Lombardi fit comfortably into the religious culture of Green Bay, one of the most Catholic regions in the nation. Even Allouez, the suburb in which the Lombardis lived, had a Catholic origin; it was named for Claude Allouez, a Jesuit missionary and educator. Nearly three of every four residents of Green Bay identified themselves as Catholic. The parochial schools had as many students as the public school system. There were two Catholic high schools and ten Catholic elementary schools. Among the sixteen Catholic churches, worshipers could choose from forty-two masses during the week and ninety-four masses every Sunday, the earliest starting long before sunrise, at 4:30 a.m., the latest beginning at ten minutes past noon (only when the Packers were out of town or not playing). During the off-season or when the Packers were playing at home on Sundays, Lombardi attended mass at St. Matthew’s parish church in Allouez (and later a new church there, Resurrection), taking a seat next to Marie near the center aisle about six rows back. The priests knew he was there, but tried not to look at him; one confessed later that if he made eye contact with Lombardi “the sermon was shot. Forget it. Just looking at him would throw you for a loop. He was so intense it was difficult to concentrate after catching his gaze.” But for the most part, outside the church, priests and nuns were made to feel at ease around Lombardi, who had been accustomed to their presence in daily life since his Sheepshead Bay childhood.
There was no such thing as a practice session too secret for his friends in the clergy. Reporters would get the boot, but if Lombardi saw a priest hanging out on the other side of the gate, he was known to shout, “Hey, those are my agents, let them in.” He was also a soft touch for nuns seeking tickets; they gobbled up a significant share of his fifty-seat allotment. Some priests had no need for tickets. Lombardi would give Father Burke game passes for himself and several fellow Norbertines. They stood on the sidelines near the bench; players joked on game day that it was hard to tell which Lombardi wanted more: to win or to get to heaven. He wanted both, of course. On rare occasions, he might introduce a touch of religion into his coaching by quoting a line from Scripture that he thought would inspire his troops, but he did not invoke God or Jesus in his locker-room pep talks. In a sense, there was no need for that—the currents of sports and spirituality within him converged at a deeper point than mere rhetoric. The fundamental principles that he used in coaching—repetition, discipline, clarity, faith, subsuming individual ego to a larger good—were merely extensions of the religious ethic he learned from the Jesuits. In that sense, he made no distinction between the practice of religion and the sport of football.
His religious side, in one sense, did serve as a necessary antidote to his football obsession. In order to be the best coach, to keep winning, to stand out from his peers, he understood that at some level he had to be imbalanced, to sacrifice his family, to use some of his darker characteristics, especially his volatility, to his advantage. His temper and impatience, he once said, were characteristics that he was “never able to subdue wholly.” To some extent he regretted this, but he also feared that if he had been more in control of his emotions he “would not have coached effectively.” His daily prayers were an effort to balance the tension between his will to succeed and his desire to be good. His son, Vincent, as he sought to understand his father’s motivations over the years, later revealed perhaps the clearest appreciation of the contradiction at the center of Vince Lombardi. “He went to mass to repent for his anger,” Vincent explained. “He thought, I’ve got this temper. I fly off the handle and offend people. I apologize. But it’s this temper that keeps me on edge and allows me to get things done and people to do things. Life was a struggle for him. He knew he wasn’t perfect. He had a lot of habits that were far from perfect. His strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa. He fought it by taking the paradox to church. It went back to the Jesuits and the struggle between the shadow self and the real self—your humanity and your divinity. He saw that struggle in clear and concrete terms.”
TODAY it requires an intricate computer program analyzing thousands of variables to construct a season schedule for the National Football League, but during Lombardi’s early years with the Packers the task was simple and the pattern predictable—even in 1960 when the league expanded to Dallas and briefly became imbalanced with thirteen teams. Lombardi began every year knowing that he would open with four home games, three in Green Bay and one in Milwaukee, and that near the end of the year he would be competing mostly in enemy stadiums, with a traditional Thanksgiving Day contest against the Lions in Detroit and a December road trip finale to the West Coast for games against San Francisco and Los Angeles. The schedule seemed a reasonable adjustment to the weather, front-loading home games for the early fall and escaping to California for the harsh northern winter, but the lack of balance also meant that the Packers could not afford slow starts—they had to take advantage of the early run in Wisconsin—and could not falter down the stretch during pressure games on the road. The pattern of those early schedules seemed to shape the rhythm of Lombardi’s teams: his rigorous training camps and pedagogical methods were designed to build teams that were mentally and physically strongest during the first quarter and the fourth, at the start of every season and at the end.
The Packers opened the 1960 season with the opposite rhythm, losing at home to Chicago, 17 to 14, when the Bears came back and scored all of their points in the fourth quarter. Disaster seemed possible, with the talented Detroit Lions and two-time champion Baltimore Colts visiting Green Bay for the following two Sundays, but the Packers won both games handily, launching a four-game winning streak that carried them to the top of the standings by early November. If the first humans were produced by Thunder and Lightning, as the Winnebago Indian tradition held, the same was being said of these Packers. Thunder was Jim Taylor, the bruising fullback, on his way to his first thousand-yard season, and Lightning was Paul Hornung, the left halfback, who had an uncanny knack for finding the end zone and lighting up the scoreboard, on his way to a record-shattering 176 points. Taylor and Hornung were about results, nothing more; other backfields around the league were bigger and faster, but none produced like Thunder and Lightning. It was said of Taylor that he loved contact so much that if no defensive backs were in his way he would go find one. To watch Hornung run at midfield was nothing special—he seemed a step slow and uninspired—but near the goal line he was the best, unstoppable.
The predictable midseason slump began at Baltimore in the sixth game. Lombardi knew it would be a trying day; the Colts, especially the passing combination of Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry, had been all too familiar to him since the famous sudden-death championship game in 1958, his last as an assistant coach with the New York Giants. Unitas and Berry were at their prime now, each on his way to a record year, and the Packers secondary was hobbling. During pregame warmups Jesse Whittenton, the speedy left cornerback, pulled a leg muscle. In his fifth professional season out of Texas Western, Whittenton was the most talented of the Katzenjammer Kids, the nickname defensive coach Norb Hecker gave his devilish Lone Star backfield trio of Whittenton, Hank Gremminger and Johnny Symank. When the Colts game began, Whittenton tried to cover Berry, but he limped to the sidelines in pain halfway through the first quarter, and Lombardi instructed Hecker to “put Wood in there!” Willie Wood was a safety, being tutored to replace Em Tunnell, and had never played the corner before, but when Hecker asked him if he could handle it, he nodded yes and sprinted onto the field. As soon as he arrived, shouts of “Number 24! Number 24!” came from the Baltimore bench, signaling Unitas that an untested rookie was in the game.
Unitas immediately started flinging passes Berry’s way, one hitch pattern after another, with the hesitant Wood arriving a second late every time. Finally, Wood said to himself, “If he runs another hitch, I’m gonna come up and be right there.” Berry ran it, and Wood arrived quickly, only to discover that it was a fake. Unitas pumped and Berry took off deep, getting behind the Packers secondary for a long completio
n. They yanked Wood from the game after that and tried another young player, Dick Pesonen, who fared no better. Berry finished with ten catches for 137 yards, totals matched by the fleet flanker, Lenny Moore. At the airport after the game, as the team waited for the charter flight back to Wisconsin, Willie Davis and Jim Ringo and several other teammates started ribbing Wood. You live in Dee-Cee, doncha? Ain’t no need for you going back to Green Bay. Might as well stay here ’cause they’re going to send your ass home anyway.
Wood thought they had a point, until Lombardi overheard the conversation and took his rookie aside. “Don’t you believe anything those fellows say. You’re not going anywhere,” Lombardi told him. “You’re staying right with me. Every one of those guys making fun of you has had the same thing happen to them. You’re going to be here as long as I’m here.” It was the longest conversation Wood had ever had with his coach, and the most meaningful. Until then, he had not been sure where he stood with Lombardi. He was embarrassed, his confidence shaken, by the way Berry had beaten him. Were the NFL scouts right not to draft him? Lombardi waited until the precise moment when it would mean the most, when Wood was doubting himself, and then assured him that what had happened to him was no big deal, that there would be hundreds of other days of redemption, and that the coach believed in him. “He gave me confidence when he did that. I said, ‘What I’m doing has got to be right because the man believes in me,’ ” Wood said later. “I think it made a hell of a better ballplayer out of me.” Hell of a better ballplayer, indeed. When Lombardi bucked up his rookie that day at the airport in Baltimore, it might be said that Willie Wood started his long and improbable leap toward the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The losing continued. The Packers dropped two of their next three games, and they headed home from Detroit on Thanksgiving evening after a 23 to 10 loss with a middling record of 5 wins and 4 losses. Taylor and Hornung were still going strong, but the quarterback position seemed uncertain again. Starr had been throwing too many interceptions, and Lamar McHan performed no better when given the chance. It might have been a dispiriting holiday, lonely and lost, but once again the coach showed a knack for pulling things together at the critical moment. Instead of lambasting his players for their mistakes (two fumbles and a punt blocked for a safety), he let them drink two beers on the flight home, spoke spiritedly to them about how they would right themselves for the rest of the season, and later that night brought them all downtown to the Elks Club with their families for a turkey dinner.
The Old Man could be gruff, awkward, unrelenting, but now he showed another side. All night long he moved from table to table, slapping backs, chatting with wives, joking with kids, inviting them to watch cartoons from a projector that had been set up downstairs, embracing everyone as part of his big happy brood. Watching him that night, Bob Skoronski thought of him as “the total father figure for the whole group.” If only for a few hours, Lombardi was fulfilling a deep longing. Not on the football field, not yet, but here at dinner among his Packers he had closed the mystical gap between the hugeness of his desire and the smallness of reality. He might be silent and distant at the dinner table on Sunset Circle, but at this moment he seemed transported in time back to those childhood Sundays at the family homestead on East Sixteenth Street among the bountiful Izzos of Sheepshead Bay.
14
Remembering Jack
ON THE SUNDAY after Thanksgiving, shortly after ten in the morning, Jack Vainisi collapsed in the bathroom of his house at 1017 Reed Street two miles from City Stadium. By the time the rescue squad arrived, he was gone—dead at the age of thirty-three from a chronic rheumatic condition that had swelled his heart to twice its normal size. He left behind a pregnant wife and two young daughters and one of the most exceptional and underappreciated careers in professional football. While Lombardi lives on in American culture, Vainisi is lost in the oblivion of minor sports figures of the past. On the day that he died, the Packers were still recovering from their defeat in Detroit three days earlier. Most of the players spent the afternoon at home, watching the televised game in which conference-leading Baltimore was upset by San Francisco, a result that allowed Green Bay to slip back into the championship race, one game behind the Colts. In a sense it was then, on that cold November day in 1960, that Lombardi and his Packers began their long run to greatness, beginning an era of dominance that would not have been possible without the work of an accomplished young personnel man who had suffered through nine losing seasons and then died before he could witness the wonder of a team that he, almost as much as the famed Lombardi, had built.
It was Vainisi who had persuaded the Packers executive board to hire Lombardi in the first place, and he who had scouted and recommended most of the players on the 1960 team, going back to Hawg Hanner from Arkansas in 1952 and including seven future NFL Hall of Famers—halfback Paul Hornung from Notre Dame, quarterback Bart Starr from Alabama, Louisiana State fullback Jim Taylor, Illinois linebacker Ray Nitschke, offensive tackle Forrest Gregg from Southern Methodist, center Jim Ringo from Syracuse and free agent Willie Wood from Southern Cal. Other talented starters scouted by Vainisi were Idaho offensive guard Jerry Kramer, Michigan tight end Ron Kramer, offensive tackle Bob Skoronski from Indiana, receiver Max McGee from Tulane, flanker Boyd Dowler from Colorado, Southern Methodist linebacker Bill Forester, Michigan State linebacker Dan Currie, Purdue linebacker Tom Bettis, defensive back Hank Gremminger from Baylor and safety Johnny Symank from Florida.
Which is more important, the talent of the troops or the skill of the leader? That is one of the central questions of all group enterprises and can be debated forever, but remains essentially unresolvable. The fact that Vainisi’s handpicked Packers had played on losing teams before Lombardi’s arrival, including Scooter McLean’s hapless 1958 squad, showed the profound difference a coach could make. But if Lombardi found the best in his players, their performance in the end was limited by what that best could be. Lombardi inherited an uncommonly talented collection of athletes when he came to Green Bay, and Jack Vainisi realized that before anyone else.
Even more than Lombardi, Vainisi was a creature of football. He grew up on the North Side of Chicago in the embrace of the Chicago Bears family. His classmate at St. Hillary’s grammar school was George Halas Jr., known as Mugsy, the son of the Bears coach. Bears players would visit St. Hillary’s to help a priest coach the eighth grade football team on which Jack played. One of the Bears, big George Musso, presented young Jack with a complete pro uniform, which he wore at every opportunity. Vainisi’s father operated Tony’s Fine Foods, a grocery and delicatessen that served as a hangout for many Bears who roomed across the street at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel during the season. At least once a year a carload of Bears would drive over to the Vainisi home for a five-course Italian meal cooked by Jack’s mother. At St. George High School, Jack became an all-Chicagoland lineman on a powerhouse scholastic team that traveled to New York to play for the mythical Catholic schools championship. Notre Dame offered him an athletic scholarship in 1945, and he played as a freshman there under Hugh Devore, who had been among Lombardi’s coaches at Fordham a decade earlier.
After one season at South Bend, Vainisi was drafted into the Army and sent to occupied Japan, where he worked at MacArthur’s headquarters and played on a service team favored by the football-loving general. He became sick there with what doctors misdiagnosed as scarlet fever. Months later, after Vainisi had returned to the service team, he discovered that he had been suffering from the far more serious rheumatic fever and that the strain of playing football had permanently damaged his heart. He was brought back to Chicago, where he recuperated for several months at Hines military hospital near his home, then returned to Notre Dame and finished his studies. No longer able to play football, he devoted himself to the sport anyway and decided that he would make his career in the front office. With his connections and enthusiasm, it took him only a few months after graduating in 1950 to land a job scouting for the Packers. The new
head coach in Green Bay was Gene Ronzani, one of the Bears who had dined at Mama Vainisi’s, and Ronzani’s top assistant was the same Hugh Devore who had coached him at Notre Dame.
As a scout, Vainisi was ebullient and innovative. He worked the telephones and traveled relentlessly in search of his “boys,” developing contacts with hundreds of high school and college coaches around the country, and was so engaging that competing pro coaches—his favorites were Paul Brown and George Halas—took his calls without fail and talked football talent with him. For his honeymoon in 1952 he persuaded his wife, Jackie, to escort him on a trip through Oklahoma, Texas and Alabama, where he spent most of his time signing new players. He developed a network of informal tipsters as well, many of them former Packers or friends from Notre Dame. His scouting reports, in eighteen thick blue canvas, three-ringed notebooks, ranked and coded the statistics of nearly four thousand players. He became known around the league as a boy wonder, lending Green Bay a measure of respect that it could not gain on the football field. Head coaches came and went, first Ronzani, then Blackbourn, then McLean—each more frustrating to him than the last. He pushed especially hard for the Packers to take Paul Hornung, the Heisman Trophy winner from his alma mater, as the first bonus pick in 1957, then fretted for two years as coaches played the Golden Boy at the wrong positions and seemed unable to unleash his talent.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 36
