When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  The line from Ignatius of Loyola to Vince Lombardi’s life in football has two other threads. In his pursuit of perfection, Loyola paid strict attention to detail. It was said that he would rewrite letters twenty times. He concerned himself with the most trivial matters, such as engaging a cook, porter or nurse for his order. His most famous work, which came to be known as The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, is predicated on spiritual discipline and precision. The exercises cover four weeks of meditations from sin and hell to divine love, perhaps the spiritual equivalent of a football training camp. Anyone attempting to follow the exercises, Loyola instructed, had to keep a daily chart of his sins and “the comparison between the rows of dots at the beginning of the exercise and the rows, shortened as much as possible at a later stage, shows the progress made in rooting out sinful habits and tendencies.” Not unlike the grading system Lombardi later developed as a coach. Diego Laínez, Loyola’s student and successor, stated that few great men had so few ideas as the founder of Jesuitism, but still fewer had been more thoroughly earnest in the realization of these ideas.” That, too, had echoes of Vince Lombardi.

  THE CLASS OF 1937 was graduated at Fordham at four on the afternoon of June 16, a gorgeous summery day, the outdoor ceremony on the green quadrangle framed by a soft blue sky above the towering frontispiece of Keating Hall. The ceremonies were presided over by the archbishop of New York, His Eminence Patrick Cardinal Hayes. Marie Planitz was there with her sister, Marge; Harry and Matty came with Madeline, Claire, Harold and little Joe. After arriving to the processional “La Reine de Saba,” Vin received his bachelor of science degree. He was wearing his class ring, with garnet stone and Ram on the side, and had on a pair of bright white shoes, oblivious of how they glistened garishly in the sober congregation of black and maroon. After leaving the grounds to the recessional “Hail, America,” he posed one last time with the graduating football lettermen, including Handy Andy Palau, Natty Pierce, Captain Frank Mautte, big Jim Lawlor and Leo Paquin, and once more he led them in song, “Once more the old Maroon, wave on high. We’ll sing our battle song, We do, or die!”

  4

  Saints

  THIS WAS ENGLEWOOD in the clean-slate sunshine of an autumn Saturday morning two years before the war. The town, nestled comfortably across the Hudson River in New Jersey four miles west of the George Washington Bridge and the cacophony of New York, still had a radiant sheen. Its unhurried avenues looped and dipped in the Seven Sisters hills, shimmering ridges with a red and yellow canopy of ancient elm, oak and hickory. Crisp piles of raked leaves smoke-simmered at the curb, sweetening the air with an intoxicating incense of order and yearning. The population of leaf rakers (including a superintendent of shade trees) was middle class in the most varied sense, balanced impartially between Manhattan commuters and well-settled families, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, second- and third-generation Irish, Italian and Polish Catholics, with a growing Jewish community and a small pocket of black citizens whose families had settled near downtown to work in the grand houses up on the Hill. That is where millionaire industrialists and Wall Street bankers had once lived, but they were mostly gone, retreated deeper into the sheltered countryside to ever more capacious homes. In the American suburban tradition, Englewood took much of its identity from its schools. The large public high school, Englewood Dwight Morrow, had a superior academic record and a campus so vast that it was often mistaken for a private college.

  There was also St. Cecilia, a parochial school whose reputation far exceeded its size. Everyone in town, indeed in much of North Jersey, knew St. Cecilia as Saints, its nickname. Saints, which sat fortresslike on the slope of Demarest Avenue on the north edge of downtown, was constructed from blocks of granite, with a gray Gothic cast, its courtyard shadowed by the white marble Romanesque Revival clock tower of St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Church next door. The school was coeducational and had fewer than four hundred students, drawn from a wide swath of Bergen County. The girls wore uniforms of blue jumpers and white blouses; the boys dressed in coats and ties. The church and school were under the administration of fathers from the Carmelite order assisted by nuns from the Sisters of Charity, who lived in a nearby convent. The faculty included a few male teachers not in the priesthood. Two new lay teachers arrived at Saints in the fall of 1939, classmates from Fordham University named Andrew Palau and Vincent Lombardi.

  Lombardi had been scuffling for two years before he found the little school in Englewood. We do, or die? Nothing had seemed so clear as his old fight song after graduation. At first he could not figure out what to do. Most of his classmates had assumed that he would make his way in the business world; he had dressed and acted like a corporate leader for years. But he had no interest in the one opportunity available to him, Harry’s meat shop, and the only other job he could find was making collection calls on deadbeat borrowers, a task that was neither pleasant nor well paid. He was not talented enough to make a full-time living in pro football, but signed on to play in the second-rung American Professional Football Association for the Brooklyn Eagles, whose home games drew decent crowds at Ebbets Field and made him a minor Brooklyn celebrity. In a sense he was back home, bolstered by his father and the Izzos who appeared at every game. Vince even lived at home for a time, bulking up to 205 pounds on Matty’s cooking, and occasionally, reluctantly, assisted his father on the waterfront.

  This life inevitably began to feel suffocating, and he made one brief and futile effort to get away, venturing down to Delaware to play for the Wilmington Clippers, another semipro football team. He apparently worked temporarily in a research lab for Du Pont during his time in Wilmington, though the company has no personnel records establishing his employment there. In any case, he returned to New York before the fall of 1938 and enrolled at Fordham’s law school, attending classes downtown on the twenty-eighth floor of the Woolworth Building. Another dead end. Vincent T. Lombardi, Esquire, might have been his old man’s dream, but he had little desire to be a lawyer and less aptitude for the law. “He got tired of it fast. It wasn’t his cup of tea,” said Richard Izzo, his cousin, a third-year law student at Fordham when Lombardi began there. One semester and Lombardi was out, with poor grades that he tried to conceal ever after. Two lost years.

  Andy Palau was also struggling by the summer of 1939. After graduation he had tried to make it to the big leagues as a catcher in the New York Yankees farm system, but fell short. Now he was shuttling between a semipro team in Vermont and his home in Connecticut, where he was pulling a shift in a Bristol factory. One night after work Palau received a call from Nat Pierce, left guard of the Seven Blocks, who had been teaching and coaching football at a small Catholic high school in New Jersey, St. Cecilia. Sleepy Jim Crowley had just hired Pierce to return to Fordham as an assistant coach. Was Palau interested in taking over for him at St. Cecilia? So much so that the next day he rode the train down to Grand Central Station, caught a bus across the river to Englewood and presented himself to Father Basil Kahler in the St. Cecilia rectory. He was hired on the spot, then unhired, briefly, when a nun discovered that Palau was a Lutheran. It took a phone call from Fordham’s Father Tynan to set matters straight with the mother superior.

  One of Palau’s first tasks was to hire an assistant coach. He tried several other Fordham classmates, with no luck, before placing a call of desperation to his old baseball coach, Jack Coffey. “Call Vinnie Lombardi,” Coffey told him. “Vinnie’s not doing anything. He’s working for his father over on the waterfront and collecting money from poor people for some darn finance company.” Lombardi? Palau had not thought of him. The last he had heard, Vin was considering the priesthood again. No, said Coffey, he was back in Brooklyn. Father Tynan had talked to Lombardi recently, Coffey said, and had the impression that he was searching for a new vocation. With nowhere else to turn, Palau made the call. Lombardi seized the offer. There was no master plan, just a call from Handy Andy, the Lutheran quarterback, looking for someone to help him out at a little C
atholic school in New Jersey—that is how Vince Lombardi became a football coach.

  Lombardi ended up staying at Saints for eight years. It was there, in the insular world of North Jersey schoolboy competition, that he developed many of the pedagogical skills that later allowed him to stand apart from the coaching multitudes. Year by year, as his reputation grew beyond Englewood, it became clearer to him that coaching was his life’s calling. Football coach was not what Harry and Matty had expected of their son, nor what his old classmates had predicted. In some ways it was a job below his own self-image. All of which worked in his favor. During his years in Englewood, Lombardi was driven by a contradiction, consumed by a sport and somewhat embarrassed that it was considered merely a game. This had two consequences: it intensified his will to win, made it overpowering in him, while simultaneously pushing him to infuse football with something more serious, to find deeper meaning in the WORK and PLAY juxtaposition tattooed above his father’s knuckles. In that mission he had much the same visionary motivation that philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in a luminous phrase, ascribed to Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and other Catholic mystics—the perception of “an intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality.”

  WHEN HE TOOK THE JOB at Saints, Lombardi said later, his frame of mind was that he “wanted to be a teacher more than a coach,” and he enrolled in courses at nearby Seton Hall to sharpen his classroom instruction. With a steady job in hand, he also felt secure enough to propose to Marie Planitz, and she accepted his engagement ring. His assignments at Saints left him with little free time and no spending money. He was Palau’s top assistant, coaching the line, during football season, head coach of the varsity basketball team, and member of the faculty, teaching physics, chemistry and Latin. For all that, Saints started his pay at $1,700 a year. The salary was paltry, but not impossible to live on. On weekends there was always Matty’s home cooking in Brooklyn or dinner with Marie. And housing in Englewood cost next to nothing. He and Palau started out sharing a boardinghouse room across the street from the church. The rent was a buck fifty each per week for the cramped quarters. “I hate to say this, but we slept in the same damn bed. Do that today, Holy Jesus!” Palau would say decades later. “A big king-size bed. We never had any trouble, really. We were so tired, slept right through.”

  The Saints lost the first two games of the 1939 football season, yet Palau and Lombardi emerged with positive reviews from the local press and intimations of better things to come based on the way their squad competed against heavily favored Ridgefield Park and St. Benedict’s of Newark, who outweighed the Saints by fifteen pounds per man. The Lombardi-coached line impressed observers more than Palau’s offense, which was based on the old Notre Dame box that he had learned from Sleepy Jim Crowley. The two Fordham teammates developed a rivalry even as they worked together compatibly and slept in the same boardinghouse bed. They competed intensely in chess matches before school in the morning and during class breaks, huddled in the corner of the locker room. At night, after dinner, they gathered empty beer cans until they had enough to field two teams, then arrayed the cans on the table, which served as a playing field, and tried to outsmart each other with new formations.

  Before the third game against Tenafly, Palau asked Lombardi to give the team a pep talk, and when it was over realized that his assistant had a fire inside that he could not match. “I knew he was intense about the game and I knew he got excited,” Palau said later. “But that pep talk was incredible. I had never seen anything like it before. I was shaking in my boots when it was over, and I know the team was, too.” Eyes bulging, eyelids blinking, fists clenched, Lombardi finished his speech, approached the starters one by one, said that they had done nothing to impress him during practice that week and demanded more. “What are you going to do today?” he thundered. The Saints scored twice in the first period, then held firm the rest of the game for a 13 to 0 win. They did not lose again that season, which ended with the Saints establishing themselves as the new power in town with a 20 to 0 victory over crosstown rival Englewood Dwight Morrow on Thanksgiving Day.

  What worried Lombardi most was the daunting task of coaching basketball. He was absorbed by football strategy and thought he understood it, but basketball was alien to him even though he had played on the Cathedral Prep team. Palau, a three-sport star who had captained the Fordham basketball squad, offered to help the first half of the season. He would teach Vince the zone defense, which was simple, he said. After football practice during the week, after games on weekends, they engaged in their basketball tutorials. Handy Andy could see that Vince had no feel for the game, but nonetheless was astute at picking up strategy and simplifying everything on court. After only five games he decided to leave Lombardi on his own. “I could see he was doing as good a job as I could have done. He had a brain.”

  In his first experience as head coach in any sport, Lombardi led the Saints to a winning season, though barely, at 10 wins and 9 losses. It took the players some time to adjust to him. Their previous coach had been “an easy rider,” in the words of Mickey Corcoran, the team’s star player, and when Lombardi came in as a strict disciplinarian “the change was a bit of a culture shock.” His emotions were never far from the surface; his eruptions became legendary. Of all the stories about his temper, the one that Saints basketball players most enjoyed telling in later years concerned the time he leaped from the bench in a rage only to bang his head on a low-hanging steel girder in the Saints’ cozy gym, a jolt that not only pained him but quieted him for the rest of the game. Red Garrity, the coach at rival Englewood Dwight Morrow, thought that it occurred in a game between the two schools when a referee made a crucial call against Saints. Corcoran had a different memory, believing that he inspired the head-banging when, as captain on the court, he chose to shoot foul shots instead of taking the ball out of bounds, defying Lombardi’s instructions.

  Corcoran, loose and cocky, with the natural basketball instincts his coach lacked, was Lombardi’s pet, the first in a long line, and as such the most frequent witness to his mood swings. Before practice during the week, Lombardi enjoyed playing H-O-R-S-E with Corcoran, Fred Schoenfelder and Johnny Moon. Match my shot! Make this one! The outcome was usually the same, the boys outshot him, but Lombardi remembered the one trick shot he threw in, and boasted about it for days. After practice on Tuesdays he occasionally invited the boys over to his room to play hearts. If he stuck one with the queen of spades he “went hilarious,” his big teeth flashing an irrepressible grin. On more than one Friday afternoon he found Corcoran after school and told him, “Call your mom, we’re going out to Brooklyn for some home cooking.” All the way out to the Lombardi house, they talked basketball: different defenses, college plays Vince had seen that week at Madison Square Garden.

  Lombardi was warming to the role of coach. It was what he imagined being a priest might be like, he told friends. He could be a father figure and leader. And unlike the priesthood, the coaching profession did not force him to repress his emotions. If he wanted to blow off steam, he could bark at the kids and no one would be shocked. He made a point of challenging Corcoran the most, as a lesson to the others. After one loss, when Lombardi thought Corcoran had taken bad shots, he decided to punish him by making him take physical education for the rest of the semester, a course not required of varsity athletes. Two weeks later he realized that he had overreacted, apologized to Corcoran and released him from gym class. That was the method of Coach Lombardi. Corcoran learned it from his mentor and used it himself when he became a high school coach years later, then passed it along to his own disciple, a North Jersey boy named Bill Parcells, who also became a coach. “Rip your butt out, then pat you on the butt. Knock you down, then build you up,” said Corcoran of Lombardi’s style. “He understood human behavior better than any person I’ve ever met.”

  Late that first season Lombardi and his blue and gold Saints were involved in a game that secured a place in t
he annals of the world’s strangest basketball contests. It happened on the Thursday night of February 29, 1940, when a powerful team from the North Jersey town of Bogota (pronounced Bu-GO-ta, not like the Colombian capital) visited St. Cecilia for a Leap Day game that meant very different things to the two teams. For the Saints, whose mediocre record precluded any chance of making the postseason tournament, a victory would enhance their late run to respectability. The mission for Bogota, at least as Coach Ev Hebel perceived it, was merely to survive the game without wasting energy, preserving his boys for a tournament game later that week. His Bucs had established themselves as the superior team, having trounced the Saints earlier in the year. What followed the opening tip was an extraordinary clash of wills between Lombardi and Hebel in an era before shot clocks or rules requiring a team to advance the ball upcourt.