Max McGee, 75; made 1st Super Bowl touchdown

Max McGee, the Green Bay Packers receiver who was the unexpected hero of the first Super Bowl, died Saturday after falling from the roof of his home in Deephaven, Minn., police confirmed. He was 75.

McGee was removing leaves from the roof when he fell, according to news reports.

“I just lost my best friend,” former teammate Paul Hornung told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. His wife “Denise was away from the house. She’d warned him not to get up there. He shouldn’t have been up there. He knew better than that.”

Inserted into the Packers’ lineup when Boyd Dowler was sidelined by a shoulder injury, McGee went on to catch the first touchdown pass in Super Bowl history in Green Bay’s 35-10 victory over Kansas City in January 1967. Still hung over from a night on the town, McGee caught seven passes for 138 yards and two touchdowns.

“Now he’ll be the answer to one of the great trivia questions: Who scored the first touchdown in Super Bowl history?” Hornung said. Coach Vince Lombardi “knew he could count on him. . . . He was a great athlete. He could do anything with his hands.”

McGee -- who is remembered for saying “when it’s third-and-10, you can take the milk-drinkers and I’ll take the whiskey-drinkers every time” -- often tested the limits with Lombardi.

McGee caught only four passes for 91 yards during the 1966 regular season and, not expecting to play against the Chiefs, violated the team’s curfew and spent the night before the game partying, returning to the team’s hotel after dawn.

Before the game he reportedly told Dowler: “I hope you don’t get hurt. I’m not in very good shape.”

Dowler went down with a separated shoulder on the Packers’ second drive, and McGee borrowed a helmet because he had left his in the locker room. A few plays later, McGee caught a Bart Starr pass one-handed and ran 37 yards to score.

“He had a delightful sense of humor and had a knack for coming up with big plays when you least expected it to happen,” Packers historian Lee Remmel said. “He had a great sense of timing.”

Remmel said McGee once teased Lombardi when the coach showed the team a football on their first meeting and said: “Gentlemen, this is a football.”

“McGee said, ‘Not so fast, not so fast,’ ” Remmel said. “That gives you an index to the kind of humor that he served up regularly.”

Born in Saxton City, Nev., , McGee was a running back at Tulane and the nation’s top kick-returner in 1953.

Selected by the Packers in the fifth round of the 1954 draft, McGee spent two years in the Air Force as a pilot following his rookie year before returning in 1957 to play 11 more seasons. He finished his career with 345 receptions for 6,346 yards -- an 18.4-yard average -- and scored 51 touchdowns.

After retiring from football, he became a partner in a chain of Mexican restaurants. From 1979 to 1998, he was an announcer for the Packers Radio Network.

McGee and wife Denise founded the Max McGee National Research Center for Juvenile Diabetes at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 1999.

McGee is survived by his wife, four children and several grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements were pending.