Lombardi had little time to search out McGee. His eyes swung back to the field with alarm, as Ted Dean, Philadelphia’s swift halfback, was busting loose and sprinting upfield, returning the kickoff fifty-seven yards, immediately putting the Eagles back in scoring position. Eight plays later Dean carried the ball on a sweep play around left end and scored from the five. With the extra point, Philadelphia led 17 to 13. Time was running out. After an exchange of punts the Packers took over for the last time with one minute and twenty seconds left in the game. Bart Starr trotted out to the huddle. He had struggled all day, but now as his teammates looked over at him, they noticed that he seemed eerily calm. There were sixty-three yards to the goal line, but every man in the huddle believed that they would get there. Starr five yards to Taylor. Starr four yards to Tom Moore, Hornung’s replacement. Taylor on the Green Bay sweep for nine more, out-of-bounds just across the midfield stripe. Starr to Knafelc for seventeen. Incomplete to Dowler. Starr to Knafelc for eight more. The Packers are now at the Eagles twenty-two. Chuck Bednarik sits on Knafelc after the catch, letting precious seconds tick off the clock. Time for only one more play.
Red Smith of the New York Herald Tribune, Green Bay-born and Notre Dame-bred, a Lombardi man since Vince’s West Point days, was watching from the press box. “For 59 minutes plus,” he wrote, “the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers, 1958 dogs of the National Football League, had heaved and hauled and grappled and threshed across the squashy turf for $2011.41 per Hessian, the difference between winning and losing the title of world’s toughest mercenaries. From the Philadelphia 22 yard line, Bart Starr passed to Jim Taylor. That wonderful runner ducked his head like a charging bull, bolted like an enraged beer truck into Philadelphia’s congested secondary, twisted, staggered, bucked and wrestled one step at a time …”
Photographer Robert Riger was watching the same scene from a more intimate angle. “I was the only camera in the end zone and wanted a picture of Taylor coming right at me for the touchdown,” Riger said. “‘Come to Poppa. And I’ll give you the whole town of Green Bay.’ The play started and Starr shot the fullback a little nickel pass on the left side. He took it and cut back over center and had one man to beat, a rookie in a spanking clean uniform who had just been sent in—Bobby Jackson—and the kid made the stop. Bednarik came over and there was a big pileup, but had Taylor gotten by Jackson, Green Bay would have won and I would have had the picture.”
The image that lingers is not the unheralded Bobby Jackson making the initial stop, but Bednarik pounding over to the scrum and sitting on Taylor as time ran out. “I was on top of him and I stayed there,” Bednarik recalled. “You’re darn right I was watching the clock. I made up my mind I was going to lay on him until it was over. That is known as stalling for time.” Taylor remained sprawled on the ground for a half-minute after the gun had sounded. Philadelphia police rushed across the thawing field, “black buttons agleam on blue heroic abdomens,” as Red Smith described them, in a vain effort to keep fans from tearing down the goalposts. Bednarik, a mess of mud and sweat, stood near the fallen Taylor. “Get up,” he said. “This goddamn game is over!” Then he looked up to the roaring stands, lifted his gnarled fists high above his head in victory and unloosed a bloodcurdling shout of triumph. As Taylor made his way to his feet, the injured Hornung, shrouded in a warmup cape, walked out to console him. Thunder and Lightning—and old Concrete Charlie Bednarik stepped between them and embraced each of his young competitors and said they had a helluva football team and would be back in the championship the next year. Robert Riger never got the photograph of Taylor scoring the phantom winning touchdown, but he was nearby when this scene took place and shot a picture from behind the three athletes, exhausted and limping off the battlefield, arm in arm, that evoked emotions far deeper than winning or losing.
Dominic Olejniczak, president of the board of directors, wiped tears from his eyes as he entered the losing locker room after the game, but there were no tears among the players and coaches. To them, this was not a last, fleeting chance, but a first chance. The sense was that they did not lose, they just ran out of time. Lombardi said as much to the press. “If we could have added a couple of more seconds at the end of each half we would have been all right,” he said. McGee chuckled to himself when he overheard his coach say that he was neither surprised nor bothered by Max’s run off the fake punt. “With veterans like McGee, we give them the option,” Lombardi said. Right, McGee thought to himself. And if I hadn’t made the first down, it would have been my last option. With the press out of the room, Lombardi gathered his players around him and said there was a revelation in this loss. “Perhaps you didn’t realize that you could have won this game,” he said in a quiet, deliberate voice. “But I think there’s no doubt in your minds now. And that’s why you will win it all next year. This will never happen again. You will never lose another championship.”
That night Lombardi took his family and a group of friends and team officials to dinner in downtown Philadelphia. At one point, he was sitting alone with Ray Scott, the voice of the Packers, and they replayed the game one last time. He was proud of his men, Lombardi said. They had given every ounce of effort. But that was more than he could say for himself. He had cost the team six points, the difference between winning and losing, by not going for easy field goals. “Coach,” he said to Scott, using his all-purpose nickname, which he applied equally to people he admired and others whose name he had forgotten. “I learned my lesson today. When you get down there, come out with something. I lost the game, not my players. That was my fault.”
AN IMPORTANT ASPECT of the mythology of Vince Lombardi is that his rise took place in Green Bay, not New York. For a New Yorker to succeed in New York is a routine story. Even though it is an oft-told tale, there is a certain romance to someone coming from the provinces and making it in New York. But for the opposite to happen, for a New Yorker to leave the big city and head out to the middle of nowhere to become famous—that is an adventure story with something in it for everyone. New York, his hometown, the place where myths were conceived and written and broadcast and spread, was rooting for Lombardi as a favorite son, and the rest of the country found something magical and inspiring in the emergence of little Green Bay, the David among the Goliaths of professional football. As dissimilar as they were, this coach and town seemed the perfect combination: just as Green Bay could not have succeeded without Lombardi, Lombardi would not have become what he became without Green Bay.
It very nearly did not happen that way; the symbiosis of Lombardi and Green Bay almost ended before it had fully developed. At the end of the 1959 season, Jim Lee Howell had walked into Wellington Mara’s office and announced that he was burned out. The thrill of winning, Howell said, no longer compensated for the deep anxiety he took from losing. He would coach the 1960 season, but that would be his last. Howell’s surprise burnout did not come at the best time for the Maras. Not only had they let Lombardi go to Green Bay a year earlier, but they had just lost Tom Landry to the expansion team in Dallas. The brains in the New York coaching brain trust were employed elsewhere.
Would Lombardi come back? The Maras had reason to believe that he would. When they had released him from the final year of his contract back in January 1959 to go out to Green Bay, it was with the understanding that he “would have first chance at the Giants’ coaching job should a vacancy ever occur.” As soon as Howell told the Maras of his plans, they contacted Olejniczak in Green Bay and secured secret permission from him to talk to Lombardi about the Giants job. Lombardi met with the Maras during his winter trip to New York at the end of the 1959 season, when he was being anointed as coach of the year, and expressed an interest in returning. “However,” as a Giants document on the issue later stated, “both parties recognized his obligations in Green Bay, and it was agreed that the matter would be tabled until the completion of the 1960 NFL season.”
The Green Bay press spent the season concentrating on the stunning improveme
nt of the Packers on the field, mostly trying to ignore rumors about Lombardi’s departure, but sportswriters in New York devoted much of their energy to speculating about his return. It seemed that all of New York wanted Vinnie back. Ed Sullivan, the television host, who golfed at Westchester Country Club with Giants executives, was constantly promoting Lombardi for the job, sending clips about him to members of the New York press corps, who were eager to recount his glory and lay out the arguments as to why he should leave Green Bay.
Yes, he was hailed as the Pope in Green Bay and had performed a miracle there, but so what? they asked in print. In his columns from Green Bay, Red Smith never failed to write that Lombardi was pacing the wrong sidelines. “Lombardi has relished his success in Green Bay, has enjoyed being his own boss even though the double job makes heavy demands on his time,” Smith wrote in a column after Thanksgiving, just before the season-changing Bears game. “But he doesn’t try to hide his homesickness.… They love Vincent in Green Bay. They would love him in New York.” Another Lombardi booster was Arthur Daley of the New York Times, a Fordham graduate and longtime Lombardi friend, not to be confused with Art Daley of the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Lombardi, he wrote in early December, was “a New Yorker at heart” and “always the Giants’ boy.” The venerable Stanley Woodward, who had known Lombardi since they shared a cabin together at Red Blaik’s Bull Pond, pounded out the same theme: “Vincenzo, as every one knows, has about as much business being out in Green Bay as Mayor [Robert] Wagner. He is strictly New York-New Jersey and his playing-coaching career until he heard the jingle of Wisconsin shekels was on the line of Fordham-St. Cecilia’s-West Point-New York Giants. He was Col. Earl H. Blaik’s Tower of Pizza and the Giants have never attained the class they showed when he ran the offense. It’s your move, Jack Mara.”
These eastern writers watched with equal parts admiration and fear as Lombardi’s Packers swept through the end of the season and headed toward Philadelphia for the championship. With every win, the Times’s Daley wrote, it appeared that Lombardi was “tightening the chains anchoring him to Green Bay.” It is clear that Lombardi was confiding in his pals in the New York press corps, and that their ambivalence reflected his own. Should he stay or leave? Marie had never fully adjusted to the small-town life and would gladly move back to New Jersey. Lombardi’s attachment to the Packers board of directors could not match the personal bond he felt toward the Maras. Daley of the Times was right—Vince loved New York. During one of his trips back to Manhattan, as he was crossing Fifth Avenue in midtown, he looked up at the skyscrapers and announced, “This is my town!” New York was where he always thought he would coach, if not at Fordham, then with the Giants.
But there were compelling reasons to stay. He wielded more power in Green Bay than he could ever hope to have with the Giants. Wellington and Jack Mara admired him, but they were not willing to cede all authority. As much as he enjoyed many of the players he had coached as a Giants assistant, he felt equally close to the Packers—and in terms of talent they were younger and better. The people he admired most in the league, including George Halas of the rival Bears, urged him to remain in Green Bay. Part of the Halas argument, which was also made by Paul Brown and to a lesser extent by Commissioner Rozelle, was that Lombardi had in essence saved the Green Bay franchise and that his leaving would endanger it again. Even more important to Halas was the fear that if Lombardi voided his contract in Green Bay and left for New York, it would weaken the NFL in its struggle with the AFL—if coaches could break their contracts, how could the league use moral pressure to keep players from doing the same?
With these factors to consider, Lombardi vacillated, as he had during most of his important career decisions. At times during that fall and winter he told friends that he could persuade the Packers to release him from his contract, at other times he said that they would not do it. Olejniczak made it clear that he did not want Lombardi to go. “I’d just as soon lose both legs as lose Lombardi,” he said before the Eagles game. “But I know one thing, he’s a man of integrity.” There were reports later that the Packers board refused to release Lombardi. They might have, in the end, but it was never put to a final test. He met with Wellington Mara in Philadelphia before the championship game and told Mara that he had decided to stay in Green Bay. “He said that he had to fulfill his obligations there,” Mara said later. “And he also knew that he had a darn good team coming back. He told me that.” When reporters broached the subject after the game, Lombardi gave them an answer of sorts. “Let’s have no more of that talk!” he barked.
SIX WEEKS after Jack Vainisi died, his wife suffered another heartbreak. The baby that she had been carrying was delivered stillborn on January 4, 1961. A few weeks later Lombardi called and asked Jackie to join him and Marie for dinner at the country club. Marie, who had suffered through two childbirth tragedies of her own, tried to console Jackie, and the three friends talked about football and children and old times through dinner, until finally Lombardi leaned across the table and lowered his voice to a rough whisper. “I have to ask you this or I will get no peace,” he said. “Do you think I was at all the cause of Jack’s death?”
Jackie Vainisi thought about how her husband would attempt to conceal the pain shooting down his left arm, how he would eat entire lemon meringue pies when she was not looking, how she had tried to change his diet, to give him vegetables, but he just kept gobbling up more desserts, despite his heart condition, and worked more, eighteen-hour days and nights, wanting to excel, to win, to find the best boys out there, agreeing with what Vince was doing, first-class all the way, nothing second-rate or halfhearted, the full measure of commitment, until that Sunday after Thanksgiving when he slumped dead on the bathroom floor at age thirty-three, before he could see all the great players he had scouted perform in their first championship game. “No,” she said to Lombardi. “You didn’t kill him. Of course not. Nobody could do that to Jack but Jack.”
15
Golden
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
—DYLAN THOMAS, “Fern Hill”
HE STRUGGLED in obscurity for twenty years and then fame arrived, and it came to him in a rush. He had been in Green Bay for only two seasons. His Packers had won 15 games and lost 10. He had captured a conference crown but not a league championship. His achievements as a professional football coach were solid but not singular, not in the same class as those of George Halas, the Papa Bear who had been running things in Chicago since the league’s creation forty years earlier, or Paul Brown, who had won an average of ten games a year over fourteen seasons with his Cleveland Browns, or even Weeb Ewbank, who had led the Baltimore Colts to consecutive championships at the end of the fifties. Yet by the first few months of 1961, Vince Lombardi was a transcendent figure in football, worshiped as the Pope in Green Bay, coveted by other teams, held up by national sportswriters as the model of leadership. He was so hot that John F. Kennedy, the new president, who had first met him on the steps of St. Willebrord during the 1960 Wisconsin primary, talked about him admiringly and wrote notes to him and invited him to the inauguration in Washington (missed it; league meetings to attend), and Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, made plans to see the Packers the next time they came east.
What was it about Lombardi that set him apart? It could not have been style over substance in any conventional sense. He was innately shy, sometimes painfully so, according to Marie. He had to screw up his courage every day to be a public figure; the witty chatter and glad-handing did not come naturally to him. He was literal, not subtle. If you invited him to a six-thirty cocktail party, peer out the window at 6:25 and you would see him pulling up in his Pontiac, ignoring Marie’s plea that they drive around the block a few times to avoid being the first guests ringing the doorbell. Straight ahead with Vince. He did not fake or seduce or charm his way into celebrity. Nothing flashy about his looks: squat and sturdy build, gap-toothed smile, broad and fleshy nose, thick
-lens glasses, short wavy dark hair, salted with whitish gray, always fresh from the barber’s chair. In dress he was indistinguishable from the State Farm agent on Monroe Street or the cheese broker over at the Bellin Building or the floor manager at H. C. Prange’s Department Store: invariably neat, with his big class ring and wristwatch and tie clasp and button-down short-sleeved white shirt.
The furthest thing from Kennedy cool. He wore hats and galoshes and rain slickers made of translucent plastic, and played golf and gin rummy and cried and screamed and smoked and sweated and watched Tom and Jerry cartoons and laughed so hard that tears squirted out of his eyes like windshield wiper spray. He fell asleep in the recliner chair in his den and snored away until supper.
No way around it, Lombardi was a square. And yet look again and something else emerges. Here he is, on the Wednesday evening of April 5, 1961, making his way through the banquet hall of Tappen’s Restaurant at the corner of Ocean and Voorhies in Sheepshead Bay, guest of honor at a testimonial dinner-dance sponsored by his hometown board of trade. Chris Schenkel, the network sportscaster, has just introduced him. Sellout crowd, the place buzzing. Frank Gifford is there, and the Maras, and Father Tim, and Harry and Matty and all the Izzos. Uncle Pete and Uncle Frank, in black tie and tails, lead him up to the front, this way, this way, past the Kiwanis Club table and the Knights of Columbus table, band playing the Fordham Ram fight song, Lombardi walking with his left fist clenched in triumph, a white carnation shining in the lapel of his dark gray suit, the suggestion of a smile creasing his face—his confirmation day smile, four decades later.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 39
