ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1949, at eight in the morning, Lombardi attended his first meeting of the Army football staff. The holiday session was one of Blaik’s annual traditions, reinforcing the idea that no team in the nation would get the jump on Army. That was the essence of Red Blaik, the most prepared man Lombardi had ever met. And there was much to get ready for this year. Blaik had two new coaches under him, Lombardi for offense and another young bull, Murray Warmath of Tennessee, for defense. Eighteen graduating lettermen had to be replaced, seven of them defensive starters, and the schedule was more difficult than usual, with early games against top-ranked Michigan and Penn State.
Lombardi and Warmath had met once before. Fifteen years earlier they had smacked each other around on a November afternoon in the Polo Grounds, Warmath lining up at left guard for Tennessee, Lombardi at right guard for Fordham, which prevailed that day, 13 to 12. Now the two tenderfoot coaches shared a desk in a communal war room below Blaik’s office, and were brought together in a trying initial assignment: they were called up to the blackboard several hours each day for the first week, diagramming plays and formations, defending their ideas against Blaik’s piercing questions. It was a variation of Lombardi’s first job interview, but this time for keeps. At one point Lombardi found himself in a heated debate with Blaik and the other assistants over the proper way to deliver the center’s snap to the quarterback. Blaik had always taught the half-turn of the ball, presenting it to the quarterback sideways. Lombardi preferred the quarter-turn, with the ball reaching the quarterback at a slight angle. It was quicker, he said, and made it easier for the quarterback to hand off or pass. Blaik disagreed, so they got out a ball and practiced both methods there in the conference room outside Blaik’s office. The quarter-turn proved faster by a fraction of a second.
When spring practice opened on March 12, Lombardi began to appreciate the totality of Blaik’s preparedness. The coaches reported at eight each morning, spent the first hour on correspondence, then convened at 9:15 for a staff meeting to establish the precise missions and chronology of that afternoon’s practice, from the moment the players left the dressing room at 3:45 until they walked off the field at 5:15. The athletes had only a limited amount of time for football in their regimented days, sandwiched between final class and dinner formation at six o’clock, so nothing was left to chance. A set amount of time was devoted to each drill. Fifteen minutes for line blocks. Fifteen minutes for back blocks. Fifteen minutes for the blocking sleds. Fifteen minutes at the end for all the units to come together and work on new plays. Blaik discouraged assistant coaches from bringing papers with them onto the field; they were expected to memorize the plays and blocking assignments of every player. At first Lombardi had trouble keeping pace. “Run No. 10!” Blaik commanded from the rear of the offensive unit, forcing his assistant to confess that he had not yet found time to install play No. 10. “Blaik just gave me his bland Scots stare,” as Lombardi later described the scene. “‘Run No. 11,’ he’d order.”
After practice the coaches broke for dinner and then often were expected to return to the gym, sometimes working until midnight. Photographs and motion pictures had been taken of that day’s practice, and were developed and waiting for the assistants to study in the evening, along with films of future opponents. Blaik was a film fanatic, one of the first football coaches to analyze the game play-by-play, position-by-position, methodically charting another team’s tendencies on each down at various positions on the field and tuning his offense and defense in response to what he had seen. When studying films of their own team, Blaik and the assistants replayed the film to determine what every player did on each play, assigning grades based on the degree of execution. Football was Blaik’s life, his profession and only hobby. He largely disdained the social scene beyond West Point and his house on the hill, where he and his wife, Merle, hosted parties for out-of-town guests on football Saturdays and group suppers for cadets on Sunday afternoons. He seemed to think about football twenty-four hours a day.
Watching film was his idea of fun, WORK and PLAY. Once, after he and his staff had studied Michigan game footage for several hours in the projection room near his office, Blaik turned to Warmath and Lombardi and said, “You guys want to have some fun?” It was a hot afternoon and the assistants were restless. Warmath dreamed of a round of golf. “Heck,” said the colonel to his projectionist, “open up the locker and get those Navy films out. Let’s look at those for a while!” Even in the off-season the focus on football was relentless. Lombardi would be “halfway through dinner” when the phone might ring and it was Blaik saying, “I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.” They would drive to the gym and “discuss personnel or play ideas” late into the night. It was then Lombardi first realized that “football was a full-time twelve-month vocation.”
In many ways the philosophy at West Point was similar to a way of life that Lombardi had learned earlier at Fordham from the Jesuits. There was a direct line from one to the next, from religion to the military to football, from the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius to the football regimen of Colonel Blaik. Both emphasized discipline, order, organization, planning, attention to detail, repetition, the ability to adjust to different situations and remain flexible in pursuit of a goal while sustaining an obsession with one big idea. Lombardi was a daily communicant at both altars, absorbing what he learned from the Jesuits and Blaik to become the leading apostle of the mystical discipline of football. As integral as religion was to his sense of self, it was not until he reached West Point and combined his spiritual discipline with Blaik’s military discipline that his coaching persona began to take its mature form. Everything he knew about organizing a team and preparing it to play its best, Lombardi said later, he learned at West Point. “It all came from Red Blaik.”
Lombardi wanted nothing more than to please Blaik, a father figure who had the eminence and reserve that Harry Lombardi, Old Five by Five, lacked. Vince’s bluster turned to obsequiousness when he was within range of the coach. At times he came across like a bootlicking corporal, snapping off refrains of “Yes, Colonel!” and “Yes, sir!” to Blaik’s slightest requests. Yet it is hard to imagine two less similar personalities than Red Blaik, the Presbyterian Scotsman from the middle American town of Dayton, Ohio, and Vince Lombardi, the Italian Catholic from Sheepshead Bay.
Blaik was all understatement—reserved, aloof, stern, outwardly cool. He stood alone at practice, tall and straight in his Army baseball cap, sweatshirt, football trousers cut off below the knee and woolen socks, barking out crisp commands, rarely needing to modulate his tone of voice, just a nod and a look that said he could not be fooled. When he saw something that displeased him, he called the offender over and quietly explained what should have been done. He disciplined by way of teaching. His one curse word was “Jesus Katy!” More often “Jeebers Katy.” And yet his “presence was overwhelming,” said Doug Kenna. “He radiated authority. He was really in charge.” Lombardi was overstated, emotional, enthusiastic, explosive, hungry for stories and action, quick to laugh and cry and yell, his deep, distinctive voice reverberating across the practice field. He thrived on resistance, another force pushing back at him, physically and mentally, and he confronted the players spontaneously, swearing and steaming, all hands-on demonstrations, just like with the high school boys at Saints, demanding that the linemen hit him, and he hit back.
The irony was that the cadets spent most of their hours at West Point with someone in their face, as they rehearsed drills on the Plain, and marched through archways to classes and meals, and made their beds and lined up for inspection, always with someone vociferously demanding more of them—and they looked forward to football practice as a respite from the daily grind. Lombardi threatened the equilibrium—he came in attacking—and there was some culture shock at first. The players were not accustomed to being confronted so vigorously; some hated him for it. This was part of the “rough soul” that Blaik saw in him and attempted to soften. “He toned do
wn my temper, or tried to,” Lombardi said of Blaik years later. “When I’d get too intense and explosive on the field, he’d call me into the office the next day and sit there and look at me and twirl his class ring—West Point 1920—and say, ‘Vince, we just don’t do it that way at West Point. You can’t talk that way to cadets. You can’t drive them that way because they’re being driven all day.’ ”
There was one dominating characteristic that Blaik and Lombardi shared—an overwhelming will to win. “There was never any question that we were not allowed to lose,” said Doug Kenna, who became one of Blaik’s closest friends as player and assistant coach. “That was the general attitude. We did lose, but it was a bleak day at West Point when that happened.” To the poetic sportsman’s code of Grantland Rice, that wins and losses meant less than how you played the game, Blaik was once heard to reply with clean brevity: “Eyewash!” He was a miserable loser and proud of it. Blaik posted his Ten Football Axioms on the walls of the Army dressing room. Axiom No. 1 was about the distinction between losing and sportsmanship. “There never was a champion who, to himself, was a good loser. There is a vast difference between a good sport and a good loser.” In Blaik’s opinion the “purpose of the game is to win. To dilute the will to win is to destroy the purpose of the game.” In this, as in most matters, he was influenced by General MacArthur. He never forgot MacArthur’s words: “There is no substitute for victory.”
MacArthur, or “Dauntless Doug,” as he was known by fellow cadets at the turn of the century, had played baseball for three years at West Point, a right fielder with a weak bat who willed himself on base. During his senior year he managed the 1902 football team. By the time he returned to the Point two decades later to serve as superintendent from 1919 to 1922, he was a football man through and through, regarding it as another form of war-gaming. When Blaik and the other players of that era looked over at the sidelines during practice, invariably they caught sight of MacArthur pacing back and forth, riding crop in hand. Before he left that post for the Philippine Islands, his thoughts on the correlation between sport and war were carved in the stone portals of the gymnasium:
UPON THE FIELDS OF FRIENDLY STRIFE
ARE SOWN SEEDS THAT
UPON OTHER FIELDS, ON OTHER DAYS
WILL BEAR THE FRUITS OF VICTORY
He followed Army football religiously from then on, scouring press guides and magazines, watching highlight films whenever possible, memorizing the biography of every player, even third-stringers: height, weight, age, hometown. Even during the toughest days of World War II, according to his wife, he spent hours thinking about Army football, one of the few diversions that could relax his mind. After Army walloped Navy 23 to 7 in 1944 to finish undefeated, MacArthur sent Blaik a telegram saying that they had “stopped the war to celebrate” the “magnificent success” of “the greatest of all Army teams.” He was fascinated by Blaik’s coaching strategies and their parallels on the field of battle; when Blaik became an early proponent of two-platoon football, using specialists on offense and defense, MacArthur remarked that this “makes the game more and more in accord with the development of tactics of actual combat.” Once, after Blaik informed him that he had lost both his line and backfield coaches, MacArthur lamented that “it could not have failed to be a great blow…. However, this again follows the technique of war, for you always lose your best men in the heat of battle.”
Blaik and MacArthur were regular correspondents, their letters often touching on war, politics, friends, enemies, but always returning to their shared love of the minutiae of Army football. On July 30, 1949, as he made final preparations for the approaching season, Blaik sent a four-page single-spaced typed letter to MacArthur in Japan at General Headquarters of the Far East Command. He took note of the difficult schedule Army faced, the inexperience of his team, the arrival of two new assistants, Lombardi and Warmath, the weights of top performers along the defensive line, his preference for two-platoon football, and concerns that his defensive backs were too short and that his running backs were too “dainty.” MacArthur wrote back on August 8, accurately reading between the lines of a coach’s typical pessimism, saying that Blaik’s report “fills me with hope that you will have a reasonably good season,” an impression, MacArthur added, that was “fortified by the magnificent results you have always been able to produce in the past.” In closing, he asked Blaik to “tell the Public Relations Officer to send me such literature as is put out about the team, and keep me in touch with the results of the games during the season. We are way out on the end of the line here, and little news of the Academy trickles through.”
That exchange of letters came during the one brief period of the year when Blaik was on vacation of sorts, though he was not really away from football even then. During the final week of July and first week of August, he would retreat to Bull Pond, a fishing camp with two cabins on the West Point property about eight miles southwest of campus. This was by tradition a stag affair, just Blaik and his staff, a few Army Athletic Association officers and a handful of sportswriters. Lombardi was a first-time guest that year, and it was at Bull Pond that he developed friendships with two other West Point figures who later became significant influences on his life: Colonel Russell “Red” Reeder, a one-legged marvel, hero of D-Day, who taught history and psychology and was in charge of the athletic grounds, and Colonel Orrin C. “Ockie” Krueger, assistant graduate manager of athletics, who was Blaik’s all-purpose aide-de-camp. From New York came Willard Mullin, the popular sports cartoonist for the New York World-Telegram, Stanley Woodward, sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and Look magazine’s Tim Cohane.
Lombardi slept in Cabin No. 2, also known as the Mother Lodge, which was where most of the fun was. Bull Pond was the quintessential male-bonding experience of that time and culture. Every night the campers gathered on the screened-in front porch as an Army Signal Corps projectionist ran Army football highlights and Hollywood films. This was not a particularly artsy crowd; they preferred westerns and anything with Susan Hayward. Once when Blaik asked for a showing of Julius Caesar, most of the boys left to play cards and drink near the backroom bar, which was operated by the fun-loving Red Reeder and never closed. No one wanted to stay in Cabin No. 1 with Blaik, known to his cohorts as St. Blaik. He did not smoke or drink; furthermore, according to Ockie Krueger, “Blaik snored to beat hell.” The group often took turns cooking. Lombardi and Mullin created a passable meal, by all accounts, but a gastronomic conspiracy of Blaik, Woodward and Cohane offered up a breakfast that “tasted as if it had been cooked in a drain pipe” and a lunch that elicited the immortal query from Murray Warmath: “Have I eaten this or am I supposed to?”
Along with the taciturn Blaik, Lombardi was the poorest storyteller in the gang, but he laughed the loudest at the jokes, including his own. He was the best audience possible for Cohane, the erudite, pipe-smoking scotch drinker who shared with his fellow Fordham grad a corny and romantic sense of humor. It was in the haze of a hangover one morning that summer that Cohane conceived the idea of a Bull Pond All-America team, the fictitious counterpart to the College All-Star teams he selected with Grantland Rice. The sensibility of the Bull Pond All-America team reflected Cohane’s perspective on major college football, which was shared by the others: he revered it, despite its flaws, which he preferred to deal with through jokes rather than hand-wringing editorials and official investigations. On that 1949 Bull Pond team were players whose names made Lombardi laugh so hard that tears shot from his eyes. Excalibur Slime, the “maniacally aggressive” tackle from King Arthur’s Knight School. Hairy Dog Staggerfoot, the “tipsy broken field artist” from Three A.M.&M. Percy Smog, the “X-ray-eyed quarterback” from UCLA. Increase Yardage, the “famed fullback and cum laude student in underwater fingerpainting” from Harvard. And the favorite of both Lombardi and Cohane, Chuckles Axemurder, the “murderous end” from Bedlam Hall.
NOT EVERYONE loved Red Blaik and his football program. His staff and players
responded to him with reverence and undying loyalty (“You signed a lifetime contract with him,” said Doug Kenna), but Blaik had adversaries scattered around the country, in the press box, in the academies and across the field, who considered him less than a saint. His critics complained that he was an egotist who would do anything to win and that the “brave old Army team” of the stirring fight song was not so brave after all; they played dirty, it was said, and bullied lesser teams on an easy schedule. Far from genuflecting to the patriots along the Hudson during the Blanchard-Davis era at the end of World War II, some people questioned publicly why Army had such brilliant athletes playing a game when they could have been saving the world overseas. Even Blaik’s innovative two-platoon system was the object of scorn. The average football fan disapproved when Blaik implemented his system in 1948; while Army was destroying Stanford 43 to 0 at Yankee Stadium that year, thousands booed every time Army switched platoons from offense to defense.
Blaik’s critics had reached full voice by 1949. Army began the season impressively, destroying Davidson and Penn State in its first two games. The T formation, tutored by Lombardi, looked impressive with Arnold Galiffa running the offense at quarterback. Galiffa was starting ahead of Blaik’s son Bob, a talented sophomore who some alumni and sportswriters thought was a smarter signal-caller than Galiffa. But Blaik was disinclined to start his son over a veteran of Galiffa’s talent, which he felt was considerable. In one of his letters to MacArthur, he had written, “In Galiffa, our quarterback and passer, we have a sharpshooter of unusual ability, who aside from a temperament which goes with the Italian youngsters, has all the qualities of an All American.”
West Point then was dominated by the Anglo-Saxon culture of men like Blaik and MacArthur, and Italians were thought of in stereotypical fashion as fiery and emotional, which was more true of Lombardi than Galiffa. Early that season Lombardi had encountered the prevailing attitude when Blaik asked him to address the West Point Society of retired colonels and generals in Manhattan. It was his first appearance before the brass, and Lombardi was nervous on the drive down. After showing game films and appraising the team, he thought he had survived the ordeal, when an old warhorse rose from his chair and scolded him for starting Galiffa ahead of Bobby Blaik. “The only reason you’re playing Galiffa is because he’s Italian!” came the charge. Lombardi was so enraged by the accusation that he could “feel the hair standing up” on the back of his neck. He was never known for his quick wit, but this time he found an answer that calmed him down and made the others chuckle as well. “That’s not the reason at all,” Lombardi said. “I’m playing him because I’m Italian.” In fact, Galiffa was starting because Red Blaik wanted him to start; Lombardi, like his grouchy old critic, privately preferred Bob Blaik at quarterback.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 14
