He was small and thin, later filling out to 165 pounds, but nimble and well-coordinated. 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. 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. Green Bay had two high schools, East High and West High, a situation that often creates the fiercest kind of rivalry bordering on hatred. It came right into your hands like a snowflake.” I threw it more like a shotput, using my fingers to steer it.”Īrnie’s high school teammate Jerome Quinn, who went on to star at Wisconsin, recalled, “It was no trick to catch a Herber pass.

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.

“The main thing is I couldn’t grip the ball. He couldn’t grip it with his fingertips on the laces but used his thumb instead. 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 developed powerful wrists and forearms.īut he had a handicap: he had unusually small hands. He hung a tire from a tree and threw the ball through the hole for hours. As a youngster he practiced throwing a ball over their two-story house. 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.Īrnie was bitten by the bug. Northern Wisconsin was already a hotbed of enthusiasm for the evolving game of football. A few years later he and his mother moved to Sturgeon Bay when his father was killed in a railroad accident. The Young Arnie HerberĪrnold Herber was born on April 2, 1910, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. 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. His name is Arnie Herber and this is the story of how he became the most unlikely member of the U.S.

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.īut 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.

Time passing game