When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  That was Lombardi’s job, and he took to it with manic intensity. The practice sessions in Santa Barbara were unforgiving. “He was miserable that week, he liked to have killed us,” said Bob Skoronski. “I personally thought he was going to leave the game on the practice field, the only time I ever thought that.” Lombardi was so obsessed that Marie left for Las Vegas for two days and he barely noticed she was gone. (“You mean you flew over the mountains?” he said to her when she got back. “No, dummy,” she replied. “I flew under them.”) No relaxation for his men, no distractions. He raised the fines for curfew violations to record amounts. “Vince made it very clear from our first day out there that we had to win that game and that he didn’t want to make a squeaker out of it,” said Red Cochran, his offensive assistant. Lombardi had nothing to gain. One loss and all was lost, he said. If he lost, it would diminish everything that he had accomplished since he got to Green Bay: the championships of 1961, 1962 and 1965, the NFL title win over Dallas in 1966—if he could not beat the Kansas City Chiefs, what would any of that mean now?

  There were other reasons they had to win. Not just for his legacy and theirs, but for the NFL. Tony Canadeo said Lombardi felt that he was carrying the league on his shoulders. “If we’d have dumped that game, God! Everyone would have blamed the Packers!” Even before they reached Santa Barbara, the pressure had started. “We were getting all kinds of telegrams and telephone calls from all these millionaires who owned teams,” said Ruth McKloskey. “‘Go get it. Go get ’em, Vince!’ And over the league Teletype. Everyone giving advice. Watch this. Watch that. Every time something came in, you could see this grim look on Mr. Lombardi’s face. The NFL was all uptight about it. So he was very upset.” What the owners said to Lombardi, Lombardi said to his players. “He told us this was for a way of life, a game of survival, a test of manhood,” remembered Willie Davis. Lombardi received a letter from Wellington Mara of the Giants that moved him so much he read it to his team. Like other owners, Mara reminded Lombardi how essential it was that the NFL team win, but he ended his note with the ultimate compliment. He was happy, Mara said, that it was Lombardi and his Packers, among all the league’s teams, carrying the NFL standard.

  Before dinner on the eve of the game, Max McGee spotted Ray Scott in the lobby of the Packers’ hotel in Los Angeles. McGee was nearing the end of his career and had not played much that season. He had caught four passes all year, playing behind Boyd Dowler and Carroll Dale. But Dowler had been hurt while scoring a touchdown against Dallas, so McGee paid more attention than he might have to the game films. Scott, the Packers’ regular season play-by-play man, was working the game for CBS. The competition in the television world was as fierce as the one between the leagues. CBS was the NFL network, NBC had the AFL, and both had rights to the game. McGee motioned to Scott to come with him to a corner of the lobby, behind a potted tree. He had a scoop.

  “Scotty,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m gonna get in that game tomorrow, but if I do, they’ll never get old Max out.”

  “What do you mean?” Scott asked.

  “I’ve been studying film and I’ve found me a cornerback. I’m gonna have him for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

  Then McGee went back to his room to see if Paul Hornung wanted to go out on the town with him. The week in Santa Barbara had been frustrating for McGee—not Lombardi’s practices, but the fact that there was nothing to do at night. He was wired and ready for action by the time he reached Los Angeles. Before conspiring with Scott behind the lobby tree, he had met a few stewardesses in the bar, and they had agreed to meet later that night. “Horn,” he said to Hornung back in their room. “I made a little deal. Gonna meet a coupla girls.” But Hornung declined. He knew that he was not likely to play the next day, the nerve in his shoulder was still bothering him, but the notion of paying thousands of dollars to break curfew did not appeal to him. “He had a little more value of money than I did,” McGee explained later. Hawg Hanner, who had retired and was now an assistant coach, was in charge of the curfew bed checks that night. McGee and Hanner had snuck out together many a night in the old days. The night before the Chiefs game, Hanner went to Max and Paul’s room first. They were always checked first on the theory that if they were in, everybody was in.

  Hawg stuck his head in the door and saw McGee under the blankets, covered to his neck. “Okay you guys, you’re here now,” Hanner said.

  “Hawg, you gonna check us again?” McGee asked.

  “Yeah, gol dang, I’m gonna check you guys every hour,” Hanner responded. As he closed the door, he looked back one last time and shook his head no.

  Minutes later McGee was on his way. He returned to the hotel the next morning just as Bart Starr was walking through the lobby to buy a paper and get breakfast. Starr noticed that Max was wearing the same sport coat and shirt he had on the night before. When McGee got back to the room, he asked Hornung, “Am I safe?”

  “No,” said Hornung. “They caught your ass.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “Ah, nothing happened.”

  McGee was so relaxed he napped for an hour and looked refreshed boarding the bus for the stadium. Lombardi was the last man on. He took his seat, front right, and the driver shut the door and started to pull out. “Just a minute,” Lombardi said. “Stop a minute.” He rose to his feet, stepped into the aisle, got the attention of his players and danced a soft shoe. The players started screaming, “Go, Coach, Go!”

  When he sat down, Jack Koeppler asked him, “What the hell was that?”

  “They were too tight,” Lombardi said.

  The game would be watched by the largest television audience ever to view a sports event, more than 65 million people, but in person it did not feel historic. There were 61,946 people inside the Memorial Coliseum, more than enough to fill Lambeau Field, but they seemed lost inside that monstrous stadium. The most expensive ticket was twelve dollars, and still more than a third of the seats went empty. Pete Rozelle saw Ed Sabol in the locker room before the game and handed him fifteen complimentary tickets. Sabol passed them along to one of his cameramen, who went outside with the freebies; he returned later with five tickets that he could not even give away. Steve Sabol took his NFL Films camera out for the coin toss and had the strange sensation that there was a bigger crowd at midfield, with the officials, the two networks, the still photographers, the team captains, than there was in the stands. A band played the national anthem and virtually no one in the audience sang.

  As the game began, McGee and Hornung were sitting on the bench together, not paying attention. They were making plans for an unlikely event—the marriage of the Golden Boy later that month to Patricia Roeder, a Green Bay native now in Hollywood. Max was throwing a bachelor party for him in Las Vegas and then they would come back to Beverly Hills for the wedding—they were getting all of that lined up, just two guys talking on a Sunday afternoon, could have been anywhere, and then a single word pierced their consciousness—“McGEEEEE!”

  Hornung looked at McGee and McGee looked at Hornung, and the first thing that passed through McGee’s mind was that Lombardi was going to fire him right there in front of a full stadium and sixty-some million people watching on television.

  “McGEEE! Get in there!” Lombardi was screaming.

  Dowler had tried to play, but his shoulder was still hurting from the Dallas game. Lombardi needed an end. He could have gone with someone younger, but he trusted McGee in big games. Max was eager, he had watched the films, but still this was unexpected. He didn’t even know where he had put his helmet and grabbed the first one he could find. It belonged to a lineman. “He looked like Ned the third grader going out there,” Hornung said. No passes came his way during the first series, but when he came back to the bench he told Hornung, “If Bart’ll throw me the ball I’ll win the car. They’re not even covering me.” The car was the ’67 silver Corvette convertible that Sport was giving to the game’s most valuable player. He passed the same mes
sage along to Starr. In the next series, he slipped past the cornerback, broke into the clear over the middle and reached back effortlessly to bring in Starr’s slightly errant pass for a thirty-seven-yard touchdown.

  Perhaps there was something to be said for ignoring Lombardi and staying out all night. McGee was among the few Packers playing free and easy. Willie Wood had two interception chances, but was too anxious and dropped them. Ray Nitschke was so keyed up he forgot his assignment on several plays. The Packers were playing hard, but just missing, and took a precarious 14 to 10 lead to the locker room at halftime. Lombardi told his men that they were “too tight.” Nitschke muttered to his defensive pals, Well, who the hell does he think got us so nervous in the first place? In the first half, Lombardi continued, they adjusted to Kansas City. “Now I want you to go out there and make Kansas City adjust to you.”

  That was all it took, not a change in the game plan but a subtle adjustment of attitude: Don’t worry, you’re the best, make them respond, go after them. The key play of the game came early in the third quarter. Third-and-five for the Chiefs near midfield. Quarterback Len Dawson tried his patented rollout pass, but Lee Roy Caffey, the big turkey, was blitzing from outside linebacker and forced Dawson to throw hurriedly toward his tight end, Fred Arbanas. Willie Wood, loose at last, stepped in, made the interception and raced down to the five-yard line. Elijah Pitts scored on the next play, and the game was theirs. McGee came back to the huddle after every play urging Starr to throw to him. He caught seven passes for 138 yards and thought he could have had twice as many if the ball had come his way more often. Winning wasn’t everything to Lombardi this time, winning big was. When it got to 35 to 10 he started feeling good, and when Donny Anderson smacked Kansas City’s boastful defensive back, Fred Williamson, with a churning knee, he felt even better.

  Williamson wore white cleats like Joe Namath and was a trash talker long before the phrase entered the sporting lexicon. He had been boasting all week about his tackling technique, which he claimed had busted open the helmets of thirty opponents over the years. Hence his nickname, The Hammer. And how exactly did The Hammer do it? With “a blow delivered with great velocity perpendicular to the earth’s latitudes. I grab the guy with one arm anywhere from his waist up—preferably around the neck—and slam him to the ground, and boy, it smarts.” During film sessions in preparation for the game, Lombardi concluded that Williamson was the dirtiest player he had seen. “If he hits one of our men in the back or head or throws one dirty elbow, he’s out of there,” Lombardi told his team before the game. And now Anderson had knocked him out accidentally, just by lifting a gangly leg into Williamson’s chin. When he went down, unconscious, the Green Bay bench erupted with noise. Who was it? Who got hit? “That’s The Hammer!” Willie Wood yelled out, “They just nailed The Hammer!” The Packers had made the Chiefs adjust; The Hammer was carried out on a stretcher.

  After the game Steve Sabol sought out Lombardi for a brief interview for NFL Films. The locker room was relatively quiet; no yelping or spraying champagne. After the awards ceremony, Sabol found the coach in his dressing quarters struggling to take off his tie. Long ago, in another locker room, Vinnie Lombardi had been overtaken by joy when the young and outmatched Cadets of Army had stunned Duke at the Polo Grounds, and he had moved triumphantly among his players that afternoon with a pair of scissors, cutting off their sweat-soaked T-shirts, the symbols of hard-won victory. Now, in the moments after winning his fourth pro championship in six years, the symbol was not a player’s sweat-soaked shirt but a coach’s knotted necktie. The tie said everything about Lombardi and the pressure he was under to win. He had cinched a Windsor knot so tight that he could not undo it, no matter how vigorously he yanked and pulled. The tie was his noose and he was hanging himself, until finally, in exasperation, he asked the equipment man for a pair of scissors and cut it loose from his straining neck.

  23

  In Search of Meaning

  FOX RIVER, frozen. The bay, frozen. Christmas and the cheer of a new year, long gone. The glow of a new spring, impossibly far away. Green Bay took on a bleak and empty cast in late January and early February. The setting was colorless and without relief. Gray plumes of paper-mill smoke lingered in a cold gray sky. The subzero temperatures and dirt-encrusted snowbanks were nothing new, but earlier they had provided local atmosphere for the stretch run of the champion Packers. By the end of January football memories had faded and even a Super Bowl season seemed as old and flat as a half-drunk bottle of last night’s Blatz.

  The doldrums of 1967 could have been worse. Lombardi might have stopped coaching, but instead he said that his comments in Tulsa before the Cowboys game were the idle musings of an exhausted man. He would not retire, not with the possibility of winning an unprecedented three straight titles. The Pope’s reign would continue, though there was one new casualty. Red Cochran, the offensive assistant, quit even before the team plane got back from the Super Bowl. Seven seasons with an obsessed boss were enough. “The pressure to win just got to Red,” reported his wife, Pat. “Vince was hard to live with day after day.”

  It is human nature that famous people can become more difficult to live with in direct proportion to their rising public esteem. Lombardi was more celebrated than ever that winter as he continued the transition from winning football coach to national icon. He had become especially popular in the business world, where his sayings on leadership were admired by a growing legion. That crossover process had begun in a small way years earlier when a pharmaceutical company bought several boxes of Run to Daylight! and assigned its sales force to read the book during a convention in Florida. Bill Heinz had noticed then that his co-author was “fascinated by the guys who were big business executives,” and now it amazed Lombardi that they were also fascinated by him. With pride and nervousness, he accepted an invitation from the American Management Association to speak on February 8 at its annual personnel conference in New York. What would he say? In his rhetoric he made it sound easy to transfer football lessons to business, but to friends he confided that he was not all that sure.

  When responding to letters, Lombardi’s habit was to write his answers in a long, looping script on the back of the correspondence and have them typed by his office assistant, Lorraine Keck. But for speeches he used a different process. The ideas for his New York speech came to him as he paced his stadium office and spoke into a dictaphone in rhythmic cadences, slowly spelling each difficult word and instructing Keck on punctuation. Although, as Heinz once told him, Lombardi was virtually useless when it came to recalling vivid anecdotes from his own life, he had a powerful memory for rhetorical phrases. He could remember a speech almost verbatim after reading it twice and deliver it relying on note cards with a few key words.

  Lombardi was not a creative thinker, but he was a methodical gatherer and organizer. For years he had been collecting philosophical thoughts and sayings in paragraph chunks, filing them away like football plays in his brown leather satchel, and for a speech he would take them out and reshape them neatly in his own style, then fit them together one on top of another as if they were little square blocks of granite. Some of his ideas were taken from popular culture, magazine essays and motivational books, but more were mined from the lessons of his own past. They came from Harry’s tattoos and Matty’s scoldings, from the exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the lectures of Father Cox, the halftime orations of Sleepy Jim Crowley, the leadership psychology of Red Reeder, the pronouncements of General MacArthur and the axioms of Colonel Blaik. That was how he constructed his New York speech, and from then on, rather than create something new, he mostly rearranged the same familiar blocks.

  The Great Lakes region below Green Bay was buried in snow that February, record amounts from central Wisconsin down through Chicago and around to Detroit. The paralyzing weather began with what Life described as “a preposterously uncivilized blizzard” that struck Chicago in late January, dumping twenty-four inches in twenty-nine hours, 24 million
tons of snow on the city alone, closing O’Hare International Airport for three days. Another storm arrived on February 2 and yet another four days later, silencing Milwaukee under a foot of snow. The storms then moved east and pounded New York with a double blow, first three inches of snow and a forty-degree temperature drop, then the full force of a blizzard. More than a foot of snow fell overnight and into the morning of February 7, closing La Guardia and Kennedy Airports. The New York Stock Exchange and Macy’s shut down early, and the lobbies of midtown Manhattan hotels overflowed with men in galoshes carrying attaché cases, stranded commuters desperately seeking overnight lodging.

  It was in the midst of this storm that Lombardi made his way from Green Bay to New York to deliver his speech at the personnel conference. With major airports on both ends socked in by snow, he traveled by rail, his first long train ride since his days as an assistant at West Point. He sat in the parlor car most of the journey from Chicago eastward, talking, drinking and playing cards with two judges, Christ Seraphim of Milwaukee and John Pappas of Boston. Pappas had been an owner of Suffolk Downs racetrack and a major importer of Spanish olives. Seraphim, known for dispensing a harsh brand of justice, was a casual acquaintance of Lombardi’s and had dined with him several times before Packers games in Milwaukee. Once, years earlier, as Lombardi’s party sat around a table at a Bayside restaurant, Seraphim and the coach had argued passionately over the roots of crime. The judge blamed crime on the bad character of individuals; Lombardi insisted that society shared responsibility for allowing desperate conditions to exist. Now, according to Seraphim, Lombardi’s views were edging closer to his. As the train rolled east, Seraphim recalled, they bemoaned a society “where people thought they could break the law with impunity.”