When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  She was confronting the same emotion that her husband had been facing in a very different realm: the unbearable pain of coming in second, again.

  21

  Winning Isn’t Everything

  THE COMPULSION TO WIN, Bertolt Brecht once wrote, is “the black addiction of the brain.” The Marxist playwright and the Jesuit football coach were philosophical opposites, but on this matter they were not far apart, and there is no doubt that Lombardi had the addiction by 1965. After coming in second two years in a row, he vowed never to lose again, and redoubled his efforts to assure that he would not. He papered the locker room walls with motivational aphorisms, all variations on the themes of competition and success. One of those maxims later came to be regarded as the essence of his philosophy: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

  What exactly he meant by that, indeed whether he believed it or even said it, has been a matter of debate ever since. His critics blamed Lombardi for promoting a win-at-all-cost competitive pathology that led inevitably to Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters at the Committee to Re-elect the President, whose 1972 headquarters featured a sign that read “Winning in Politics Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing.” Lombardi’s supporters insisted through the years that he was misinterpreted. What he said, or meant to say, they claimed, was that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing worth striving for, or winning isn’t everything, but making the effort to win is.

  His philosophy of winning was more complex and contradictory than either side would allow. The precise words—“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”—were indisputably part of the Lombardi phrase book and did appear in bold letters once on the locker room wall, but to say that he believed them is true yet meaningless out of context. Every year Lombardi told his players that professional football was a cruel business. His job and theirs, he would say, depended on only one thing, winning, and the only way to win was to accept nothing less. To that extent, his statement was an articulation of the obvious, the reality faced by any professional athlete or coach, and not necessarily relevant in a broader sense. But to say that winning was merely a practical necessity for Lombardi would be misleading. He considered it a matter of personal as well as national definition—“the American zeal,” he once called it, “that is to be first in what we do and to win, to win, to win.” He was obsessed with winning, and that obsession led to unfortunate imbalances in other aspects of his life.

  Still, there was a crucial distinction in his philosophy between paying the price to win and winning at any price. He did not believe in cheating to win, and he showed no interest in winning the wrong way, without heart, brains and sportsmanship. Although he never shied away from the violence of the game, insisting that football was “not a contact sport, but a collision sport,” he did not encourage dirty play. “Piling on, cheap shots, clotheslining people—that wasn’t our style of play,” said Tom Brown, the former baseball player who took over as strong safety in the mid-sixties. When one of Lombardi’s defensive backs tripped a receiver in frustration, he immediately yanked him from the game, even though the referees did not see the violation. Winning in and of itself was not enough for him. His players knew that he was more likely to drive them mercilessly after they had played sloppily but won than when they had played hard but lost.

  “After games, Henry Jordan would always get this look on his face and say, ‘Who won?’—because we always won but you wouldn’t know it from Vince,” said Red Cochran. “Vince would be chewing everybody out. He would be most like what everyone probably thought of Lombardi—a tyrant, more volatile—after a close win where we screwed up than any other time.” Carroll Dale, a receiver who came to the Packers in 1965 from Los Angeles, said that it was “human nature, when you win, to overlook mistakes.” But Lombardi was different. “He would not overlook them. He would correct them, immediately. Winning wasn’t everything for him, he wanted excellence. There’s a difference.” For years afterwards, his players spoke with amazement at the recollection of Lombardi’s behavior after an exhibition game they had played in Jacksonville against St. Louis. The Packers thoroughly whipped the Cardinals that day, 41 to 14. After the final gun, Bob Skoronski was strolling casually back to the dressing room, talking to some friends who had come down for the game. “Suddenly the door opened and an assistant coach grabbed me and said, ‘You better get in here.’ And I walked in—and there was Coach Lombardi standing on a chair, screaming at the top of his lungs. I thought I was in the wrong locker room. I thought we had won.” He was furious with the way they had played in the second half. Winning was not enough.

  The signature phrase itself—“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”—was not coined by Lombardi, and in fact the first time it was recorded for posterity, it was uttered not by Lombardi or by any other football coach but by an eleven-year-old actress. Its etymology goes back decades before the philosopher coach reached his rhetorical apogee in Green Bay in the mid-1960s, but the best place to start is in Hollywood in 1953 with the screenwriter Melville Shavelson. Warner Brothers had optioned a piece of short fiction from the Saturday Evening Post about a football coach at a small Catholic college, and recruited Shavelson to write the screenplay, which he agreed to do after also being made producer. He sent the script to John Wayne, who surprised everyone by taking the starring role, even though, as Shavelson said, the football coach “didn’t ride a horse or shoot a gun.”

  The script became the movie Trouble Along the Way, which was a box office flop and quickly assigned to the dustiest bins of celluloid obscurity, yet takes on a rich subtext when viewed in parallel with the life and mythology of Vince Lombardi. The story involves a fictional college in New York named St. Anthony’s, which bears a certain resemblance to Fordham. The school has fallen into debt and is to be closed by the diocese, but the old rector, Father Burke, is determined to save it. His scheme to stay afloat is to create a big-time football team that can draw sellout crowds at the Polo Grounds. In search of someone to resurrect the program, he finds Steve Williams, the John Wayne character, a winning coach with a checkered past who has lost jobs in several conferences already. Steve also happens to be a down-on-his-luck father. He lives above a pool hall with his tomboy daughter, Carol, who calls him Steve and knows how to cure his hangovers and loves football as much as he does. Her mother, Steve’s ex-wife, has run off with a Manhattan dandy. Miss Singleton, a social worker played by Donna Reed, comes in to examine the home life of young Carol, and is almost deceived by the manipulative ex-wife into believing that Steve should lose parental rights, but eventually falls in love with him despite his outrageously sexist behavior, and also becomes best pals with his daughter.

  Steve in the meantime goes about the business of bringing winning football to St. Anthony’s. At first he seems like no one more than Vince Lombardi when he replaced the hapless Scooter McLean in Green Bay. “We gotta get back to fundamentals,” Steve says, swaggering cockily around the practice field in sweatpants and a letter jacket, exhorting his players to hit him, teaching them by example how to block and tackle. But soon enough he is doing whatever it takes to win. He recruits a quarterback from the Canadian professional league, brings in more ringers by promising them a share of concession and gate receipts, and holds workouts all summer in violation of collegiate rules. His schemes, as Shavelson lets them unfold, come in the context of society’s larger hypocrisy. Why shouldn’t his players get the money instead of some rich alumni? Steve asks at one point. He exacts free equipment from a sporting goods store by reminding the salesman of kickbacks he had taken in the past, and forces the Polo Grounds to book St. Anthony’s by threatening to organize a religious protest against the professional contests held there every Sunday.

  Before the opening game of the year, Steve’s ringers show up at mass wearing their letter jackets and pray for victory. The crowd at the Polo Grounds is standing room only. Father Burke is there amidst a covey of giddy religious fathers who sudden
ly worship football. Miss Singleton and Carol arrive at halftime after escaping a hideous society party for rich young people at Carol’s mother’s penthouse suite, a phony event that contrasts sharply with the vigor of football. And a huge upset is in the offing. St. Anthony’s is ahead 13 to 0. Carol chomps on a hot dog, delighted with her father’s success. But the virtuous social worker seems concerned. She has learned about Steve’s illegal recruiting methods.

  Carol wonders why she isn’t cheering.

  “I’m not getting paid,” Miss Singleton says. Then she asks, “Is winning so important?”

  And from the mouth of an eleven-year-old girl comes the immortal answer. “Listen,” she responds. “Like Steve says, ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!’ ”

  In the end, of course, it is neither everything nor the only thing. Father Burke learns about Steve’s underhanded methods and temporarily suspends the football program. Then he decides that Steve was just doing what he knew how to do, and that it was his own desperation to save the school that led to trouble. He brings Steve back on better terms, and the final scene shows Steve, Miss Singleton and Carol, hand in hand, leaving church.

  The drama behind the scenes surpassed anything on the set. Wayne, the symbol of American manhood, was cheating on his second wife, and had brought his latest lover, Pilar, who would later become his third wife, to Hollywood to be with him during the filming. His second wife had hired a detective, however, so Wayne occasionally disappeared, once for a week, trying to lose the gumshoe’s tail. When he was on the set, he demanded that in every scene with Donna Reed she had to make a play for him. Machismo wasn’t everything, it was the only thing. This would have ruined the Miss Singleton character, so Shavelson pretended to adhere to Wayne’s wishes, then reshot many of the scenes without him to restore them to their original intent. It was from this milieu of Hollywood mythology and deceit that Lombardi’s trademark phrase arose.

  Shavelson had only a passing knowledge of football when he wrote the script. Decades earlier he had covered the sport one year for the student newspaper at Cornell, from which he had graduated in 1937, making him a contemporary of Lombardi, who was playing guard at Fordham during that same era. In contrast to the formidable Fordham team of the Seven Blocks of Granite, Cornell stumbled through the season without winning a game. But Shavelson saw enough to develop what he later called “a troubled take” on football, aware that “a helluva lot of players on other teams were too big and driving big cars and something was wrong.” The coach at Cornell then was Gil Dobie, known as Gloomy Gil, who once warned Shavelson never to bet on college football games because of their unpredictability—“The outcome depends on whether the quarterback got laid last night.” As to the famous phrase, Shavelson said that it came from his Hollywood agent, who also happened to represent the colorful UCLA football coach Henry “Red” Sanders. “The agent quoted me the line once and said that he had heard Sanders say it,” Shavelson recalled. “That’s how it got in the script.”

  If Red Sanders coined the phrase, as it appears he did, it would be appropriate. Before heading for UCLA and the West Coast in 1949, Sanders had been at Vanderbilt. He was the best friend of the most revered sportswriter in Nashville, Fred Russell of the Nashville Banner, and by extension also close to Russell’s mentor, Grantland Rice, who had gone on from Vanderbilt and Nashville to become the great mythmaker of sports in New York. Herb Rich, who played for Sanders at Vanderbilt and for Lombardi in New York, said they were equally intimidating. Sanders, he said, “was one of those coaches who, if he walked by, you would start jogging in place, just to show that you were active. He had a cutting tongue, and we feared him.” His cutting tongue meant something different to the press. He was known for his sardonic wit and frequent use of sayings. Sometimes he would throw out a series of clichés just to exasperate the sportswriters. “With malice aforethought,” Russell once wrote, Sanders would answer questions “with such moth-eaten phrases as ‘I hope Dame Fortune is with us.’… Then, after he’s had his fun, Red will talk so articulately and with such a sense of what is news that he practically writes the lead paragraph.”

  According to Russell, who continued writing his column into his nineties in the late 1990s, Sanders first uttered the winning isn’t everything phrase long before he reached UCLA, indeed before he began at Vanderbilt. “I remember hearing him saying it back in the mid-1930s when he was coaching at the Columbia Military Academy,” Russell recalled. It is likely that Sanders meant it literally, yet with a touch of sarcasm. Three years after Sanders passed the phrase along to his agent and his agent passed it along to Melville Shavelson, Sanders got in trouble at UCLA for recruiting violations. He gave a speech at a prison shortly thereafter to a group of lifers, and began by saying, “Men, we’ve all got our problems. You all are mighty lucky you’re not in the Pacific Coast Conference.”

  How did the saying get from Sanders to Hollywood to Lombardi? It is possible that Lombardi watched Trouble Along the Way in New York during his West Point years. His friends said that he would seek out any movie that had football in it, and that he liked John Wayne. But even if he saw the movie, the phrase might not have stuck. Although his dream in 1953, when the movie came out, was to revive a dormant football program at a small Catholic college, Fordham, he would have taken issue with the dark interpretation of the movie, and thus the context of the phrase. Like most aphorisms, it seems to have found its way gradually and ineluctably into the national consciousness. Before Lombardi put it on his locker room wall, it had already appeared in the yearbook of the 1961 San Diego Chargers, then coached by Sid Gillman, who decades earlier had preceded Lombardi as Colonel Blaik’s line coach back when MacArthur was declaring that there was no substitute for victory. Perhaps the lineage traces back through West Point. “Winning isn’t everything to Coach Sid Gillman,” the Chargers yearbook biography began. “It’s the only thing.”

  22

  It’s the Only Thing

  WHADAYA THINK OF THAT, ya big fat wop!” Alex Karras shouted at Lombardi as he ran off the field at halftime of the Packers game in Detroit on October 17, 1965, with the Lions ahead by eighteen points. Karras appeared to love nothing more than beating Green Bay and Lombardi. For years the Packers had been the better team, but their games were always waged with ferocity by players as familiar with one another as brothers on opposite sides of a civil war. When Detroit had beaten Green Bay on Thanksgiving Day 1962, handing the Packers their only loss of that season, the victory nearly validated the Lions’ ultimately disappointing year, and that single defeat was so distasteful in Green Bay that not even the championship win over the Giants completely erased it.

  Now the Packers seemed on a roll again. They had won their first four games, two of critical importance over the Colts and Bears, teams that had won the conference title the previous two years. The feeling was that this team did not have the flair of the championship years, but had a more aggressive defense. In each of the first two games, Herb Adderley had returned interceptions for touchdowns, and linebacker Lee Roy Caffey, the “big turkey,” as Lombardi called him, who came over in the Ringo trade, scored on an interception in the third. But at halftime at Detroit, Karras had reason to roar. His Lions were ahead, 21 to 3. They had won three of their first four games, and would be tied with Green Bay if they held the lead that afternoon. The season could turn right there.

  Lombardi’s players were furious as they clattered into the dressing room at halftime. Surprisingly, they were more upset than their coach. Rather than vent his frustration on his players, Lombardi stepped atop a foot locker and delivered an oration on pride and loyalty. “Win, lose or draw, you are my football team,” he said in closing. “You are the Green Bay Packehs. And you have your pride!” Pat Peppler, the personnel man, found himself misting up, and realized that he was not alone. The second half was no contest: Bart Starr at his best, three long touchdown passes and a four-yard run for another score, and the Packers had their belated response to
the loudmouthed Karras, winning 31 to 21.

  The fact that Alex Karras was the one who had taunted Lombardi had a special meaning for the Green Bay players. They knew the Detroit tackle with the sort of intimacy that comes with playing against someone twice a year for half a decade and studying him on film for countless hours. At times Karras seemed like the best defensive lineman ever, but in films they noticed that he might play hard for one down, then rest for three. His coach could not get him to play consistently, every snap. In that sense, Karras reminded the Packers players of the edge they had over other teams. It was not that they were of superior character, but that they were pushed to overcome human nature in a way that Karras was not.

  Most professional football players, explained Tom Brown, the Packers safety, “are basically lazy guys. We want to take the easy way out. We are so far superior. We’ve always been better. As nine-year-olds. Ten-year-olds. We were always the best athletes on the field. We probably got preferential treatment from youth coaches and all the way up. So we never really had to give one hundred percent effort. Because if we gave seventy-five percent we were better than all the other kids.” If Karras had played for Green Bay, Brown and his teammates were convinced, he would have been unstoppable. Lombardi would have found a way to bring out that unused 25 percent.

  The comeback against Karras and the Lions marked the beginning of another amazing run for Lombardi and Green Bay. No more second place. Other teams could go to the Shit Bowl. His favorite players grew creaky and slower, some were disabled and some left. The culture of the 1960s changed around him, challenging him and everything he believed in. Winning, the black addiction of the brain, left him depleted, mentally and physically, and his disposition became increasingly edgy. His distrusting relationship with the press devolved into occasional paranoia. The stakes seemed to increase exponentially, so that any slip threatened to erase all that he had already accomplished. Yet he persevered and won and won and won—and that made all the difference. The early championships of 1961 and 1962 had a sweet innocence that could not be duplicated, but it was in 1965 that Lombardi and his Packers began separating from the rest, lifting the team to a singular place in NFL history and turning the philosopher coach into a figure who transcended his sport.