By Matt Schudel
April 15 at 10:43 PM ET
Willie Davis, a Hall of Fame defensive end and a team captain for Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, when he helped lead his team to the first two Super Bowl championships, died April 15 at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 85.
The Packers announced his death, noting that his wife said he had been treated for kidney failure.
Mr. Davis played 10 years for the Packers, joining the team in 1960 and becoming a stalwart defensive performer at left end. He was one of the leading disciples of Lombardi, an intense taskmaster and perfectionist who is considered one of football’s greatest coaches.
“Perfection is not attainable,” Lombardi said, in one of many maxims attributed to him. “But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
Throughout most of the 1960s, the Packers reached a level of excellence that few teams in any sport have equaled, winning five National Football League championships in seven years. In January 1967, the Packers met the Kansas City Chiefs of the rival American Football League in the inaugural Super Bowl, winning 35-10. The next year, in Super Bowl II, the Packers beat the Oakland Raiders, 33-14. The Super Bowl trophy is named for Lombardi.
The 6-foot-3, 245-pound Mr. Davis led Green Bay’s pass rush in both games, and as the team’s defensive captain he was, in effect, Lombardi’s alter ego on the field.
“He told us this was a way of life, a game of survival, a test of manhood,” Mr. Davis told author David Maraniss for his 1999 biography of Lombardi, “When Pride Still Mattered.”
Steady, smart and seemingly indestructible, Mr. Davis did not miss a game during his 12-year NFL career. He never gave up on a play and often chased down runners on the opposite side of the field.
Before his Super Bowl heroics, Mr. Davis forced what Green Bay fans call the “million-dollar fumble” during a game against the Baltimore Colts late in the 1966 season. With the Colts driving for a touchdown in the fourth quarter, Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas dropped back to pass, then tucked the ball under his arm and ran toward the goal line.
Mr. Davis caught him from behind on a muddy field and jarred the ball loose. Linebacker Dave Robinson recovered the fumble, and the Packers held on for a 14-10 victory. They then beat the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL championship game before going on to the first Super Bowl.
“As a pass rusher, he was so quick off the ball,” Robinson said of Mr. Davis in an interview with Packers.com. “He was a good run player, too. He was so strong in the chest, he could hit the tackle and control them. Throw them or drive them.”
Mr. Davis played his first two NFL seasons with the Cleveland Browns, doubling as an offensive tackle and defensive end. Admiring his ability, Lombardi acquired him in a trade before the 1960 season, making him a full-time defensive player.
“In Willie Davis we got a great one,” Lombardi said in 1962.
During the team’s grueling preseason drills, Lombardi was known for loudly criticizing some players and quietly encouraging others, depending on what he thought was the best motivational tool in the moment. One year, after ripping another player, he unexpectedly turned on Mr. Davis, who was never unprepared for practice or a game.
The next morning, Mr. Davis asked Lombardi for an explanation.
“He said, ‘I’ve got to prove nobody’s beyond chewing out,’ ” Mr. Davis recalled to sportswriter W.C. Heinz for the book “Once They Heard the Cheers.” “I said, ‘Yeah, coach, but give me some warning.’”
Mr. Davis was a five-time all-pro and still holds the Packers record for recovered fumbles, with 21. Sacks of opposing quarterbacks were not an official statistic when he played, but historians have credited him with more than 100 during his career. He brought a tenacity to the game that made him, according to NFL Films, one of 100 greatest players in pro football history.
He was the leader of a defensive unit filled with Hall of Fame players, including defensive tackle Henry Jordan, linebackers Robinson and Ray Nitschke and defensive backs Herb Adderley and Willie Wood, who died in February.
Former Packers center Bill Curry called Mr. Davis, in an NFL Films documentary, “the finest combination of leader and player that I ever saw.”
[[Willie Wood, Hall of Fame defensive back for Vince Lombardi’s Packers, dies at 83]]
Beyond the field, Mr. Davis served as a leader for other African American players in the NFL and, as Lombardi instilled, a force for team unity on the Packers. As a white player from Georgia, Curry had not been on an integrated team until he joined the Packers in 1965.
Mr. Davis “didn’t just help me to play in the NFL for 10 years,” Curry said, “he changed my life because I was never able to look at another human being in the same way I had.”
William Delford Davis was born July 24, 1934, in Lisbon, La. He was 8 when his parents separated, and he moved with his mother and two younger siblings to Texarkana, Ark. His mother was a cook at a country club.
Mr. Davis earned a scholarship to the historically black Grambling State University in Louisiana, where his coach was Eddie Robinson, who prepared dozens of players for pro careers and was the first college football coach to win 400 games.
After graduating in 1956, Mr. Davis served two years in the Army before joining the Browns in 1958. While playing in the NFL, he also received a master of business administration degree in 1968 from the University of Chicago. He retired from the Packers at the end of the 1969 season and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1981.
Mr. Davis was a football broadcaster for NBC in the 1970s and turned down several coaching offers. He operated a prosperous beer distributorship in Los Angeles before selling the business in 1989.
He was a key figure in planning the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and was reportedly recruited to run for mayor of the city. He later owned several radio stations and was on the boards of the Packers and several companies and founded a charitable foundation in Lombardi’s name.
His marriages to Ann McCullom and Andrea Erickson ended in divorce; survivors include his wife, the former Carol Dyrek; and two children from his first marriage.
In his business office, Mr. Davis kept pictures of his Packers championship teams and a framed portrait of Lombardi.
“There are days when I wake up and I don’t feel like getting up and crawling into the office,” he told Heinz in the 1970s. “I say to myself that I own the Willie Davis Distributing Company, and today I’m going to exercise my prerogative and not go in. Then I think, ‘What would Lombardi do?’ I get up and out of bed.”
