Even though the rest of the country was essentially shut down, which allowed millions to see this …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o-EfTV6hgE

… the National Football League still played today in 1963.

Sports Illustrated’s Monday Morning Quarterback tells the tale of the game between Philadelphia and Washington, preceded with …

Early on the afternoon of the fourth Friday of November 1963, Philadelphia and Washington were practicing for their game that Sunday, each team’s 11th game of a lost season. Three years earlier the Eagles of quarterback Norm Van Brocklin and linebacker Chuck (Concrete Charlie) Bednarik had won the NFL championship, and they had followed that up with a contending 10-4 season. But the heart of that team was gone, and these Eagles had won just five of their past 23 games. The Redskins hadn’t won a league title since 1942 and hadn’t had a winning season since ’55. They would go to Philadelphia with only three wins in their previous 18 games.

The Redskins held their practice on a field by the Anacostia River, a few hundred yards from two-year-old D.C. Stadium, where they played home games. The team had just begun position drills at various spots on the field when coach Bill McPeak blew his whistle and called the players together. Everybody up, everybody up! Pat Richter, a 22-year-old rookie wide receiver and punter—and the team’s first-round draft choice, from Wisconsin—walked toward the gathering with a sense of foreboding that sticks with him five decades later. “It was eerie,” he says. “You looked around at the roadwaysand it was quiet, and you sensed that something had happened, but you didn’t know what it was.” …

Players from both teams, and from the other 12 in the NFL, awaited word from [commissioner Pete] Rozelle on whether the seven games scheduled for Sunday would be played. There was no template for such a decision; the country had never buried a sitting president in the television era. Some college football games were played that Saturday, others were not. The NBA and NHL continued playing on the weekend, yet the fledgling American Football League called off its games. Rozelle sought the counsel of White House press secretary Pierre Salinger, who had been his University of San Francisco classmate. Salinger advised Rozelle to play the games, and Rozelle gave the go-ahead on Friday night.

 “I’ve never questioned it,” Salinger told SI’s Peter King in 1993, nine years before he died. “This country needed some normalcy, and football, which is a very important game in our society, helped provide it.”

As the story of the Kennedy assassination weekend has been recounted over the past half century, a certain narrative emerged: NFL players were marched like gladiators to the Colosseum to distract the masses as the President lay in stateand the man accused of killing him was gunned down in the basement of a Dallas police station. There was some truth to this. “There was an empty feeling,” says [Eagles receiver Pete] Retzlaff, “and I didn’t feel like we should go out and play football under the circumstances.”

Yet they were employees, under contract and powerless. “There was no activism among athletes at that time,” says Richter. “This was something the commissioner said to do, so you did it.”

Some players saw nothing wrong with this. “I wanted to play,” says [defensive back Lonnie] Sanders. “I thought it would be relaxing for us, and maybe it would help the mood of the entire country.”

[Linebacker Maxie] Baughan agrees. “I thought it was the right thing to play,” he says. “There was nothing [the fans] could dobut sit at home and mope. They couldn’t change what happened.” …

They played the games that Sunday, like every other Sunday. They played in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and New York City. Every stadium was packed. “There were, at Yankee Stadium yesterday, 63,800 who went through the turnstiles,” wrote Stan Isaacs in Newsday. “Nobody twisted anybody’s arm.” It was perhaps the very first inkling of the real power of the NFL. Or perhaps people just needed a place to gather. …

“It almost felt like we were all in church, not in a football stadium,” says Betty Lou Tarasovic, wife of Eagles lineman George Tarasovic. “It was crowded, but there was none of that raucous feeling you usually have at a football game. It was solemn. I remember right after the game started, the announcer said that Oswald had been shot in Dallas.” (Oswald’s murder by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, at 11:21 CST in the Dallas police headquarters, had been shown live on national television. None of the NFL games that day were broadcast on network TV.) …

Years later Rozelle would call the decision to play on that Sunday the worst of his 29-year commissionership. But the Eagles remember another response. During the 1964 season Robert Kennedy visited the team. “He told us we did the right thing by playing,” says Baughan. “He said that’s what his brother would have wanted.” It’s an absolution that many of them have carried into old age

The Packers hosted San Francisco at Milwaukee County Stadium. The Packers won 28–10. About which, Packers News writes:

Vince Lombardi hid it well, but some of his former players said the legendary Green Bay Packers coach took the assassination of President John F. Kennedy very hard.

“There’s no question that bothered him as much as anything I’d ever seen,” Hall of Fame defensive lineman Willie Davis said in a telephone interview this week.

Friday marked the 50-year anniversary of Kennedy’s death, and Davis remembers Lombardi being stoic and internalizing his grief over the slain president.

Davis remains convinced the last thing Lombardi wanted to do was play a football game just two days after Kennedy was killed.

“It was a thing by game time that had truly sapped him of all of his energy and passion and everything else,” Davis said.

Lombardi and Kennedy had a lot in common and developed a personal relationship. Both grew up on the East Coast, both were devout Catholics and both loved football.

On the final Sunday of Kennedy’s life in November 1963, he watched the Packers-Chicago Bears game on television. While Kennedy the politician maintained his neutrality, he played a role in the Packers’ first championship under Lombardi two years earlier.

Prior to the 1961 NFL title game between the Packers and New York Giants, Lombardi put in a call to Kennedy on behalf of Paul Hornung, who was serving in the Army during the Cold War.

According to various reports, Lombardi asked if Kennedy could grant Hornung a weekend leave so he could play in the title game, and the president came through.

Kennedy reportedly said, “Paul Hornung isn’t going to win the war on Sunday, but the football fans of this country deserve the two best teams on the field that day.”

Hornung scored a then-record 19 points in the Packers’ 37-0 victory over the Giants, and Kennedy sent Lombardi a congratulatory telegram.

There was an obvious connection between the two leaders, one from the political world and the other from the sports world.

“You knew there was some relationship,” said Jerry Kramer, the starting right guard on the five Packers’ championship teams during the 1960s.

“(Lombardi) had identified I think with President Kennedy and President Kennedy identified with him.”

Lombardi respected authority, so when NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle decided the games would go on immediately after the assassination, the Packers coach dutifully followed orders. But Kramer knew Lombardi’s heart wasn’t in it, and the same went for his players.

“He was upset, but he hid his emotions pretty well,” said Kramer, who vividly remembers Lombardi saying to the team: “ ‘All right, we’re going to play the damn game, so let’s get on with it.’ ”

That was in stark contrast to Lombardi’s normal approach to a game.

“He obviously wasn’t happy about it, he didn’t think we should (play),” Kramer said. “The way he said ‘we’re going to play the damn game,’ he never talked that way about the ‘damn game.’ I don’t think I ever heard him use that term where football was concerned. The amount of emotion he showed us was in that statement … he was disturbed by it and he was upset by it.”

Many sporting events that weekend were called off. The American Football League and Big Ten postponed their games, and only about 20 college games were played that weekend.

But Rozelle, after consulting with Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger, decided playing the games was something the deceased president would have wanted.

So at 8:30 on the morning after the assassination, the Packers boarded a train from Green Bay to Milwaukee in advance of their Sunday game against the San Francisco 49ers at County Stadium. According to a Press-Gazette story, players discussed the assassination in small groups on the trip, with some admitting they couldn’t hold back tears.

A crowd of 45,905 watched the Packers win handily, 28-10, although there were no player introductions, no halftime musical entertainment and no commercial announcements during the game.

The Press-Gazette reported that a large flag flew at half staff during the game, and a moment of silence was observed prior to kickoff.

Davis said to this day he believes there was no justification for playing games so soon after such a tragic event. …

“For me, it really kind of shook my world,” Kramer said. “It made me uncertain of everything. If this can happen in this country, with everything we know and everything we have to protect our president, if our president can get killed, is there anything that can’t happen?“What is solid? What is something you can depend on? What is there out there that you know is strong and real and solid and it’s going to last? Is there anything?”