When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Thirty seconds into the game Johnny Moon fired up a long set shot for the Saints. The ball bounced off the rim and the rebound was hauled in by Henry Baum of Bogota, who immediately revealed Hebel’s strategy, which was for his boys to do absolutely nothing. One arm akimbo, the other cradling the ball, Baum stood in one spot, motionless, stone-faced. Lombardi ordered his defenders to back off and wait for Bogota to go into its offense. For seven and a half minutes Baum held the ball. Jeers and hisses hailed down from the stands. The second quarter was more of the same. The stall irritated Mickey Corcoran. He looked over at Lombardi and inched toward his man. Lombardi shook his head. “Stay back! Stay back!” He was furious at Hebel, but determined not to give in. The shorter the game, he figured, the better chance the outmanned Saints had for pulling an upset.

  Saints won the tap to start the second half, and Corcoran, his fingers itchy from sixteen minutes without a shot, quickly pumped one from outside. No good. Baum of Bogota had the ball again, assuming his familiar frozen posture. Nineteen minutes without a point. The crowd grew rowdier. Then Lombardi gave the signal, and the Saints moved up to press the ball. From then on, the game was normal basketball. The visitors had lost all energy to play even when they were instructed to do so. They took a total of seven shots and never scored a basket; a lone free throw prevented them from being shut out. The final score was 6 to 1. After the game an eerie quiet descended on the gym as Lombardi stalked across the court. He screamed at Hebel for his tactics, even though they had backfired. It was cowardly, he said, for the better team to hold the ball and make a mockery of the game. Hebel remained calm. He said he was merely saving his team for the tournament and making a point against zone defenses, which he detested. The two men had to be separated, but parted without blows. They did not acknowledge each other for several years.

  AT NINE O’CLOCK one Sunday morning that spring, Palau was awakened by a pounding at the door. His roommate was not home. Just a minute, Palau said, and got up and opened the door. There stood Marie Planitz, dressed in Sunday clothes, tears streaming down her face. She and Vin had been fighting, she said, and the engagement was off. Where was he? She said that she was going across the street to attend mass at Saints. Would Palau please help them get back together? When Lombardi returned late that afternoon, Palau told him about Marie’s visit. As his roommate later described the scene, Lombardi seemed distraught, complaining that everywhere he turned people were pressuring him to reconcile with Marie.

  Even his mother, who had never expressed much appreciation for his girlfriend, now seemed to be urging him to make up. He was almost twenty-seven, she pointed out, he needed a wife, and Marie worshiped him. His younger brother Harold, studying fine arts at Fordham, had also been drawn to Marie’s side. While Vince was working at Saints, Harold and Marie occasionally took outings in the city. Harold shared his brother’s temper and perfectionism, but had a more artistic nature; he and Marie enjoyed sitting in the courtyard at the Plaza Hotel, sipping brandy Alexanders, talking about books and opera, American politics (they were Republicans; Vince supported Roosevelt) and the war in Europe (they thought America should keep out of it). To Harold, Marie was “the greatest woman ever,” and he thought his brother would be lucky to have her.

  Vince soon reconsidered. After another spat with Marie he wrote a note of reconciliation and left it at her apartment: “Darling Rie,” it began. “I love you so much Rie. I’m sorry about last night. I’m with you 100 percent.… Have been here since 10:00 this morning. Alone since 11:30 A.M.—it is now about 1:00. Intend to leave soon. I even brought up some buns this A.M.—thought maybe you and I could have some coffee and—Sorry to have missed you, Honey. I love you with all my heart. I mean that. Sincerely, Vincent.”

  A date was soon set for the wedding. He and Marie were married on Saturday, August 31, 1940, at the Church of Our Lady of Refuge on East 196th Street in the Bronx. The nuptial mass was performed by the Reverend Jeremiah F. Nemecek, a Fordham football fan who idolized the Seven Blocks of Granite. Mary Planitz watched as her husband walked down the aisle with their daughter Marie and took a seat next to his lover, Mary’s sister Cass. The other daughter, Marge Planitz, the maid of honor, was so upset with her father and Cass that she refused to acknowledge their presence. Most of the Izzo clan came up from Sheepshead Bay, filling the church with good will. But Matty Lombardi seemed less than overjoyed that day. After stepping in to restore the engagement, she could barely repress her earlier attitude that no one was good enough for her son. She and other family members privately worried that Vince was marrying Marie for the wrong reasons: she was blonde and buxom, a blue-eyed Irish-German, the daughter of a stockbroker, a step up the social ladder. None of that underlying tension was evident in the wedding pictures. Marie looks luxuriant in a white bridal gown with a seven-foot train that drapes the floor in a semicircle around the smiling Vince, in black tails and striped tie, proudly displaying his wedding ring, which had inscriptions of the Sacred Heart and Blessed Virgin inside the band.

  The couple ventured to Maine for their honeymoon. Marie later confided that she was a virgin bride and that her first night in the conjugal bed was a difficult experience for her, as was the entire adjustment to life with her new husband. He seemed preoccupied with football even on their honeymoon, and cut it short to get back to Englewood before the first Saints practice. “I wasn’t married to him one week,” she related later, “when I said to myself, Marie Planitz, you’ve made the greatest mistake of your life.” His temper, his obsession with sports, his compulsion to tell other people what to do, the tension between his dominant public persona and his innate shyness and private anxiety—all were apparent to her from the start. But she had married Vince because he seemed solid, religious and faithful, unlike her father. She believed, as he did, in the sacredness and lifelong commitment of marriage. She told herself that she would have to adjust.

  Bored and stuck in a little second-floor apartment on Grand Avenue in Englewood, she scrambled for ways to fill the ocean of hours when Vince was working with his boys. She drank coffee and pink ladies, and played cards with the mothers of St. Cecilia players. She walked to Palisade Avenue with Palau’s new wife, Margaret, a southern girl from North Carolina, who had just had a baby and lived in the same apartment building. On the way over, she taught Margaret how to talk northern (peh-nee, not pinny, for the coin. After they had shopped for both families at the market, Margaret carried the infant on the return trip while Marie pushed the baby carriage stocked with food. The hard part was lifting the loaded carriage up the four front steps. Once every few weeks Marie rode the bus back into New York to spend the day walking around Manhattan with Vince’s brother Harold. She refined her artistic skills, crocheting and creating intricate Christmas ornaments. Late on weekend nights, when Vince was at last free from athletics, he took Marie out to his favorite haunts with the Palaus and other friends. They often drove up Route 9W to Englewood Cliffs for a late meal at Leo’s and then some band music at the Rustic Cabin, where they fell into the habit of buying a beer and steak sandwich for a performer who came over to their table to chat after his closing set, a skinny young Italian crooner from Hoboken named Frank Sinatra.

  In all of those ways, the evidence suggests that Marie adjusted admirably and tried to make the most of her marriage with Lombardi. She also learned quickly how to “give it back to him” and make him retreat after he had yelled at her. But on a deeper level she never adjusted. Haunted already by the trauma of her family history, by the unshakable reality that her father had run off with her aunt, she found only more heartache in her early efforts to create a family of her own. She became pregnant soon after her wedding, but at seven months the unborn infant died in her womb. With her doctor refusing to induce a birth, Marie carried the dead fetus inside her for several more weeks, a miserable period of prayer and mourning that she spent in bed at the Lombardi house in Brooklyn. In the aftermath of that tragedy, she began drinking heavily. Harold Lombardi, who tri
ed to help, remembered that she was “in a perpetually troubled state of mind.” She seemed distressed, her sister-in-law Madeline said later. “It had a terrible effect on her.”

  At times Vince was so preoccupied with teaching and coaching that he seemed unaware of his wife’s troubles. He knew that she had a drinking problem, but considered it largely a matter of will and discipline. She was too weak, he told her. She either had to learn how to hold her liquor, as he did, or abstain from alcohol, an attitude that only led her to try to hide her drinking from him. Their relationship vacillated between hostility and adoration. They were a handsome and lively couple, their presence announced by their explosive laughter, but they snapped at each other over little things, unmindful that friends might hear them. They were chain-smokers, their ashtrays overflowing with butts, and incessantly blamed each other for burn marks on their Danish modern furniture. Vince attended mass at St. Cecilia’s each morning and prayed for calm and control: of his temper, of her drinking. Once, in the car with his sister Madeline, a desk clerk at the Waldorf-Astoria, he cried in despair about his marriage.

  When Marie became pregnant again, Vince’s mother insisted that she return to the Lombardi house for bed rest a month before the due date. The pregnancy was difficult, but resulted in the successful birth of a son on the morning of April 27, 1942, at Prospect Heights Hospital. He was named Vincent Henry Lombardi. Vince and Marie had agreed on the first name, but she was surprised by Henry, a middle name that Vince had provided to the nurses without consulting her. Where did that come from? Vince explained that Henry (or Enrico) was his father’s real name; it was traditional in Italian families for the first son to be named after the grandfather. Marie had wanted her son to be a junior: Vincent Thomas Lombardi Jr. In any case the arrival of the baby temporarily eased the tension in the marriage. The birth gifts included a carriage from Pop Lombardi, a crib from Gramps Planitz and a big leather football from the family doctor. Everyone said that Baby Vincent was going to grow up to be a football player. Marie had a family now—more than she expected. When she and Vince and the baby drove back to Englewood on May 7 in their old blue Buick, they were joined by Harry and Matty, who had moved out of Sheepshead Bay with little Joe and found a house on Knickerbocker Road not far from Saints and their oldest son, the football coach.

  FOOTBALL AND RELIGION were conjoined at Saints in every manner possible. The team played on Sundays, the only time Saints could gain access to Winton J. White Stadium, since Englewood Dwight Morrow High laid claim to the municipal field on Saturdays. Before every game the preparation for battle resembled a holy rite. After the players put on their pads and uniforms, Coach Lombardi led them out from the dank basement locker room and directed them down the slope to church, their cleats clickity-clack-clicking on the sidewalk and up the marble steps as they entered the sanctuary to attend mass and receive communion. “The Few Minutes That Count Before a Game,” noted the caption over a yearbook picture depicting the team on its knees, huddled in a semicircle of prayer near the front altar. At the end of pregame mass, a cluster of nuns greeted the squad out front on Demarest and distributed sacramentals, little bleeding hearts made of red felt. Some boys stuffed the hearts inside their pants or helmets; Lombardi tucked his under the sock of his left cleat. A man of superstition, he also was careful to wear the same coat and hat to every game.

  The boys rode to the stadium standing in the open bed of an oil stock truck. On the way up Tenafly Road they sang, “On, Cecilia, on, Cecilia, Fight on for your fame!” to the tune of Wisconsin’s familiar fight song. Before the opening kickoff, Lombardi gathered his charges at the sideline to recite the Lord’s Prayer. The bleachers were aswarm with thousands of fans, in part because the Saints were a powerhouse team, but also because in that era, when television had not penetrated the American culture and professional football was considered a minor sport, the Saints were a main source of Sunday entertainment in North Jersey. Strangers traveled by bus from towns thirty miles away to watch them play. The grandstands nudged up to the team bench, and Harry Lombardi was always right there, lighting his good luck Luckies, sitting as close to his son as he could, along with his brood, which included Marie and Baby Vincent. In a tradition that defined his offbeat character, Old Five by Five climbed the cyclone fence and sneaked into games without paying. The ushers let it pass with a shake of the head: There goes Lombardi’s old man.

  On the ride home, the boys belted out the same raucous tune every week, “My Wild Irish Rose,” and if they won, which was most of the time, the truck pulled into the half-circle driveway at the Sisters of Charity convent. As nuns streamed onto the broad front porch and peered out second-floor windows, the squad serenaded them with the school song.

  Saint Suh-seeel-yuh!

  Saint Suh-seeel-yuh!

  We sing it in our way.

  We love our Alma Mater tried and true

  And all we are and all we have

  We give it all to you!

  The sisters had prayed for victory: how could Saints lose?

  The 1942 season was Lombardi’s first as head football coach. Palau had left that summer to return to Fordham to coach the Rams backfield. This was not the same program that Handy Andy and Butch had been part of back in the mid-1930s. Sleepy Jim Crowley had left for military service after Pearl Harbor, and many on his staff and squad had followed him. Within a year the Fordham program would close down for the remainder of the war, never to regain its previous stature. Still, Palau’s leaving frustrated Lombardi even as it provided him with a new opportunity. He fretted that everyone was a rung ahead of him up the coaching ladder of success. First Nat Pierce, now Palau had made it back to the college ranks at Fordham; Johnny Druze was an assistant at Notre Dame. Leo Paquin was coaching at Xavier Prep in Manhattan. But the fact that Palau left ahead of Vince was no surprise. He had always been one of the Fordham administration’s favorites, and his record at Saints did nothing to hurt his reputation. The team lost only one game in 1940 and went undefeated in 1941. It apparently did not occur to Fordham’s new coach, Earl Walsh, that the brains behind the Saints operation was the old right guard, the forgotten Block.

  Lombardi was bursting with ideas after Palau left, eager to assert himself as head man. He took his boys out to Hackettstown, New Jersey, for a two-week training camp and installed a new offense, merging the Notre Dame box with a variation of the T formation. He had learned the T himself the previous spring, after attending a coaching clinic and picking up a pamphlet co-written by Clark Shaughnessy and George Halas. First Shaughnessy at Stanford in 1940 and then Halas with the professional Chicago Bears in 1941 had found great success with the T, which had been largely out of favor until they revised and restored it. In the T, the quarterback stands close behind the center to take the snap, with a fullback directly behind him and a halfback on either side of the fullback. The formation was as old as rugby, predating the American football game, but only with the innovations of Shaughnessy and Halas did it reveal its full offensive potential. There were two keys to their new T: putting a man in motion to distract the defense, and using the quarterback as a true field general who would handle the ball on every snap and control the field of play through sophisticated fakes, handoffs and passes. The T required precision and constant practice, but not great physical prowess, an offense that seemed made for Lombardi and his Saints, the first team in the area to use it.

  Offensive football became Lombardi’s mistress. Late at night, when Marie and Baby Vincent were asleep, he sat at his kitchen table, filling the ashtray with Chesterfield butts and studying plays. Sometimes he found a new variation that excited him so much that he could not even wait until practice the next afternoon to try it out; instead, he took a few boys out of class for a half hour in the morning and brought them down to the gym to run through the play. Repetition was at the core of his coaching philosophy. Doing the same thing over and over again, whether it was a play or a calisthenic, he believed, would make his boys fearless and insti
nctive. “He said, ‘What I’m going to do, I’m going to drive you. I know the average level of conditioning at other schools. We’re going to surpass that,’ ” Joe McPartland, a fullback on those Saints teams, remembered. “That was the genius of Lombardi that you could see right away. He pushed you and pushed you and made you strong.”

  The Saints campus did not have a practice field. When school ended at three o’clock, the boys dressed in the locker room and walked a half-mile to MacKay Park, a hike that took them through the heart of Englewood’s downtown. Wearing pads and cleats and sometimes loaded down with equipment that did not fit into Lombardi’s Buick, the Saints brigade made such a racket that homeowners and shopkeepers heard the squad approaching from blocks away; people came out to their porches or storefronts to trade quips with the boys and cheer them along. As they passed a downtown fruit stand, a few players inevitably swiped apples. Father Tim Moore, who served as Lombardi’s assistant, knew what they were doing—he often took confession from them in the parking lot after practice—and pleaded with them to stop, saying that the poor fruit vendor was going broke. Once, when a ravenous lineman persisted in filching apples, the good Irish father calmly took off his collar, barked “Di’n’t I tell ya!” and decked the wayward Saint with a hard right. Corporal punishment was not an everyday thing at the school, but neither was it forbidden.

  Lombardi limited his hitting to the practice field. Nothing engaged him like the explosive moment of contact between blocker and tackler. He was his own blocking sled. One practice routine called for every boy to charge off the line and hit the head coach as hard as possible. “Hit me! Hit me!” he shouted, his voice echoing through MacKay Park, deep and intimidating. The boys felt conflicted by this demand. “When you would see him at practice you would say to yourself, Oh, my God, he’s going to take me on today,” recalled John “Gassy” DeGasperis, a Saints guard. “You had equal parts courage and fear. You wanted to go hard, but you could never hurt him. And if you did, he never let on to you.” Al Quilici, a roughneck little Saints halfback, said that one of the lasting memories of his life was the day he cracked Lombardi in the jaw with a vicious elbow and the coach smiled and thundered, “That’s the way to do it!” Football, Lombardi preached to his boys, was a lesson in life. They were going to get knocked down, but they had to drag themselves up and take another hit and do it right.