The Ice Bowl: The Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers Season [Hardcover]

Mike Shropshire (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1997

In 1966, the Green Bay Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys for the NFL championship. The teams' intense rivalry in the following 1967 season would culminate in one of the most classic football games of all time--the Ice Bowl. Now one of the most irreverent sportswriter in the business brings the final game of the '67 season to life, vividly profiling the players' distinctive personalities on and off the field. of photos.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Some games simply live forever. The 1967 NFL championship game, played in minus-37-degree wind chill, between the Packers and the Cowboys is certainly one of them. It was a grudge match between the teams that had played for the title the year before, a game between two teams that hated each other, two teams as different as their field generals--flashy Dallas quarterback Don Meredith and blue- collar Packer signal-caller Bart Starr. Ice Bowl recounts these teams' dramatic march toward the inevitable showdown with stunning detail and lively analysis, culminating in a vivid replay of the championship game, where Starr scored the winning touchdown with just 13 seconds left. It is a football moment that, 30 years later, can still take fans' condensing breath away.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (October 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556115326
• ISBN-13: 978-1556115325
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #432,719 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Needs to get the facts right, November 30, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Crystal Lake, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ice Bowl: The Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers Season (Hardcover)

Mike Shropshire needs to do a better job doing his homework! On p. 37 he notes Tony Canadeo as the Packer president in 1967. Canadeo never was. Dominic Oleniczyk was from 1958 through 1982. Name mispellings, such as referring to Packer OT Bob Skoronski as "Skronski" (p. 46) hurt the author's credibility. He refers to "St. Thomas Hospital" on Webster St. in Green Bay on p. 6. I am sure he meant to refer to it as either Bellin or St. Vincent, which are the only two hospitals on that street. He also listed the "Tropic" (actually "Tropics") on p. 81 as a common Packer haunt in the '60s. This was a strip joint in town at the time. Did the editors care enough to check out facts before this book went to print?

Author trashes the present-day Cowboys in first chapter and paints Green Bay as a town full of drunken slobs as he searches for a bar to watch the Super Bowl.

Slow developing, but still worth a read for those fans interested in the glorious '60s. I just wish the author would have done a little more research when compiling the facts.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Ice Bowl and other unrelated incidents, January 4, 2002

By 

Daniel (Dallas, TX, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ice Bowl: The Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers Season (Hardcover)

Basically a good account of the seasons of the Packers and the Cowboys leading up to the 1967 NFL Championship Game. However the author throws in a lot of unrelated information that appears to filler material. It was if the author decided that the 1967 season and the "Ice Bowl" would not be enough material for a book. That is not the case because the author focuses on the recollections of a few key players. There were many other players, fans, coaches, sportcasters that the author did not consult, or referenced with little detail. For example, he notes that Don Meredith complained about the game not being a fair test of football because of the weather. He could have noted that Meredith also stated that the icy field took away ninety percent of the Cowboys offense (Dallas Times Herald) You hear a lot from Pete Gent, but nothing from other more notable figures. He also uses stereotypes to describe the cities of Dallas and Green Bay. In his description, Dallas was a place full of ultra right-wing millionaires rolling in their own money and Green Bay was a place where people live wretched lives only brightened by their beloved Packers. The author often uses awkward references to events like the Vietnam War to start his chapters. It was like he was couldn't decide whether to write a football book or a David Halberstam-like account of the era. He should have stuck to football.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Leonard Pinth-Garnell would love it!, February 16, 2005

By 

WNY Reviewer (Western NY, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ice Bowl: The Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers Season (Hardcover)

In the early years of "Saturday Night Live," Dan Ackroyd played a character named Leonard Pinth-Garnell, who would host a show called "Bad Ballet" or "Bad Theater" or whatever. They'd present a truly awful play or whatever, then cut to Leonard Pinth-Garnell applauding and saying "Awful! Dreadful! Simply terrible!" and roll the credits over footage of someone dropping the script into a trash can.

Well, if Leonard Pinth-Garnell ever wants to do "Bad Book" he can start with this one!

After learning of Ed Gruver's highly-rated book about the Ice Bowl, I looked for it at my local library, forgetting Gruver's name. That's how I picked this book up. Big mistake.

By the time I'd gotten into just the prologue, I felt like the kid in "The Emperor's New Clothes," wondering how anyone could like this book. So I came to Amazon, looked the book up, saw the existing reviews, and realized I'd gotten the wrong one.

Here are the things, JUST FROM THE PROLOGUE AND FIRST CHAPTER, that made me hate this book:

1. "All about me" - Author Mike Shropshire just keeps sticking himself into things. "Here's what I did... so and so told me..." I'm much less interested in reading about the author than I am reading about the game.

2. Lame jokes - for example, two jokes about pot smoking. Tony Kornheiser and often Jerry Izenberg, citing just two examples, show that one can write informatively about sports while being funny. Shropshire manages neither while attempting both.

3. Getting the facts wrong - Page 15: He says that the Cowboys and Packers played for the 1966 NFL title on December 30, 1966. Actual date was January 1, 1967. Page 18: Packers beat the Chiefs 34-10 in first Super Bowl. Actual score was 35-10. This is nitpicky stuff, but when, again and again, Shropshire messes up information readily available, I take what he says with an increasingly-larger grain of salt.

I will now look for the Gruver book, and I expect to enjoy it. I can also recommend "Instant Replay" by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap, which also covers the game and the 1967 season, just much better than Shropshire's book; and "When Pride Still Mattered" by Dave Maraniss, which has an amazingly detailed and riveting chapter about the game.

To write such an awful book about such a compelling topic must have been hard work, but Shropshire managed it.