When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  The Packers were in fact the only team to respond. First came a positive letter from Lombardi, followed shortly by a visit from Vainisi. At first glance, Wood was not the most impressive recruit. He stood just under five ten, weighed less than 175 pounds, and his sprint times were average. But he had broad shoulders and a thick neck, along with some unteachable traits: he was fearless, quick and agile, able to touch the top of the goalpost crossbar with his elbow from a standing leap. Vainisi offered him a $6,500 contract and sealed the agreement with a handshake. Wood was the last man to make the 1960 squad, and he was overwhelmed after it became clear that he had survived. When the Packers traded his rookie competitor for the final slot to the Dallas expansion team, he called his old high school coach, Ted McIntyre, who had also lobbied the Packers to sign Wood, and shouted into the phone, “Hey, I made it, Coach! I made it!” Thinking back on what he had endured, he realized it had been worth the pain and effort. “It was such a long shot. I was so pleased with myself.” That lasted until the following Monday morning, when Wood attended his first meeting of the regular season squad. There stood Lombardi in the front of the room, glaring directly at the rookie, or so it seemed, and declaring that nobody really made his team until the second year, and even then they shouldn’t feel too comfortable. “It was almost as though he was reading my mind,” Wood said later. “He must have known that I might think the pressure was off, and it’s never off. It was as though he was saying directly to me, ‘You have to knock yourself out here every day.’ ”

  Playing football, knocking himself out, was not the most trying task for Willie Wood during his rookie season with the Packers. He felt more pressure simply enduring the routines of daily life. He felt the blast heat of prejudice the first time he stepped off the bus as a Green Bay Packer before his first exhibition game, played against the Pittsburgh Steelers in New Orleans—a neutral site for everyone but the black athletes.

  The scene remained vivid in Wood’s memory: The team bus whines to a halt in front of a downtown hotel. Lombardi and the coaches march off, players clamber down and stream into the lobby, suitcases are unloaded from the belly of the coach and stacked near the registration desk. Emlen Tunnell, entering his thirteenth year in the league, dean of black ballplayers, knows the routine and hangs back. Whites only. The four black Packers must stay at a black hotel on the other side of town. But Tunnell forgets to tell the rookie about another Jim Crow edict: Stay outside. Don’t even go in. Wood enters the lobby searching for his suitcase; a porter moves swiftly, intercepts him near the door and stiffly escorts him to the sidewalk. Four suitcases are finally hauled out for the four black players. There’s a taxi by the curb. Wood opens the back door and starts to get in. No. Wrong cab. White cab. You can’t get in a white cab. Have to catch a black one.

  He has not played a game yet and he is “ready to explode.” He is reminded inevitably of something worse that happened to him back during his first year in California, when he was playing for an otherwise all-white junior college out in the valley near Fresno, and his team arrived in the little town of Santa Maria. The local sheriff drove over to the hotel and announced that “the colored” player, Willie Wood, would be quarantined in his room that afternoon; no way he was going to be allowed to play on the same field with white boys.

  Parched valley of California, river crescent of New Orleans, little difference. What about Green Bay? In the isolated province of northeastern Wisconsin, Wood and his black teammates—Tunnell, rookie receiver Paul Winslow and second-year defensive end Willie Davis, acquired from Cleveland—were strangers in a strange land. The four black Packers used to say that they constituted four-fifths of the permanent black population of the city, the fifth being the shoeshine man at the Hotel Northland. Now and then “you might see a black guy down near the train station or at the Y, just passing through,” Wood said. This was a slight exaggeration: according to the 1960 U.S. Census, 128 blacks then lived in Brown County, but this was still only about .01 percent of the total population. Wood could not imagine that the racial homogeneity of Green Bay was happenstance. “There were no blacks there, and we just automatically assumed that none were there because nobody wanted them there, so you also automatically just assumed that your stay there would be unpleasant.” Green Bay citizens did not seem hostile so much as uninformed on matters of race. During Wood’s first month in town, he encountered a woman who remarked that she had “never met a Negro before” and that she was surprised he seemed so polite; she had only read about “you folks fightin’ and fussin’ in Chicago all the time.”

  The trailblazer for black players in Green Bay had been Bob Mann, a gifted end from the University of Michigan who arrived in 1950 (after playing briefly for the Lions) and stayed five seasons. During Mann’s time in Green Bay the local newspaper referred to him as a “colored” athlete until he finally took sportswriter Art Daley aside one day and said, “We don’t want to be called colored, we’re Negroes.” Daley pleaded ignorance. He had grown up in Fond du Lac without ever knowing a black person. “I don’t know why I used ‘colored’—dumb shit, I was. I wouldn’t think of using that today,” Daley reflected more than forty years later. Jim Crow segregation was not in effect in Green Bay, but private housing was largely unavailable to black players during the 1950s and at the beginning of Lombardi’s tenure. Their living quarters were so inadequate that the married men among them chose to keep their families away during the season. Mann had lodged in a trailer. Davis and Winslow shared a rundown bungalow behind an industrial lot, and Wood spent his rookie year at the downtown YMCA, where his bill was a buck fifty per night, a modest rent that he reduced even further by checking out before road trips.

  Em Tunnell, a bachelor who loved the high life of Harlem nightclubs, where he was as much a celebrity as Billy Eckstine, found a room at the Hotel Northland at the corner of Adams and Pine, one block from the Y. “Yes, Your Hotel Northland Has Kept Pace,” boasted the establishment in its advertisements. The proof: two automatic elevators, the “most modern hotel desk in the Middle West,” along with a new coffee shop, bay room and dining room. Despite these amenities Tunnell was excruciatingly bored in the dead old building in a ghostly white town, but at least the Old Man secretly picked up his tab; Lombardi respected and needed Tunnell’s experience that much.

  “I’d get out of this town if it wasn’t for Vince,” Tunnell told a visiting reporter from New York. “He’s real brass, real arrogant. He’s the kind of guy you have to cuss out once a week when you’re alone. But nobody else can cuss him out to me. In my heart, I know what he is.” Tunnell could offer no more impressive endorsement of his coach, and his black teammates felt the same way. Wood called him “perhaps the fairest person I ever met.” Race was an issue that revealed the integrity of Lombardi’s character. In later years he would try to explain his position on racial matters by saying that he viewed his athletes as neither black nor white, but Packer green. He insisted that there were “no barriers” on his team and all things were “equal, racially and socially.” He was color-blind, he said. And though this was literally true—Lombardi was color-blind—there was more to it than that. It has always been easy for whites to claim color blindness in the United States since white is the dominant color in American society, but the claim often serves as a ruse for not recognizing the particular obstacles faced by non-whites. Lombardi might have seen only one color on the football field, but he was not blind to the discrimination that his black players encountered off the field, and he did everything he could to ease their way in an alien environment.

  During his first year in Green Bay, Lombardi called his team together on the practice field and delivered a rare lecture on racism. “If I ever hear nigger or dago or kike or anything like that around here, regardless of who you are, you’re through with me. You can’t play for me if you have any kind of prejudice.” His actions that year were more often quiet and behind the scenes, like paying Tunnell’s hotel bill when it was hard to find suitable hous
ing, or making sure the black players had enough money to go to Milwaukee or Chicago on off-days. But as his status and power increased in his second season, his sensitivity to racial inequities intensified as well, and his responses became more overt. Before the season began, Lombardi spread the word among Green Bay’s tavern and restaurant owners that any establishment that did not welcome his black players would be declared off limits to the entire team. At Tunnell’s suggestion, he allowed the black players to leave the St. Norbert training camp twice during the preseason for quick trips down to Milwaukee, the closest city where they could find barbers who knew how to cut their hair.

  The Jim Crow discrimination that black Packers faced when the team played exhibition games in the South enraged Lombardi, and at the end of the 1960 preseason he decided that he would never again allow his team to be split by segregation; from then on, he said, any hotel that would not accommodate all Packers would get no Packers. The final preseason game that year was held in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, against the lily-white Washington Redskins. According to Lombardi lore, an event took place there that solidified the coach’s decision to no longer submit his team to the segregation policies of the South. As the story goes, Lombardi, his naturally tawny skin further darkened by a month of practice sessions under the summer sun, entered a local restaurant the night before the game and was refused seating by a hostess who mistook him for a black man.

  There is no documentation of the episode; decades later no one remaining from that team could remember precisely who was with him that night; and there are many apocrypha in the legend of St. Vincent of Green Bay—but this story nonetheless rings true. Lombardi told it to his family later, and to many of his players, and there was no reason for him to concoct it or exaggerate it. The black players often joked among themselves that by the end of summer camp their coach was a secret “brother.” In any case, the all-for-one edict from Lombardi followed that trip to North Carolina. When he took the Packers into the Deep South the following summer for a game against the Redskins in Columbus, Georgia, he lodged the players at Fort Benning, the integrated army post, so that they could all stay together.

  Lombardi had been keenly aware of the sting of prejudice long before his supposed Black Like Me experience in Winston-Salem. He had gone through life being called a dago and wop and guinea because of his dark skin and southern Italian heritage. Throughout his school years he had struggled to overcome the lower academic expectations that society seemed to have for Italian boys. In high school and college he had tried to dress more sharply, scrub cleaner, keep his hair trimmer and maintain a more businesslike appearance just so that he would not be defined by stereotypes. At Fordham, he had risked suspension from the football team by tackling and punching a teammate who had taunted him in the shower with ethnic epithets. At various points during his long apprenticeship in coaching, he had suspected that his advancement had been slowed by bias against Italians. But the world teems with people who are sensitive to prejudice only when it is against them, not when they are inflicting it on others. Lombardi’s concern seemed universal, not merely self-centered.

  There was evidence of this even when he moved in the most racially exclusive circles in Green Bay, such as his country club, Oneida Golf and Riding. Among the caddies at the all-white private club were several members of the Oneida Indian tribe who lived nearby on the western rim of Green Bay. Big Elroy and Ray Bear were legends at the course, said to know every blade of grass along Duck Creek, able to anticipate the slightest shift in wind. It was tradition for the Native Americans to caddy in the spring, when local teenagers were in school. “But the minute school let out, we’d take the white kids from school. Then when the kids went back to school, we’d take the Indians again,” said Jack Koeppler, the insurance man who often played in the same foursome with his pal Lombardi. Koeppler said the men at the club followed that pattern, with one exception: Lombardi insisted on using Indian caddies year-round. “If they’re good enough for spring and fall, they’re good enough for summer,” he once said. The first time he was greeted at the practice tee by a teenage boy, instead of Big Elroy, Lombardi stormed back to the clubhouse and “loudly berated” the club pro. He was a generous tipper to his caddies, and became a one-man interest-free lending institution as well. Indians in a financial pinch would appear behind the eighteenth green, taking a silent position down by the trees at the bottom of the hill, sometimes with wives and children, and wait for Lombardi to finish his round. Invariably, he would greet them, listen to their stories and provide the needed funds.

  THE TRINITY OF LIFE, as Lombardi often described it, was God, family and the Green Bay Packers. He placed them in that order, though his family, in reality if not in his idealized image, usually came in third, unable to compete in his heart and mind with his dual passions of God and the Packers. There has been a tendency in recent decades to mix sport and religion in the most superficial, public ways, with athletes proclaiming that God healed an injury or guided the winning shot, that a comeback victory was the Lord’s work, as though the Father and Son, if not the Holy Ghost, were taking sides and cared one whit about the outcome of games. It would be difficult to find someone who conjoined sport and religion more deeply than Lombardi, but as an old-line Catholic, trained by the Fordham Jesuits, he accomplished this in a more personal way, without proselytizing. He was not the sort to pray explicitly for victory over the Chicago Bears, but he could worry that his team might lose if he failed to pray before the Bears game. This was part raw superstition, part his sense that God cared not about the Packers or Bears but about the act of prayer itself.

  Prayer was the essence of Lombardi’s religious practice and the constant of his daily routine. Before he left Sunset Circle each morning, he fell to his knees in his bedroom and prayed to St. Anthony and St. Jude, their statue likenesses sitting atop his dresser above the sock drawer, icons he had carried with him since his days at Saints. Here was Lombardi, the winner, praying to saints of loss and miraculous recovery. Jude for the impossible, the lost cause. Anthony for finding what was lost, the lost key or lost emotion. “O Holy St. Anthony, gentlest of Saints, your love for God and Charity for His creatures made you worthy, when on earth, to possess miraculous powers. Miracles waited on your word, for which you were ever ready to speak for those in trouble or anxiety. Encouraged by this thought, I implore of you to obtain for me this request. The answer to my prayer may require a miracle, even so, you are the Saint of Miracles.” The statues were ceramic, each a foot high, robed in green and blue paint, with the barefooted St. Jude revealing the holy spirit through the portal of an eternal flame burning atop his forehead.

  In his coat pocket Lombardi carried old black wooden rosary beads. He had rubbed his long thick fingers over these same beads, uttering Hail Marys and Our Fathers, since studying for the seminary at Cathedral Prep. He even equipped his car for the purpose of prayer; snap-on rosary beads looped around the upper half of the steering wheel, allowing him to count off the decades while taking Susan to school or heading on to the office. The beads were fluorescent so that he could perform his prayerful obligations while driving at night. It was his usual practice to pray silently, but in the mornings during the six weeks of Lent, as he was driving Susan and her neighbor friend down to St. Joseph’s Academy, he would recite the Rosary aloud all the way to town—and demand that the girls in the back stop gossiping and begin praying aloud along with him.

  By his side in the car or at home were two religious books. The first was a new Holy Name Edition of the Catholic Bible, a treasured present he had received the previous spring, abundant in red leather, featuring full-color reproductions of masterpieces of religious art, photographs of the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel and the magnificent churches of Rome, and biographies of American cardinals. Inside were two black-and-white snapshots that his children had no idea he carried with him: one was of young Vincent and Susan playing in the backyard in Englewood at ages six and one; the other showed Susan as a pixi
e-faced six-year-old at West Point. Resting atop the Bible was a smaller book, a black leatherbound Maryknoll missal containing the prayers and responses for celebrating mass. Inside as book markers were two laminated holy cards. One featured a line from Ecclesiastes: “Be in peace with many but let one in a thousand be thy counselor.” Another, handwritten, offered a prayer in case of unexpected death: “My God, if I am to die today, or suddenly at any time, I wish to receive this communion as my viaticum. I desire that my last food may be the body and blood of my savior and redeemer; my last words, of Jesus, Mary and Joseph; my last affection, an act of pure love of God and of perfect contrition for my sins; my last consolation, to die in the Holy Grace and in thy Holy Love. Amen.”

  That was among the prayers he whispered every day at his first stop, St. Willebrord, an old Dutch Catholic church near his office that was named for the patron saint of Holland and run by the Norbertines. St. Willebrord was a sturdy rectangle of orange brick and light stone dominating the corner of Adams and Doty, with a dark-shingled steeple rising to the low-slung northern sky. The church had taken on a new sheen at the time of Lombardi’s arrival, its exterior sandblasted, thousands of bricks replaced, new plastic paint applied, and a six-foot statue of Christ the King, made from hard white Italian Carrara marble, erected on the south lawn. As a downtown institution convenient to urban professionals, St. Willebrord was among the more ethnically diverse churches in town. The French had St. John the Evangelist and St. John the Baptist, the Poles St. Mary of the Angels, the Belgians St. Peter and Paul and Holy Martyrs, the Irish St. Patrick, and the Germans St. Francis Xavier Cathedral. Lombardi was a daily communicant at St. Willebrord’s eight o’clock mass, parking in the back lot, slipping in the side door and taking a pew near the white altar below an alignment of saints shining down from stained-glass windows. His daily ritual was so precise and predictable that Jim Huxford, who worked the sideline down-and-distance chains at Packers games, knew that if he drove by at 7:56 each day he could wave to the coach entering the church. Altar boys who regularly assisted when the priest served Lombardi wine and wafer noticed that his tongue was oddly serrated, bitten into jagged edges, perhaps from years of anxiety.