There were blocking codes along the line, three or more options per position on a play, but also simple reads and reasons for every move. With repetition this seemed obvious, intuitive, and the young Rams learned their lessons well. They became so adept at the T that by October they were embarrassing the varsity in practice, galloping through the line at will during midweek scrimmages. They also appeared invincible in their two official games against other freshman teams, clobbering Rutgers and NYU in shutouts. The 12 to 0 defeat of Rutgers, during which the Fordham freshmen held the Scarlet Knights to negative yards on offense while compiling more than four hundred yards on the ground themselves and completing twelve of seventeen passes, prompted an article in the New York Herald Tribune boasting that “Coach Vinnie Lombardi … can feel justly proud for a job well done,” that his “yearlings looked like a million dollars,” and that they were certain to “lift the Rams to the prestige they knew on the gridiron before the war, come 1948.” The NYU game, won by Fordham 33 to 0, excited the press boosters even more, especially in contrast with Danowski’s uninspiring 1-6-1 record with the varsity that year.
At season’s end Lombardi was rewarded with a new job, but not the one he expected. He was asked, belatedly, to step in and coach Fordham’s freshman basketball team. The job had become vacant when Bob Mulvihill, who was slated to coach the freshmen, instead unexpectedly was declared eligible to play one final year with the varsity after returning from the Marine Corps as a twenty-five-year-old senior. Lombardi had been a successful high school basketball coach, leading one of his Saints teams to a regional championship during the war years, so he was considered the logical replacement. In fact, he had no interest in the job and knew less about the game than most of the Rams players. One of the freshman cagers that winter was Dick Tarrant, who later became a respected basketball coach at Richmond University. As Tarrant remembered that season, Lombardi was an odd mentor, largely preoccupied with football.
The players respected him and dared not challenge him. They learned that if practice was at three o’clock, they were wise to show up at two-thirty. He made them run laps (“which was absurd in basketball,” Tarrant noted, since basketball scrimmages were nonstop running in any case), and set them up in a simple offense from which he would not stray. But for the most part he left the players alone, realizing that their skills surpassed his knowledge and interest in the sport. “He didn’t know any of us and didn’t really care to. He was babysitting us for that year,” Tarrant said. Often, while the team was shooting baskets or running layup drills, Lombardi slipped off to a corner of the gym where a huddle of football players waited, and he went through the snap and ballet with his center and quarterbacks. The basketball team appeared bulky and overpopulated at times, as Lombardi brought linemen in to run laps with lanky forwards and guards. Sometimes at night, after studying football films for an hour, he walked across the campus hill against the howling winter wind and encountered a pack of athletes trudging back from dinner to their dorm in a former army barracks behind the gym. He would ignore the basketball players in the group and focus his attention on the shivering gridmen. Did you work out today? Do your sit-ups? The basketball players appreciated their anonymity; not only was Lombardi’s energy elsewhere, but also his wrath.
Lombardi that winter was nonetheless, as usual, intense and nervous for better or worse. His will to compete was inevitably contagious, even in a sport that mattered less to him. During a meaningless freshman basketball game against Hofstra, Wagner or St. John’s, played two hours before the varsity contest, with only a few girlfriends and student loiterers in the stands, a gym so empty that you could hear the vendor selling popcorn and Coke behind the stands on the other side of the court, Lombardi might launch into one of his eye-blinking spasms in response to a referee’s ill-conceived foul call. There was one other characteristic that his basketball players never forgot about Lombardi the freshman basketball coach: he had a noticeably nervous digestive system. “Before every game he would be in the crapper. He would flush and we’d all giggle,” Tarrant recalled. “And he spent most of halftime in the bathroom with the runs. I always wondered whether coaching placed an increasing strain on his colon. Lots of times, if you have colitis, the doctor will ask, ‘Are you under stress?’ ”
POTATO ED, they called Ed Danowski, and that aptly described his coaching style. He had many attributes—athletic grace, handsome looks, sincere demeanor—but charisma was not one of them. No more sizzle than a half-baked spud. When Fordham’s freshman class of 1947 moved up to the varsity the next season, so too did Lombardi, and though he was not promoted to head coach, he did most of the coaching, intellectual and spiritual, while Potato Ed, as one player described it, “stood in the corner and chewed tobacco.” Fordham ran the T as Lombardi taught it, and entered the season with raised expectations, which were rudely dashed with an opening 53 to 14 loss to a middling Lafayette team. The situation deteriorated from there, with losses to Canisius, Georgetown, Boston University and Holy Cross. It was the first time in his career that Lombardi felt direct responsibility for losing, and with each loss he grew more intense and inventive, throwing as many trick plays as he could scheme up into his basic T. Fordham simply did not have the skill and depth yet to compete again at the big-time level. This mattered not at all to Father Gannon, who had already expressed his preference for safe losing and mediocrity, and it had no discernible effect on the disposition of Potato Ed, who shook it off with the sanest retort a losing football coach could summon, that it was only a game, not “life and death.”
Alumni boosters and their cohorts in the press box were fed up, however, and began hectoring for change. There were suggestions of bringing back Hugh Devore, a former assistant to Sleepy Jim Crowley then coaching at St. Bonaventure, and even the fanciful notion that Frank Leahy, another former assistant, could be lured back from his prestigious post at Notre Dame. But most of the public speculation centered on Lombardi. “RUMOR MILL: DANOWSKI OUT?” queried a headline in the New York Post with two weeks to go in the season. The story said “Vin Lombardi, who gained fame as one of the Rams’ renowned Seven Blocks of Granite, was said to be in line for Danowski’s spot.” The New York Journal American’s Barney Kremenko followed up with the change as a fait accompli, saying Danowski’s days were “numbered” and that “alumni had tabbed Lombardi as their man as far back as a year ago, when he coached the frosh to victories over NYU and Rutgers. But the fact that Danowski’s contract had another year to run caused complications, and the embarrassing matter was dropped.” In his “Sports Chatter” column, Harry Singer offered the opinion that Danowski’s “lack of color and personality” were the main reasons he would be replaced by Lombardi, “who is rated just the opposite from the present Ram coach and who will make personal appearances and is a good mixer.”
Lombardi neither pushed the speculation nor made an effort to quash it. Every morning during his commute from Englewood to the Bronx, he fretted aloud about the stressful situation he found himself in. He expected to be made head coach and wanted the job, but he did not want to be seen as Potato Ed’s betrayer. He felt responsible for instructing the players, preparing them for each game, but it was still Danowski’s team, and he was frustrated by not having true authority. As the controversy bubbled up around them, Danowski and Lombardi, barely on speaking terms, nonetheless devoted themselves to ending the season in respectable fashion. The Rams played spiritedly while losing to Rutgers in the penultimate game, after which a sympathy backlash for Potato Ed began to emerge. Leading sportswriters who had covered him during his days with the Giants began to comment on his good will and decency. President Gannon, working behind the scenes against the blatant move by some alumni to restore big-time football at Fordham, was only too willing to become a private source for pro-Danowski stories. Danowski was also aided by the neutrality of the most influential member of the alumni advisory board, Wellington Mara, owner of the New York Giants. Then and later, Mara’s relationship with
Lombardi was overstated by many: they had been classmates at Fordham, but were not pals. Mara felt just as close to Danowski, who had been one of his players with the Giants for eight seasons. “I don’t know that I had any role,” Mara said decades later of the dispute. “But I tried to stay away from that whole thing.”
The players were torn. Some considered Potato Ed a dolt, a few thought Vince was a martinet, but most of them liked both men for decidedly different reasons: Danowski’s ease, Lombardi’s contagious will to win. On the weekend before the season finale against NYU, Herb Seidell, the team captain, was called home to Indiana to care for his father, who had fallen off a ladder. When he returned on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the day before the game, he could sense an “enormous amount of strain” in the locker room. Players were being called in one by one to talk to Father O’Brien about the coaching situation. O’Brien told Seidell that he was taking an informal poll and that the players seemed to be unanimous in their support of Danowski. Well, Seidell responded, all the players knew who was doing the coaching. It was Lombardi. He left the meeting convinced that “the cards were stacked against Vinnie” and that the administration was “trying to create the illusion of support” for Danowski. The next day Fordham played its finest game of the year, smothering NYU 26 to 0, and the salvation of Potato Ed was assured. “If Ed Danowski’s job as head coach of Fordham wasn’t saved by that endorsement his players gave him in chalking up the traditional game with the Violets for their beloved mentor,” wrote Dan Parker in the New York Mirror, “then there’s no balm in Gilead.”
The balm arrived a week later, after a long Friday night meeting between Father O’Brien, acting on behalf of President Gannon, and Jack Coffey, the athletics director. It was arranged that Danowski would receive a new contract and a raise. He was to fire two of his assistants but keep Lombardi, even though Danowski had made it clear that he could not stand the sight of his threatening aide. If this was a compromise, it was “not a happy arrangement,” noted Tim Cohane, who had been following the careers of Lombardi and other former Fordham athletes since his days as the school’s publicist. Cohane had left Fordham in 1940 to enter the world of major sports journalism, his longtime ambition. He started at the New York World-Telegram, writing a column entitled “Frothy Facts” and covering college football and the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. Then in 1945 he moved on to Look magazine, where he served as sports editor. He was still plugged in at Fordham, and in fact had been lobbying for Lombardi’s takeover of the football program. When that maneuver flopped, he received word that Vince and his dream of leading the Rams back to national glory were crushed.
Lombardi had not found his way home after all, but had merely drifted through two more lost years. He needed a way out again. The man who had created the mythology of the Seven Blocks of Granite soon had another plan for him. One school, one football program, stirred Cohane’s soul as much as the old Maroon. On an afternoon in early December, he met his favorite coach, Colonel Earl H. “Red” Blaik of Army, at the Eastern College Athletic Association meetings at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. On the way to dinner Blaik casually mentioned that he was losing his offensive line coach and needed a replacement. Know anyone? Blaik asked. Yes, sir, Cohane said. He thought he knew just the right man for the job.
6
Fields of Friendly Strife
LOMBARDI DROVE NORTH from Englewood up Route 9W high above the Hudson River, the roadway along the Palisades framed by fresh snowbanks and slicked with sleet and ice. He was on his way to the United States Military Academy at West Point on this December morning in 1948, a brave new world for him, and the journey was not an easy one. When he reached Thayer Gate at the south end of the academy, he declared that he had an appointment with the football coach, then negotiated his way up Mills Road past Michie Stadium and Lusk Reservoir and down toward the gymnasium. Even in the somber shroud of early winter, the panorama was at once majestic and intimidating: massive stone everywhere, barracks and cliff, Gothic spire, long gray coats, vast snowy Plain, broad cold river. When Lombardi reached the gym, he rode the elevator to the top floor and climbed another flight of stairs to an office in the tower. There, in front of him at the secretary’s desk talking to an aide, stood Colonel Red Blaik, the man Lombardi had come to see. He was an imposing sight, six foot two, lean and immaculate at age fifty-one, with bronze hair and serious pale blue eyes.
“Sid, take a look at the hands on this man,” Blaik said when Lombardi extended his butcher-boy thick right hand in greeting. “Easy to see why he was a block of granite.” He was talking to Sid Gillman, his line assistant, who was leaving to coach at the University of Cincinnati and whose position Lombardi hoped to fill. Blaik’s seeming familiarity with the Seven Blocks of Granite was, in fact, rehearsed. He knew nothing of Lombardi before a recent briefing from Tim Cohane, who had brokered the interview, and he harbored doubts that Lombardi’s coaching background prepared him for this job. The men retreated to the coach’s inner sanctum: warm lighting, dark walnut paneling. On one wall, in bronze, hung a West Point coat of arms. Behind Blaik’s mahogany desk, on which stacks of mail were neatly piled, was a large framed photograph of a saluting General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. military forces in the Far East, who had been superintendent at West Point when Blaik played football there shortly after World War I. MacArthur was Blaik’s hero, the No. 1 fan of Army football. Pleasantries quickly gave way to the substance of the job interview, a doctoral examination on football methodology.
What pulling technique do you teach your offensive guards? Blaik asked his prospective assistant.
The crossover step, Lombardi answered, rising from his chair to demonstrate the move he had learned under Sleepy Jim Crowley and Frank Leahy at Fordham, swinging his right arm back in a fluid motion to propel the quickest turn. The idea is to pull with speed and still be under control so you can assume a hitting position quickly, Lombardi explained.
Blaik pressed on: What technique do you teach guards for turning up into the hole?
Again, Lombardi returned to the fundamentals he had learned from Leahy, his former line coach, who was now gaining national renown as head coach at Notre Dame. Drop the outside shoulder, Vince said, and push off the outside foot.
On defense, Blaik asked next, do you favor the forearm shiver or the forearm left?
I think there’s a place for both, Lombardi said, hedging slightly. But I personally favor striking the opponent under the shoulders with a forearm left.
Why? Blaik asked.
With the shiver, Lombardi answered, if you miss, they’re into your belly right away. He tried to sound authoritative, but had no idea whether he was making points with the unrevealing colonel.
Blaik continued with the gridiron interrogation: What technique do you teach for downfield blocks?
The roll block. If you miss the target, Lombardi explained, he still backs away and it’s enough to tie him up.
That’s what we teach, Blaik said. The colonel was impressed. Lombardi seemed as taken with football nuance as he was.
The question-and-answer session persisted for nearly two hours until Blaik ended the interview and treated his guest to lunch at the officer’s club. As Lombardi walked to his car for the drive back to Englewood, Blaik seemed noncommittal but encouraging. He said he would call.
That night Tim Cohane, curious about the results of his matchmaking, placed a call to Blaik to see how it went. As Cohane later remembered the conversation, Blaik said of Lombardi, “He’s all right.” Pressed further, Blaik added, “He’s a rough soul.” Cohane knew that Blaik was never impulsive in judgment, rarely effusive in praise, but was that a psychological assessment, a compliment, a criticism? Perhaps all three. The next day Blaik’s office called Lombardi and asked him to return for another interview. This time Vince rode the train north through more icy weather and met with Blaik alone in the tower. Blaik discussed West Point, the history of the academy, the winning tradition of the football team since he
arrived as head coach in 1941, and then went over Lombardi’s background and salary at Fordham. He never asked how much Lombardi wanted, but stated that the job would pay $7,000, with free housing included. He also mentioned that there was a grade school on the post for young Vincent, who was six, and his little sister, one-year-old Susan, when she reached school age.
Blaik cautioned that he had to gain final approval from the athletic board, but Lombardi descended from the tower this time knowing that he had the nod. It was not the top job that he had yearned for, still just an assistant’s position, but being hired by Blaik was nonetheless a significant achievement. Now he would be coaching in the big time and learning from the best. Blaik was the dominant college coach of the forties. He was an offensive wizard whose teams from 1944 through 1946, led by his famed tandem of backs, Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard, Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside, had amassed prodigious point totals, a tie with Notre Dame the only blemish on their record. His sixth-ranked 1948 team had also finished unbeaten, though not perfect, having been tied by Navy in the season-ending rivalry. Blaik could hire virtually anyone he wanted, and he had selected an assistant less than two years removed from a small Catholic high school in North Jersey. Before leaving West Point this time, Lombardi was shown around the post by another assistant coach, Doug Kenna, who had played quarterback for Blaik during the war years. Kenna found Lombardi engaging, but nervous and uncertain that he could adjust to the military environment.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 13
