When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  The nutcracker was Lombardi’s “test of manhood” for offensive linemen, according to Bob Skoronski, the big left tackle from Indiana, who was returning to the pro game in 1959 after missing two years for military service. Skoronski knew that many factors could help him make a block during a game—the defensive formation, the uncertainty of the defender about pass or run, the double-teaming with another blocker—but with the nutcracker drill, there was nothing to make it easier, “no escaping it,” as Skoronski said. If you “didn’t have the courage to get your head in and get that guy out of there” the nutcracker would expose you. “Coach Lombardi loved it. He would be right in the midst of it, hovering over you, urging you on. He would get so excited about a good block.” Most of the players, especially on offense, did not share their coach’s enthusiasm. As Gary Knafelc, the tight end, waited in line for his turn, he gazed anxiously across the way to the corresponding line of defenders, counting back to see which one he would have to face. No one wanted Hanner, the immovable object, but Knafelc most feared Ray Nitschke, a second-year linebacker out of Illinois, who seemed to be salivating for his chance to slap and whack and “pound the hell” out of him.

  And there stood Lombardi, pushing for more. The image lingers, for any examination of Lombardi as a leader inevitably leads to the subject of pain. The infliction of pain is an unavoidable part of professional football: Pain is suffered by most players on almost every play. Football is hitting, and hitting causes pain. In other professions, pain is largely mental or symbolic, a word used to denote hard effort or the enduring of a difficult process. In football, pain is those things as well, but it begins with the physical: throbbing, aching, piercing, dizzying, screaming, vomiting, fear-inducing and fear-conquering pain. It is misleading to say that Lombardi was a sadistic coach who derived satisfaction from the pain of his players. Even if that were true on a superficial level, it misses a larger meaning of pain in Lombardi’s view of the world. He operated from a philosophy of pain, complex and contradictory, woven from the geographic, cultural, religious and physical threads of his life.

  Images of pain shaped his ancestral homeland of southern Italy, both the Neapolitan region of his father’s Lombardis and the remote mountain village of Vietri di Potenza, home to his mother’s Izzo clan. The people of southern Italy shared a history of pain on the largest scale fathomable: centuries of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, epidemics, revolts, famines, invasions, counterreformations, a communal memory of the works of man collapsing, crumbling, shaking, corpses burning, bodies thrown into the sea. In southern Italy pain was a constant of the human condition, the defining theme of religion and art. Paintings of flagellation, crucifixion, stigmata, biblical tragedies, luminous and muscular, with intimations of breathtaking pain. Pain was its own reward, to be endured, gloried, but not overcome. Of course that is not to say that anyone whose heritage traces back to southern Italy would have a propensity for pain, merely that in Lombardi’s case the general historical thread connected to his specific family history.

  During his life in the new world of Sheepshead Bay and Fordham, Saints and West Point, pain existed more within the reach and control of man. His mother disciplined him with pain, believing it could bring him closer to perfection. His father insisted to him that pain did not exist, that it was only in his mind, that it indeed could be overcome through persistence and denial. Pain was an aspect of Jesuitical free will, endured not with resignation but by choice, not from fear but out of hope. The penance of pain was accepted as a ritual leading to something more noble than individual desire. Paying the price, in Red Blaik’s phrase, meant withstanding and conquering pain. Pain was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The art was not in the pain but in what pain created: tireless, fearless, unbeatable men. To succumb to pain for no greater purpose was to accept defeat. That is why Lombardi drove his men toward pain, and it is why he was so distraught during the first week of practice when he entered the Green Bay training room one morning and saw more than a dozen players seeking treatment for minor bumps and bruises and lounging in the whirlpool. Serious injuries were one thing, but this looked like malingering. “What is this, an emergency casualty ward?” he thundered, according to his later account. “This has got to stop. This is disgraceful. I have no patience with the small hurts that are bothering most of you.” The next morning, the training room was virtually empty.

  Lombardi’s philosophy of pain was intensified by the contradictions of his own experience. He was constantly fighting his vulnerability to pain. He had a low pain threshold, and his athletic career was littered with injuries large and small that took him off the field. At his first high school, the pre-seminary Cathedral Prep, which did not even have a football team, the joke was that “Lombardi has more injuries than Hoover has commissions.” At Fordham, he missed most of his freshman year, part of his sophomore year and three games in his junior year to injuries. His susceptibility to injury was matched only by his determination to recover. When he became a coach, the football trainers often treated Lombardi for minor complaints that he would not tolerate among his players: sore joint, headache, hangnail, nervous stomach—he always had something bothering him. It is a characteristic of many leaders that they confront their own weaknesses indirectly, by working to eliminate them in others, strengthened in that effort by their intimate knowledge of frailty. So it was with Lombardi and pain. It was in seeking a triumph of character and will both for himself and the team that he exhorted his Packers to confront pain and stood there, laughing, as Ray Nitschke pounded the hell out of another blocker in the nutcracker drill.

  BEFORE THE START of the 1959 season, most pro football experts picked Green Bay to remain in the cellar of the Western Conference. “Last and probably least—that’s the sad forecast for the once-proud Packers. They’ve got a good new coach in Vince Lombardi, but he might as well kiss this one off as a rebuilding year,” declared a prognosticator in Sport magazine. But the team knew it was better than that. Through six preseason games, four of them victories, the players grew more convinced week by week that they could play with anyone in the league. In preparation for the opener against the rival Chicago Bears, Lombardi concentrated on building his new team’s sense of family and community. He moved the entire club, including wives and children, to suburban Milwaukee for a final week of training and bonding on the grounds of a private boarding school in Pewaukee. This was a time of year that he came to relish. He had made the final cuts, the team was set, the playbooks had been studied and learned. Now they could go out to the practice field and drill the same play over and over until it was more than routine and familiar, it was in their blood, part of their reflexive being. This was not just any play, but the play, the power sweep, which came to be known as the Packer sweep.

  Lombardi had used the sweep in New York, and had originally borrowed it from the playbook of the Los Angeles Rams, but once he arrived in Green Bay he transformed it into something that was singularly identified with him and his Packers. Since his days at West Point, he had based his coaching philosophy on Red Blaik’s belief that perfection came with simplicity. The theory was to discard the immaterial and refine those few things that one did best. Years later, looking back on his development of the power sweep, Lombardi suggested that “every team arrives at a lead play, a No. 1 play, a bread and butter play. It is the play that the team knows it must make go and the one that opponents know they must stop. Continued success with it of course makes a No. 1 play because from that success stems your own team’s confidence. And behind that is the basic truth that it expresses a coach as a coach and the players as a team. And they feel complete satisfaction when they execute it successfully.”

  The sweep was Lombardi’s No. 1 play. His offense started with it and revolved around it. In his football lexicon, it was known as the 49—“Red Right 49 on 2,” the quarterback might say. The 4 signified the formation, 9 was the hole farthest to the right sideline, and 2 was the snap count. “Red Right 49 on 2.�
� Over and over again. Nothing could make Lombardi happier than the call of that play. He instructed his offensive linemen to take bigger splits, allowing slightly more distance than usual between each of them at the line of scrimmage. Usually they lined up thirty to thirty-six inches apart; Lombardi wanted them separated by forty inches. The tight end, the key blocker on the sweep, moved out wider from the right tackle, exactly nine feet to the tackle’s right. Lombardi could sense immediately if it was eight feet or ten feet, and it had to be exactly nine feet.

  The block of the tight end, Gary Knafelc or Ron Kramer, determined the entire shape of the play. Lombardi instructed the tight end not to leave his feet or smash into his opponent, but rather to calculate, in the split second after the snap, which direction the left outside linebacker could be pushed. If the linebacker was moving inside, the tight end had to stop him from penetrating the line of scrimmage and bump him toward the middle. If the linebacker was moving outside, the tight end’s mission was to get in his way and keep bumping him farther outside, passively allowing the linebacker to beat on him during their contact. The point, said Lombardi, was to block the linebacker: “Whichever direction he takes, drive him in that direction.”

  The right tackle, Forrest Gregg, was taught to deliver what was called a slam on the left defensive end. From a three-point stance, Gregg drove into the end with his forearm or shoulder, a quick blow intended to set up the defender for a follow-up block, a cut below the knees delivered by the fullback, Jimmy Taylor, pounding at him from behind the scrimmage line. After slamming the defensive end, the right tackle sought out the middle linebacker and tried to seal him off from the flow of the play. This was what Gregg loved to do most, get beyond the line of scrimmage and rumble downfield, setting his radar on a linebacker to eliminate. In time, Lombardi would come to regard his square-jawed right tackle as the greatest downfield blocker he had ever seen.

  One of the thrills of the sweep was the glory it provided the men who played offensive guard, Lombardi’s old position. On most plays, the guards were hidden in a scrum at the line of scrimmage, the least noticed players on the field, indistinguishable in a tangle of feet, arms, bellies and sweat-soaked jerseys as they scrapped with the defensive interior linemen. But with the call of the sweep they were rendered majestic, a powerful and mobile matched set. At the snap of the ball, they swung their right arms back to begin the crossover step that Lombardi had learned from Frank Leahy decades earlier, then traced a precise arc behind the line of scrimmage and out toward the right sideline, ahead of the runner, serving as his proud bodyguards, visible and essential. The right guard, Jerry Kramer, watched which way the tight end pushed the outside linebacker and rumbled toward the opening cleared by that block, inside or out, taking on whoever first appeared in his path—“the first color that isn’t ours,” as Lombardi put it. The left guard, Fuzzy Thurston, followed behind Kramer from a point deeper in the backfield, with the ball carrier, Paul Hornung, trailing directly behind him. They were so close sometimes that Hornung had his left hand on Thurston’s hip. Fuzzy was looking for the next opposing color to come along after Kramer made his block.

  Thurston and Kramer became the symbols of the Packer sweep, patrolling the turf ahead of Hornung, circling deep and around the corner, forearms out, ready to strike, Nos. 63 and 64 in green and gold.

  The center, Jim Ringo, had to execute the most difficult block, moving quickly to his right after snapping the ball and hooking the left defensive tackle to prevent him from bolting into the backfield through the hole created when Kramer pulled out to lead the sweep. The left offensive tackle, Bob Skoronski, also pulled right, following Thurston, looking to hit anyone else who penetrated through the line, then turning upfield at the first hole. The flanker, rookie Boyd Dowler, who lined up outside the tight end, had to get inside position on the cornerback covering him and either push him to the outside or level him with a low block. The wide receiver on the other side, Max McGee, ran downfield looking to block the free safety. The play was made to order for Hornung, who lacked burning speed—his teammates teased that he was huffing just to keep up with Fuzzy—but had sharp eyes and powerful legs, and a knack of knowing just when to move off Thurston’s block and slash upfield. And like Gifford before him, Hornung could transform the sweep into an option pass, a threat that made the defensive backs hesitate for a crucial few seconds.

  The Packers first learned the sweep in their heads, with Lombardi at the chalkboard, instructing in the same fashion that he taught physics back at St. Cecilia, so that the dimmest pupil could comprehend. The beauty of the sweep, like all of Lombardi’s teachings, was that it accommodated seemingly contradictory principles: It was at once simple yet subtle, direct yet flexible. Every player was taught not just what he should do under normal conditions, but how to respond to any unexpected defense. Position by position, Lombardi went through as many as twenty defensive possibilities, offering his players a logical response to each of them. Some coaches, considered innovative, might have twenty plays but no options for any of them; Lombardi, sometimes mischaracterized as unimaginative, preferred one play with twenty options. It was a variation of the Jesuit concept of freedom within discipline. The sweep again symbolized the philosophical lineage from Ignatius of Loyola to Vince Lombardi, both said to be limited to one great idea, but unrestrained in the incomparable realization of it. The sweep had another meaning in Lombardi’s system: it was his definition of team, a play in which the offensive players had to think and react together, eleven brains and bodies working as one. “Everyone was important in the sweep,” said Ron Kramer, recalling in his own lively language the message he took from Lombardi. “It’s really all of life. We all have to do things together to make this thing we call America great. If we don’t, we’re fucked.”

  Like Lombardi’s charges back at Saints, the Packers took in their lessons with some measure of fear, never knowing when he might order them to the front of the class to diagram a variation of the play. A fine balance between confidence and fear helped make the lessons stick. “You’re watching this day after day, and it starts sinking in, becoming second nature,” Bob Skoronski later explained. “And after a while you say, ‘I don’t care what happens, we can make this thing go.’ ”

  Then came more repetition on the practice field. In Pewaukee during the week before the opener against the Bears, it seemed as though the sweep was all they did. The sweep dominated their thoughts and actions, the constant of their lives—Lombardi even injected it into their conditioning drills. For the wind sprints at the end of practice, they did not line up like most teams, toeing a line and chugging downfield in a track race; instead, Lombardi put them into the sweep formation and had them run out their assignments from that play, all dashing twenty yards to the end zone, again and again. The joke on the team was that they ran the sweep until Lombardi got tired. In that week before the Bears game, all the positions on offense seemed set except tight end, where Knafelc was fighting to hold on to his job against Ron Kramer, the huge and mobile end from Michigan who had just finished a military commitment, but had a knee injury and was struggling to regain his old form.

  With his competition hobbled, Knafelc was at tight end most of the time that week. At the afternoon practice on Thursday, before the team left Pewaukee and headed back to Green Bay, Lombardi put the offense through a final half-hour drill, running sweep after sweep against the starting defensive unit. It was the modern equivalent of Bloody Wednesday for the Seven Blocks back on the practice field on Rose Hill, the smell of wet autumn leaves, smack and thud and up for more. “Again!” Lombardi shouted. Ron Kramer was on the sideline, watching. Knafelc was in there for every play, sacrificial lamb, giving himself up to the linebackers, passively bumping them as they pounded him. This was too much like the nutcracker drill for Nitschke. He loved it. Blood spurting out from his knuckles, smeared on his pants, some his, some Knafelc’s. He and Dan Currie just teeing off. Lombardi screaming: “Move! Knafelc! Seal it! Seal it! Again!” I
t seemed as if they had run the play twenty times, and Lombardi was never satisfied. It’s sticky, he would say. It doesn’t look good. Finally, Knafelc was so worn out that he lost his fear and said something sarcastic to Lombardi. “Coach,” he said, “by this time I think even Ray knows it’s a sweep!”

  Lombardi turned his face to hide a smile.

  “That’s it!” he shouted. “Everybody in!”

  As the players dragged off the field, one of Knafelc’s young sons came running over to him and shouted, “Daddy, I still love you.” Fine, but what about the seemingly displeased coach? The answer came the next morning, when Knafelc was eating breakfast with his wife and kids at the training table, and Lombardi walked up to him and said in his authoritative voice, softly but clear enough for the whole family to hear, “You’re starting Sunday.” Three simple words—that was all it took to erase the anxiety and fear that Knafelc had felt on the practice field when Lombardi was yelling at him. Now the ordeal seemed worth it. He was floating “nine feet high.”