When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  For the Navy game, as for all away games, Blaik followed his idiosyncratic practice of shepherding his team onto the field hours before kickoff and leading them on a leisurely stroll across the grass in their traveling clothes. He thought of this as a way to sharpen the focus, heighten the sense of anticipation, bring the boys together. Before they left the field for the locker room, Blaik gathered the team around him and gave them the first play to run during the game—something for the offensive players to think about as they put on their uniforms. But none of his psychology was of any use this time. Navy scored two touchdowns before Army could run an offensive series. In football, as in life, excessive fear and anxiety can dim the brightest mind. Army’s young quarterback had been given the first play during the street clothes ritual, and Blaik and Lombardi went over it with him again before the first series. With a pat on the back, the signal-caller trotted boldly out to the huddle, then made a sudden U-turn and sprinted back to the sidelines, panting. “Coach,” he said to the perplexed Blaik, “what did you tell me to do? I forgot.” So much for the infallible memory of cadets. Yes, Army could fall lower. The final score was 42 to 7. There was only one blessing in the darkness of defeat: Lombardi and his colleagues were not forced to watch films of the game over and over for the next year. Not even Blaik could find a lesson in that loss.

  THE NEXT JULY, one year after his return from Korea, Lombardi undertook a trip that he probably found even more daunting than the visit to Bigfoot Brown’s war zone bunker. He took part in a father-son camping trip in the wilderness of Canada, driving in a three-car caravan up to La Vérendrye Provincial Park northwest of Montreal for a week of fishing, canoeing and sleeping outdoors. Lombardi had been a city creature for all of his thirty-nine years. The only camps he knew were football camps. He had never before spent a night without a roof over his head. Although he grew up near the fishing shanties of Sheepshead Bay, he had little interest in fishing. He had avoided the fishing hole at Bull Pond in previous summers, preferring to stay in the Mother Lodge where he would play gin with Tim Cohane and Stanley Woodward while Warmath and Blaik and Red Reeder sat out there in a rowboat for hours on end. Warmath could “fish you into the ground,” as Reeder put it. “He didn’t know when to quit. He could sit in that damn rowboat for eight or nine hours until you all got sick of it.” Eight or nine minutes was all Lombardi could tolerate. Luckily for him, Warmath was not on this Canada trip; he had already left West Point to become head coach at Mississippi State. The July campers included the Lombardis, Reeder and his son Russ, Phil Draper (another Army colonel) and his son Stephen, and young Charles Summerall, Russ Reeder’s cousin.

  There was no question about who commanded this northern expedition: Red Reeder, still boyish and lean at age fifty, sandy red hair, jug ears, winning grin, sharp voice, clear blue eyes, natural-born wit and storyteller, prolific writer, lifelong Army brat “born at reveille,” football dropkicker and baseball letterman in the West Point class of 1926. Red prepared the menus, fixing dry vegetables, beef jerky and other lightweight and durable food. He plotted the course, drove the front car, scheduled the wayside breaks, determined the overnight stops—all this with a prosthesis where his left leg used to be. Reeder was the real thing, an infantry colonel. Eight years earlier during the first week in June, he had readied his men of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Division for their landing on Utah Beach in the Normandy invasion. What happened to him that fateful week was a story that Lombardi never tired of hearing, a romantic narrative of battle, football, pride and daring.

  Before sailing from England for the landing in France, Reeder had gathered his regiment on a hillside on the edge of the coastal town of Plymouth and delivered what amounted to a pregame speech. First he addressed the sergeants, saying that noncommissioned officers had helped raise him since childhood and were the heart of the Army, the real leaders of fighting men. Then he described the landing at Utah Beach in football terminology: “The Eighth and Twenty-second regiments will land ahead of us and block to the left and right. The paratroopers are our downfield blockers. We will land and plunge through the hole and head for Cherbourg.” His troops cheered, roaring even louder when Reeder declared that he would be at the front as they fought their way through France.

  When their ship approached Normandy and the infantrymen assembled on deck near the landing crafts, Reeder took to the loudspeaker and read them a message from British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery that ended with an old quatrain from the Earl of Montrose. War and sports—the words echoed the Fordham fight song, and the poetry easily could have been written by Grantland Rice up in the press box:

  He either fears his fate too much,

  Or his deserts are small,

  Who dare not put it to the touch,

  To win or lose it all.

  Five days later, as Reeder led a patrol through the French countryside—“plunging through the hole”—he was hit by a German shell. He did not lose it all, just his left leg. For daring to put it to the touch, he won the Distinguished Service Medal, one of fourteen decorations he received during the war. Ten months later he was walking on an artificial leg. Within two years he was back at West Point, reorganizing the tactical department, teaching the psychology of leadership, hitting grounders to Army infielders as assistant baseball coach and writing a book with his sister Nardi Reeder Campion that would become the basis for John Ford’s film classic The Long Gray Line. No small deserts for Red.

  When Lombardi arrived at West Point, Reeder immediately befriended him. They lived near each other on the loop. Russ became pals with young Vincent, Dort Reeder calmly kept the confidences of the troubled Marie, and Red watched after them all. Once the Lombardi basement flooded and Marie called in a panic—Vince was out of town (and was of little use around the house anyway)—and Red came over to fix the pipes and clean out the basement. He did not have Blaik’s noble airs, but was more endearing and took on the role of Lombardi’s playful mentor. For the rest of his life (he lived to age ninety-five) Reeder kept a picture of himself and Lombardi from the early 1950s, standing arm in arm at closing time at the Bear Mountain Inn, Lombardi in white suede shoes, ribbed socks, with his pant cuffs rolled way up past his shins, his right hand cradling both a cigarette and a Rheingold Extra Dry (the label upside down; long before the age of pull tops a can could be opened top or bottom), jaw agape in a teeth-flashing grin; Red impishly pulling the hat off Vince’s head. When those two were on the premises, everyone at the Bear Mountain Inn knew it: Red would punctuate his stories with bursts of laughter, which caused Vince to guffaw so loudly that the table would reverberate, which made Red cackle even more, until it seemed that the entire drinking hall had caught the joyous contagion.

  Anyone who spent time around Lombardi in those situations could only be puzzled by the prevailing image of him later in his career, when the human being could not be separated from a symbolic character created from his success. In the mythology of Coach Lombardi, the relentless winner, all gruff and bluff, there was little room for the mirthful and even giddy goofball that he sometimes surely was. Of course that aspect of his personality was seldom evident, usually seen only when he was in the company of close friends, in a bar, on a golf course, at a party. His own children rarely knew him that way. The camping trip to Canada was one of the few vacations Lombardi ever took with his son, and the memory stayed with young Vincent through the years as their relationship became more difficult.

  There was nothing intimidating about Lombardi on that adventure. He was good-natured if inept, out of his element. After the campers had spent two days fishing along the river, eating their catch along with Reeder’s wilderness food, Vince declared that he was “sick of this stuff,” bolted for a shopping spree at a nearby general store and returned with a six-pack of beer, thick steaks and corn on the cob. The next day Reeder suggested that they break camp and canoe upriver to a lake. To minimize intrafamily bickering, he had separated fathers and sons, placing Lombardi in a canoe
with young Draper. As Reeder later recalled the scene: “When we reached the lake we encountered a stiff wind and I looked back and there was Vince and his canoe was spinning around. Poor little Stephen Draper was up front, teeter-tottered up in the air, and couldn’t get his paddle down in the water. Vince didn’t know how to load a canoe. He had all the weight in the back and was just going around in circles, helpless.” Reeder paddled back, steered the canoe to shore and helped Vince rearrange the load. That night they slept along the lakeshore and were serenaded by a loon. “Hear that?” Reeder said as the loon’s lament echoed across the watery darkness. “That’s the cry of a lost soul.”

  Lombardi felt more comfortable in landscapes tamed by man. There was a golf course on the academy reservation, an odd ten-hole layout cut into the woods that he played on Wednesday afternoons in the off-season with the other football assistants and occasionally Coach Blaik. Russ Reeder was the caddy, his profits based on a novel if somewhat coldly Darwinian system devised by Lombardi. He was paid a dollar a hole, which meant he could expect to make ten dollars a round—but only if no balls were lost. It was the youngster’s primary responsibility to track down errant shots into the rough and woods; if he could not, the men would subtract the cost of the ball from his base salary. It seemed that Lombardi compulsively felt the need to give young people a test, an incentive. Golf became his favorite form of relaxation, stealing time that might have gone to his family, even seducing him away from the tower during slow summer days when Blaik was studying film and devising game plans.

  With friends and assistants, as with players, Blaik seemed rigid but was in fact deceptively flexible, a trait that Lombardi slowly absorbed and used to his advantage later in his career. When subordinates thought they were fooling Blaik, more often than not he knew what was going on but let it pass, or delivered a subtle message to keep them from straying too far. One weekday summer morning Lombardi and Kenna slipped out to play golf at a country club near Tarrytown. “The old man will never find us here,” Vince assured his nervous playing partner. As they finished the ninth hole and approached the clubhouse before making the turn, the club pro approached with a sly smile and said, “Colonel Blaik would like to buy you guys a beer.” Kenna, horrified, thought they should quit and return quickly to West Point. Lombardi, after three seasons with Blaik, was less obeisant than he once was. We’re here, he said, he knows we’re here; might as well finish. But how did Blaik find out? “He knew anything that moved,” was Kenna’s explanation. That answer unavoidably provokes a harsher question. If Blaik was attuned to everything around him, how could he have been unaware that his players, including his own son, had been violating the honor code? One answer might lie in the simple fact that people develop an ability not to hear what they do not want to hear.

  General Douglas MacArthur

  Waldorf-Astoria Towers

  New York, N.Y.

  Dear General MacArthur:

  They are mowing the stadium grass today and the air has that certain scent of autumn which reminds all football addicts that the season is just around the bend. One of the penalties of city life is the absence of nature’s reminders, so this letter on the ’52 season is a less romantic way of your learning that soon another football season will be with us. Politics and the state of the nation are out as we discuss the football troops at West Point. The attached personnel charts will give you a team picture of our squad and these additional random thoughts will supplement the charts.

  So began a letter Blaik wrote to his general in the summer of 1952 as Year 2 of the Army football recovery began. Although the coach now knew enough about his personnel to offer a preseason guide, in contrast to the previous year, it was still a characteristically bleak Blaik assessment: he informed MacArthur that there were only four talented players on offense, one of whom was “the most immature youngster” he had ever coached, and his defense was “far below par,” with “only one man of the entire group who normally would make a first West Point team.” Defensive coach Murray Warmath was gone. Potent Southern Cal was on the schedule again, along with Georgia Tech. The opening day opponent, South Carolina, had “the fastest backfield in the Southern conference.” The Cadets would be “equal in material” to only two opponents, Columbia and VMI. There was only one way for Army to rise from its gridiron depression, Blaik asserted: by giving the last full measure of devotion to winning.

  “Unfortunately, too much experience in losing [gracefully] often lowers the resistance to defeat,” he wrote. “Through the years I have found that between equal teams the winning formula is a thin margin above which to remain requires fidelity to fundamental principles and a team faith that abhors mediocrity and moral victories. I have often stated that there never was a champion who to himself was a good loser; there is a vast difference between the good sport and the good loser, but today even at the Military Academy we have a school of thought whose followers believe we should place little emphasis on winning. They have never experienced the pride of accomplishment which only comes from sacrifice and superior performance.”

  In other words, if you were against Blaik, you were a loser or wanted to lose. There was an opposing faction at West Point, but while the academic scandal had temporarily weakened the football team, it had not helped Blaik’s critics diminish his power. He signed a new contract in 1952 that gave him even more control, as coach and athletic director, and his salary exceeded that of the dean of academics, a brigadier general. MacArthur congratulated Blaik for his renewed contract and revised his earlier prediction that it would take West Point ten or fifteen years to recover from the 1951 separation of Blaik’s boys. By the end of another year, he now said, “the general athletic public will completely ignore the incidents” of the honors scandal, and the football program will “come back into its own.” The 1952 squad was in fact better than Blaik had predicted, though not all the way back. Army won and lost at an even rate and finished 4-4-1. After the Cadets upset Penn 14 to 13 in the penultimate game, MacArthur dispatched a congratulatory telegram to Blaik: “Your splendid team fills my old soldier’s heart with pride. Remind them on November 29 there can be no substitute for victory.” November 29 was the date of the Navy game, and though it was no substitute for victory, Army lost that day by only 7 to 0, a far less embarrassing score than the year before.

  The Cadets were competitive in all but one contest, aided considerably by Lombardi’s new positioning up in the press box during games, where he could analyze plays and send tips and recommendations down to the bench. Gerald Lodge, who played linebacker that year and called the defensive signals, said that Lombardi was as valuable on defense as offense because of his uncommon ability to notice several events simultaneously along the line of scrimmage as though they were happening in slow motion and in isolation. “I would come out after the first series of plays on defense and Lombardi would get me on the phone and tell me what to tell each of the players on the whole defense—what the opposing team was doing differently than we expected and how to adjust to it. The ends were too split; tighten up; the quarterback is tipping off his passing plays, subtle things like that. It is hard to watch more than one or two people at a time, but he could see everybody and just rattle it off.”

  Lombardi’s ability to see everything on a football field served another purpose for him that year. After the games he often had the assignment of taking the film down to a studio on Long Island to be processed, and on the return trip, at Blaik’s request, he stopped in midtown Manhattan for a special screening and play-by-play analysis in General MacArthur’s commodious living room atop the Waldorf-Astoria. These were decidedly informal sessions (Doug Kenna, who performed the same errand at times, likened MacArthur to “a friendly old Dutch uncle”). There sat MacArthur, wearing his frayed gray flannel Army bathrobe with his varsity letter sewed onto it, at ease in his favorite chair, with Lombardi perched nervously nearby, and a military aide running the projector. The general was all questions: Why this play? What were you trying
to do there? He had memorized the numbers of every Army player and knew more than Lombardi about their biographies. But it was not all football minutiae; MacArthur also talked about the difficulties West Point had endured and the value of competitive sports. Years later, when Lombardi was a national figure delivering speeches about the philosophical importance of football, he often reflected back on what MacArthur told him during those peculiar Waldorf screenings in the early fifties.

  In one of those speeches, Lombardi said: “I can vividly remember him saying that ‘competitive sports keeps alive in us a spirit and vitality. It teaches the strong to know when they are weak and the brave to face themselves when they are afraid. To be proud and unbowed in defeat and yet humble and gentle in victory. And to master ourselves before we attempt to master others. And to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep. And to give the predominance of courage over timidity.’ I think they are great words from what I consider to be one of the great Americans.” It is improbable that MacArthur, watching game films in his gray bathrobe, uttered precisely those words to Lombardi. This sounded more like the prose of one of MacArthur’s carefully composed speeches. But the importance is one of lineage. In tracing the roots of Lombardi mythology, one significant branch leads back through Blaik to the melodramatic old soldier.