Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  “Possible use as a reserve lineman.” The press book said about me, but we never had a full season to find out. The Ivy League Presidents Committee stepped in first and ruled me ineligible for the rest of my senior year for reasons I was too stupid to foresee, but Lou Little, the famous old coach, believed in getting fair value for the dollar, and I was occupying a place at the training table and eating shockingly more than my allotted three squares, so to cover it, I was appointed co-coach, actually line coach, of the 150-pound team. John Wagner and I coached the lightweights to a 2-3 record, finest record in CU lightweight history, you could look it up. And what valuable experience this provided me as a future writer, the ability to see things from the standpoint of an actual coach … a coach who would spend Friday night drinking with the same classmates he’d have to coach the following day, a fringe lunatic who would occasionally get down and personally show his troops the beauties of the cross body and crab block, executing flawless technique against guys he outweighed by 75 pounds, a coach who would occasionally suit up old buddies who’d been thrown out of Columbia up to two years previously, some of whom weighed up to 190 pounds. Oh yeah, meet the coach, shouting incoherent gibberish at the referees from the sidelines, threatening the hotshots on the opposing team. Oh yeah, he’s gonna win a Pulitzer some day.

  The magic of the gridiron all came together in a blinding flash for one season, 1956, when I played for a league championship army team in Germany and was selected Honorable Mention All-Europe, and then there were four seasons in the $25-a-game semipro leagues around New York and finally a one-game comeback at age 36 in a league one level down, and that was it. Jim Thorpe was asked to step off the field and take his cleats with him.

  What this did was to inject a kind of “I was there” style into my writing that some people find enlightening, but others feel is merely a show of arrogance. There are things you do learn, though. Trash talking, which gets such play in the daily chronicles, is meaningless, actually less than meaningless.

  And at the NFL level, so are inspirational talks by coaches, unless they happen to be, “That’s gonna cost you.” Or “Don’t forget to drop off your playbook before you leave.” If you need to be inspired by a coach, you’re in the wrong business. “Leadership ability,” always is regarded as a big part of a quarterback’s dossier, but quarterbacks seldom lead anybody; the teammates, who sweat alongside you, do. In fact, a lot of quarterbacks are disliked by the people who have to block for them or catch their passes. These are the things you just know from experience.

  The first pro football locker room I ever saw was in 1960, the Eagles-Packers NFL Championship in Franklin Field, Philadelphia. I had been with the New York World-Telegram & Sun for about six months. I had been covering high school sports and I’d worked on the night desk in the summer, before the schools started, with the Little League World Series as my only bylined piece during that period. But they wanted to see how I would handle myself in the big arena, so they sent me down to do loser’s dressing room quotes for our regular pro football writer, Joe King. It was a disaster.

  The problem was that I was spending my Saturday nights playing guard for the Paterson (N.J.) Pioneers of the Eastern Football Conference, which billed itself as either Minor League Football or the NFL’s farm system. Take your pick, but in reality it was one of the many outposts of semipro football. The Packers had lost to the Eagles, but I couldn’t get over the way the Green Bay middle three of Jim Ringo, Fuzzy Thurston and Jerry Kramer had crushed the center of the Eagles’ defense, including the great Chuck Bednarik. The first guy I saw in the Packer locker was Thurston.

  “Hey, great job against Eddie Khayat,” I blurted out. His eyes narrowed. He had just lost the biggest game of his life. Was this some kind of con job?

  “Thanks,” he said. I’d been knocked out by the smoothness with which they called their in-line audibles among themselves, their change-ups. I complimented him on it. By now Kramer had joined our little group.

  “You’re a writer?” he said.

  I brushed it off. I told him that we were having trouble calling our audibles on the Paterson Pioneers. I asked them how they called them.

  “Hey, Jim!” he called over to Ringo in the next locker. “I want you to meet this guy.” So for 10 minutes or so, they laid it out for me, who made the call in each situation, how they handled the dummy calls … and the Eagle tackles, Khayat and Jess Richardson, which they most definitely had done. The Packers ran for 223 that day. It was a nice friendly little group, and I was thinking, Wow, it sure is great covering an NFL locker room.

  Then I noticed that the room was emptying. My page of quotes for Joe King was blank. Oh oh. I excused myself. I looked for Bart Starr. He was gone. They were helping Paul Hornung into his sportcoat; he had suffered a pinched nerve in his shoulder.

  “How’s the shoulder?” I asked him. “It hurts,” he said. And he was gone. I searched for Vince Lombardi. He was on his way out the door, wrapping a muffler around his neck, for the cold.

  “Uh, coach,” I said.

  “I said everything I had to say to all the writers,” he said. “We needed more time, OK?” And he was gone. Everybody was gone except for a few stragglers, some equipment men loading stuff into bags. I made my way up to the press box, which was on an odd angle. It looked as if a strong wind might blow it, plop, right onto midfield of the venerable stadium. It matched my own feeling of impending doom.

  Put a little pencil mustache on Humphrey Bogart, and I’d hire him to play Joe King in the movie version. Cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth, a bottle of Heineken’s close by his left hand, grey fedora pushed back on his head, with his press ticket in the band, Joe was everyone’s idea of what an old-time sportswriter should look like. I stood behind him and watched him type.

  “OK, waddya got?” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Gimme Lombardi.”

  “He was on the way out. He said they needed more time.”

  “And … AND?”

  “And that’s what he said.”

  “OK, gimme Hornung. How about the shoulder?”

  “He said it hurt.” By now Joe had stopped typing. He was as fascinated by the horror of this as I was.

  “What did Starr say?” he said so softly that I could barely hear it.

  “Nope, I missed Starr,” I mumbled.

  Joe took his hat off and laid it on the desk. He turned in his seat and stared at me. “Son, what DID you get?”

  “Well, I talked to Kramer and Thurston and Ringo about how they called their audibles, and …”

  He waved me away, as one would dispel a bitter memory. “Out, son. OUT! GET OUT!

  “Jack … Nat … catch me up on Lombardi … can you give me a little Starr … Just a graf or two … I SAID OUT OF HERE, KID! OUT!”

  It took me two years before I saw the inside of a professional locker room again.

  People have asked me what Lombardi was really like. My answer always is the same, “Tough to cover, but I’d have given five years of my life.” Of the great mass of literature his life has produced, I can usually tell within a few pages whether the author of the latest Lombardi book ever met him, and if he did, if he knew him fairly well. The monuments to Lombardi, many of which are carefully researched and meticulously written, are worthy achievements, but they’re missing an element. The people who really knew him mixed in the quirks and oddities, the little snappers, the times when he played the angles.

  Once I covered a Green Bay practice when Marvin Fleming, the tight end, was a 21-year-old rookie, youngest player in the league. In the locker room, Lombardi passed his locker and stared at him. Then he did it again. Then he leaned over and said something to him that I couldn’t hear. When the coach left, I asked Fleming what he had said. He smiled and shook his head.

  “He said, ‘Marvin, your eyes look dull. Have you been abusi
ng yourself?’”

  One of the first games the New York Post sent me out to cover, all by myself, was Green Bay at Chicago in 1966. I set up my audience with Lombardi well in advance for a Tuesday actually. That’s how nervous I was. I took a cab from the airport and got there at lunchtime, an hour and a half before my appointment with the coach. It was raining heavily. I told the Packer receptionist who I was and what I was there for. She said, “You must be hungry.” Coming from New York, I wasn’t familiar with Midwestern hospitality. Yes, I certainly was hungry.

  “There’s a German restaurant down the street,” she said. “They have a luncheon buffet, dumplings, sauerbraten, all you can eat. Do you like that?” I practically fainted. I couldn’t talk. I was staggering. I nodded my head.

  “It’s only a few blocks, but it’s raining,” she said. “Here, you’d better take my car.” And she handed me the keys.

  I got back, well stuffed, in time for my audience with Lombardi. He was cordial. He asked me where I grew up and where I had played. I told him, adding that in high school we had scrimmaged against the team he was coaching, St. Cecilia’s in Englewood, N.J., and that I had very fond memories of his power sweep. He threw back his head and laughed. Then he called in his line coach, Phil Bengtson, who’d had the same position at Stanford when I was there, just to check me out. Bengtson, God bless him, if it would have been England, he’d have been knighted. I’m sure he didn’t remember a thing about me, but just to be a mensch, he gave it the, “Hey, nice to see ya … how ya been … I see that you’ve picked up a little weight,” and so forth. Whew. I had passed muster.

  So we chatted for a while, and then Lombardi got real serious and said, “You’re a young writer, you’re from New York, I’m going to give you a good story for your paper.” Thump, went my heart, thump thump. “This is the game where I find out about my million dollar rookies, Grabowski and Anderson. All that money we paid them (combined contract a cool million, record numbers in those days) … I’ve got to know whether they can play.”

  And on and on in that vein, until I am so feverish to call my paper and tell them to hold the back page because I’ve got a scoop from Lombardi, that I can hardly bear it. And I gave them the message, and they held the back page and next day’s streamer, in red, blared, LOMBARDI TO UNVEIL MILLION DOLLAR ROOKIES.

  P.S: Neither one played a down.

  And as I sat there in the press box, watching the backs of those two players, their numbers boring holes in my brain, Jim Grabowski, fullback, No. 33, Donny Anderson, halfback, No. 44, watching their asses flattening on the bench as I prayed, implored whatever football Gods that lived high above Chicago’s Wrigley Field to please, please, just send them in for a series or two. Nope, zero and zero. Finally, I mentioned it to one of the Packer beat guys, Bud Lea of the Milwaukee Sentinel. He started laughing.

  “Welcome to the club,” he said.

  “Easy,” he said. “He knows that Halas gets everything clipped from the out of town papers. So he might as well plant something, just to give him another thing to worry about.”

  You’re a young writer, you’re from New York, step this way, kid, this here’s a pea, and it’s gonna be under one of these three shells …

  Just as a follow, the Pack beat the Bears, 17-0, and held Gale Sayers to 29 yards rushing.

  Obviously, it would be a defensive story for me. In the Green Bay locker room, Lombardi was sitting on a little counter in front of the cage where they handed out equipment, in the center of a cluster of writers in overcoats and hats. Steam was rising. They were interviewing the coach, but it looked like they were cooking him. I waited my turn and then asked, “What was your theory in defending Sayers?”

  “Force him back into the flow of traffic,’” Lombardi said, “cut off his escape. It’s a theory as old as football itself.”

  Fine. I had my Lombardi quote. It was time to talk to the players. The Packers locker was next to the equipment alcove, through an open door. Dave Robinson, the strongside linebacker who had had a good day, was about 10 feet in. I introduced myself and asked him, “What was your theory in defending Sayers?”

  “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Lombardi shouted from the next room. Both rooms fell silent. I looked through the door, and he had popped up from the center of his steam table and was pointing a finger in my direction. Everyone was staring at me.

  “The same thing,” he said. “You asked me the same thing, in exactly the same words. What’s the matter, didn’t you believe me?”

  A few of the players were hiding their faces, so the coach wouldn’t see them chuckling. Robinson had a big smile on his face. He waved me to follow him around the corner. As I went, I heard Lombardi telling the writers, “The exact same thing … see that guy there … first he asks me about Sayers, then he goes in and asks them the same thing…”

  A few days later, I was having dinner with someone who worked with gifted and talented kids. I told him the story.

  “One mark of genius is to be completely aware of everything taking place in your immediate environment,” he said.

  Maybe so, but to me it was just a case of rabbit ears.

  I interviewed Lombardi for the last time in May, 1970, slightly more than three months before he died. We were in the latter stages of the counterculture movement, campus unrest, hippies, flower people. Woodstock was less than a year old. I was curious to hear Lombardi’s take on all this and I fully expected some diatribe about people who were too lazy or selfish to work, etc. His answer made me ashamed of myself for trying to stereotype one of the most unusual and perceptive thinkers I had ever encountered.

  “They’re showing an awareness of things; they’re making themselves heard,” he said. “They have a right to say what they want, and it behooves us to listen. I don’t know … my own lack of awareness … in my own little sphere, maybe I didn’t see the things I should have. My kids tell me things, and sometimes I have trouble understanding them. Well, I’ve got to learn.”

  He never had the chance.

  I wish I could have sat down and talked real football with Lombardi, about how he originally came up with his greatest technical innovation, the “run to daylight” approach that swept through the league like a cleansing wind, bringing option blocking, option running, Freedom! He probably fooled around with it as a line coach at West Point and then gradually introduced it into the NFL in pieces. That’s what I’ve never read in any of the multitude of Lombardi bios, the working of the mind behind the plan. Would he have opened up to me, a writer, as alien to the club as police reporters are to precinct cops? Who knows?

  In 2006 the Jets beat the Dolphins by three points in the Meadowlands. The key moment in the game came when Miami, after having driven to the New York’s 32, against a defense that rushed only four and brought no pressure, had a third and two with 38 seconds left. Now, he’s going to bring it now! I thought. Eric Mangini, the Jets’ 35-year-old coach, learned defense as a young assistant at Bill Belichick U, and his game was defensive innovation. Oh, he brought pressure, all right, two DBs coming outside the same flank, but he didn’t bring it from the blind side, as I thought he would. They came from the left wing, entering into the widest field of vision of right handed Joey Harrington. His rushed pass was incomplete, the field goal was missed, the Jets won the game.

  My brain was on fire. The front side! Of course. He wanted Harrington to see the blitz.

  I called Mangini that night. I laid out my scenario. “You wanted to show him the blitz. You wanted to spook him, right?” Most coaches would give you a cliché answer to a half-assed technical question, but Eric and I go back a long way. I can talk to him.

  “Right,” he said. “That’s what I did.”

  This wasn’t what you’d call a scoop, not even something you could build a story around, if you were doing a first-day piece. And there weren’t any fancy or controversial quotes to dress it up. But it’s
something that stays with me and makes me feel good every time I think of it.

  “Simple pleasure for poor bhisti,” to quote Sam Jaffe, playing Gunga Din in the movie of the same name.

  Sometimes it doesn’t work so well, and that’s when the ego gets inflated, and you are firmly put in your place. Bill Walsh, the 49ers’ Hall of Fame coach, liked to talk football theory or life itself, actually. I enjoyed listening to the way he phrased things, using the analogies of war … Attacking in “quick lethal strikes …” or descriptions that bordered on the poetic, such as his picture of Joe Montana as a “lithe, almost sensuous athlete.” So on this one particular evening we were talking about personnel, and the makeup of the ideal squad, and I got a bit carried away and started voicing some theories about desire and the power of the will. And the more Walsh tended to agree, the more into it I got, and finally, in an absolute explosion of ego, I asked him, “Do you think I could ever have gotten a job in some team’s personnel department?”

  There was an embarrassing pause, and Walsh contorted his face into a pained expression. How to explain it to this boob … ? Finally he said, “The problem is,” and he paused to find the right words. “The problem is that you would fill a squad with players who would look very determined, chasing opponents across the goal line.”

  Disappointment is always part of the business. If you can’t handle being put in your place from time to time, don’t be a sportswriter. In the mid-1990s I was in the Colts’ camp, doing my interviews for my scouting reports for Sports Illustrated’s pro football issue. I was almost through for the day when Tony Siragusa, their right defensive tackle, asked if he could speak to me for a moment. He took me down to the deserted weight room and talked for 40 minutes; I guess he didn’t want his teammates to see him spending that much time with a writer. I always enjoyed the way Goose played, a little over 300 pounds, technically correct against the run (I had been arguing for years that the Vikings’ great interior pass rusher, John Randle, never would make my All-Pro team because he was such a liability facing the running game), seldom out of position, almost impossible to trap.