Review: "Instant Replay"

Kramer himself says today that he's glad he could resist the temptation to be "literary" in his prose, and the straight-forward account of the season that ended with the Packers winning their second Super Bowl feels natural and easy.

When Instant Replay was first published in 1968, Kramer and Schaap were among those breaking the trail as far as sports diaries went. Lots of the ones that have followed have been more explicit. Many of them have made a lot of people mad. Instant Replay, republished this year, is restrained compared to them.

On the other hand, even 40 years after the fact, the portrait of grown men as large adolescents living in fear of Vince Lombardi...grown men who regard sneaking out of pre-season camp for a beer as a great adventure...is compelling. So is the extent to which Kramer and his teammates were willing to risk their health and compromise their futures. When we talked, Jerry Kramer said he'd prefer not to discuss his own injury problems, but he acknowledged that some of his teammates had been badly damaged. When one hears that, it's hard to regard as a joke Kramer's contention in Instant Replay that Coach Lombardi had the highest pain threshold on the Packers, since none of the players' injuries ever hurt him a bit.