Paul Hornung's last touch

December 18, 1966

The play: Paul Hornung touches the ball for the last time

One of the great cruelties of professional sports is the sudden endings. Great teams find their seasons over in the blink of an eye thanks to an odd bounce or a single missed tackle. Great coaches prepare their teams for everything only for injuries to derail their carefully laid plans.

And great players abruptly find that the wonderful bodies that carried them to fame and fortune and success can’t do what they asked them to do for so long.

This is a cruel reality, but not a unique one. It happens to everyone who plays sports at any level, and it happens to hundreds if not thousands of professional athletes every year. No one plays forever, and there’s really no reason to call out any one player’s encounter with Father Time.

But Paul Hornung merits an exception for a few reasons.

First, he was one of the first greats of the Vince Lombardi era to see his career come to an end. Bart Starr and Forrest Gregg would play until 1971. Ray Nitschke until 1972. Gale Gillingham, one of the later draft picks of Lombardi’s tenure, would hold out until 1976. But Hornung would be done even before the end of the 1966 season.

Second, he was arguably Lombardi favorite player — and the only player for whom we have indisputable, on-the-record confirmation of Lombardi describing him as the best player he ever worked with. There are disputed sources attributing that sentiment to Forrest Gregg, and Lombardi had a tendency to pile superlatives on whichever player he was talking about at the moment (he throws out “best” and “finest” and “greatest” all throughout the pages of “Run to Daylight,” the famous book he “co-wrote” with W.C. Heinz). But he actually said the words “Paul Hornung is the greatest player I’ve ever coached” in a press conference, and even if you disagree, it’s hard to discount words from the man himself.

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