When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Rarely were there enough hours in the day for Lombardi and football. In the manner of Sleepy Jim, his old coach at Fordham, he kept his players on the field past sundown on autumn evenings, running plays over and over in the dusk. If it became too dark to see but he was still unsatisfied, he herded the team near the parking lot and illuminated the area with headlights from his Buick and the cars of townspeople who had come to watch practice. Soon enough he discovered the limits to how far he could drive young players. At one twilight practice, as he ran the same play over and over, shouting at a lineman who persisted in making the same mistake, the player suddenly burst into tears of frustration. Here was a youngster who tried hard but was less intelligent and athletic than many of the boys, and his response to criticism jolted Lombardi. He came to realize fully for the first time, he said later, that “there were limitations to the game due to mentality and physical ability and that the amount that can be consumed and executed is controlled by the weakest man on your team.” There were ways to hide the physical liabilities of the weakest member of the team, Lombardi concluded, but every player “has to do his own thinking.” From then on he tried to coach so that he was understandable to the slowest member of the squad.

  The situation that Lombardi inherited from Palau was in some ways unenviable: a record that would be hard to match, including two state Catholic championships and a thirteen-game winning streak, and only three returning lettermen to lead the way. Furthermore, a fluke in scheduling found the Saints playing their fiercest opponent twice that season: they opened against rival Englewood Dwight Morrow and ended with them again on Thanksgiving Day. In his first game as a football head coach, Lombardi lost. Englewood beat his Saints 18 to 7, T formation and all, ending the winning streak and worrying the coach and the team’s fans. “That night the St. Cecilia rooters were quiet,” the school yearbook reported. “There was no blast of horns, or snake dance down Palisade Avenue, or bonfires. We could hardly believe that Englewood had won, but with determined minds we vowed that in the return game, the outcome would be reversed.”

  That completed the losing for the year. There were two ties, but no more defeats in a season marked by two notable triumphs: first, a 32 to 6 thumping of powerful West New York Memorial, during which Lombardi’s T formation attack amassed 197 yards passing; and then a 7 to 0 shutout of Dwight Morrow, a season-ending victory that loosed the celebration that had been stifled by the earlier defeat. After serenading the nuns on Tenafly Road, hundreds of fans gathered at the school courtyard to cheer some more, then headed down the valley to Palisade Avenue, their “hearts full of joy” as they paraded along the downtown strip past Mac’s Luncheonette and Pat’s Toys, the Paramount Beauty Salon and Jabocus Shoes, the Young Colony Shop and Pearlman’s Liquor, Charlie Wilson’s bowling hall and Buckley’s Drug Store, singing “On, Cecilia!” all the way. From there they worked their way up to the house Lombardi and his family had moved into that season. When the gleam-toothed visage of the new coach appeared at the door, “horns blew and the students yelled at the top of their lungs.” Vince and Marie invited the students in for refreshments, and there was old Pop Lombardi, regaling the crowd. With their spirits still running high, the students drove back to the stadium and sprinted across the empty field, whooping it up. Later, the Englewood school board sent Saints its annual bill for alleged damages to the goalposts and scoreboard.

  It was football glory for Lombardi and his Saints thereafter. The opening loss to Englewood turned out to be the last they would suffer in four seasons, until Seton Hall Prep beat them in the third game of 1945. It was a streak of thirty-two unbeaten games, including three ties, and inside that streak was another more spectacular one, twenty-five straight wins beginning with the rout of Memorial and ending with a scoreless tie in a bowl game against Union Hill at the end of 1944. The undefeated 1943 team, state parochial school champions and perhaps the best of the decade, surrendered only three touchdowns all year and outscored opponents by the overwhelming total of 267 points to 19 despite being outweighed in every matchup. With a new four-linebacker defense Lombardi had installed, they won eight games by shutouts, one of them a 6 to 0 win in the Legion Bowl against Jersey City Lincoln in front of 12,500 fans.

  Little Saints challenged any school in the region during those years, the best of New York City and Hudson County, and beat them all, including a Brooklyn Prep team that featured a wily little back named Joe Paterno. Before the game against Prep, Lombardi gathered his squad in the locker room and read a series of nasty letters and telegrams that he said had been sent from Brooklyn. He did not tell his enraged players that he had concocted the defamatory material himself. That revelation came only years later in late night reminiscences with his friend and colleague Paterno, who had gone on to star at Brown University and begin a luminous coaching career at Penn State, reaching a status in the college ranks nearly equivalent to Lombardi’s later in the pros.

  Lombardi believed in fair play, he told his players, but not in the concept of good losing. He equated a loss with a sin. “I don’t want any good losers around here,” Joe McPartland remembered him telling the squad every year. “If you think it’s good to be a loser, give the other guy the opportunity.” Good losing, he said, was “just a way to live with yourself. It’s a way to live with defeat.” He was so intense that he would not even talk to the Englewood coach if he saw him in church. He was consumed with finding the edge that would assure victory. On Thursday nights he invited the quarterbacks and captains over to the house for a working dinner at which they studied plays for that Sunday’s game. Between breaks in classes, he hauled a few more players into his office to talk football. When teams started to adjust to the T formation, he devised ways to switch it with the Notre Dame box at the last second so the defense would be off guard. When he entered the locker room with a smile on his face, the boys usually knew what was up. Wait’ll you hear this one. He had stayed up all night diagramming a new play; sometimes he said plays came to him in his dreams.

  In practice the first three days of the week before a big game against Xavier, he built up the opponents to make them seem like monsters. They’re gonna kill you. They’re gonna wipe you guys up. “It was like impending doom, disaster,” said Iggy McPartland, one of his backs. “You didn’t want to be disgraced in front of your family.” But in the locker room before the game, after the referee stuck his head in to say it was time to take the field, Lombardi worked himself into a tear-inducing frenzy. Now his team could do no wrong. You guys have worked so hard. They’re a great team out there, but they’ll never see the day they can touch you. You have more of what it takes than any ten teams I’ve seen. His little Saints in blue and gold charged onto the field unbeatable.

  While confident that he could take any group of boys and mold them into a football team, Lombardi was not naive about what made the difference. He was on an endless search for talent. Union City, Bergenfield, Cliffside Park, Clifton—he and Father Moore traveled the roads of North Jersey from one parish to another looking for players. John DeGasperis was in eighth grade in Cliffside Park when his teacher said there were two visitors who wanted to meet the class. “All of a sudden Father Tim and Coach Lombardi walk in. Father Tim talks first and says, ‘I’d like you to meet the football coach.’ When you saw Lombardi you were just awed by him. He had a smile, a voice, a big husky build. You said, ‘Wow.’ I had no intention of going to a Catholic school, but he had heard about me from another kid from my town who went there and at the end of the session he called me over and said, ‘You’re coming to Saints.’ I told him my family had no money. He said, ‘Don’t worry. You’re coming to Saints.’ ”

  The local parish agreed to help pay DeGasperis’s way. To save money, he hitchhiked to Englewood and back, often getting home after seven at night. But he became the best middle linebacker in North Jersey, proud to wear the Big Gold C. It was not just strapping specimens Lombardi sought, he also paid particular attention to scrappy youngsters from working-c
lass families. He discovered Al Quilici from discussions with the local police, who told him about a kid who could outrun the law and was always fighting. Quilici had moved out to Englewood with his family from a cold-water flat in New York City. He helped bring in money for his parents, running up Englewood’s hill at four in the morning to feed horses at stables owned by the town’s equestrian elite. Lombardi promised him a scholarship and chance to wear the Saints uniform, and asked only that he confine his aggression to the football field. “You follow my way and I’ll get you a scholarship to college,” the coach told him. When Quilici arrived at Saints, Lombardi arranged for him to get into a typing class: it would help make his small hands more dexterous, the coach said, and also result in neater papers and better grades. It all proved true: Quilici starred at Saints, learned to type eighty-five words a minute on a manual typewriter and was recruited to play big-time college football at Arizona.

  The truth about Lombardi was that his outward bluster barely concealed his soft spot for players, even in the classroom. When he encountered someone like Joe McPartland, a better student than athlete, he called on him daily in physics and pushed him to use his intelligence on the field. Think, Joe! Use your head! But when DeGasperis approached him after the first week of physics and confessed that he could not handle the material, Lombardi immediately transferred him to general science. “Otherwise he would have had to fail me,” DeGasperis said later. “He turned out to be a friend.” Iggy McPartland, Joe’s less academic little brother, said Lombardi essentially gave him and many other football players a free pass in class during the season. “He did favor the football players. He didn’t call on me until after Thanksgiving. He figured the football players were engaged in a sport that took a lot of time and that we were enhancing the image of the school, so he was considerate. The other students could be studying at home while we were still down at MacKay Park practicing under the headlights. After the season he’d look at me in class like he’d never seen me before and go, ‘Hey you!’ and I’d stand up and mumble something—I’d figure I was wrong, I didn’t understand physics—and he’d say, ‘Very good, sit down.’ ”

  THE SISTERS OF CHARITY had such melodious names.

  Sister Symphrosa for history.

  Sister Theophane for mathematics.

  Sister Mary Aquinas for Spanish.

  Sister Rose Magdalen for English.

  Sister Anna Madeline for Latin.

  Sister Louise Marie for French.

  But the most memorable sister at Saints was known for more than her lyricism. She was Sister Louise Baptista, the principal. The students called her the Bap. A big-boned, intelligent woman with a sharp Boston accent, the Bap was fearless and fearsome, walking the halls of Saints in her black habit, her face framed in tight white cloth, a one-nun security patrol. Talk too much in class or act up in the hallway and the Bap would order you to kneel in humble contrition before she thwacked you with her punishment stick. Joe McPartland “got walloped a few times by the Bap. She had a good-sized arm,” he said. There was no zone of privacy for students as far as the Bap was concerned. She inspected girls’ pocketbooks looking for cigarettes, and if she suspected something awry in the boy’s bathroom, she harrumphed, “Gentlemen, I’m coming in!” and barged through the swinging door.

  The Bap understood her hormone-driven adolescent charges and seemed almost to mock them in her bluntness. “I found a pair of bloomers and they’re not mine,” she reported one day over the school loudspeaker. Then she paused ten seconds, anticipating the giggles her announcement would elicit, before scolding, “You filthy children!” The students at Saints made fun of her behind her back, imitating her tanklike build and unfamiliar accent, but what they never realized is that she was on to them as well. One of the favorite sisterly, if somewhat uncharitable, games at the convent was a variation of charades in which the Bap acted out the roles of students and others guessed who they were.

  Not everyone subscribed to Sister Bap’s authoritarian ways. Some officials in Englewood had begun to worry about the incipient problem of juvenile delinquency and expressed fears at public debates that “harshness and cruelly severe punishments for minor infractions” would only alienate the children further. What they shared with the nun and other disciplinarians was an inherent belief that it was the responsibility of teachers, parents and civic leaders to instill in the youth of Englewood a set value system through every means possible. The established code of ethics of the community, while often ignored in the private lives of town fathers, was articulated in a series of full-page advertisments printed in the Englewood Press. One Thanksgiving Day ad, under the blaring headline “SMALL SINS MAKE LIARS—LIARS MAKE CRIMINALS—FIRST OF ALL, TRUTH,” sermonized that the compulsion to lie was at the root of most delinquency. “To tell the truth always is the principle that will take your son and daughter further than any other. In the school, on the playground, in the home—the boy or girl who abhors a lie is not likely to commit those sins which demand lying to avoid exposure.”

  At Saints, ethical values were largely passed on not by the priests and nuns but by Vince Lombardi, who found his pulpit everywhere, on the playing field, in the classroom and at schoolwide auditorium meetings. He was the one person to whom Sister Bap acceded. Dorothy Bachmann, salutatorian at Saints in 1944, thought “all the nuns loved him. They were not afraid of Vince, but they respected him for the way he presented his values to the students.” Saints football, with its discipline, subservience and teamwork, was considered the ideal demonstration of proper teenage behavior, and Lombardi the purveyor nonpareil of the football philosophy. He was one of only four men on the Saints faculty of nineteen teachers. It was perhaps a typical ratio at a high school run by nuns, especially during the war years. That Lombardi was at Saints at all, rather than in the military, was unusual.

  Though he was color-blind and nearsighted, other men with those liabilities were drafted into the service during World War II. Marie had expressed early reservations about the war and had attended an America First rally at Madison Square Garden in 1941, but Vince was adamant in his hatred of Hitler and in full support of the war effort. The Izzos were a patriotic lot; more than a dozen of his cousins and uncles had enlisted, including Tony Izzo, who was staying with Harry and Matty in Englewood while attending Fordham when he joined the Navy. Vince said that he tried to enlist but flunked a physical because of his poor eyes. That is possible. At least one of his friends, Francis Garrity, the basketball coach at Dwight Morrow, later said that he was with Lombardi when it happened. But there is no government record of any such event. Lombardi’s Selective Service System records indicate that Bergen County Draft Board No. 7 gave him deferments throughout the war. The first deferment, in December 1941, was a II-A in the national interest for teaching. In 1943 he received a III-A deferment for dependency reasons. He was the sole provider then for Marie and Baby Vincent, but other young fathers were not deferred during the war. By April 1944, he had been reclassified IV-A, deferred by reason of age. He was then almost thirty-one years old.

  The fact that he did not serve was not held against Lombardi in his community. The prevailing attitude was that the students at Saints were lucky to have a strong male figure available to mold them during those difficult years. Here was a paradox in Lombardi’s character. He was never a soldier. He was never a priest. Yet he seemed the embodiment of the soldier priest, in the line of Ignatius of Loyola. The students at Saints regarded him with fear and respect. Their newspaper, the Arcade, applied popular song titles to personalities at Saints and matched “Mr. Lombardi” with “Mean to Me.” He was known to throw an eraser at a daydreaming student, and his students came to learn the warning signs of a Lombardi eruption: “He would just stand there mute and his eyes would start blinking, harder and harder. That was the sign that an explosion was coming,” recalled Don Crane, one of his students. “When his eyes started to blink, you stayed away.” Only one student was truly in danger of suffering harm at Lombardi�
�s hands: his youngest brother, Joe, who had enrolled at Saints as a freshman in 1943. Joe looked like his older brother and even played the same position in football, guard, but his disposition was the opposite: sweet and easy.

  Being coached by his big brother was bad enough—“Lombardi! You’re living on my name! You stink!” Vince screamed at him in practice—but it was in the classroom where Joe suffered most. In his sophomore year he coasted through school, thinking that as a football star he did not have to study. At an awards program at the end of the year, his brother disabused him of that notion. Vince was the master of ceremonies that day in the auditorium, calling students to the stage to receive scholastic honors and their report cards. As the program ended, Lombardi said that he had “one special mention” and brought up his brother. One by one, he read off Joe’s poor grades. As Joe stood there sheepishly, Vince grew madder and redder, his eyes blinking violently, until finally he uncorked a wild swing at his little brother, who ducked and raced frantically for the exit, where one of his football teammates, Hooks Cerutti, had propitiously stationed himself, letting Joe through and then closing the door before Vince, huffing in pursuit, could catch him. The program ended right there in chaos with students scrambling out of the way of the raging bull, Mr. Lombardi.

  Vince caught him later that night at home. The students were fearful about what would happen the following Monday, but Lombardi acted as though nothing had happened. For the most part, his intimidation was more a matter of demeanor than action. Dorothy Bachmann recalled that her lab partner in chemistry was so afraid of Lombardi that she never uttered a word all year. “She would never open her mouth and I had to do all the experiments because she was too scared.” Lombardi tried to lighten things up with humor, but his jokes were always stale “groaners” that he laughed at harder than any of the kids. He was a believer in pop quizzes, and would stroll down the aisle singing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” occasionally stopping to peruse someone’s answer sheet. By all accounts, even though he scared some students, Lombardi was an effective teacher, able to explain physics and chemistry in comprehensible terms. He often spent a week repeating one concept until the slowest student in the class understood. “He made the subject clear and succeeded in communicating all the essentials so that all the students could get good grades,” said Joe McPartland. “He had a great way of sensing whether you were getting it. He’d say, ‘I don’t think you really understood that,’ and go over it again.”