When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  LOMBARDI WAS ANXIOUS and frustrated when the 1953 season arrived. This was his fifth year at West Point, and he had the quality of a postgraduate lingering on campus after his classmates had moved on. It was indisputable that he was Blaik’s top aide and wielded more power than any previous second-in-command—the “prime minister to Blaik’s king,” as one player described the relationship—yet no matter how much influence he had, he was still an assistant coach. Three other former Blaik assistants had teams of their own by now. Why not him? Was it because he was Italian? Did they think he was too emotional? What did Murray Warmath have that he didn’t have? These were among the questions he brooded over when Tim Cohane drove up to West Point to visit. The two Fordham Rams sat in Lombardi’s living room late into the night and talked about life and football and the meaning of success. Their relationship “indulged strong differences of opinion” because they both believed in the benefits of discipline and hard work—and they both believed in Lombardi, Cohane said later. “I wanted badly for him to succeed. And he knew it.” Cohane already had done more to promote Lombardi’s career than anyone else. At Fordham, he had publicized Vinnie as one of the Seven Blocks of Granite. As sports editor at Look magazine, he had recommended him to Red Blaik. And he was still trying to help. When he noticed a coaching opening around the country, he called sportswriter pals and urged them to plug Lombardi, which they sometimes did, but to no avail.

  In June, Lombardi had turned forty. He and Red Reeder had spent the summer working on a book about football. Red did most of the writing, but Vince provided the ideas. Reeder was impressed by the depth of Lombardi’s knowledge of the game, the way he correlated tactics and strategy like a military general. But the New York publishers were not interested in a technical football book written by an assistant coach. Forty years old and still unrecognized. Few seemed to remember the glory of the Seven Blocks. Eight seasons at Saints. Two assisting back at Fordham. Four more in the shadows of the colonel. Lombardi was in danger of being permanently trapped in an image that he did not want, the football lifer, the valuable but anonymous man in the trenches. He burned for something more. He wanted to be Red Reeder leading his troops onto Utah Beach, to put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.

  Not much was expected of Army’s 1953 team. Six players, including the most talented back, Freddie Meyers, had been lost to academic failure. Would those setbacks have been avoided if the corps still passed the poop? Perhaps, perhaps not, but in a sense the team rendered that question irrelevant by playing above its abilities. Blaik sensed during fall practice that his players were jelling—“We are off to a good start in the face of some personnel problems,” he wrote to MacArthur in his preseason letter—and the players, for their part, noticed that the coaches, especially Lombardi, had even more emotion than usual invested in the team’s fortunes. Although Blaik was a proponent of two-platoon football, his squad clearly benefited from rules changes making substitutions more difficult in 1953, essentially going back to the days of sixty-minute men. This placed more emphasis on discipline and conditioning, the two areas where all Army teams were unmatched. The Cadets defeated Furman in the opener, 41 to 0, the most decisive win, and first shutout, since before the 1951 scandal. They were on their way to a win in the second game against Northwestern of the Big Ten, but were done in by two fumbles near the end zone and a dropped interception, which might have cost them three touchdowns and made the difference in a 33 to 20 loss. Lombardi took the loss especially hard, Blaik later recounted: “Vince was crying in the dressing room because individual mistakes had cost the game for a bunch of kids who had worked so hard to come out of nowhere.”

  Army rebounded in unexpected fashion, playing out the rest of the season unbeaten, with a lone scoreless tie against talented Tulane (whose star back was a future Green Bay Packer named Max McGee) and a stunning 20 to 7 victory over powerful Navy in the year-ending rivalry. It was the first Cadet win over the Midshipmen since 1949, and it brought with it a host of rewards: service academy bragging rights, a prized watch inscribed A 20 N 7 1953 that the players wore proudly for the rest of their lives, the Lambert Trophy as the best team in the East and some national coach-of-the-year honors for Red Blaik. But the upset over Navy was not the turning point. The emotional high in a passionate season had come earlier, in the heat of middle October, when Army played at the Polo Grounds against Duke, a national power, then ranked No. 7, with a brilliant backfield led by Red Smith and Worth (A Million) Lutz. On the eve of the season, Blaik had met privately with forty-five cadet captains and pleaded with them to help restore the academy to the days when the football team received unqualified support, a final reconciliation after years of estrangement. Team and corps needed to come together, Blaik told the captains, not just for competitive spirit, but for “a regaining of a soul for the academy.”

  The Duke game accomplished what words alone could not. The entire corps, 2,400 strong, rode down to New York for the game and stood as a thunderous wave of blue-gray, screaming from the moment the team set foot on the field until the final gun. The players gave them plenty to shout about: Tommy Bell plowing up the middle for the first score, quarterback Pete Vann ambidextrously switching the ball from right hand to left to make a crucial southpaw toss leading to a second score, Duke missing an extra point that would have tied the game at 14-all. It was a game worthy of golden era sportswriting, and Red Smith was there for the New York Herald Tribune to record the final act, which starred, felicitously, the Duke back of the same name. “The score held at 14 to 13 as the fourth quarter rolled out, and up in the press box historians burrowed in the records hunting another Army victory as unexpected as this. They couldn’t find one. Then, suddenly, it appeared such comparisons would be vain, for here was Duke clamoring for another touchdown. There was a double reverse behind the line of scrimmage and Red Smith broke free, pursued only by Bob Mischak, a frustrated back who plays end and third base at West Point. Smith had a lead of at least eight yards when the pursuit began, but Smiths simply aren’t fast. Seventy-three yards down the field, Mischak had him by the neck and dragged him to earth seven yards from the goal line.”

  In truth, sportswriter Smith underplayed Mischak’s accomplishment at the expense of an irresistible joke about the running abilities of anyone named Smith. No one on the field or the sidelines expected Mischak to catch him. Gerry Lodge, pursuing from his linebacker spot, was ten yards behind Mischak as they ran after Smith and was shocked that his teammate made the tackle, one that he could remember vividly nearly a half-century later: “He grabbed Smith on top of the shoulder pads and pulled him straight down. The runner, and all of us, were so surprised.” Duke had four downs to score from there, and bulled closer every time. On fourth down with two yards to go, Worth Lutz pounded forward on a quarterback sneak, and when the referee cleared the pile he had been stopped inches from the goal line. Blaik, fearful of a fumble, ordered a quick kick on first down and sent his defense out again for a final stand in its own territory. Forty seconds left. Cadets streamed down from the stands and gathered on the far sideline and behind the end line. Duke threw four straight passes, the last one broken up in the end zone. “Suddenly,” wrote Red Smith, “the stained white jerseys of the West Point team disappeared, swamped under wave upon wave of blue-gray soldier suits. West Point cadets never break ranks. This time they practically broke their heroes to pieces.”

  When Bob Mischak made that unlikely play, what Blaik called “a marvelous display of heart and pursuit,” Army’s football team regained its soul. Not just Lombardi, but all the coaches, even the stoic colonel, cried in the locker room after the game, and it was difficult at that moment to dispute that MacArthur was right: there was no substitute for victory. Not victory for its own sake; victories of this sort brought deeper feelings, for the game, for the school, for the team, for the human spirit. Tim Cohane was there with his young boys, who remembered the scene forever: Blaik smiling, a sight they had rarely seen before, and Lombardi roaring and s
haking with laughter. For the athletes, this was the reason they played, this moment, sitting there exhausted in the dusty old dressing room above the south end of the field, lockers clanging, rounds of “On Brave Old Army Team” echoing in the din, T-shirts soaked with burning sweat sticking to their backs like extra layers of skin, and … here comes Vince, beaming, holding scissors, shouting, “WE’RE GONNA CUT ’EM OFF, MEN!”—cut off the T-shirts. It was an honor, a symbolic gesture signifying that Blaik and Lombardi and their boys had everything to look forward to even though they had nothing left to give.

  9

  Cult of the New

  Far off I hear the rolling, roaring cheers.

  They come to me from many yesterdays,

  From record deeds that cross the fading years,

  And light the landscape with their brilliant plays,

  Great stars that knew their days in fame’s bright sun.

  I hear them tramping to oblivion.

  GRANTLAND RICE WROTE THOSE LINES as the closing stanza of a poem titled “The Long Road” that appeared on the last page of his final book, a memoir completed less than a month before his death. He died at 6:15 on the scorchingly hot evening of July 13, 1954, two hours after suffering a massive stroke while reading his mail at the “Sportlight” office on West Forty-eighth Street in midtown Manhattan. Rice was the romantic mythmaker of American sports, the creator of the Four Horsemen, but in the end he understood that everything he had glorified during his half-century in the press box would soon be tramping with him into oblivion, replaced by the new and the modern. “The best doesn’t belong to the past,” he wrote in the introduction to “The Long Road,” though his tone seemed less expectant than resigned.

  In the very month that Rice died at age seventy-three, wrecking balls were demolishing an archaic vestige of the newspaper culture he had entered at the dawn of the twentieth century, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World Building. It was the last original structure downtown along what had been known as Newspaper Row, former home not just to the defunct World, but also to the Journal, the Evening Post, the American, the Tribune and the Sun. Grantland Rice and the World, flesh and mortar of an obsolete era, gone at once. And here, suddenly, came the new age of television. By the summer of 1954 more than 350 broadcasting stations had started up in cities around the country, where three years earlier the national total was under fifty; in those same three years the ownership of TV sets in the average American home went from extraordinary to routine, from one in five families to nearly two of every three. Television profits rose by 25 percent that year, while radio and newspaper revenues declined. Perhaps Grantland Rice died at the appropriate time, just when the sportswriting style of his day was losing its dominant role to television as the teller of stories and shaper of myths.

  Rarely did the old seem so old and the new seem so new as in 1954. The cult of the modern had been growing with the century, and now it was powerful and omnipresent, and television was just part of it. Corporations and their advertising agencies offered up the gods of science and progress to be worshiped in every aspect of American life.

  “THE LIGHT OF A NEW AGE,” blared a headline in Newsweek promoting the magazine above an eerie photograph “taken in the predawn dark, lit entirely by the flash of an A-bomb seven miles away.” Another ad featured an alien hero of this new age, a scientific technician in protective plastic suit and mask, handling radioactive materials next to the promise: “As General Electric Sees It, the atom will produce power for homes in 5 to 10 years” and do so “without government subsidy.” New chemicals, magic elixirs, were introduced to the public with religious reverence. Union Carbide sold its products with a mural depicting a huge hand reaching down from the clouds (man or God?) and pouring a chemical from a giant test tube onto a panorama of factories teeming with workers; the company boasted that its scientists were inventing a new chemical every month: “From the earth, air and water come new things for all of us—and new jobs.” From Diamond Chemicals came an ad depicting a crowd gathered on the sidewalk of Main Street USA, peering into a dry-cleaning building, with someone shouting out the headline: “There’s a revolution going on in the back room!” What revolution? A new dry-cleaning chemical named perchloroethylene. Environmental degradation was celebrated as progress. Southern Pacific Railroad developed an ad campaign based on the theme of man overpowering nature in “The Golden Empire” that stretched from Louisiana to California. “Eight years ago some rabbits called this Texas Gulf Coast plains ‘home,’ ” proclaimed one ad showing the before-and-after effects of industrial expansion. “Now a multimillion-dollar chemical plant is located where the rabbits scampered only a few years ago … and right next door are other new plants, supplying the booming industries of the great Southwest.”

  New and modern everything: new vinyl handbags and pedigreed plastic furniture, new 1954 Mercury automobiles with “years-ahead styling” and “new ball-joint suspension” and “entirely new V-8 engines” and “new colors”—reds, yellows, blues and greens that seemed mixed into modern and sexy tints. New lightweight cans for soft drinks, new trailers for truck transports, new miracle-tip cigarette filters, new tubular all-steel folding chairs, new king-size baked-enamel tray tables, new water coolers with foot pedals, new central duct air-conditioning systems, new gear teeth for power transmissions, new aluminum pipes for farm irrigation, even a “new Chicago” undertaking a “great, new surge” with new expressways and skyscrapers.

  IT WAS IN THE SPIRIT of the new that the New York Football Giants made a coaching change that year. Steve Owen had run the team for twenty-three seasons, since before Vince Lombardi entered Fordham. Once, long ago, the beefy Oklahoman with the gravel drawl and massive red face had seemed new and innovative himself, never more so than during the 1934 championship game played at the Polo Grounds against the Chicago Bears. Freezing rain and frigid temperatures that December day had turned the field into a skating rink. With his team trailing 10 to 3 in the first half, Owen, on the advice of the team physician, sent his equipment manager out to round up several dozen basketball shoes. The Giants wore them in the second half and gained tractional advantage over the slip-sliding Bears, coming back to win by the score of 30 to 13 in what became known as the Sneakers Game. But that story was a generation old. Owen was fifty-five now and had not won a championship since 1938. He was coming off his worst season, one in which his squad finished with 3 wins and 9 losses, and it seemed that the modern game had overtaken him. His varied offenses looked more desperate than imaginative. Even before the 1953 season was over, after a humiliating 62 to 14 loss to Cleveland, the Giants owners, father Tim and sons Jack and Wellington Mara, called Big Steve into the front office. “What’s up?” he inquired, and they gave him the answer: his time was up. They were bringing in someone new.

  In the New York Daily News the next morning, a two-column headline reported the firing along with a prediction: “GIANTS BOOT OWEN UPSTAIRS, LOMBARDI SEEN NEW COACH.” The story began: “Steve Owen, long renowned as ‘the coach without a contract,’ yesterday was removed from the job as football boss of the Giants after one of the most disastrous campaigns in his 23 years at the helm. Steve comes off the field and into the front office following this Sunday’s final game with the Detroit Lions in the Polo Grounds. It was learned by THE NEWS that president Jack Mara is seeking the services of Vincent Lombardi, backfield coach and highly regarded right-hand man to coach Earl (Red) Blaik at West Point. Mara already has contacted [Blaik] regarding the hiring of Lombardi, one of the famed Fordham Blocks of Granite who joined the Army coaching staff in 1949.”

  Lombardi, according to the story, “stacks up as just the injection of ‘young blood’ the Giants seem to need.” By this account, he was born in Brooklyn, raised in Englewood and played as a starting guard for three seasons at Fordham. He was said to have graduated in 1937 “after making the Dean’s list four straight years” and then gone on for “two years of post-graduate study” at Fordham law school. The article by
sportswriter Gene Ward had every fact wrong except where Lombardi was born. It is unclear whether Lombardi himself fibbed about his academic record or merely never corrected the exaggerations and allowed them to become part of his résumé, but from then on, most articles describing his school years asserted that he was a cum laude graduate with two years of law school under his belt. Occasionally he was even said to have earned his law degree. But the most important fact that Ward had wrong—at least from Lombardi’s perspective—was that he was being considered for the Giants’ head coaching job.

  He was not. The Maras hoped to hire Red Blaik, not Lombardi. Wellington Mara, who had been Vince’s classmate at Fordham, said that Blaik turned them down and urged that they consider his top assistant—“Why don’t you talk to my man Vince?” he said—but the Maras were hesitant to put Lombardi in the head job, worried that he was lacking in professional experience and unsure that he could be a disciplined leader. They were drawn instead to Jim Lee Howell, another of their former players, a lanky end from rural Lonoke, Arkansas, who was almost two years younger than Lombardi but had more of the aura of a pro. He was a former drill instructor in the Marine Corps who recently had been working two jobs: assistant with the Giants in the morning and head coach at Wagner College in the afternoon. “Now here is a guy who can come in and hammer things out,” Well Mara said of Howell.

  Contrary to later reports that they were close college chums, Wellington Mara had known Vince only casually during their Fordham years, when he spent most of his spare time scouting pro talent for his father’s team. Vince and Well were in Ignatius Cox’s ethics class together, but so were several hundred other students. In their senior year Mara was sports editor of the Maroon yearbook and wrote stories about the exploits of the Blocks of Granite, but considered Lombardi the least talented of the seven and never interviewed him. It was Steve Owen, in fact, who first alerted the Maras to Lombardi’s coaching skills. Owen had been the guest speaker at a Saints football banquet one year in the mid-1940s. “You know that guy Lombardi who was in your class at school?” he told Well Mara after returning from Englewood. “They win the championship every year!” Mara became more familiar with Lombardi at West Point because of his relationship with Blaik. When Army played at the Polo Grounds, the Maras invited the coaching staff to stay overnight as guests of the Giants and watch the pro game the next afternoon. Blaik reciprocated by inviting the Maras to West Point.