When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Sleepy Jim’s entire team felt frustrated that year. The two ties and a 20 to 0 thumping by Purdue had dropped the Rams from the top national rankings. Thinking that Fordham had no chance against Jock Sutherland’s Pitt team, New York’s sportswriting fraternity had largely ignored what proved to be Fordham’s finest defensive outing in years, choosing instead to take the overnight train to Columbus to cover the Notre Dame versus Ohio State matchup. But after stopping Pittsburgh, Fordham’s players were convinced they were the best squad in the East going into the season finale against rival NYU, which, with an easier schedule, was unbeaten in seven games and anticipating a bowl berth. Before the game, the New York Evening Journal, Harry Lombardi’s favorite paper, thought it had a scoop. Fordham’s two senior stars, running back Joe Maniaci and tackle Amerino Sarno, reported that two “flashily dressed” gamblers driving an “expensive car” approached them outside the practice field at Fordham and offered them $1,000 each to throw the game.

  As Maniaci told the story to the newspaper, “Sarno and I were on our way to the gym to change our clothes. Two fellows got out of their car. One guy asked, ‘You guys need any money?’ I said, ‘Who doesn’t?’ The fellow asked me if I’d like to make a G for myself and made Sarno the same offer. We laughed. ‘What do you want us to do?’ The fellow said, ‘We’re a couple of bookies and we stand to make a lot of money on this game if we know which way it’s going to go. All we want you guys to do is make it sure for us. You, Maniaci, you fumble that ball whenever you can and you, Sarno, make your tackles miss. In other words, dog it.’ ”

  Hours before the game the next day, Maniaci and Sarno reported the bribe attempt to Sleepy Jim and their teammates. The story enraged the squad, pumping them up even more for the crucial contest, which was played on Thanksgiving Day before a boisterous sellout crowd of 75,000 at Yankee Stadium. Fordham dominated the Violets, winning 21 to 0, led by the offensive play of halfback Maniaci and quarterback Handy Andy Palau, who caught a touchdown pass, intercepted two passes, punted, returned punts and won the Madow Trophy as the game’s most valuable player. Lombardi spent the first quarter on the sideline, but rushed the field with a band of teammates in the second quarter when Sarno got into a fistfight with NYU tackle Perry Gaffen. When the brawl ended, Sarno and Gaffen were tossed from the game, and the hole in the line gave Lombardi some unexpected playing time at guard. At midfield after the game, Crowley encountered NYU coach Mal Stevens, whose Rose Bowl hopes had just been crushed.

  “I’m sorry, Mal,” Crowley said.

  “That’s all right, Jim,” said Stevens. “Maybe I can do as much for you someday.”

  Up in the press box, Damon Runyon, covering the game for the New York American, banged out his familiar telegram-style lead, addressing it to the Rose Bowl Committee:

  Dear Gents: Sorry will be unable to meet you in Rose Bowl stop We used everything possible against Fordham including our Dukes but were de-emphasized again stop They have tough chins stop Suggest worthy opponent for you would be Andrew Palau and any ten other fellows stop Love and kisses

  The Violets

  New York University

  The next day Father Harold Mulqueen, the prefect at St. John’s Hall where the football players lived, confronted Maniaci and Sarno after being told by police detectives that the bribe story appeared questionable. The seniors finally confessed to the priest. They had concocted it. Their only motive from the beginning, they said, was to inspire the team, which indeed they had, and the lopsided victory restored Fordham to national renown: the final polls ranked the Rams eleventh in the country.

  There was one final bit of controversy for the Fordham football team that school year, and Lombardi was in the middle of it. It happened during spring practice, as the men were going through drills in preparation for the 1936 season, which would be Lombardi’s last. He felt unsure of his standing on the team. Sleepy Jim had been picking on him, making him feel that he could do nothing right. Late one afternoon, after a discouraging session, Lombardi was taking a shower when he was approached by Richard Healy, another senior-to-be who was feeling equally frustrated after three years as a second-string end. Healy was known as a practical joker, and this time he went too far. He called Lombardi a wop and told another player to stand next to him to see who was darker. Lombardi was enraged. He tackled Healy to the hard shower floor and punched him several times before Leo Paquin and a few other teammates broke it up. Blood flowed into the shower drain as Healy and Lombardi were taken to the infirmary.

  “I got an egg on my head and he got some stitches in his forehead,” Lombardi later recalled. Healy said he “got the worst of it” in the exchange of blows, and carried the shame of what he had done for the rest of his life. “I agonized over it for years. It haunted me. It was another dumb trick. A dumb Irish trick. I regret that. It was a sad moment in my life.” Fordham had a new president that spring, Father Robert I. Gannon, S.J., who did not think much of big-time college football. When he heard about the shower room fight, he considered it evidence that the violent game was making brutes of young men, turning them away from the responsible traditions of the Jesuits. He suspended both players from the team. Lombardi was stunned. “I thought,” he said later, “that it was the end of my career.”

  3

  We Do, or Die

  TEN DAYS BEFORE the Fordham football squad opened its 1936 season, a young sportswriter for the Associated Press visited the practice field at Rose Hill to assess the team’s prospects for the coming year. This cub reporter for the AP later gained journalistic renown as James R. Reston, Washington editor and columnist for the New York Times, but in his early days he covered sports under the informal byline Scotty Reston. Writing in the clipped and matter-of-fact style of the wire service, Reston centered his preseason account on a quote from the coach that was predictable both for its humor and pessimism. “I feel at home with this squad because they’re big and I can’t pronounce their names,” said Sleepy Jim Crowley. “But we’re playing so many tough teams that we can have a very good year and still lose almost every ball game.” The eight-game schedule, Reston pointed out, featured first-rate teams from every corner of the nation: Southern Methodist from the Southwest, St. Mary’s from California, Purdue from the Midwest and Georgia from the South, along with powerhouse Pittsburgh and NYU in the traditional finale. But Crowley had sixteen top lettermen returning, and not even his droll pessimism could diminish the great expectations for his team in his fourth year as coach.

  Reston appraised this as Fordham’s “biggest, fastest and most promising squad in years.” His competitor at the New York Sun, Edwin B. Dooley, in a story headlined “Ram Team May Be Best in History of Institution,” wrote his season-setter in more effusive prose: “Every one on the campus from the clerks in the office to the gardeners on the lawn was talking about it. All of them wanted to know if you had heard about the team Jim Crowley is going to have this year. If you hadn’t it was a pity, for it was an absolute fact, you were informed, that the Maroon machine will be the best ever to set foot on Fordham’s practice field.” The stories noted that the strength of the team would be its seven-man line, led by a rugged junior who played center on offense and backer-up (what linebackers were called then) on defense. He was the player Reston identified as “the great unpronounceable”: six-foot, 200-pound Alexander Franklin Wojciechowicz, who was being promoted for All-American honors as Wojy, his more pronounceable nickname. It was said that the sound of his blocks and tackles was so distinctive, a clean and sharp smack, that even a blind man could tell if Wojy had made the play. Starting up front with him would be ends Leo Paquin and Johnny “Tarzan” Druze, tackles Ed “Devil Doll” Franco and Al “Ali Baba” Babartsky, both of whom had been moved out from guard, leaving left guard for Natty Pierce and right guard for Vin Lombardi.

  At last Lombardi was a fixture in the starting lineup, the beneficiary of the persuasive powers and football judgment of Crowley. First the coach intervened with Father Gannon to lift
Lombardi’s and Healy’s suspensions. Then he and line coach Frank Leahy concluded that they could field the sturdiest forward wall by moving surplus guard talent to tackle, where two vacancies had been left by graduation. The new line Crowley built for the 1936 season from left to right: Paquin, Franco, Pierce, Wojy, Lombardi, Babartsky and Druze. Before the era of two-platoon football, these seven were almost sixty-minute men, playing both ways all season with occasional substitutions (the most frequent being Harry Jacunski at end for the oft-injured Paquin). On offense they responded fiercely to Crowley’s familiar sideline refrain: “Blockers! More blockers!” he would shout. On defense they became known as the Seven Blocks of Granite, an evocative epithet that made the 1936 season memorable and blessed the Fordham linemen with a permanent place in football lore. For one among them, the scrappy right guard, already twenty-three years old, his uneven playing career nearing an early end, it served an even greater purpose: the figurative block of granite became a cornerstone in the construction of the mythology of Vince Lombardi.

  On the eve of the season opener, Crowley paced the floor of his apartment on East Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan. This late-night pacing had become a ritual for him, as he turned over in his mind every play that might go wrong the next day. Up at the Fordham campus, nine of his veteran players gathered in the St. John’s Hall room of Dick Healy to tell stories and play craps for dimes on the bed. Butch Lombardi came, the bruises of his shower brawl with Healy forgotten. Paquin, considered the intellect of the group, was interviewing his teammates for a weekly column he wrote for the Fordham Ram. The players were in “fine physical and mental condition,” Paquin determined, and were anxiously awaiting “the coach’s signal to ‘Go get ’em, boys.’ ” Wojy said he was eager for the St. Mary’s Gaels “to blow into town.” Frank Mautte, captain and halfback, was expecting trouble from Pittsburgh, which had already started its season and had rung up 53 points in the opener. Franco was nervous about his move to tackle and looking forward to playing the “Southern Methodist gang for thrills.” Lombardi said he had “a score to settle with Purdue,” which had dealt the Rams their only loss the previous season. Andy Palau, still frustrated by Sleepy Jim’s cautious offense, said he expected to pass more this year. The answers were classic ballplayer clichés, none more so than the one Paquin elicited from Johnny Druze. “I’m not looking ahead to anyone but Franklin and Marshall,” the opening day opponent, Druze said, noting that assistant coach Hugh Devore “saw them play last Saturday, and reports a great club.”

  Not so great, it turned out. The year before, Franklin and Marshall had surprised Fordham, losing only 14 to 7. This time Fordham ran up 66 points before the Diplomats from Pennsylvania finally scored in the closing seconds by falling on a blocked punt in the end zone. The Rams offense looked unstoppable, gaining 308 yards on the ground and another 98 through the air on six of seven passes. It was not entirely the wide-open attack Palau was hoping for, but impressive enough. But the offense created by Crowley, the old Horseman, turned from apocalyptic to meek after that first week. Southern Methodist came into New York next, and from the start all attention was on the visitors from Dallas, who arrived like a traveling circus, replete with mascot pony, marching jazz band and an official sweetheart named Mary Ann Collins. Riding east by train, the SMU pageant reached Grand Central Station at 10:45 Friday morning. While the players relaxed at the Hotel Croyden, the jazz band and its official sweetheart wowed New York, parading double time down Forty-second Street and performing at the Madison Square Garden rodeo.

  At the Polo Grounds the next day, Southern Methodist revived the circus atmosphere by keeping the ball high. The Mustangs threw more passes than Fordham might attempt in a full season (forty-eight), and gained 213 yards passing, to zero for the Rams. But for all their showmanship, they could not score. Six times Fordham’s defenders were pushed deep into their own territory; each time they stopped SMU from crossing the goal line. The visitors grew desperate as the afternoon darkened, until finally they threw one too many; Johnny Lock intercepted a long SMU pass and raced seventy-five yards for the game’s only score. Fordham had been outplayed all day, but still won 7 to 0, maintaining its national standing. In the locker room afterwards, Sleepy Jim and his players acknowledged that they had been lucky. But Johnny Lock was a shaky hero, nauseous since reaching the end zone. In the excitement of the moment, dashing downfield on his run to glory, he had swallowed a wad of tobacco.

  LOMBARDI WAS AN INVETERATE talker on the field. Always yapping. Aggressive. Barking. Come on, let’s go! There were times when Andy Palau had to tell him to hold it down so he could call the play. No. 40 was the bossy older brother to his partners along the line, shoving them around even though they were all bigger, demanding more from them even though they were all better. “The better we became, the tougher and meaner Vinnie got all the time. He felt it was his obligation to instill religion in the younger players,” said Tarzan Druze. The other members of the line were comparatively quiet. Wojy, a good-natured quipster out of uniform, turned mum in the locker room before a game and let his hitting speak for him until it was over. Natty Pierce, Druze and Devil Doll Franco occasionally threw wisecracks and taunts across the line to opposing players. But only Butch was incessantly talking to himself and his teammates. His eyelids blinked furiously. Damn it, what’s going on here! When he missed a block or thought a play had been fouled up, he hustled back to the huddle seething “like a madman,” in the words of his line coach, Frank Leahy, who worried that Lombardi was “always treading a thin line” between competitiveness and fanaticism. “There never was a more aggressive man who played for me than Vincent. There were times when I genuinely worried that he might be too aggressive.” He impressed the more talented Wojy as a battler, a “fighting guard who never took any guff from anybody.” But he rarely let his emotions interfere with his concentration for the next play.

  As the quarterback in Crowley’s Notre Dame box formation, Palau lined up a few yards behind center, then shifted to the left or right before the snap, often ending up behind the right guard. On many plays he and Lombardi had the same blocking assignment, pulling out to double-team an opposing tackle or guard, Vin hitting the defender from the inside, Handy Andy from the outside. They were not the most intimidating sight coming at you, Palau a bony 165 pounds, twenty less than Lombardi, and both were slow afoot, but they were persistent and smart. They developed their own internal blocking signals. If one thought he could handle the tackler alone, he would yell “Ice” and the other would turn upfield looking for a backer-up to block instead. “Vinnie was very smart that way,” according to Palau. “Many times he called the play and got it right.” His attributes of perfectionism and determination were more apparent to the team than to sportswriters in the press box, who dismissed Sleepy Jim’s occasional comment that Vinnie was his most underrated player. Wojy and Devil Doll attracted most of their attention.

  Lombardi’s teammates could not see intimations of greatness in him, but they responded to his forceful character. He seemed mature beyond his years, carrying himself on campus like a young salesman moving briskly on his way to the next call. His shirts and suits were sharply pressed. He toted a snappy brown briefcase with neatly organized class notes and football diagrams. On game days he helped round up the team for mass, bringing along even Palau, a Lutheran. After the ritual ankle taping down in Jake Weber’s barber’s chair and a midmorning lunch of steaks and chops, peas, potatoes and milk, the Rams marched onto the bus for the ride up Fordham Road and down the Grand Concourse to the Polo Grounds. They sang most of the way, loud and joyous, starting with the playful (“She Told Me She Loved Me, but, Oh, How She Lied”), moving on to the sacred (the lilting Latin hymn, “Regina Coeli, Laetare”) and ending with the school’s emotional fight song. Lombardi would rise from his seat, flash his luminescent teeth and conduct the chorus of “The Fordham Ram.”

  Hail, men of Fordham, hail; on to the fray;

  Once more our foes assail in
strong array,

  Once more the old Maroon, wave on high;

  We’ll sing our battle song: WE DO, OR DIE!

  THE SOUTHERN METHODIST show was nothing compared with the coming of St. Mary’s two weeks later. Led by its ebullient coach, Edward “Slip” Madigan, the team and an accompaniment of six reporters and 253 fans rode out of the Moraga valley in northern California on a fifteen-car special train, stopping to practice at Chicago’s Soldier Field along the way. The eastbound party was preceded by Tom Foudy, an advance man born for the carnival circuit, who spread word that the Gaels had a new back, Jes Groux, who could throw the ball eighty yards “and when the wind is right he can make it one hundred,” and pass with such accuracy that he knocked a nickel off a stake from fifty yards away. In this, their sixth trip east, Foudy noted, the Gaels would feature “the only Jew ever to play for St. Mary’s,” sophomore Harry Aronson, the son of a San Francisco tailor, and they would wear sensational new uniforms, solid silk in stockings, shirts and trousers, all of a shimmering emerald green with red, white and gold touches.