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Jerry Kramer, a guard for the Green Bay Packers, started a diary during the 1967 season, his tenth with the club and his thirty-first year. He wanted to figure out what kept pulling him back to the game. With help from the journalist Dick Schaap, he turned those daily notes into a candid, witty account of life as a player.

The season turned out to be among the most memorable in the history of the pro game. It built to the championship clash with Dallas that became known as the Ice Bowl, where Kramer had a pivotal part. The diary grew into a book, first published in 1968, which became a major bestseller and remains one of the best-known accounts of professional football.

The book is often credited as one of the first to take readers into a pro team's locker room and show how a professional franchise actually operated. Kramer follows the team from training camp through the Ice Bowl and into the locker room before Super Bowl II. He portrays a violent, hard-fought era of the sport and offers a close look at the team's head coach, Vince Lombardi.

This edition returns the book to print after more than a decade. It keeps the look of the original and adds a foreword by Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley, along with previously unpublished photographs from the Lombardi years.