Arnie Herber: The Man Who Invented the NFL Passing Game
The incredible story of unlikely Hall of Famer Arnie Herber - as told by Norman L. Macht
Many of today’s young NFL fans can recite the passing stats of star quarterbacks like Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Pat Mahomes and Drew Brees.
They may have heard their fathers or grandfathers talk about Brett Favre, John Unitas, Bob Griese, maybe even old-time passing greats like Sid Luckman, Cecil Isbell and Slingin’ Sammy Baugh.
But I’d wager that none of today’s fans has ever heard of the man who invented the short and long passing game in the NFL about a hundred years ago, before the league even began recording passing stats.
His name is Arnie Herber and this is the story of how he became the most unlikely member of the U.S. Pro Football Hall of Fame.
It is based on my interviews with high school and pro teammates (he had almost no college experience), members of his family, and longtime friends.
The Young Arnie Herber
Arnold Herber was born on April 2, 1910, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. A few years later he and his mother moved to Sturgeon Bay when his father was killed in a railroad accident.
Northern Wisconsin was already a hotbed of enthusiasm for the evolving game of football.
In 1919 the Indian Packing Company in Green Bay sponsored a semipro team that became a charter member of the first professional football league in 1921, a year later renamed the National Football League.
Arnie was bitten by the bug. As a youngster he practiced throwing a ball over their two-story house. He hung a tire from a tree and threw the ball through the hole for hours. He developed powerful wrists and forearms.
But he had a handicap: he had unusually small hands. Years later, when he had become the NFL’s top passer, he revealed why he threw sidearm and how he held the ball, which was rounder and less pointed than today.
He couldn’t grip it with his fingertips on the laces but used his thumb instead.
“The main thing is I couldn’t grip the ball. I held it with the strings in the palm of my hand instead of on the end of my fingers like all the passers do today. I threw it more like a shotput, using my fingers to steer it.”
Arnie’s high school teammate Jerome Quinn, who went on to star at Wisconsin, recalled, “It was no trick to catch a Herber pass. It came right into your hands like a snowflake.”
High School Rivalry
Green Bay had two high schools, East High and West High, a situation that often creates the fiercest kind of rivalry bordering on hatred.
In their case, it had begun in 1895 and continues to this day with the same intensity, topped by an annual Thanksgiving Day football game.
It was a 30-year legacy of such a feud that young Herber walked into when he and his mother returned to Green Bay and Arnie enrolled as a freshman at West High in the fall of 1925.
He was small and thin, later filling out to 165 pounds, but nimble and well-coordinated. He was ready to play football for the Purple of West High.
Playing offense and defense, he was the play caller, drop kicker, punter, passer, runner, blocker and most aggressive tackler on the team. But he was also very green, unpolished and unfamiliar with the football lingo.
Teammate Jerome Quinn recalled, “When Arnie started calling signals for the ball to be snapped from center, he’d say, ‘Hick . . .one . . . two . . . three’ and the older players snickered and giggled.
He wondered what they were laughing about. Finally one of them told him the word was ‘hip’ not ‘hick.’”
Arnie led them through an unbeaten season until the big Thanksgiving Day East-West game. City Stadium, later to become the home of the Packers, had just been built adjacent to East High.
Before a crowd of 7,000, he drop-kicked a 50-yard field goal and showed some early passing skill, but East High won for the eighth straight time, 9-3.
The next year his passes to Quinn and a daring call of an end-around as time was running out and snow was falling avenged that earlier loss, the only one Herber suffered in his three years of high school competition.
By 1927 he was considered the finest high school athlete in the state, lettering in football, basketball and track. His West High teams had dominated East High in football, basketball and track. The East Siders never forgot.
Although local high school stars had little national recognition in the 1920s, the coaches at West Point had heard about Herber’s high school records.
Growing up, Fast
They wanted him to play for Army. But right after graduating, he had eloped with Lois LeFevre, a vivacious blond “older woman.” He was 18; she was 20. He couldn’t go to West Point.
So he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1928. Freshmen scrimmaged against the varsity. Arnie ran and passed and returned kickoffs and ran the varsity ragge.
But he didn’t go to classes, spent more time in the pool hall, and after football season he dropped out.
He went home and worked on the railroad.
A prominent family in town persuaded him to go to St. Regis College in Denver, a small Jesuit school that had visions of becoming the third part of a holy trinity pf football powers with Fordham and Notre Dame.
The school paid their expenses. Playing under the name Don Herber he ran and passed and kicked, but the team struggled to a 3-6 record.
The 1929 stock market crash swept the school’s dreams of football glory with it. The expense money stopped. So the Herbers, with newborn daughter Jean, went home.
Arnie put on bib overalls and worked in a quarry for a while, but it was hard work and he was too easygoing for hard work except on the football field.
Getting a chance with the Packers
Then, in the summer of 1930, Curly Lambeau, the coach of the Green Bay Packers, called him..
Lambeau, one of the earliest advocates of the pass as an offensive weapon, was looking for a drawing card. The Packers were averaging under 5,000 attendance. Several other NFL teams were doing even worse.
He figured a home town boy might be good for the gate. Herber signed for $75 a game.
Here he was, a 20-year-old rookie who had sold programs to get into Packers games and run errands for the players as a kid, with no All-American credentials, not even any college experience to speak of – who ever heard of Regis College – one of 18 players on a team that had just won its first NFL championship.
The veterans – Cal Hubbard of Harvard (later a major league umpire), the great Bo Molenda of Michigan, Vern Lewellen and others – didn’t take him seriously.
When he sometimes got the plays mixed up, they called him Dummy. He was 5-11 but weighed under 175. They called him Sparrow. None of it bothered him. He’d heard it all for years from the East High crowd.
The riding didn’t stop even when he threw a 50-yard touchdown pass in his first game, a 14-0 win over the Chicago Cards. It got so bad Lambeau left him home for a few weeks while the team made an Eastern swing,
A tough rite of passage
Herber began the 1931 season on the bench. The other players continued to treat him like an errand boy: “Hey, Dummy, do this for me . . . get that for me . . .” Said quarterback Harry O’Boyle, “We didn’t take him seriously as a football player. We wondered why Lambeau kept him around.”
It didn’t help when Lambeau sent him into the first game of the season against the hated Chicago Bears, with less than a minute to play.
His orders were to throw a long desperation pass. The snap from center was low.
He fumbled it, the Bears recovered, and the 14,000 spectators in City Stadium on East High grounds let him have it: “Send in the East High team!”
The booing, the catcalls, the drop dead letters never bothered him. He was a stoic, immune to verbal or physical pain. He never complained. Whatever bothered him he kept to himself.
Getting Cut
Two weeks later NFL president Joe Carr notified the Packers they were over the 22-player limit. Herber was one of the five players cut.
He continued to travel with the team and, according to some accounts, stayed on the payroll. But he couldn’t play and watched as the Packers won their third straight championship without him.
Teammates from that era differ in their recollections of what happened at the start of the 1932 season. There are tales of Lambeau sending Herber on a fake errand and calling a meeting of the other players.
Said O’Boyle, “The players still called Arnie ‘Dummy’, if not to his face.
But as for Lambeau calling a meeting and telling us ‘the kid has a lot of spirit and I don’t intend to see it broken’ or ‘I’m not going to let you stars ruin this youngster’ and stuff like that, well, I don’t think Lambeau had it in him to say things like that in a meeting.”
Lineman Milt Gantenbein agreed that the older players treated Herber with no respect, but he did recall such a meeting taking place.
“Nobody liked Lambeau, but I think he did hold that meeting. He threatened to fine anybody who called Herber Dummy again. He was still the only one who had confidence in Arnie.”
When fullback Bo Molenda continued to pick on the youngster despite the warning, Lambeau released him.
Starting for the team
Installed as the starting left halfback in a 1932 backfield that included O’Boyle and future Hall of Famers Clark Hinkle and Johnny Blood McNally, Herber led all NFL passers in the first year the league kept individual records.
But he did more than that.
A typical performance was the final home game against the Staten Island Stapletons (yes, there once was a team from Staten Island in the NFL).
In the 26-0 win, Arnie passed for two touchdowns, punted, carried six times, and intercepted two passes, running one back 45 yards and the other 85 yards for a touchdown.
When the season ended Arnie worked at the family soft drink bottling plant. There wasn’t much money in pro football. Clark Hinkle was making $125 a game.
“Arnie would have played for nothing,” his wife said. “He was always underpaid, but never held a grudge about it. He didn’t make $5,000 a year the whole time.”
Moving into the mid-1930s
By 1934, when he again led the NFL in the sparse passing stats of the time, Herber’s reputation for distance and accuracy was established.
After the season, Curly Lambeau went to California. On January 1, 1935, he went to the Rose Bowl game and watched All-American end Don Hutson lead Alabama to victory. Other pro team scouts were watching, too.
A few days later, the phone rang in the dorm in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A student picked it up and called out, “Hey, Hutson, there’s a call for you from Green Bay.”
“Where’s Green Bay?”
“Search me.”
Lambeau was on the phone.
Hutson recalled, “He tried to sell me on going to Green Bay by telling me he had this great passer there, a guy named Herber. I had never heard of him.
They didn’t even print the scores of NFL games down in Alabama in those days. Lambeau offered me $300 a game, and that was more than anybody else had offered, so I took it.”
Hutson later said, “It was the luckiest thing that happened to me . . . going to Green Bay. He was very innovative and pass-minded and very few people were at that time. Lambeau originated patterns that are still used today.”
If Hutson’s debut had been written by a movie scriptwriter, critics would have panned it as too hokey.
The Packers opened the 1935 season against the archrival Bears at City Stadium. Chicago kicked off. Bruder returned it to the 17.
On first down Herber faded back, back, back to his four and lofted a long pass that looked more like a punt.
Hutson caught it in stride over his shoulder at the Chicago 43 and outraced Beattie Feathers to the goal line. It was the only score of the game.
“It was a great way to get acquainted,” said Hutson. “I found out fast that Herber threw a very light ball, very easy to catch.”
On October 27 the Herber-Hutson duo put their brand on the Bears again in one of the most sensational finishes in NFL history.
With under three minutes left, the Bears led, 14-3. Most of the Wrigley Field fans headed for the exits. The Packers were on their own 31.
Herber threw one of his featherweight bombs to Hutson who broke a tackle and went over the goal line.
On the first play after the kickoff, Bernie Masterson fumbled on the Bears’ 15. The Packers recovered. Three running plays failed to move the ball.
On fourth down Herber fired a short pass to Hutson in the end zone. Hutson held on as Keith Molesworth crashed into him. Green Bay won, 17-14.
Wrote George Strickler in the Chicago Tribune, “This [Herber-Hutson] combination composes the most feared aerial attack in the National League today.”
The Packers rode their highest in 1936. Herber’s league-leading passing led them to another championship. By now the other teams decided if they couldn’t stop Arnie’s passes, they’d try to kill the passer.
A moving target
Herber was not a scrambler. He had to hold the ball long enough for his receivers to get downfield, and he knew he was going to get hit.
Playing with very light pads for protection and often without a helmet, he took a bone-bashing, bloodletting beating week after week. His nose was broken so often that he decided not to get it fixed until he retired.
After every game, he was literally battle-scarred.
He never complained. Once in a while, he got even.
At City Stadium before an overflow crowd one day, the Detroit Lions took turns flattening him on every play. After Harry Ebding, Butch Morse, and Jack Johnson took shots at him, Arnie told Ebding to knock it off.
“I can’t,” Ebding said. “Coach Potsy Clarke told us to go after you.”
The next time Ebding charged him, Herber threw a pass right into his unprotected face and knocked him out of the game.
It wasn’t until late in the game, after several warnings, that a penalty was called. The Lions complained about the penalty call: “We’ve been doing it to Herber all day and they didn’t call it. Why now?”
It helped set up the winning field goal in a 20-18 Packer win.
Despite his success, for his first five years with the Packers, playing in City Stadium in East High territory, Arnie was still West High Herber.
They booed him, rode him, loudly reminded him of his Belgian ancestry, “and everybody in Green Bay knew how dumb they were,” said his wife, Lois. (Herber was Belgian/German with a dark complexion.)
They wrote letters to the newspaper; the press criticized him, said he was too erratic, weak on defense, and couldn’t think fast enough to call signals.
In 1932, his first full season, the NFL coaches named him to the All-Pro team at left halfback, over Red Grange.
But he didn’t even get second team mention when his home town paper picked their own Top 22 NFL players.
It wasn’t until 1936, after leading NFL passers three times, after three of his four championship seasons, that Arnie Herber topped the applause meter at a Green Bay post-season banquet following the 21-6 title victory over the Boston Redskins (who moved to Washington the next year).
The Packers then went west to play some exhibition games. The first stop was the MGM movie studio, where they made a Pete Smith short, “Pigskin Champions.”
According to Don Hutson, “The first day the director said, ‘We’re going to show the kicker kicking from the 50 out of bounds at the two.’ Clarke Hinkle was our main kicker.
He worked at it all day, kicked his leg off, and finally got one out at the two.
“The next day the director said, ‘Today your passer will stand at the 50 and throw the ball through a two-foot pane of glass hung between the goal posts.’ He thought he was in for another day’s shooting.
“Herber went out to the 50 and threw the ball and broke the glass. The director wasn’t ready. He told Arnie to start over. They hung another piece of glass. On his second try he did it again. That was it for the day.”
They barnstormed with the Bears. In one game Joe Stydahar, a 6-foot-4, 230-pound rookie tackle, came barreling through the line and spread Herber’s nose all over his face.
The Packers thought it was a cheap, dirty shot. Hinkle broke into the Bears huddle and offered to take them all on. Nobody took up the challenge.
The Chicago players said it was Luke Johnsos, not Stydahar, who had done it. Johnsos was an end who wouldn’t hurt a fly. That night Hinkle and a bunch of Packers roamed the Hollywood bars looking for Johnsos. They didn’t find him.
Years later when Johnsos was a coach with the Bears, he learned that the Packers had been looking for him that night.
“I never knew that,” he said. “But they wouldn’t have found me. I was in my room reading the Bible.”
By 1940 the years of battering began to show. Herber could still throw the ball 65 to 70 yards, but he had begun sharing the passing duties with Cecil Isbell, and it was Isbell-to-Hutson as often as Herber-to-Hutson.
The national spotlight had turned to Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, who had come from TCU in 1937 to begin a 16-year career with the Washington Redskins.
In most histories of the game, Baugh is credited with revolutionizing football’s offensive strategy. But Baugh knew better.
“Arnie has been around so long,” he drawled. ‘they take him for granted. That is, everybody takes him for granted except the boys who are playing against him. Herber, without any doubt, is the greatest long passer in the game.”
Getting released
After the 1940 season the Packers released him. They said he had a bum knee, but there may have been friction between him and Lambeau. Some fans wanted to give Herber a day that year, but the coach vetoed the idea.
At the age of 30, Arnie was out of the game. Kept out of the army by chronic varicose veins, he worked for three years as sales manager for the family bottling plant.
One day in 1944 he received a call from the New York Giants. Red Smith, a former Packers assistant who had gone to New York, had suggested to Giants coach Steve Owen that Herber might help the war-depleted Giants.
They talked the rusty, overweight, out-of-shape 34-year-old soda salesman into coming to summer camp.
One New York writer described him as a “tub of lard.” The Green Bay writers got on him for going over to the enemy.
The East High gang, now bankers, lawyers and businessmen, didn’t mind kicking him around while he was working for the home team.
Now they resented his deserting them for the New Yorkers.
“He worked hard to get into shape,” recalled Mel Hein, the all-time great Giants center who finished his career with Herber in 1945.
“We older players respected him from his Green Bay years. He fit right in, and lifted the spirits and morale of the whole team. He was especially valuable in instilling a winning attitude in the rookies.
“He called a lot of the plays that year.
Owen didn’t send them in from the sidelines like they do today. And he was a real leader.
He had a fast arm but he needed time for his receivers to get out there. We knew he wasn’t going to scramble or run, so we had to protect him.
He had a little temper and would bawl us out if we let somebody get through to him. But then he’d say, ‘That’s okay. We’ll get ‘em next time.’”
Arnie still had some big games left in him.
Trailing Philadelphia, 21-7. With less than six minutes to play, he completed five out of six passes for 114 yards and two touchdowns to earn the Giants a tie.
They went on to win the Eastern Division title and wound up in the championship playoff – against the Green Bay Packers, who won, 14-7.
What Herber called his greatest day in football came in 1945 in the next to last game of his career.
It seemed as if he had saved his greatest performance for an out-of-town audience where it would be appreciated, instead of the East High boo birds back home.
Here is how he described it in the book, My Greatest Day in Football, giving the credit to his receivers, Frank Leibel and Sam Fox, in typical laconic Arnie style:
“When you get old and past your prime and have a good day, it’s a memorable thing in a player’s life.
What you do in your prime you expect. But at the end of the trail it provides unexpected thrills.
The Giants were going nowhere; they were 2 and 5. . . I was just another guy on the bench, partly because of a week-long injury, and the Philadelphia Eagles were leading, 14-0.
The Eagles’ Steve Van Buren took the second half kickoff and ran 98 yards for his third touchdown. 21-0. Our kickoff return came from our three to the 50, I was surprised when [coach] Steve Owen called me in.
“He sent me in with definite instructions to take advantage of weaknesses he had spotted. In seven minutes we made three touchdowns and tied it at 21. Frank Leibel was the receiver. . .
With five minutes to go, Sam Fox caught my spot pass in the end zone for the fourth touchdown.”
For all the beating he took, Herber had missed very few games. In 1937 a severe leg injury sidelined him.
In ’38 he broke his hand he broke his hand taking a wild swing at a pugnacious rookie who was picking on a smaller player on the train after a game.
Looking back, Herber gave credit to his coaches and to his favorite receivers, Don Hutson and Johnny Blood McNally.
“And don’t forget those fellows who blocked for me,” he said. “Without them I would have been a dead duck back there.”
Entering the Hall of Fame
Twenty years later he asked Clarke Hinkle, the man who had blocked for him all those years ago at Green Bay, to introduce him at his Hall of Fame induction at Canton, Ohio.
Despite the Packers playing at nearby Cleveland the next day, nobody from the team was there. To them, Herber was history.
None of them had been born when he was making that Packers history.
Arnie Herber died October 14, 1969, from cancer. His wife, Lois, believed it had been brought on by the frequent blows to the body he had taken.
Playing with flimsy light leather helmets – no face masks – and often without a helmet: who knows how many concussions he had suffered.
He had also suffered numerous body blows in multiple auto accidents. Once, after totalling his car, he rented a hotel room in a nearby town until he had healed enough to go home under his own power.
Arnie’s longtime friend Jim Ford recalled Herber’s last appearance on a football field. “Mike Nichalske, a former Green Bay guard, and I went to see him every day that summer.
The doctor told us that Arne was in great pain but never complained. That fall at the Packers’ annual homecoming game, the older players came out on the field to be introduced.
Herber came in an ambulance and dragged himself out on the field on his own. When he was introduced and stepped forward, even the toughest players couldn’t hold back the tears.
“About a week later he died, Michalske holding his hand like a father, trying to calm him down. He was so weak, but still fighting.
I looked at him, but saw only the tough guy who used to get blindsided time after time and get right up and take it, saying ‘Tough luck. We’ll get ‘em next time.’”
In Green Bay today there stands Lambeau Field, where the Packers play, on Lombardi Avenue. Mike McCarthy Way is nearby. In an industrial park there are streets named for Isbell, Hutson and Hinkle.
There was a Herber Street in the park, but it was closed off and the name was removed.
There are no memorials to Arnie Herber in Green Bay today. But there are no echoes of boos to be heard anymore, either.
