning baseball team than Green Bay’s losing football team. But the 1959 baseball season was over, the Braves having failed to win a third-straight National League pennant—they had finished second, two games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers—and the Packers hoped their surprising start would bring out more spectators. Tickets sold briskly during the week, the total surpassing 23,000 on Wednesday, 28,000 on Friday, and 32,000 by Saturday afternoon. With sunny, mild weather predicted, the Milwaukee Journal speculated the crowd might top 40,000, a threshold reached only once before, at an August 1955 exhibition game against the Colts and then-rookie Alan Ameche, a Wisconsin native who had won the Heisman Trophy as a University of Wisconsin fullback.