When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  As the long northern winter persisted through February, March and April, Lombardi and his staff huddled inside the office on Washington Street, grading film and analyzing personnel. In May they finally took their first look at a few players, when the quarterbacks were flown in for a weekend minicamp, but even then there was no throwing; it was brains Lombardi wanted to deal with first, not arms. Lamar McHan, Bart Starr and Joe Francis, as well as a few receivers who happened to be in town, were taken up to the second-floor film area, where a classroom had been created for them. Lombardi handed out the playbooks and worked with them the first morning on the terminology of his offense. “We’re going to take a giant step backward, gentlemen,” he began. By that he meant that he was asking his quarterbacks to forget everything they knew about plays and play-calling, to empty their brains so that he could fill them up again with his system, his knowledge. He would teach it to them just as he had taught physics at St. Cecilia in the early forties, so that the slowest person in the room understood everything he said, writing it in chalk on a blackboard. A coach “must be a pedagogue,” he once explained. “He has to pound the lessons into the players by rote, the same way you teach pupils in the classroom.”

  The quarterbacks had never experienced anything like this. Scooter McLean’s playbook, based on a Clark Shaughnessy system that he had brought from the Bears, was more than four inches thick, as was the one McHan had used with the Chicago Cards. Lombardi’s was an inch and a half. Scooter’s plays were wordy and needlessly complicated, Lombardi’s were clear and easy to remember. To call an end sweep in the old days, the quarterback had to recite a nonsensical rataplan of names and numbers—49 Bill O Grace Ed, or 49 MO Grace Pop. With Lombardi, the same play was just 49. The 4 signified the formation and 9 the hole—simple as that. In other systems, the quarterback called blocking patterns for offensive linemen. With Lombardi, blocking calls were left to the linemen themselves. There were fewer plays, but more options within each play, yet Lombardi taught the quarterbacks how to read the defense and select from the options in a rational way so that they did not feel overwhelmed. Freedom through discipline and simplicity. He also presented the logic of each play. “They call it coaching, but it is teaching,” he once explained. “You do not just tell them it is so, but you show them the reasons why it is so and you repeat and repeat until they are convinced, until they know.”

  It might sound unimaginative, but there was in this a touch of Lombardi’s genius. Even in his repetitive drills he had a way of making the mundane seem important, the football variation of a masterly novelist who could take the muddle of everyday life and bring clarity and sense to it, and allow readers to see, for the first time what was in front of their eyes all along. Bart Starr was on the edge of his seat, listening—getting it for the first time. All “the crap” was gone; this was “right to the bone,” simple, yet “so refreshing and exciting,” Starr thought. Everything was accounted for, labeled, identified, put in order, fundamental and sound. You could tell that the coach believed in what he was doing. His tone of voice, his posture, his manner, it all made you believe. It all made sense. Starr knew after the first twenty minutes that Lombardi was giving them a new world, and from then on he felt an insatiable hunger for more. When the players took their first break late that morning, Starr ran downstairs, found a pay phone and called his wife, Cherry, in Bir-mingham. “I think we’re going to begin to win,” he blurted into the phone.

  THERE ARE two Green Bays, the city and the bay. The bay is part of Lake Michigan as it curls around the Door County peninsula, which sticks out from the coastline of northeastern Wisconsin like a disjointed pinky finger, or cursive lowercase i, if one thinks of Washington Island as the point that dots it. The city rests at the bottom of the namesake bay, yet the two seem only incidentally connected. Up through the Door County peninsula, the bay defines the life of artisans, merchants and the tourists who live and vacation in Wisconsin’s summer resort mecca, a land of fish boils, cherry orchards, antique barns, gentle coves and radiant northern sunsets. But down at the bottom where the city meets the bay, the shoreline is blotted by an industrial scattering of warehouses, port facilities, and oil and gas storage terminals. The bay may have brought the city into being when French traders settled there three centuries ago, but it long since had stopped being central to the urban existence. A visitor could spend days in the city without seeing the bay; one New York sportswriter, in fact, traveled to Green Bay scores of times over four decades and never caught sight of it.

  The city of Green Bay has always been defined by another body of water, the Fox River, which cuts through the middle of it, dividing the city equally east and west. In its culture, economy and civic architecture, Vince Lombardi’s new hometown was in essence a river city. The low-lying downtown hugged the Fox River, and so did the huge mills operated by Charmin, Fort Howard, Nicolet and Northern that transformed pulpwood into paper towels, napkins and toilet paper for an entire nation. There was nothing beautiful about the Fox as it wended through town, two hundred yards across, vital and polluted; in the winter, fishermen built huts on the frozen sheet and dropped lines through holes in the ice, while dense gray and white plumes of factory smoke curled overhead. With all of Green Bay’s comfortable old neighborhoods, there also came the transient underbelly of a river city, the railyards, empty lots and flophouses on the edge of downtown, the big-stakes all-night poker game at the Hotel Beaumont, the smoky gambling joint above a supper club called the Spot run by old man Wally Adamany. The river helped delineate Green Bay society: the upper class and working class tended to live in older neighborhoods east of the river, while the upwardly mobile middle class found more room to grow on the newer west side of town. Lombardi crossed the river bridges almost every day. His daughter attended school on the east side, his son on the west. His home on Mission Street and office on Washington Street were both east of the Fox. The stadium was across the river on the west side, as were the practice fields and airport. His country club, Oneida Golf and Riding, was west; his church, St. Willebrord, was on Adams Street in the east.

  Only a few miles south of Green Bay sits De Pere, another bridge town split in half by the Fox, with an old downtown on the east side and St. Norbert College nestled above the western bank at one of the more scenic points along the river. The Norbertine priests who ran the small Catholic college in West De Pere wielded influence in the Green Bay area far beyond their numbers. They were casually known as the White Fathers, from the white robes that they wore. They were recruited from Holland by the bishop of Green Bay in 1893 because they were fluent in Flemish and Walloon, and it was hoped that they might counteract a heretic preacher who had been proselytizing among Belgian immigrant farmers in Door County. Over the decades they had established a small religious and academic empire in their new land, operating an elementary school, high school (Premontre, young Vincent’s school) and parish church (St. Willebrord) in Green Bay, and an abbey and St. Norbert College in De Pere.

  Like the Jesuits who had shaped Lombardi’s life at Fordham, and the Carmelites he befriended at St. Cecilia in Englewood, the White Fathers tended to be gregarious fellows who played active roles in community life and held many of the same interests as the people they served. They could be seen hacking around the local golf courses and were fanatical about Packer football—and were delighted that Vince Lombardi, the new coach, who took daily communion at their church in downtown Green Bay, had agreed to keep preseason training camp at St. Norbert.

  On Thursday evening, July 23, Lombardi stood at the front entrance of St. Norbert’s Sensenbrenner Hall and shook hands with the first-year men, quarterbacks and centers—the first wave of players to report for 1959 training camp. A month earlier he had reached his forty-sixth birthday. He had waited since the summer of 1946, his last season as head coach at Saints, for a moment like this, when he could work with players from the first day of camp and have the power to shape them into a team in his image. As he described it later, tho
se were “thirteen very long years, especially for a fellow with a naturally explosive temper and a seething impatience.” But perhaps he was fortunate that he had to wait so long; when his time arrived, he was exuding a sense that he knew precisely what to do. And now here came the first troops, the rookies and handful of veterans moving through the receiving line of coaches that summer evening. Lombardi stood upright, all teeth and firm grip, with a friendly comment for each of them—Good to see ya, welcome to the Packahs, look at those hands, Phil! heh! heh.

  Then he came across what he took to be an adolescent interloper.

  “What the hell are you doing here? This line isn’t for kids!” Lombardi snapped. To which Billy Butler, who was at least two inches and twenty pounds shorter and lighter than his program statistics of five foot ten and 180 pounds, replied: “Well, you drafted me. Ain’t I supposed to show up?”

  Butler was a Wisconsin boy, from the small town of Berlin, who had returned kicks and played defensive back at Chattanooga and was drafted by Jack Vainisi for the Packers in the nineteenth round. Had Black Jack lost his magic personnel touch? Not really. Butler was a tenacious athlete who became one of only three rookies to make the team; the others were Boyd Dowler, a rangy flanker from Colorado, and an offensive lineman from Northwestern named Andy Cvercko. It was not Vainisi’s fault that Lombardi failed to find a place on the roster for an obscure running back from Ball State drafted in the twenty-seventh round named Timmy Brown, who went on to a sterling career with the Philadelphia Eagles, or that Lombardi did not like Alex Hawkins, another all-purpose back drafted in the second round out of South Carolina, who was picked up by the Colts and played in the league twelve years. Lombardi was operating in that first training camp with two assumptions that he carried with him for the next decade: first, he preferred veterans to rookies, even when starting from scratch; and second, he wanted only a certain type of athlete who was willing to play for him, even if the player disliked him. Lombardi might never have known that little Billy Butler couldn’t stand him (“Lombardi was the biggest asshole I ever met in my life,” Butler said later); but he did know that Butler went all out from the first day of camp.

  The veterans were not due to report until Saturday night, but Max McGee, an end, and Howie Ferguson, a fullback, arrived in town late Friday morning and decided to stop by St. Norbert for lunch. After eating with the rookies, the two southern boys with Louisiana roots (Ferguson was from New Iberia; McGee was from East Texas but went to Tulane) took off again. They hit the local bars, partied late into the night, crashed at a downtown hotel and checked into camp the next day as scheduled. Lombardi was waiting for them, enraged. “He’s ready to run us off and we’ve just met the guy,” McGee remembered. Ferguson was in no mood for the tirade. “What the hell, we’re not due till today!” he snapped. Irrelevant, said Lombardi—they had come under his watch by eating a meal at camp the previous day: “Once you do that you’re part of this organization.” McGee had the outward ease of a free spirit, but in fact hated confrontation, it upset his stomach, and he accepted Lombardi’s dictate. Ferguson continued arguing, and soon enough, like Billy Howton before him, he was gone.

  On Sunday evening Lombardi addressed the full squad inside Sensenbrenner Hall. He had been rehearsing riffs in the speech for months, turning it over in his mind from the time that he had driven up to Green Bay with his family that snowy day in February. He started with the practical: first the playbooks—they were important, the bible—here’s what happens if you lose one. Then the practices—he would keep them tight and exact, an hour and a half, twice a day, the way Colonel Blaik had taught him, and the players would know exactly what they were supposed to be doing every minute. There was much to learn so he expected them to be on time, West Point time, hereafter known as Lombardi time, which meant ten minutes early. Meetings would start at nine, not five minutes after nine. Get there ahead of time, prepared. He promised to be relentless, driving constantly. With every fiber of my body I’ve got to make you the best football player that I can make you. And I’ll try. And I’ll try. And if I don’t succeed the first day. I’ll try again. And I’ll try again. And you’ve got to give everything that is in you. You’ve got to keep yourself in prime physical condition, because fatigue makes cowards of us all.

  He would have no tolerance for the halfhearted, the defeatist, the loser. The goal was to be the New York Yankees of football. World champions, every day, year-round. Admired everywhere. No more T-shirts on the road. Team blazers and ties for everyone. Wherever you go, you represent the team. You will talk like, you will look like and you will act like the most dignified professional in your hometown. Relentless in the pursuit of victory. Only winners. Anyone who didn’t like it was perfectly free to get the hell out right now. There are trains, planes and buses leaving here every day, and if you don’t produce for me you’re gonna find yourself on one of them.

  No one walked out. There was silence until Lombardi cleared his throat and smiled sheepishly and said, “Gentlemen,” and gestured that the meeting was over. As the players filtered out, Lombardi caught Max McGee’s glance and nudged him over to the corner, just the two of them. McGee had been in the league since 1954, the same year Lombardi joined the pro ranks. He had been through Ronzani and Blackbourn and Scooter McLean, and he had never witnessed anything quite like what Lombardi had just done. To him it was as though they had worked in the dark for five years and someone came in and “turned on the lights.” Lombardi could not read McGee’s face, but there was something about the veteran’s open manner that softened him, allowing him to reveal uncertainties that he usually kept hidden.

  “What’d you think?” Lombardi asked.

  “Well, I’ll tell ya, you got their attention, Coach!” McGee responded. “There’s no doubt about that.”

  “You know, I wasn’t sure,” Lombardi confided. “Everybody could have gotten up and walked out for all I knew.”

  Some players might have considered walking out during the next week. The practice sessions seemed brutal compared to the lackadaisical training they had undertaken with Scooter a year earlier. Three laps around the goalposts at the start. Then twenty minutes of calisthenics, West Point style, ending with the up-down grass drill, running in place, Lombardi striding through the ranks, Where is he? “Get those knees up, Knafelc! Keep those legs moving! FRONT!” Dive on your stomach. “UP!” Pop back up. Where is he now? Who’s he looking at? Hawg’s going down and he isn’t coming up. Hawg was Joel David Hanner, the defensive tackle whose nickname perfectly captured his rural Arkansas roots and voracious appetite. Since joining the Packers in 1952, Hawg had made a habit of eating his way through the off-season and slowly working his way into shape. His blubber was deceptive. Even after Hawg had indulged at the trough, no one wanted to line up against him and discover once again that he was quicker and stronger. He checked into camp weighing 278 pounds, massive by the standards of that era, but after two days of Lombardi drills he had lost eighteen pounds, and at the end of the up-downs on the second afternoon he keeled over from sunstroke and ended up at the appropriately named St. Vincent Hospital, taking liquids intravenously. He thought he was finished, but came back and found that “the toughest grind” he ever encountered became easier day by day as he lost weight, until he was down to playing shape at 250.

  Young Vincent was there observing it all under the searing summer sun, attending his sixth training camp with his father, this time as an assistant to Dad Braisher, the equipment manager. He was the ball boy and water boy, though the Old Man barely believed in water. Players were discouraged from sipping water during most of practice; Vincent would sneak them ice cubes and towels soaked in ice water, which they could suck on. They were bitching and moaning under their breath. Guadalcanal, Billy Butler called it. Bring us some goddamn vodka, another muttered one afternoon. They weren’t sure about the kid at first; he looked like Lombardi, had the same name, but Em Tunnell quickly spread the word: You don’t have to worry about junior. The b
oy’s not gonna tell any tales out of school. It was the same as with the Giants. Vincent worshiped the players, but had mixed feelings about the coach. When the father yelled, the son winced. He identified with players who were in the most trouble or most rebellious. The bond strengthened whenever Lombardi snapped at him, too, which was almost every day: “Get that ball over there! You know better than that, mister!”

  When Ray Nitschke arrived in camp after finishing summer training with the Army, Dad Braisher sidled up to him with a warning for the obstreperous young linebacker. “Ray, hey Ray, Ray, look, it’s not like it used to be.” First Hawg Hanner was taken to St. Vincent, then two rookies. “Geez, that first camp was tough. They were dropping like flies,” said Vincent later. If someone dropped a pass, the Old Man shouted, “That’s a lap!” and ran the offender around the goalposts again. One day Lombardi raged at Em Tunnell, ordering him off the practice field twice to run punitive laps, but Vincent and Em were the only ones wise to the Old Man’s trick. Lombardi was using Em, his old friend from the Giants, to demonstrate to the others that even a veteran all-star was not above discipline on his team. Tunnel knew the routine and could take it. But others who had never seen it before were stunned. Art Daley of the Press-Gazette witnessed it from the sidelines and later said he thought to himself, Vince Lombardi is a cruel bastard.

  Controlled violence is what Lombardi called football, and he did not consider the phrase an oxymoron. The violence was as important to him as the control. He distinguished controlled violence from brutality, which he said “ultimately defeats itself,” but he did not try to minimize the role of violence. To approach football any other way, he said, “would be idiotic.” Every play began with a series of planned collisions, one man hitting, another hitting back, up and down the line. That was the pure element of the sport, the first Lombardi commandment: “Thou Shalt Hit.” Hit me! He first heard those words as a freshman at Fordham during opening week of practice up on the scrimmage field at Rose Hill, with Frank Leahy, the line coach, standing across from him and demanding a thwack. C’mon, hit me! So Lombardi had ordered his little Saints in the twilight at MacKay Park in Englewood, taking them on one by one, man against manchild. For the Packers, Lombardi instituted a drill called the nutcracker that became his symbol of controlled violence. Two blocking dummies were placed horizontally on the field about five yards apart. The action had to take place within that confined space. The quarterback handed off to a running back, who ran for daylight between the dummies, but even the runner was incidental to the play. The violence was between an offensive lineman, blocking for the runner, and a defender who had to try to fight off the blocker and make the tackle. The defender’s advantage was that he knew the play was a run. The blocker’s only advantage was that he knew the snap count, allowing him to get in the first lick.