Hornung: An Example to Ponder About
Still to be determined is what sorcery could make a Paul Hornung risk.
By this, means risking his handsome neck and handsome way of living by assaulting, as he did, a rule he can read on every locker room wall in the National Football League.
The answer is not too hard to find. In a sense, Paul Hornung was indoctrinated to excess at age 17 with the coming of the first high-pressure college recruiter.
So sought after he was that Paul (Bear) Bryant, now at Alabama but then coach at the University of Kentucky, brought the governor of Kentucky to the modest Hornung apartment in Louisville to help charm Hornung into accepting a scholarship in 1953.
Bryant has since said he would have stayed at Kentucky three more years had he landed Hornung. He did not get Hornung, however, principally because of Hornung's mother, whose abiding dream was for her son to go to Notre Dame.
Hornung was asleep in another room when the governor came to call, and Mrs. Hornung did not bother to wake him up.
As a Notre Dame man, Hornung found that he could rationalize the firing of his former coach, Terry Brennan, for being 'too young,' even though Brennan had been hired five years earlier when he was five years younger.
Hornung called it part of the game. Used to special treatment as a pro star, it seemed natural to Hornung that the U.S. Army obligingly gave him weekends off so that he might continue his career with the Packers.
He had found he could scarcely get out of the way of people wanting to do him favors and give him money. It was by this time quite easy to tale lightly 'a simple little wager' of $100 or $200.
The money didn't mean much to him, why should the rule? After all, he said, 'I'm just another one of the vehicles in this business.'
The point about Paul Hornung, of course, is that he is not unique among American athletes. Commercial sport is a business. The people who run it - whether they be college presidents or owners of big-league ball clubs - want to be successful.
They are successful if they win, and they win when they have the best players. But this drive to excel puts terrifying, almost unreasonable pressure on good athletes such as Hornung.
Small wonder that the values of such gifted athletes become relative and that rules become playthings to be toyed with. The young men often develop what ex-West Point Coach Earl Blaik calls a what-the-hell attitude.