Pro Football: Confessions of a Legend

The whole world loves a lover —which probably accounts for the fact that people are forever doing favors for Paul (“Golden Boy”) Hornung, 29. Paul is properly grateful. In his autobiography, Football and the Single Man (Doubleday; $4.95), the ex-Notre Dame star and veteran Green Bay Packers halfback does his best to repay everybody who, as he puts it, “contributed to making Paul Hornung, like Wyatt Earp, a legend in his own time.”

It is quite a list. First come the sportswriters, who awarded him the Heisman Trophy as the U.S.’s No. 1 college player in 1956, after he sparked Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish to their worst (two wins, eight losses) season in history. There is Paul’s mother, who pounded a typewriter for the WPA in Louisville after his father left home in 1939, and cut corners all one year to buy him a $48 bicycle for Christmas. “I rode it up and down the street once,” recalls Paul, “and that was it.”

Then there is the “friendly, friendly” college recruiter who offered him 1) $10,000 in cash, 2) a new car, and 3) not one but two free scholarships (the other was for the girl of his choice) to play ball at some place other than Notre Dame. Roman Catholic Hornung had to refuse: “If I hadn’t, there wouldn’t be a priest in Louisville who would talk to me.” South Bend, as it turned out, wasn’t such a bad place after all. Paul drove a car on campus in violation of the rules, and he learned to save his class cuts for long weekends that extended through Monday and Tuesday.

Paree & the Black Books. Thanks to his friends, Hornung’s whole life has been one long weekend, and “every day is Derby Day.” While he was still a junior at Notre Dame, a “bachelor millionaire” named Abe Samuels introduced Paul to the chorus line at Chicago’s Chez Paree. After he turned pro, a pinball-machine operator named Barney Shapiro staked him to a Las Vegas trip and handled his weekly bets (up to $300) on pro football games. When Paul was suspended in 1963 for gambling, Governor Endicott Peabody of Massachusetts made a speech in his behalf. Wisconsin’s Senator Alexander Wiley did his best to get Paul deferred from the Army, and when that failed, President Kennedy intervened to get him a pass so that he could play in the 1961 championship game against the New York Giants. Paul scored 19 points in that game and won a Corvette for his performance. “If John F. Kennedy hadn’t made the call he had,” Hornung writes, “I wouldn’t have played and wouldn’t have won a $5,000 automobile … I loved that man.”

To say nothing of girls—hundreds and hundreds of them, or so he says, all catalogued and cross-filed in Bachelor Hornung’s library of little black books. Paul’s appeal is obvious. “I have curly blond hair,” he writes, “and someone described me as having ‘clear blue eyes, dimpled chin, and sensuous lips.’ ” To hear Paul tell it, he can scarcely fend off the swarms of adoring females. At Notre Dame, a strange girl once smuggled herself into his dormitory room. Another practically attacked him on the Packer bench, smack in the middle of a ball game. His basic taste in “fiancees” (he calls them all that) is pretty well defined. They should be “tall and beautiful,” and they should know who Khrushchev is. He once threw over a Hollywood starlet who didn’t. Lately, he says he has been concentrating on foreign girls, because “they don’t like to talk. They just like to be with you. When you light their cigarette, they light yours.”

Relieved of Duty. Hornung tries not to let his extracurricular activities get in the way of his work. For one thing, he cannot afford to: Packer Coach Vince Lombardi already has fined him several times, twice for the amount of $500. For another, his work has not been going too well lately. After a 1964 season in which he missed 26 out of 38 field goal attempts, he has been relieved of his kicking duties. So far this year, he has scored only 18 points—a long way from his N.F.L. season record of 176.

Those little things do not keep him awake at night. “A lot of people have said about me, ‘Paul Hornung was born to be a winner. No matter what happens, things will always turn out right for Golden Boy.’ “