When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  REPETITION, confidence and passion. The trinity of Lombardi’s football success was established that Sunday afternoon, September 27, when he coached his first regular-season professional game. In the locker room beforehand, the players were overtaken by a sensation they had not felt in a long time. Something was transforming them; as they put on their Packers uniforms, they seemed surprisingly calm and self-assured. Lombardi worked the room, moving from locker to locker, shaking hands with his men, looking into their eyes, making sure they were ready. Then he gathered them around him for a pregame speech, and his will to win took on a physical manifestation. His body seemed to pulsate as he spoke, his words closing a circle of pride and emotion that began decades earlier, back when Sleepy Jim Crowley roused his Fordham Rams by evoking the image of his old mother listening to their game against St. Mary’s on the radio as she sat in a rocking chair and counted her rosary beads out in Green Bay, a mythic place in the American heartland that Vinnie Lombardi, right guard among the Seven Blocks of Granite, had never seen … and now here he was, in that same faraway place, his coaching dream a reality at last, drawing on his memory of Crowley’s ancient exhortation to the team manager to open the door and get out of the way, son, here comes my Fordham team!

  Now go through that door and bring back a victory! Lombardi told his Packers, and with those words Bill “Bubba” Forester, a veteran linebacker, jumped up in a frenzied roar and banged his arm on a metal locker, his worst injury of the year, but not enough to stop him from leading his band of brothers, consumed by their mission, on a rampage out of the dressing room and into the darkening gloom and mist of City Stadium.

  For all his obsession with offense, Lombardi arrived at his head coaching position realizing that he needed a fierce defense to win. He gave his defensive coach, Phil Bengtson, more freedom than his other assistants. Bengtson ran the defensive meetings and called the alignments during the game. With his phlegmatic demeanor, tall and pensive, a Camel dangling from his lips, he was a perfect counterpoint to his boss; the players found him a relief from the head coach’s relentlessness. But even then, it was Lombardi’s defense, in the end, still his fire that burned inside his players. And it was the defense that brought Lombardi victory in his professional debut.

  The offense misplayed three easy touchdown opportunities in the first half, but Green Bay’s linebackers swarmed over Chicago on the waterlogged field, limiting the Bears to two field goals, and the Packers finally put enough points on the board in the final seven minutes to win 9 to 6. Jim Taylor busted in for a five-yard touchdown run, and Hawg Hanner, the Razorback giant who had collapsed on the practice field during the first week of drills, now had enough stamina to tackle Bears quarterback Ed Brown in the end zone for a clinching safety—a play that had been set up by Max McGee’s end-over-end sixty-one-yard punt that rolled out-of-bounds on the Chicago two.

  There were 32,150 fans in the stadium that day, unaccustomed in recent years to football success, and they counted down the last fourteen seconds as if it was the end of a championship game. When the final gun sounded, Jim Ringo, the center, scooped up the ball and raced to the sidelines. “You deserve this more than anybody else,” he said, handing the official “Duke” pigskin to Lombardi. A phalanx of Packers then swept the coach off his feet, shouting a victory chant as they bore him on their shoulders, and trotted off the muddy field, up the ramp to the delirium of a winner’s locker room. His players had never seen a happier man than Lombardi after that game. He had “a grin that would not come off” as he spread praise all around until he found Max McGee and grabbed him by the cheeks, like Grandma Izzo might have done, and kissed him hard on the lips for that game-saving punt. How much did winning mean to this coach? McGee now knew the answer. They all liked to win, every player wants to win, but no one wanted to win as much as that “big smackeroo.”

  13

  Trinity

  Yes, strange things happened everywhere, but the Fordham wall still stands.

  HERE STOOD the Fordham wall one more time, aligned at midfield on the gridiron of Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City before an exhibition game between Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants. It was the Monday evening of August 22, 1960, almost a quarter-century after Grantland Rice wrote “Old Gibraltar.” The old left tackle, Ed Franco, had organized the reunion, assembling the Seven Blocks of Granite and their coach, Jim Crowley, for the first time since 1937. The Blocks were in their late forties now and had matured into increasingly irregular shapes, their fame fading with every year that distanced them from their storied accomplishments at Rose Hill, though the poetry and mythology of their nickname saved them from oblivion.

  Devil Doll Franco operated a forty-two-lane bowling alley in Secaucus, New Jersey. Leo Paquin was still head football coach at Xavier Prep in Manhattan, where his charges had once competed against Lombardi’s little Saints. Tarzan Druze had experienced a coaching rise and fall, working as an assistant for Frank Leahy at Boston College and Notre Dame before getting his chance as head coach at Marquette University, where he lasted only two losing seasons; he found a job with the Denver-Chicago Trucking Company in central New Jersey. Natty Pierce was in charge of physical rehabilitation at a veterans hospital on Long Island. Ali Baba Babartsky managed a plant for Fruehauf Trailer Company in Dayton. And Alex Wojciechowicz, the mighty Wojy, after an illustrious pro career as a linebacker for the Lions and Eagles, returned home to the Jersey shore to sell real estate. Sleepy Jim Crowley worked the rubber chicken circuit as a wisecracking toastmaster and served on the Pennsylvania Boxing Commission.

  Lombardi had been the least publicized of Crowley’s linemen during their glory days at Fordham, and he got the slowest career start after college. Three of the Blocks (Franco, Babartsky and Wojciechowicz) had played in the NFL, and the other three (Pierce, Druze and Paquin) had entered the coaching ranks before him. During those early days there was no certainty that Lombardi would go furthest in football. His apprenticeship had taken twenty years, but now suddenly he was a bright new national sports figure, being honored by his reunited friends for his selection as NFL coach of the year for his inaugural 1959 season in Green Bay.

  Lombardi’s triumphant return east brought Harry Lombardi down to Jersey City from Englewood, along with Father Tim Moore and his merry band of Carmelite Saints. A contingent of New York sportswriters crossed the Hudson, marking Lombardi as the coach to watch in a league that was rising along with the new decade. In the locker room after the game, which Green Bay won, 16 to 7, Tarzan Druze, who had been on the coaching staff at Notre Dame when Hornung played there, was shocked to see the Golden Boy sitting at his locker nursing a beer and a cigarette. Leahy would not have tolerated drinking and smoking in college, but this was the pros. “Yeah,” Hornung said, catching Druze’s surprised glance. “It’s a little different here.”

  COACH OF THE YEAR. That 1959 rookie season in Green Bay had been an erratic one for Lombardi and his men. At first, this matter of winning seemed deceptively easy. The opening day triumph against the Bears was followed by two more home wins over the Detroit Lions and San Francisco 49ers, and by the middle of October the Packers were lodged in first place in the Western Conference. The turnaround coach was bathed in sporting press platitudes. Tom Miller, the team publicist, declared that Lombardi could have his choice of “being mayor of Green Bay or governor of Wisconsin.” Headlines pronounced Lombardi a “Miracle Man.” One New York newspaperman noted that “not since Napoleon’s escape from Elba has such spirit been generated as the aroused hopes of Green Bay citizens over the comeback of their team.” Tex Maule in Sports Illustrated found Lombardi’s quick success as further proof of his theme that the modern professional game was becoming a sophisticated science. He wrote a column praising Lombardi’s “cold, analytical mind” (and repeating the lore that the coach had a law degree).

  The players themselves, when asked to account for their transformation, to a man attributed their success to Lombardi. Linebacker Tom Bett
is admitted that he had shed twenty-five pounds in training camp and gained needed quickness because of Lombardi’s conditioning program. Hawg Hanner, also in the best shape of his life, said the players were motivated by the fear that “if you goof off, somebody else will take your job.” Gary Knafelc acknowledged that fear was a motivating factor, but said it made him play better. “We should have had Lombardi five years ago,” he exclaimed. Lamar McHan, the rejuvenated quarterback, called Lombardi “a force” who radiated his “ability and desire” down to his men. He “knows what he is talking about,” McHan added, “is very precise about it, and a lot of his orders work out.” Lombardi, for his part, was not shy about accepting credit, telling one reporter: “You defeat defeatism with confidence, and confidence comes from the man who leads. You just have it. It is not something you get. You have to have it right here in your belly.”

  A test of that confidence came soon enough, along with a reminder that any coach, even one as effective as Lombardi, is not everything in football, that players also matter. By the time the Packers played their fourth game of the 1959 season against the Los Angeles Rams, they had lost their roughneck fullback, Jim Taylor, who had only just begun to show his great promise. A freak injury put him out of the lineup for several games. He had been lounging in the living room of his Green Bay apartment one weekday evening when his wife called out that a fire had started in the kitchen. She had been frying potatoes when the cooking grease burst into flames. Taylor dashed in, grabbed the frying pan and was trying to keep it balanced while carrying it outside, but spilled the hot grease, severely burning his right hand and bare feet. Three other starters were injured as well in more traditional football ways, and the Packers were outmatched by the Rams, losing 45 to 6. It was the start of a five-game losing streak, the longest of Lombardi’s career.

  There were a few moments of personal despair. Bart Starr became so despondent over his lack of playing time at quarterback behind McHan that he was spotted drinking several beers with Ron Kramer after a game in New York, a sighting as rare as a giraffe striding down Fifth Avenue. (“Bart had four beers. Miller High Lifes. It was the last time anyone saw him like that,” Kramer later reported.) But for the most part the Packers maintained their confidence during the midseason losing streak. They felt like winners even as they were losing, so thoroughly had Lombardi rid them of the “defeatism” that had permeated the squad under Scooter McLean. Losing can have vastly disparate effects on athletes. Some teams learn nothing from a loss, but fall deeper into the abyss. The plays seem predictable, the squad grows selfish. Lombardi’s team reacted in the opposite way. The players learned more about themselves with each loss—not only that they hated losing, but that they were close to winning and that, as McHan had said earlier, most of what Lombardi was teaching them actually worked and eventually would allow them to prevail. They learned something else equally important about their coach. As much as he ridiculed the notion of a good loser, he was not shortsighted in pursuit of victory. The truth was that he seemed more ornery after a game in which they had played poorly and won than after a loss in which they had played hard.

  After five weeks of being battered and beaten, the Packers closed the season with four straight wins, finishing with a record of 7 and 5, good enough for third place in the west, the first Green Bay team in a dozen years to have more wins than losses. The offense began clicking during the winning streak. After McHan left the lineup with an injury, and Joe Francis was tried briefly, Lombardi finally called on Starr. The fourth-year man from Alabama still seemed tentative and prone to throwing interceptions, but he improved week by week, and by the final two games on the West Coast against the Rams and 49ers, which the Packers won convincingly, 38 to 20 and 36 to 14, he seemed to be operating the most explosive offense in the league. Taylor had returned to bang through the middle, Hornung had perfected the option sweep, throwing two touchdown passes in the final game, and Starr had begun to learn how to become Lombardi’s quarterback, which is to say he was starting to think exactly like the coach.

  It was during the San Francisco game that Starr had a quarterback’s epiphany. He was poised at the line of scrimmage, bent over center waiting for the snap, and as he looked across the line he read the defense in a nanosecond and changed the play accordingly. What had once seemed rushed and confusing now seemed clear and obvious, as though it were all happening in slow motion. One quick look and everything that Lombardi had taught him snapped into order: read and react, freedom within discipline. It was also during the 49ers game that Starr began to assert himself with his teammates, at one point insisting that the garrulous Max McGee “hush up!” in the huddle. The order had a delayed effect: it seemed so out of character that Jim Ringo called a timeout so the offensive linemen could stop laughing; but from then on, Starr commanded his team’s respect.

  Soon after the season ended Lombardi appeared on Frank Gifford’s “It’s Sports Time” radio show in New York and was introduced by his former player as having overseen “the best reclamation project since the raising of the Normandie.” The Packers might not yet be the best club in the league, Lombardi told Gifford, “but in one quality there are few like it. We have great determination. And in Bart Starr we’re going to have one of the great quarterbacks in football. In fact, Frank, with what we’ve already shown, it makes me want to look forward to next season.” Later that week, while he was still on the East Coast, visiting with Harry and Matty and the rest of the Lombardi family, he was named NFL coach of the year in an Associated Press poll of sportswriters and sportscasters. “Vinnie, Vidi, Vici—NFL’s Top Coach,” read the headline in one New York paper. He won twenty-nine of thirty-seven first-place votes, with four going to Jim Lee Howell of the Giants and two to Weeb Ewbank of the Colts, whose teams were meeting for the second straight year in the championship game. “I was hoping to win five games—tops,” he told the press that day. “Seven was a surprise. Determination made the difference.… I know it sounds corny, but that’s the way it was.”

  When he got back to Green Bay, Ruth McKloskey, his secretary, noticed a certain bounce in his step as he “strutted around” the office, smiling broadly when someone mentioned the honor. Then Marie dropped by and decided that he seemed a little too proud of himself. “You may be coach of the year to everybody else,” she said. “But you’re still just Vince Lombardi to me.” There were times when he responded to his wife’s irritations by yelling at her, even in public—“Shut up, Marie!” was one of his familiar refrains. This time he turned silent until she left. “Boy, he didn’t like that, because she said it in front of us,” McKloskey later recounted. “He didn’t say anything, but he got in his office and you could just tell.”

  NINETEEN SIXTY, the dawn of a new decade, a time to move up and out, and the Lombardis followed the crowd from city to suburb, from old house to new, heading farther south in Allouez past the massive stone State Reformatory out to a custom-built ranch house on Sunset Circle constructed to display the middle-class modern tastes that Marie shared with her husband. It was one level, long and low, with a narrow front portico, red brick with two front picture windows trimmed in white, wide driveway leading to side garage, sleek, elegant French furniture, custom drapes from H. C. Prange’s (hung twice before Marie approved), built-in grill next to the kitchen stove, open counter leading from kitchen to the eating room, wall-to-wall carpeting, den and TV room around the back ell with wood paneling and console television in front of two big chairs, one the Old Man’s recliner, a bedroom nearby, two more down the far hall, another guest bedroom in the basement behind the house-long rectangular party room and bar for entertaining friends after games. Three fireplaces went unused; Lombardi was afraid of fire, haunted by a childhood mishap in which he had burned his arm.

  The setting seemed exotic then, so open and modern in contrast to the old streets of the east side that intersected Riverside on the way downtown: slightly humped in the middle and sloping to the curbs, darkened by overhanging oaks and elms,
two-story wood-frame houses huddling close together, block after block of the same rectangular grid. Sunset Circle broke into daylight, a daring half-loop of quarter-acre lots with undeveloped land separating the four families inside the semicircle. Between the Lombardis and Riverside Drive stood vacant land that later served as an informal parking lot for Packers fans who drove out after Sunday victories to gaze at the coach’s shrine. To the west and across the loop was a field of river brush and wild asparagus that grew down to the railroad bed running alongside the nearby Fox River. All this within easy commute of Lombardi’s three primary workplaces: 3.8 miles up Riverside Drive and Monroe Street, then left at Crooks to reach the downtown Packer offices; about six miles up and across the river to City Stadium, and only 1.6 miles south to the training camp at St. Norbert in West De Pere. He could reach any of them within fifteen minutes.

  It was not just the unused fireplaces that made the new Lombardi house feel cold. Inside, it seemed uncomfortably silent and somber much of the week. The halls were dark and uninviting. A friend of Susan’s said that her lasting image of the home was “one of sadness. … It was a sad house as soon as you walked in, empty, you could feel the family void.” The defining scene was at the dinner table: Vincent on one side, quiet and tense; Susan on the other, chatting away, oblivious, until she realized that no one was responding to her; Marie perched at the end nearest the kitchen, impeccably dressed, bony and uneasy, offering little visible motherly comfort to her children, barely showing interest in the events of their days, instead focusing her gaze on her husband across the way, looking at him with awe and adoration as he sat there, eyes on his plate, chewing his meat, thinking about … who knows what? Starr’s sore ribs? The Bears linebackers? The Rams passing game? A new wrinkle in the belly series? When he cleared his throat, the others stiffened with anticipation: maybe, at last, the father would speak, his voice deep and resounding. Pass the salt, Marie.