When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Even if they did not want Lombardi for the top job, the Maras were interested in having him join their staff. Following Blaik’s suggestion, Well Mara called Vince and set up an interview at the Bear Mountain Inn. Lombardi later remembered Mara saying to him during that phone call, “We’ve always wanted you on the Giants and we have an opening.” According to Doug Kenna, Lombardi had told other members of the Army coaching staff that he wanted the head coaching job with the Giants “worse than anything in the world” and thought that was the opening Mara was talking about. It came as a “terrible disappointment” when Mara instead invited him to come to New York to run the Giants offense for Jim Lee Howell. It seemed that the football world was stocked with men who worked under Blaik and became head coaches: Murray Warmath at Mississippi State, Herman Hickman at Yale, Stu Holcomb at Purdue, Sid Gillman at Cincinnati, Andy Gustafson at Miami, Bob Woodruff at Florida, John Sauer at The Citadel. Why not Lombardi?

  Mara’s offer might have been flattering, but it was a disappointment. Lombardi told his former classmate that he needed to talk to Blaik before making a decision. Later that afternoon, in the gym tower office, he informed the colonel of his new job prospect, said that he preferred to stay at West Point and asked for a raise. It was only when Blaik rebuffed the raise request, saying that Vince already was paid the maximum for an assistant, that Lombardi decided to take the Giants job. “Another thousand dollars would have kept me at West Point,” he said later. The story that he had joined the Giants broke in the newspapers on Christmas Day. In the New York Herald Tribune account, he was praised for his football intellect: “Lombardi now wears spectacles and gives the appearance of a studious professor. He is regarded as one of the smartest theorists in junior coaching.” The Daily News said that he had “proven himself an outstanding handler and tutor of backs and was hired [to a two-year contract] for this particular talent,” replacing Allie Sherman, the backfield coach under Steve Owen.

  As it turned out, Jim Lee Howell would rather have retained Sherman. To ensure that the two men would get along, Mara sent Lombardi down to Arkansas to visit Howell during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Lombardi felt out of place walking the winter pastures of Howell’s large farm outside Lonoke, a town northeast of Little Rock, but the two men got along, especially after Howell said he would entrust the offense entirely to Lombardi. Howell also got to Lombardi through his stomach by feeding him an Arkansas version of an Izzo family meal, freshly shot wild duck and wild rice. Lombardi, as Howell later described it, “just couldn’t believe it, and he kept saying over and over, ‘You can’t buy anything like this anywhere.’ ” On his return to the Giants offices at Columbus Circle, Lombardi let out “a huge guffaw” when he recounted his trip to “Lone Okie,” as he called it, according to Well Mara. “I remember him laughing and laughing about all the cow shit in Lone Okie, Arkansas.”

  • •

  THE NEW JOB brought the Lombardis back to New Jersey. They moved at the semester break, enrolling Vincent and Susan in a new school in Oradell, ten miles northwest of their former home in Englewood and an easy commute into Manhattan. It was a hurried move, and Marie was not delighted with the new town or her new house, a split-level brick rambler, less impressive than the stately colonial at the academy, but Vince was in no mood to look around. He was preoccupied with the transition to the new job. As confident as he was about coaching, he knew almost nothing about the pro game, and felt that he had much to learn in a short time. At West Point he had become proficient in studying film, and that is what he did now, following a more grueling schedule than ever. He brought home films of every Giants game of the past two years, set up a projector and screen in the den, sent the kids and even Marie down to the basement rec room if they appeared bothersome, lit up a cigarette and went to work, often not finishing until his eyes were sore and his ashtray was littered with packs of butts.

  As Lombardi watched the grainy black-and-white film, he charted the movements of all twenty-two players on the field, using separate yellow notepads for each team’s offense and defense, then indexing the notes so that he knew where to find a specific type of play. The notepads provided the original text of what later became known as Lombardi’s bible, a tome written in the language of X’s and O’s, the chapters stored in a brown leather satchel that he kept from the winter of 1954 until the day he died. The Giants offense seemed anemic, but how could he revive it? He paid special attention to the games involving the Cleveland Browns, whose coach, Paul Brown, was considered the most thorough and innovative in the league. In Lombardi’s bible, the chapters charting the Browns were the book of revelations.

  From the films he had studied from January through June, Lombardi reached two conclusions about the offense he would try to develop for the Giants. The first involved the passing game. “The big point I realized was that whatever formation I used, I had to have a flanker back,” he said. “You had to have the threat of a pass. Everyone in the league was using flankers.” But it was the running game that needed the most work. “From pictures my sense was the passing game was great and the running game was only a half try. Everybody said, ‘You can’t run much in the pros.’ Their defenses were too large and mobile to sustain a running game against them. I reasoned that the people we had on offense were every bit as big and every bit as mobile.”

  Lombardi took his first close look at the pro athletes that July at the Giants training camp at Willamette College in Salem, Oregon. It was also their first look at him, and it is fair to say that he was more impressed than they were. Here was a pro team that had won only three games the year before, yet Lombardi was awed by their athletic prowess. The gap in talent between Army and the Giants was far wider than the one between Saints and Army; he had not seen anything like this in all his twenty years in football. At West Point, he and Blaik had operated on the theory that “the bigger the man, the less quickness.” But watching pro linemen in drills he was “amazed by the speed, agility and quickness of the big men.” The talents of backfield stars Frank Gifford, Kyle Rote and Charlie Conerly impressed him even more: “the fluid motion that Gifford had running. The great hands Rote exhibited … catching the ball. The anticipation Charlie Conerly had in releasing the ball—anticipating where the defensive man would be.” And beyond their athletic grace, Lombardi said later, he was “pleasantly surprised by the mentality of the pros.”

  The pros, for their part, were more surprised than pleased in their initial impressions of Lombardi. They considered him a college chump. For all his film study, he would not shed his Army playbook. He came in excited about delay plays in which the quarterback sprinted out and came to an abrupt stop, waiting patiently for his receivers to get clear downfield. Maybe that worked at West Point, but the Giants knew it was unsuited for the pros, where the quarterback would never get enough time. He installed another play from Army’s split T formation designed to have Conerly, on thirty-three-year-old knees, fake a handoff and a pass and run around end. Conerly had no desire to run and changed the play whenever Lombardi sent it in. For offensive linemen, Lombardi taught rule blocking, another technique used at West Point. Instead of blocking a specific defensive player, each lineman blocked a zone, and if there was no one in that zone he fanned back to another area, following specific rules, hence the name. Army and other colleges were ahead of the pros in using rule blocking. It eventually became the norm in the National Football League, but the Giants had difficulty adjusting. “You had that first July that they didn’t believe,” Lombardi said later. “When I first explained it they looked at one another—‘What’s he doing?’ ”

  The zealousness with which he sold his new schemes backfired at first. He appeared defensive about his credentials, and kept repeating that he had worked with the great Colonel Blaik at Army, as if that would impress the pros. Many of the players thought he was “loud and arrogant—a total pain in the ass,” as Frank Gifford later described him. Behind his back, they mocked him, calling him the Little Ge
neral and Little Mussolini. In the dorm rooms they enacted parodies of his coaching persona, his flashing teeth, his oversized feet and long arms, his barking commands, the way he lined up his blackboard chalk like a sixth-grade teacher (hiding his chalk became one of their favorite pranks). They were not afraid to tease him to his face, in milder fashion, dropping down to old-fashioned four-point stances and snarling their faces in pantomime of the old pictures of the Seven Blocks. The most memorable scene at the 1954 training camp came when veteran running back Eddie Price, fed up with the way Lombardi was trying to change his pass-blocking technique, muttered, “I’m getting the hell out of here,” and ran off toward the locker room. Lombardi, angry but worried that he had gone too far, ran after him, shouting, “Eddie! Eddie! Come back, Eddie!” Offensive guard Bill Austin was stunned by the scene. “Lombardi chewing on Eddie like that, we just weren’t used to that kind of discipline.”

  Young Vincent, a husky boy of twelve, accompanied his father to camp that year. He cleaned cleats, brought the balls out for practice, carried the water buckets and lived in a dorm room with a few other ball boys. He saw far more of the players than he did of his dad, which was fine with him, considering what it was like when they were around each other. “My father would chew me out in front of everybody. He’d scream that I didn’t get the footballs, that I didn’t do this or that,” Vincent said later. This brought Vincent closer to the players, who empathized with what he was enduring. Although it embarrassed Vincent to see his dad screaming at his heroes, it was a revelation to him when he heard what they were saying about the Old Man. One day, standing on the sidelines next to two players, including one who had played at Army before being expelled in the cheating scandal, Vincent overheard an obscene rant against “that goddamned Lombardi.” The second player gulped, realizing that the coach’s son was next to them. Then, looking directly at Vincent, the first player said, “Well, the kid’s gotta learn sometime that Lombardi’s an SOB.”

  It was with Jim Lee Howell that young Vincent experienced his most anxious moment at training camp in Oregon. One morning he arrived at practice several minutes late, as did a few players. Howell knew that some players had lagged behind, but could not determine which ones, and insisted that Vincent tell him who they were. The team was gathered on the practice field, watching in amazement as Howell demanded that Lombardi’s son squeal. Vincent refused, and Howell dismissed him, barking, “Don’t come back until you’re ready.” Vincent left, proud that he did not give in, but fearful of his father’s wrath. “I avoided my dad for as long as I could,” he said later. His fear was groundless. Squealing had a deeper meaning to his father. It evoked the most unpleasant memory of his career, the West Point academic scandal, which centered on an honor code that required cadets to inform on cadets, a concept that offended Lombardi by running contrary to his sense of loyalty. When he finally caught up with young Vincent the next day, he surprised his son by saying that he was glad Vincent had refused to spill the names to Jim Lee Howell. Then he added, “If you had told, I’d have hit you.” Even in praise there was a threat, but this time Vincent found it reassuring.

  After his difficult early weeks at training camp, Lombardi began to earn the respect of the pros. He did it through persistence and adjustment. The will to succeed was his dominant characteristic, stronger in the end than his insistence on having things his way. If he had to adjust, he would find the means; it was a talent that he exhibited for the rest of his coaching career, though it often went unrecognized, overshadowed by his public image as the implacable leader who demanded that the world adapt to him. He began roaming the hall of the Willamette dorm at night, visiting with the offensive players. He acknowledged that he had much to learn and sought their advice, help and loyalty. He asked the veterans to work with him rather than second-guess him. “We would listen to him and he would listen to us,” said Charlie Conerly. He tried to become one of the guys, not the authoritarian boss but the smarter older brother; they called him Vince or Vinnie, not Coach or Mr. Lombardi. He drank beers with them, laughed loudly at their jokes, told them how much he wanted them to succeed.

  Frank Gifford was the key. Lombardi had seen him play in college when Southern Cal had defeated Army at the Polo Grounds in 1951. The field that day had been aswarm with photographers capturing every move of the graceful All-American from the West Coast. But when Gifford returned the next year to play for the Giants, he began two seasons of frustration. He never clicked with Steve Owen, and felt that he was being misused, shuffled from offense to defense. There were few rewards in pro football then. Gifford, one of the highest-paid players in the league, had just received a raise to $10,000 a year. He thought he could get more publicity and money in Hollywood, where he had been taking minor acting parts since his first year at USC. After the 1953 season he considered staying on the coast. He was “not unhappy” that Steve Owen was fired. “I might not have come back had there not been changes,” he said later. But could Vince make him happy? From game films Lombardi had seen that Gifford was his ideal offensive threat, someone who could run, pass and catch. “You’re my halfback” were the first words he ever said to Gifford after introducing himself. Still, the first weeks were tense. It meant little to Gifford to play halfback in a rinky-dink West Point offense.

  Lombardi never lost his manic edge. Jim Lee Howell saw him pacing the dormitory roof before a preseason game, and from then on would shout, “Someone get a roof for Vinnie!” whenever his assistant seemed tense. But Lombardi did get the message the players were sending, and he adjusted and began building a pro-style game that let Conerly be Conerly and Gifford be Gifford, and from then on the players were on his side.

  IF NOT THE DREGS of the athletic world, pro football began the 1950s closer to the bottom than the top. College football, major league baseball, horse racing and boxing all drew more ink, more attention on radio (and early television) and, with few exceptions, more fans in the stands. College football had been considered socially superior because of its attachment to academic institutions and its pretense of innocence. The pro gridder was thought to be a mercenary playing for meal money and free beer (Ballantine, sponsor of Giants games on WINS, provided the players with a case of beer every few weeks). It mattered not at all that many college stars were also mercenaries benefiting from lucrative, if illegal, financial arrangements. The amateur in American sports was protected by the prevailing myth that college boys played only for the love of the game and school spirit.

  The lowly image of the workaday pro football bruiser had persisted for decades, since Jim Thorpe, the great Olympian and all-around athlete, and six owners gathered at Ralph Hay’s Hupmobile auto agency in Canton, Ohio, on August 20, 1920, and conceived the beginnings of what would become the National Football League. But by 1954, as the spirit of the new came to dominate American culture, it seemed possible that pro football might be perceived in a brighter light. With the worship of the modern came a desire for the most technically proficient, the biggest, fastest and sleekest of everything—the professional. The amateur ideal seemed quaint, the concept of the exciting pro was taking hold. There were only a few signs of this transformation at first. One was in Cleveland, where Paul Brown had created the model of the new professional sports team: well organized and sharply outfitted, its players tested for intelligence as well as athleticism and treated more like corporate officers than factory tradesmen. The other was in Los Angeles, land of the new, where the Rams, led into the big time by a young publicist named Pete Rozelle, were the hottest game in town, luring massive crowds to the Coliseum. More than 93,000 fans saw the Rams play the San Francisco 49ers on the second Sunday of the 1954 season, an amazing figure; the other teams in the league that weekend drew between 17,000 and 27,000.

  These were still only faint glimmers of what was to come. For the most part, the NFL remained endearingly unsophisticated. When Herb Rich joined the Giants roster during the second week of that 1954 season, after being acquired from the Rams, he w
as concerned that neither his new team nor his old one would pay him for the first game. So he called deBenneville “Bert” Bell, the NFL commissioner. Bell answered the phone, listened to Rich’s concern and resolved it immediately, ordering the Rams to pay the salary. That is how simple life was in the league then—a defensive back picking up the phone and talking directly to the commissioner: no agents, lawyers, unions, league bureaucrats in the way. The NFL was not even based in New York, but housed in a small office in Philadelphia, because that was where Bell lived. He ran the league by letter and telegram, with a handful of aides helping him draft rules, keep track of the weekly transactions and negotiate the early television contracts. Every year Bell presented the same message to the NFL’s rookies: Gentlemen, prepare yourselves for later life, because you aren’t going to make a living playing football.

  For the league to rise in the sports world, it needed not just Cleveland and Los Angeles in the vanguard, but also New York. The spirit of the new was created in the advertising offices of Madison Avenue and preached in national magazines and on television networks—all centered in Manhattan. Most of the admen and broadcast executives lived in the metropolitan area, and if they were to root for a pro team it most likely would be the New York Football Giants. The Maras understood this, and were striving to change the image of the team they had run since Tim Mara bought the club in 1925 with money he had earned as a legal bookie. In the first year of the new look, the results were modestly successful: Jim Lee Howell’s inaugural team was superior to Steve Owen’s last one, winning seven games and losing five. Attendance at home games at the Polo Grounds in 1954 was uneven but improving as well, twice exceeding 45,000. The most significant transformation was in the coaching staff, which was run on the corporate model. Howell was chairman of the board, but two chief operating officers ran the daily operations: Vince Lombardi the offense and Tom Landry the defense.