Once, at a postgame cocktail party in the basement at Sunset Circle, Lombardi and broadcaster Ray Scott entered into a discussion about the consequences of their busy lives. Scott said he regretted not spending more time with his children, and Lombardi concurred. “You know what, Coach? I was a terrible father,” he told Scott. He tried to be a family man. The speech he gave to his players about loving someone who did not have outward beauty or overwhelming talent—in a sense that theme came from his feelings about Susan. She was a senior in high school that year, already nineteen, barely getting by in school, constantly testing her father’s rules. Once he asked her when she was going to take the SAT’s and she said, “What the heck are those?” Had no clue, and when he told her they were the tests to get into college, she said she had no intention of going to school again after high school. Susan had won several equestrian awards, but was not competitive. Her mother sent her to weight clinics but she kept eating. “She accepted herself for what she was,” said Mary Jo Antil, her classmate at St. Joseph’s. Susan had a yellow Mustang convertible and a fake ID card. On spring weekends she and her friends gathered at Sunset Circle before going out. Lombardi would be in the recliner in the back room, drinking a Budweiser and eating apples and cheese, dozing on and off as he watched television. As Susan was leaving, he would yell, “Susan, where are you going?” She would lie and he would tell her to be home by midnight. Like his players, she always had a curfew.
Sometimes after a few beers at the Prom off Highway 41, she lamented to friends that it was no fun being the daughter of a famous man. If she did not often break curfew, she loved to nip it. “I was nineteen and my friends could stay out till one and I had to be in by midnight, so I took it right down to the last minute. I had it timed from the moment I left wherever I was to getting home by twelve o’clock sharp.” Her dad invariably was asleep by then. Before graduation, Lombardi and Ray Antil took their daughters, Susan and Mary Jo, to the father-daughter banquet at the academy. The girls asked if they could go out on the town afterwards, and their fathers agreed. “They took us to all the bars,” said Mary Jo Antil. “We went to Speed’s on Monroe Street and ended the night at Tropics. It had all these palm trees. I danced with Mr. Lombardi. I can still see him doing the locomotion and the watusi. He was totally out of his realm, and he enjoyed it immensely.”
LOMBARDI’S PACKERS seemed unstoppable again in 1966. They lost only twice by a total of four points. The defense, anchored by big Ron Kostelnik, the underrated left tackle, was dominant. Six touchdowns came on interceptions, two by Bob Jeter, who had combined with Herb Adderley to form the best cornerback duo in the league. Starr had blossomed into the league’s most valuable player, enjoying a career year in which he completed nearly two-thirds of his passes for fourteen touchdowns and only three interceptions. The backfield was not as fearsome as it once had been, but more diverse, with Elijah Pitts scoring ten touchdowns, the sturdy rock between fading stars Taylor and Hornung and the untested Gold Dust twins. There did not seem much to complain about all year, but Lombardi found it—at the most unlikely time. On October 23, the expansion Atlanta Falcons visited Milwaukee and were beaten 56 to 3. It was the sort of game where everyone contributed: the defense scored two touchdowns, Anderson ran a punt back seventy-seven yards, and both he and Grabowski got some playing time in the backfield.
After the game Ken Hartnett, a sports reporter for the AP in Milwaukee, found Jim Taylor at his locker. Taylor seemed upset that Lombardi had not played him more. Hartnett asked Taylor about a rumor that had been going around: Was he playing out his option with the Packers? Yeah, Taylor said, adding that the large salaries paid to Anderson and Grabowski had been an affront to his pride. Hartnett wrote the story. In a different time and place, this would have been no big deal. In Wisconsin during the Lombardi era it was. So big, in fact, that Bud Lea of the Milwaukee Sentinel had had the same story and had been eager to write it, but his editor, Lloyd Larson, instructed him not to. “We don’t want to upset that guy up in Green Bay,” Lea later remembered Larson telling him. Larson was an unabashed cheerleader for the Packers, but there was another reason he was afraid to upset Lombardi. “He accepted a ton of complimentary tickets,” said Chuck Lane, then the team’s junior publicity man. “I’d go down to advance a game and Larson would shake me down. He was one of the biggest ticket brokers in the city of Milwaukee.”
In any event, Lombardi erupted when he saw the story in Monday’s papers and ordered Tom Miller, another of his publicists, to find Taylor pronto and bring him in for an explanation. Taylor was asleep at his apartment above an east side tavern. “Put your clothes on. Coach wants to talk to you,” Miller told him. When Taylor reached the office, Lombardi held up a copy of the paper and bellowed, “Explain this!” Taylor claimed that he had been misquoted.
Lombardi then announced that he was banning Hartnett from all pregame and postgame press conferences. The reporter would not be allowed in the Packers locker room or offices. Wisconsin sportswriters had taken a lot from Lombardi over the years, but this was too much. By that afternoon they had drafted a petition to Commissioner Rozelle protesting the coach’s action. The AP’s Milwaukee bureau chief, Austin Bealmear, called Lombardi and urged him to change his mind. It soon became clear that Lombardi had a rebellion on his hands, and that even he, the Pope of Green Bay, could not do anything he wanted unilaterally. Rozelle called to remind him of the NFL policy: accredited writers could not be banned from clubhouses, dressing rooms or press boxes. Lombardi was forced to retreat. On Wednesday he called Hartnett’s boss and rescinded the order.
The most revealing aspect of Lombardi’s botched effort to punish the press was that he knew Hartnett had written an accurate story. Taylor had not signed his contract and was privately threatening to leave at the end of the year. The truth is what had infuriated Lombardi, and the fact that someone in the press would print it. If his only concern had been the spirit of the team, one could see why he would be distressed that Taylor had raised the salary issue in public. But taking it out on Hartnett revealed a sense of grandiosity. “He didn’t want it publicly known that Taylor wanted out of Green Bay because that challenged his total control,” Bud Lea explained later. “It was going to be Lombardi’s decision. Lombardi tells guys when to quit here. Lombardi tells guys who’s going to play and who isn’t. Nobody makes decisions but him, not Jimmy Taylor or Kenny Hartnett. Everyone had feared the guy up here—and he wanted it to stay that way.”
It was one thing for Lombardi to cut or trade a player when he wanted to, but quite another for someone to try to leave Lombardi, even his assistant coaches. When Bill Austin announced after the 1964 season that he was leaving for the Rams, explaining that his wife could no longer tolerate Wisconsin winters, Lombardi tried to stop him. “You can’t leave,” Lombardi said, and Austin was forced to go to the commissioner’s office to win his freedom.
Lombardi had a need to prevail. Back when Curley Lambeau died in June 1965, the founder of the Packers had been duly honored in his hometown, and Lombardi seethed. When Art Daley decided to switch covers of the team yearbook, replacing a picture of a player with one of Lambeau and Lombardi shaking hands, Lombardi threw a fit. “That’s the worst book you ever put out! Terrible!” he complained. It was the picture with Curly that had bothered him so much. He disliked Lambeau, a colorful philanderer, but more than that he wanted to be regarded separately and better. He refused to talk to Daley for nearly a year after that, and when he finally gave up the grudge, Daley saw him at Oneida Golf and Riding and asked politely, “What the hell was that all about last season?” In a rare acknowledgment of his oversized ego, Lombardi answered, “Let me tell you something. I don’t like to have the spotlight taken away from me and my team.” Even worse than the yearbook picture was the Packer board’s decision to rename the stadium. He was now coaching at Lambeau Field.
The black addiction of the brain had overtaken Lombardi, as it did so often during those middle years in Green Bay. There were
times when every question from the press seemed to be taken as an affront or dismissed as stupid, every photographer, even the team’s official photographer, the skilled and unobtrusive Vernon Biever, was regarded with suspicion as a possible spy (“Get him off the field!”), and the mildest stories were considered seditious scouting reports for the enemy. The always-faithful Lee Remmel was watching practice once and noted that Zeke Bratkowski had thrown two interceptions in successive series. “I took it down thinking it might be a sentence or two in my notes,” Remmel recalled. “And I hear this roar, ‘KEEP THAT CRAP OUT OF THE PAPER!’ Lombardi was yelling in front of hundreds of people. I was stunned. ‘Me?’ ‘Yeah, keep that crap out of the paper. Be original!’ ” When Remmel confronted Lombardi, saying he was especially insulted that the coach considered him unoriginal, he was afraid that he would be barred from the team plane. Lombardi backed down, as he often did when he was directly challenged. The sporting press was in transition during the middle sixties, in many places just starting to assert its independence from teams and coaches.
Even his favored New York reporters riled Lombardi then. Tim Cohane came out for a Bears game and was shocked to see how “paranoid” his old friend had become. “Arthur, how can you ask a stupid question like that!” Cohane heard Lombardi growl at the other Arthur Daley, the one from Fordham and the Times. “That’s a very stupid question, mister,” Lombardi snapped another time at columnist Jerry Izenberg—to which Izenberg responded, “I don’t think you coached such a brilliant game, mister!” The insults went on from there, with Lombardi saying Izenberg didn’t know a goddamn thing about football and Izenberg retorting that Lombardi didn’t know a goddamn thing about journalism—and the Wisconsin writers in the room, according to Bud Lea, “enjoyed the absolute hell out it, somebody finally standing up to Lombardi like that.” But it was a bitter joy. The atmosphere in almost any room that included the coach and members of the press was tense and uneasy.
Not even paperboys were immune from Lombardi’s intimidation. Mike Gourlie, who rode his bike around Allouez with a cloth bag over his shoulder, delivering the Milwaukee Journal, spent two years rehearsing an admiring speech he would give if Lombardi ever answered the door at Sunset Circle when he was collecting. For two years it was always Marie who gave him a generous quarter tip. Finally, one night he knocked and there was the Pope himself, and Gourlie looked at him and “nothing would come out.” Lombardi shot him an angry look and growled, “Spit it out, boy!” No speech. “Collecting, sir.” Gourlie forgot everything else he was going to say.
The pressure of success seemed to weaken Lombardi’s health as the 1966 season progressed. He had given up smoking three years earlier, but he still suffered occasional dizzy spells and found himself nearly blacking out in the locker room a few times. He had always napped in the evening; now he needed another in the early afternoon. Every workday at quarter to one, after checking his mail, he closed the door to his office and settled on the green leather couch. “No sooner would his head hit the davenport than he was asleep,” according to Ruth McKloskey. She was under strict instructions to block all calls, putting off Pete Rozelle and Art Modell if need be. At exactly quarter to two, she would ring him from her office and say, “Wake-up call. Time to get up, Mr. Lombardi.”
He struggled with diarrhea and constipation. Dr. Eugene Brusky, who conducted a physical on Lombardi every year, wanted to do a proctoscopic exam, but Lombardi said no, asserting that there was no way he would let anyone “stick that goddamn thing up my ass.” He had several confidential talks with Father Burke, the Norbertine priest who had befriended him at St. Norbert. Once, “in the sanctity of the chapel,” Burke later recalled, the coach “confided that something bothered him a lot in his stomach.” Lombardi consumed bottles of antacid medicine to try to ease the churning. What Burke noticed, more than physical pain, was mental anguish. “The pressure for constant wins had gnawed on his nerves. He wanted to win, it is true, but he was disturbed over the tactics he had to use to effect his record. He told me quite confidentially that he knew he would have to give up coaching to get away from the tensions that plagued him.”
Lombardi broached the subject in public at the end of the regular season. After winning the Western Conference, the Packers left for Tulsa for a week of training in preparation for the NFL Championship Game. The title match was in Dallas against the Cowboys, who had won the Eastern Conference in their sixth year under Coach Tom Landry. For more than three decades, the NFL title game had been the ultimate in pro football. But this year it had a penultimate feel. If Lombardi’s team beat Dallas, there would be one more game. The NFL and AFL had ended their war and agreed to a gradual merger. The symbol of football peace would be a first-ever playoff between the two leagues for the world championship.
“LAST GO FOR LOMBARDI?” asked a headline in the Dallas Times-Herald five days before the NFL title game. In an interview with sportswriter Steve Perkins on the Tulsa practice field, the coach intimated that the answer might be yes. “Lombardi himself brought the subject of retirement up when he was told of a remark by linebacker Ray Nitschke, who said that this game against the Cowboys was the ‘biggest’ for Lombardi since he came to Green Bay,” Perkins wrote. Lombardi “instinctively bristled at the presumption of a player deciding what was ‘biggest’ for his coach.” When Perkins explained that Nitschke meant this was the first NFL title game where the winner went on to something more, Lombardi relaxed somewhat. “Oh, well. That’s very true,” he said. “And another thing that makes it a big one is that it could be my last one.” Why would he quit now? “The job has become too much to handle. I think it’s time I gave somebody else a chance. There used to be an offseason. For that matter, there used to be some time off during the season. I remember when I was in college I used to drop in on the Giants meetings. They had one reel of film and they’d show it to the team one time, and that was it.”
Perhaps Lombardi wanted to relax but could not bring himself to, just as he sometimes longed to be more like his carefree playboys, Hornung and McGee. But more likely his concern was that the nature of his job had changed. Once, it was hard for him to distinguish between work and play; they fit together like the tattoos etched into his father’s knuckles. Now it was WORK on one hand and more WORK on the other. This week he had to work harder than ever. It would be painful for him to lose to Landry. Even when they were on the same side, as the top assistants for Jim Lee Howell in New York, they had been competitors—the explosive Vinnie’s offense against cool Tom’s defense. Lombardi had set himself apart in the years since, but people were starting to write about Landry as the mind of a new age. Landry and his multiple offense and flex defense, making football seem robotic and complicated—enough to goad Lombardi into devising a new offense for one game, which is just what he did in shockingly cold Tulsa that week.
Lombardi’s schemes worked well enough when it counted in Dallas. On the first play from scrimmage, Elijah Pitts popped through a hole in the flex for thirty-four yards, and a few plays later Starr connected with him for a seventeen-yard touchdown. Pitts had the same nose for the goal line as his mentor, Hornung, who had been out since the second Bears game, his shoulder inflamed again by a hit from Doug Buffone. On the next kickoff, Mel Renfro fumbled and Jim Grabowski scooped up the ball and galloped in for another score. “My feet never touched the ground after I reached the end zone,” Grabowski said later. “I floated back to the sidelines.” Starr threw four touchdown passes before the day was over and Lombardi’s offense had thirty-four points, but the game was in doubt until the last play.
Tom Brown, the strong safety, was having as much trouble with Cowboys tight end Frank Clarke as he once had with the curveball during his cup of coffee with the Washington Senators. In the fourth quarter, with the Packers leading 34 to 20, Clarke ran a pattern straight at Brown, turned him the wrong way and broke clear to catch a sixty-eight-yard touchdown pass from Don Meredith. Dallas got the ball back in the final minutes and Clarke “ran th
e same damn play to beat me again,” Brown recalled. This time Brown grabbed Clarke as he was going by, and the referee called interference. Ball on the Packers two, a touchdown to tie, and it seemed almost inevitable. But an offensive lineman moved before the snap, a critical penalty that cost the Cowboys five yards. On fourth down, Meredith tried to roll right, and there was big Dave Robinson hunting him down, and Meredith in desperation tossed the ball high and gentle into the end zone—and there was the prayerful Tom Brown, waiting for redemption. “God, yeah,” he said to himself as he cradled the ball.
In the locker room after the game, Dave Robinson was sitting on his stool, receiving congratulations from teammates. Lombardi came by and stared at him, unsmiling. Later, in private, Lombardi would hug Robbie and praise him for the game-winning play, but now he wanted to make another point. “You weren’t supposed to be blitzing,” he growled, and walked away, thinking already about more WORK—now he had to make sure he didn’t lose it all to the Kansas City Chiefs.
THE GAME was a lowercase phenomenon that first year at the Los Angeles Coliseum—super bowl, no Roman numerals attached. Lamar Hunt, owner of the Chiefs, took the name from his grandson’s toy, a high-bouncing super ball. The official name on the game programs was World Championship Game AFL vs. NFL. The Packers went to Santa Barbara for a week of training (the superstitious Lombardi considered it good luck to stay in cities named for saints) and were of two minds about how seriously to take the Chiefs. Much of what they saw on film made them dismissive of the other league. Sherman Plunkett, an offensive tackle for the New York Jets, his prodigious gut sprawling over his belt, became their symbol of the sloppy AFL. Every time he appeared on film, Henry Jordan shouted, “Hey, roll that back! Look at Plunkett!” and the Packers all laughed. Plunkett did not play for the Chiefs, of course, but the films also revealed plenty of ways to exploit Kansas City on offense and defense. Particularly noticeable was the way their linebackers would stay near the line of scrimmage and not drop back into pass defense. “We had them checked,” said Willie Wood. “It was just a matter of how emotionally involved we were gonna get.”
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