Golden Boy Still Has that Midas Touch

Prospecting for a Tiger Woods nugget, a sports writer uncovered this at a memorabilia site:

“Paul Hornung’s Super Bowl I championship ring, sold, $39,181.”

How curious.

Hornung was a Hall of Fame halfback for Vince Lombardi’s 1960s teams in Green Bay. He may be the best all-around football player ever. He also succeeded in the real world. A TV star. Built businesses. Lived a millionaire’s life.

So what’s with the ring?

“I have no idea,” Hornung said.

He didn’t sell it?

“I don’t even know when I ever had that ring. I didn’t play in the game because of a neck injury. The rings, the trophies, I’ve only got a couple of those things left. They never meant much to me.”

But, almost $40,000 ...

The great man laughed.

“They can keep the ring. I wish I had the money.”

NFL players now consider life wasted unless it results in a Super Bowl ring the size of Idaho. Hornung reminds us that once upon a time, in an America far, far away from today’s, the work itself meant more than a symbol of the work.

In fact, a friend of Hornung’s said, “If you really want to know what Paul’s about, ask him whatever happened to his Heisman [Trophy].”

At Notre Dame, Hornung played quarterback, halfback and fullback. He ran, passed and blocked. He punted, kicked off and kicked field goals. He ran back punts and kickoffs. In those one-platoon days, he also played safety.

Though the Irish won only two of 10 games in 1956, Hornung’s mastery was so complete and so sensational that he won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s outstanding college player.

So, Paul, whatever happened to your Heisman?

“I did sell that,” he said.

Two years ago, Hornung sold the trophy (for a reported $250,000) to “the nicest guy in the world, a big ol’ Irishman from upstate New York,” a restaurateur named Joe Walsh.

At The Stadium, a restaurant and bar in Garrison, N.Y., Walsh “has a sports shrine with Joe DiMaggio stuff, Mickey Mantle, lots of mine, including signed jerseys and my Heisman.”

Such a story, the odyssey of Paul Hornung’s Heisman. It began on a rooftop in Louisville, Ky.

Loretta Hornung and her 2-year-old son, Paul, lived in a rented room at the front of a little white frame cottage in the city’s working-class Irish west end; they slept on cots. When the Ohio River flooded in 1937, water reached the cottage eaves. The mother carried her boy to the roof. They were rescued by a man in a rowboat.

Whatever her son did after that, Loretta Hornung loved. She remembered that after football practice at school he rode his bicycle home five miles to play in a hospital yard across the street.

“He loved playing football twice a day,” she told a reporter in 1986. “The day of the game was kind of a letdown.”

She sent her son to a Catholic high school, Louisville Flaget, and wanted him to attend Notre Dame.

“Mom made sure I studied enough,” he said.

From South Bend, he hitchhiked home. Even as a Packer, he spent offseasons at his mother’s. He took her to dinner every Wednesday. The centerpiece of her home was her boy’s Heisman Trophy--until the sad day when Notre Dame asked/demanded its Heisman winners bring the trophies to South Bend for display.

“My mother would never have forgiven me if I’d just taken it away,” Hornung said. “So I got another one made and gave that one to her. Then, later, Notre Dame sent the trophies back to us. That’s how I wound up with two Heismans, the original and the copy.”

Along came the New York restaurateur Joe Walsh, who’d heard the story of two Heismans. He bought the original. With the money, Hornung did a thing that no doubt would have pleased his mother, now dead. He created The Paul Hornung Scholarship for Louisville and southern Indiana students at Notre Dame. Nine students have received Hornung scholarships.

“I get a lot of letters from fans,” Hornung said. “The letters that mean the most to me are from those kids so thankful, saying that without the scholarships, they couldn’t have gone to Notre Dame.”

In an earlier life, the prodigal playboy Paul Hornung might have found a different use for the money. We may imagine him lighting cigars with Ben Franklins. Even in his AARP age, we’re happy to report, Hornung is not fully tamed.

Listen ...

When Shane Matthews, a quarterback of no distinction, asked the Redskins earlier this month if he could wear their No. 9 jersey, as he had done in college and with the Bears, he did it innocently enough. He also did it ignorantly, for the last man to wear No. 9 in Washington was a quarterback of distinction, Sonny Jurgensen, who could throw a tight spiral 50 yards behind his back.

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat,” Paul Hornung did not say; he chose, instead, a phrase just as colorful and less printable.

He did say, “Shane Matthews better throw a few hundred more touchdown passes before he even thinks of wearing Sonny’s jersey. Look, I can throw better than Matthews. Right now.”

Yes, at age 66, he still is The Golden Boy.