I Heard It On The NARN
By Mitch Berg
To get Jerry Kramer in the Hall of Fame, write the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Just send a letter nominating him, and the Senior Selection Committee will do the rest.
To help with the Voter ID Billboard drive, go here and learn about the fundraiser.
June 23rd, 2012 at 4:37 pm
It was nice of you and Ed to give Kramer’s daughter a chance to make her pitch. I was going to call in, but since you guys moved on to other topics I’ll post this here.
Kramer isn’t in the HOF for two reasons, neither of which make a lot of sense at this point:
1) There was a feeling for a while that there are too many Lombardi-era Packers already in the HOF. And there are a lot of them, no doubt — Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jim Taylor, Jim Ringo, Forrest Gregg, Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, Ray Nitschke, Willie Wood and Herb Adderley, along with Lombardi himself and Emlen Tunnell, who played briefly for the Packers of that era. Kramer has been slighted for that reason. There are a few guys on other dynasty teams who are on the outs for the same reason that I think belong in the HOF, notably L.C. Greenwood of the Steelers, Roger Craig of the 49ers and Jim Marshall of the Vikings. Personally, I don’t think this should matter, but historically it has.
2) Kramer was, fairly or not, resented by some players in his day because he was able to leverage his friendship with Dick Schaap into becoming a bit of a spokesman for the era, not only through the success of Instant Replay but also a number of other books he wrote with Schaap. I actually think Kramer’s prominence in the 60s is actually an argument for his induction, because he did a lot to further the marketing efforts of the league as a whole. A lot of the ongoing mythology of the NFL stems from the 1960s and 1970s and Kramer was a big part of telling that story, then and now.
I take it as a good sign that Mike Ditka and Roger Staubach are behind this effort, because they are both major figures in that same NFL mythology. Jerry Kramer was a hell of a player, too.