Willie Davis, Packers Hall of Famer, Is Dead at 85
Willie Davis, the Hall of Fame defensive end who played on five Green Bay Packer championship teams and anchored one of pro football’s greatest defensive alignments, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 85.
His death was announced by the Packers, who said he had been hospitalized with kidney failure.
Playing in the National Football League for 12 seasons, 10 with the Packers as part off the dynasty built by Coach Vince Lombardi, Davis never missed a game. He was quick, he was smart, and at 6 feet 3 inches and 245 pounds he was a formidable pass rusher and tackler.
“He hated to sit out even a play,” the Packer guard Jerry Kramer recalled.
“Once I was standing on the sidelines when Willie came out of the game with a dislocated finger,” Kramer wrote in “Distant Replay” (1985, with Dick Schaap), a remembrance of Green Bay’s N.F.L. championship teams. “I saw the bone sticking through the skin. The trainer grabbed the finger, yanked the bone back in place, then taped the finger to the adjoining fingers. Willie ran back to the game.”
Davis was only a 15th-round pick in the 1956 N.F.L. draft, chosen by the Cleveland Browns out of Grambling College (now Grambling State University), the historically black college in Louisiana. After Army service and two seasons with the Browns, which shifted him between the defensive and offensive lines, Davis was traded to the Packers in 1960.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/sports/football/willie-davis-dead.html