There were two schools of thought on Howell’s leadership style. The harshest perspective was that he had little clue how to coach but was saved by the two finest assistants who ever worked on the same team at the same time. Howell readily acknowledged the talents of Lombardi and Landry, and joked self-deprecatingly that his main function was to make sure the footballs had air in them. The more complimentary view was that he was an expert at delegating authority. Most sportswriters subscribed to the second view, portraying Howell as a progressive thinker who had adapted to the spirit of the new, which in football terms meant the era of specialized platoons. “Mostly he is the administrator and coordinator, and that apparently is the way to do the job today,” Red Smith wrote of Howell. Joe King, in the New York World-Telegram, noted, “If the question is offense, Howell says, ‘Ask Lombardi about that.’ Defense? Tom Landry is the man to see. U.S. Steel does fairly well on that plan, but it is unorthodox in football and therefore suspect by some.” To King, Howell’s platoon system of coaching was a “logical evolution—the pros have brought football to a peak of specialized skill. On the one squad the offense and defense platoons are considered separate items and play that way.”
Lombardi and Landry running the same team—the Giants knew they had an extraordinary brain trust even then. Their coaching skills were undeniable; their personalities and styles as unalike as possible. Thomas Wade Landry was lean and spare, as dry as his mission homeland in the Rio Grande valley of Texas. He could be called a boy wonder of sorts—when the 1954 season began he was entering only his fifth season as a defensive back, and was not yet thirty years old—except that there was nothing boyish about him. From the moment he arrived in New York from the University of Texas, he struck his teammates as mature and rational, always thinking his way around the football field. He already had the respect of the other players when he was made a player-coach, and did not have to raise his voice to get it. Well Mara once said that “you could hear Vince laughing from five blocks away; you couldn’t hear Landry from the next chair.” But his mild appearance was deceiving. Landry was all science and innovation, daring to change. “He taught you not to be afraid to take chances,” said Herb Rich, who played alongside him that first year in the defensive backfield. “The Rams [Rich’s former team] loved to embarrass you if you took a chance. Tom would always say, ‘Anticipate! Get there ahead of him. Go on the snap of the ball.’ ”
Landry insisted later that he and Lombardi had a good relationship, but many of the players felt a tension between them. Frank Gifford said there was “a lot of competition between Lombardi and Landry and I don’t know if it ever turned into a friendship. That filtered through the team itself. There was tension. We didn’t like them [the defense] very much, and they didn’t like us much. And didn’t really care. We were cliquey.” Lombardi, always barking, could be heard at a tense point of a game shouting at the defense: “Get the goddamn ball back for us at least once!” Landry left the obscenity-laced slaps at the offense to his players. Howell felt the competition from both sides: “One day one of them would come in and tell me he hadn’t been given enough time and the next day the other would… . They were fussing all the time.” At various times during their coexistence, the defense was ahead of the offense, and when that was reported in the press, Lombardi fell into a deep funk. “It kind of dogged Vince that our offense wasn’t thought of as good,” Landry said decades later. “I remember a lot of times when we’d win ball games, if the offense didn’t do well … he wouldn’t talk to Jim Lee Howell or me for two or three days.” Landry came to think of Lombardi as a borderline manic-depressive. He gave him the nickname “‘Mr. High-Low’—because when his offense did well he was sky high; but, boy, when they didn’t do well, you couldn’t speak to him.”
They were yin and yang in almost every respect. In film sessions during the week, Landry needed a fraction of the time Lombardi took to analyze the other team. Landry was quicker; Lombardi more thorough. It was Lombardi, borrowing on the tactics he learned from Colonel Blaik, who sold the Giants on the idea of taking pictures of enemy defenses during the game on a quick-developing camera and sending the shots down to the bench for instant analysis. (Wellington Mara, the handyman owner who loved being of use—he would shag punts if no one else was around to do it—often relayed the pictures himself, dropping them from the upper deck in an old sock attached to a string.) Lombardi showed the pictures to the quarterbacks, giving them “a different view and a good idea of how the defense is reacting. Visual education is much better than telling the quarterbacks the defenses.” He was also more patient than Landry in the midweek skull sessions. He reverted back to the high school teacher pounding out the chemistry lesson at Saints until the slowest kid understood it. Landry was more the calculus professor addressing graduate students. “Vin was a great teacher,” said Well Mara. “He could get on a blackboard and hammer it into the lower portion of the mentality. Landry would not do that. He knew there were only three or four people in the room who knew exactly what he was saying.”
There was one essential characteristic that Lombardi and Landry shared: they were driven to win. Coaching together under Howell, they never had a losing season.
WE DO, OR DIE. The old college battle cry called out to Lombardi at the end of his first season with the Giants. On the first day of December 1954, Ed Danowski resigned as Fordham’s head coach, closing a difficult nine-year reign with a hapless final season in which the Rams lost all but one game. Even more symptomatic of the school’s football decline were the attendance figures. Fordham’s four home games at the Polo Grounds were watched by an average of only 11,000 fans; more people attended a single Fordham game against Pitt or St. Mary’s during the Seven Blocks of Granite era than the ’54 club drew all season. The football program was dipped in red, losing more than $50,000 a year. With Danowski’s departure came the brief shining idea of a return to the era when Fordham was a national power. New York newspapers the next day listed possible successors who could restore Fordham to glory, and most of the speculation involved former Blocks: Johnny Druze, end coach at Notre Dame; Leo Paquin, head coach at Xavier Prep in Manhattan; Harry Jacunski (Paquin’s replacement on the line), end coach at Yale; and Vince Lombardi, offensive coach of the Giants.
Lombardi was at the top of the list and the candidate who most wanted the job. His last go-around at Fordham had ended inharmoniously, but he had been an assistant then, his ambition a threat to Danowski. Now he saw the opportunity to run his own program, and the prospect enthralled him. For all his gruffness, Lombardi was a football romantic. His athletic ideal was his senior year in college, and for nearly two decades he had been trying to re-create the intoxicating feelings that came over him that long ago autumn: up on the practice field, darkness enveloping Rose Hill, Butch and his mates banging and thudding and collapsing in the mud of a Bloody Wednesday; on the bus, a brilliant October Saturday, rolling down Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse toward the stadium, leading the Rams in joyous song; down on the playing field at the Polo Grounds, exhausted, hurting, Pitt driving toward the goal with the relentless thrusts of Goldberg and LaRue … but the Fordham wall still stands. To Lombardi, those sensations were the thrill of life, and even with all the power that Jim Lee Howell had ceded to him, he had not been able to replicate them to his satisfaction. He had not yet been fully indoctrinated in the cult of the modern; his vision was more nostalgic, linking the present with the past.
But the past was going, going, gone. Two weeks after Danowski’s resignation, Lombardi negotiated a tentative salary agreement with Jack Coffey, the director of athletics. All that was needed to make his return official was a decision by the Jesuit administration on the larger question of whether Fordham would continue big-time college football. The answer came on December 15, in a letter from Fordham’s president, the Reverend Laurence J. McGinley. “Fordham has enjoyed football” since 1883, McGinley wrote, but “the unfortunate fact remains that we have run out of money for football
and must balance our books. And so, at long last, our head must rule our heart.” Not even the prospect of Lombardi coaching the Rams could alter that harsh reality. Faced with competition from professional football and television and travel, college football programs were folding fast in the postwar era. Small private schools seemed especially vulnerable. The once-fierce Gaels of St. Mary’s were no more. Extinct also were the programs at Duquesne, Georgetown, Santa Clara, St. Bonaventure, Niagara and New York University. Only Columbia remained among the teams that once made New York City a college football town. “From Rose Hill to Oblivion,” read the headline of Arthur Daley’s column in the New York Times, a phrase that mockingly evoked the old chant of optimism—“From Rose Hill to the Rose Bowl.” Grantland Rice had vanished, and Fordham football, too, leaving behind only the lantern of mythology that forever lit the path back to Sleepy Jim Crowley, the Four Horsemen, Vince Lombardi and the Seven Blocks of Granite.
One person shared Lombardi’s despair over the death of Fordham football. Tim Cohane had seen it as his life’s mission to carry the torch for the college game, especially as it was played at his alma mater. He was also Lombardi’s leading advocate, working furtively among influential alumni to strike the deal that would have had Vince succeed Danowski. Cohane was frustrated by the Jesuits and lamented that they seemed determined to transform Fordham into “a medieval study hall.” But from his perch as sports editor at Look magazine, he saw a larger cultural trend that troubled him more. The cult of the modern was changing everything in his world, and he resented it. The money and power were shifting to television; the glamour of sportswriting was fading along with the clubby atmosphere that he cherished, the sense that they were all pals, the writers, the players, the coaches, all in it together and protecting one another. He knew which coaches were drunks and never wrote about their off-field antics, but that ancient unwritten code was being thrown aside by younger journalists. Not that he was utterly naive about the darker side of humanity—in the pages of Look he published stories about fixers and cheaters—but like his late idol Grantland Rice and his friend Vince Lombardi, he nonetheless clung to a romantic vision of the sporting ideal.
Lombardi and Cohane turned to each other for connections to that past. When they were together, they chatted in Latin, their shared language of Catholic school training, and belted out refrains of the Fordham Ram fight song. Although Lombardi could no longer attend Colonel Blaik’s summer camp at Bull Pond, Cohane called him from the Mother Lodge to announce the latest selections for the Bull Pond All-American team, certain that the fictitious gridders would provoke “bellowing, infectious laughter” from Vince. He took to calling Vince “Conquering Longbeard,” his stretched Latin translation of the words “Vincent Lombardi,” and with Fordham no longer a possibility, he pushed Lombardi for head coaching jobs elsewhere. A few weeks after Fordham dropped football, Cohane was talking to the superintendent of the new Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, who happened to be looking for a football coach. Cohane planted the seed of Lombardi, and it almost took root. The Newark Star-Ledger, whose sports editor then was Stanley Woodward, an old member of the tribe, ran a story saying that Lombardi would be the first head coach at Air Force. But at the last minute a veteran professional coach, Lawrence “Buck” Shaw, changed his mind and took the academy job.
It was with a growing sense of fatalism that Lombardi called Red Blaik a week later and inquired about the possibility of returning to West Point. If he could not reach his highest goals, he thought he might as well feel comfortable working at a lower level. Blaik greeted Lombardi’s request with equal measures of surprise and delight. He had two openings—and one larger psychological hole—on his staff. He thought of Lombardi as his perfect alter ego, smart, committed, emotional, full of life, and he missed him. “Since you left we don’t have any fun around here,” the colonel confessed during a lunch at the officer’s club. They shook hands on an informal agreement without discussing salary. Later that day Blaik called Wellington Mara to relate his discussion with Lombardi. Mara reacted with alarm. The Howell-Lombardi-Landry triumvirate seemed to be working perfectly. It was the new deal that would restore the Giants to the championship level. Over the weekend Well and his brother, Jack, talked with Lombardi three times, finally driving out to Oradell to make their case to Vince and Marie, saying that they intended for him to be head coach in New York someday. They had no intentions of dumping Howell that year, but they could reward Vince’s patience with a significant raise.
Marie urged him to stay with the Giants. The raise boosted Vince’s spirits, but he said he felt obliged to keep his agreement with the colonel. What was the right thing to do? That Monday he drove back to West Point to talk to Blaik again. The colonel realized from Lombardi’s unanimated demeanor that something was wrong. “I have never gone back on my word in my life, and I don’t intend to now,” Lombardi began, fibbing in both respects. He had gone back on his word before and he hoped to now, though honorably, if Blaik would let him. After hearing the details of the offer from the Maras, and of Marie’s excitement about it, Blaik quickly resolved the dilemma. Go back to the Giants, he said. Forget this ever happened.
One year later, at the end of the 1955 season, a season in which the Giants improved on the field but not in the standings, finishing 6-5-1, Lombardi was still looking around for a team of his own. Along with Fordham and Air Force, he had lost out at Penn and Washington, and his inability to land a head coaching job had thrown him into another depression. Mr. High-Low was down at the lowest of the low, moping around the Giants offices at 8 Columbus Circle in a self-absorbed funk. “I’ll never get to be a head coach,” he complained to Wellington Mara. “Here I am, an Italian, forty-two years old, and nobody wants me. Nobody will take me.” Mara “didn’t really buy” Vince’s argument that prejudice against his Italian heritage was holding him back, but “didn’t argue with him,” he said later. During the Christmas break that year, he sent Lombardi to California to scout the Rose Bowl. Cohane was also in Pasadena, and after the game on January 1, 1956, the two old Rams went to dinner, driving out to the Tail of the Cock restaurant off Coldwater Canyon in the San Fernando Valley. Along the way, they reminisced back two decades to the season of 1936, remembering how Fordham almost made it to the Rose Bowl that year of the Seven Blocks. Eventually the conversation came around to Lombardi’s coaching frustrations. “I’m wondering whether the right head-coaching job ever will open up for me,” Lombardi said. “I know I can coach, but the right people never seem to know it.”
“You’ll get your chance,” Cohane responded.
Lombardi hoped that Cohane was right, but he felt the faint chill of oblivion. “I’m not getting any younger,” he said.
10
This Pride of Giants
VINCE LOMBARDI, in the summer of 1956, was straddling the old and the new. He turned forty-three that June, no longer a young coach, but not wielding enough power for players to call him the Old Man. He had the same old job, but worked in a new place, not the ancient Polo Grounds, his traditional arena, where he had played and coached since his Fordham days, but a shinier venue that the Maras had found for their newly refurbished New York Football Giants across the Harlem River in the Bronx—Yankee Stadium, home of the pinstriped baseball Yankees of Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford. No name in sports was as magical as the Yankees then. The Yankees worked and traveled first-class: they wore suits and ties, their dressing room was clean, modern and carpeted, they were not just jocks but celebrities, and they won and won and maddingly won. Lombardi had grown up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. He hated the Yankees—and wanted nothing more than to be like them. He and his family also found a new home that summer, moving into a comfortable two-story white colonial on Lockwood Place in the borough of Fair Haven, nestled on the Navesink River between Red Bank and the Atlantic shore, forty miles south and around the bend from the suburban sprawl of North Jersey. It was a step up socially, the latest safe haven for com
muters, and yet old and familiar to Marie. Fair Haven was her childhood home.
Marie had barely moved in when her husband drove away again, traveling north with young Vincent for preseason training camp, which began in mid-July at St. Michael’s College in Winooski, Vermont, not far from Lake Champlain. Jim Lee Howell’s corporate-style staff was entering its third season, and the players and coaches were exuding a newfound confidence. In the evolution of many great teams there comes a tipping point when success suddenly seems expected. The Giants had reached that point. Operating behind an experienced offensive line, the backfield was gifted and deep, with veteran Charlie Conerly and Don Heinrich at quarterback; Frank Gifford and the baby bulls, Alex Webster and Mel Triplett, at running back; and Kyle Rote shifted to end with Bob Schnelker and Ken MacAfee. Landry’s defense was fortified with two promising rookies, Robert E. Lee “Sam” Huff from West Virginia and Jim Katcavage from Dayton, along with two veterans, Andy Robustelli from the Rams and tackle Dick “Little Mo” Modzelewski from the Steelers (writing in the New York Times, Gay Talese described the not-so-little Little Mo as “260 pounds of tough tenderloin with shoulders so broad that he often has to pass through doors sideways”).
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