When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  If Public Facilities made Lombardi rich, it was not at the center of his new pursuit of money and power. Year by year, as more teams approached him with lucrative offers, he became more certain about what he wanted. His ideal situation would be to have his money and power in the same place, as part-owner of a professional football team, and he pursued that goal in a frenzied, if oddly diffuse, manner.

  He had tried to persuade the Packers executive board to allow him part-ownership of the Packers, but Olejniczak and the team lawyer, Fred Trowbridge Sr., rejected his private queries on that subject. They and the other wealthy board members owned no more than single shares themselves, and they insisted that the club’s nonprofit status and its unique relationship to the people of Green Bay precluded private accumulation of stock. Not even the Pope could rewrite the bylaws of the Packers. For four years he had been affiliated with a syndicate that had made sporadic and underfinanced efforts to buy a professional team. Red Blaik was part of the group, while the money came from New Jersey financiers led by Joseph McCrane Jr., a former racetrack operator, who had played football at West Point. The syndicate twice made overtures to the Jets and Eagles, with no results.

  Lombardi had been invited to join the Jets management independent of that syndicate, but backed away in part because of Wellington Mara’s distaste for any such deal. The only veto power Mara had was the result of his longtime friendship with Lombardi, and he gently used it, saying he did not want a charismatic New York-born Italian-American owning and coaching his crosstown rivals. Mara remained interested in bringing Lombardi back to coach the Giants, but was not willing to give him part-ownership. Even as all these discussions were going on, Lombardi was being courted by a trucking magnate who wanted to buy the Philadelphia Eagles, and he had secretly signed on with a partnership making a bid for the San Francisco 49ers. McCrane was on the edge of that group, though Blaik was not. The lead figure now was R. B. “Bud” Levitas, president of Juillard Inc., a wholesale liquor distributor in northern California. In an April 22, 1968, letter to Pete Rozelle, marked “personal and confidential,” Levitas informed the commissioner of his and Lombardi’s intentions, which seemed close to being realized.

  “Dear Pete,” he wrote. “I know you are aware of the fact that Vince Lombardi and I have had some conversations with Marshall Leahy and the two major owners of the San Francisco 49ers. We have come to a tentative understanding with a couple of qualifications, one of which, of course, is approval of any transaction by the League.” Levitas said his entity would buy 51 percent of the 49ers, and that he and Lombardi would be the major stock holders. There “possibly could be one, or at the most 2 additional minor stockholders”—identified as Joe McCrane and Don Pritzker, who ran the Hyatt Hotel chain. “If this transaction is finalized, which I sincerely hope it is,” Levitas concluded, “Vince Lombardi will be the Chief Executive Officer of the new corporation and would be empowered to act and speak for the 49ers in all matters.”

  The bartering in San Francisco continued all year, and Levitas made frequent visits to Wisconsin without a word leaking to the press. It finally fell apart after the rejection of a final $13 million offer. There was, in the end, perhaps one small benefit for Lombardi—from his friendship with Pritzker he later arranged a postgraduation job for his young son-in-law, Paul Bickham, with the Hyatt chain in Chicago.

  SIDES WERE being taken that spring, players versus owners, and the very idea troubled Lombardi. The only side he believed in was the Packers side, the side that united him, his coaches and his players. But a dozen years after its inception in 1956, the National Football League Players Association had awakened from a long somnolence, its leaders insisting that the players deserved a larger proportion of the wealth in Pete Rozelle’s rich new world of pro football. They presented the owners with a list of demands and insisted on real, not sham negotiations. In the old days, talks between players and owners were so cordial that each player representative sat side by side with his owner. Now players sat on one side of the table, owners on the other.

  Lombardi was assigned to the management negotiating team, joining Wellington Mara of the Giants, Rankin Smith of the Falcons, and Mugsy Halas of the Bears. On the players’ side of the table were Dave Robinson of the Packers, John Gordy of the Lions, Ernie Green of the Browns, Jim Marshall of the Vikings, Dick Butkus of the Bears, Bob Vogel of the Colts, and their Chicago lawyers, Dan Shulman and his partner Bernie Baum, with help from Baum’s brother, Robert.

  The owners had grown accustomed to dominating the meetings and assumed a superior posture from the start again this time, an attitude that infuriated Shulman. At the first session, Lombardi addressed his questions to the players in a way that made Shulman believe that he was trying to drive a wedge between the players and their lawyers. It was a variation, in this different setting, of the friendly but distracting head rubs Lombardi would give Bob Skoronski during their contract talks.

  “Mr. Lombardi,” Shulman said, trying to change the atmosphere, “any questions you have should be addressed to me.”

  This relatively mild statement struck a raw nerve in Lombardi. How dare someone tell him not to talk to the players! He turned on Shulman and responded, “You’ll get down on your belly and crawl in the gutter before I’ll address anything to you!”

  In late May, during a negotiating session at the Palmer House in Chicago, Shulman and Baum decided that Lombardi and the owners were still pushing the players around too much. They took the players to an anteroom for a caucus, seeking to stiffen their resolve. “Go in there and tell them to go fuck themselves,” Shulman instructed John Gordy, the union president. “Use some swear words. Shake them up.” When they returned to the table, Gordy started the attack, or tried to. “We’ve got to, we’ve got to get these …” he stammered. “We’ve got to get these negotiations … these”—finally, it burst loose—“these FUCKING negotiations off center.”

  “Mister, I don’t like that language, and you could never play for me if you talked like that,” Lombardi thundered.

  Was Lombardi going to get the dominant position again? Shulman was determined not to let it happen. He rose from his chair, leaned his thin, five-eight frame across the table toward Lombardi and said, “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! Vince, the word is FUCK!”

  Lombardi, seemingly enraged, bounded from his chair and moved toward Shulman, as men on both sides scrambled to hold them back and prevent a brawl.

  “Well,” Mara said, smiling, as Lombardi settled down. “I see both teams were up for the game today.”

  The owners then called a caucus. As Lombardi rose from his chair, he caught the eye of Robert Baum—and winked. It was a sign that he was in full control and knew exactly what he was doing. “With Vince you had to show that you were not afraid of him,” Bernie Baum explained later. “That’s why we were goosing the players. He was an amazing guy. Very tough. Very gruff. But if you showed him you weren’t afraid, he would respect you. He loved football players.”

  Along with salary and pension concerns, the labor talks had a racial subtheme that spring in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The union pushed for a nondiscrimination clause in the contract, asserting that many teams were purposely drafting poor black players from the South and paying them less than anyone else. Lombardi opposed the nondiscrimination clause, saying it implied that there was a race problem in the league. He was so certain of his own fair treatment of athletes that it blinded him to the larger situation. Dave Robinson was among three black players Lombardi had drafted in the first round and paid hefty salaries. “We don’t have a problem, do we, Robby?” he asked. He was certain that Robinson would say no, but instead the linebacker offered a measured response that decades later proved true: “Coach, we don’t have a problem, but we’re winning. If we weren’t winning, very possibly we could have a problem.”

  The negotiations sputtered through May and June, and as July approached a strike seemed inevitable. Lombardi’s frustration turned aw
ay from the players and toward his fellow owners. In Baum’s opinion “he became the heart of the negotiations.” At a session at a country club in Detroit, Lombardi called a caucus of his management team and laced into them, urging them to “start negotiating and stop playing games.” When management threatened to bring replacement players, or scabs, in for the season, Lombardi balked. Wellington Mara noticed that just as Lombardi hated the union getting between him and his players, he also felt resentful when the owners tried to disrupt his sense of team. “You can do what you want, but I’m not having scabs on my team,” he said. “I spent nine years making a unit in Green Bay. They’re either going to all play together or all walk together.” The owners backed down, instead voting to lock out the veterans and open training camp to rookies and free agents until the strike was settled.

  On July 9 the negotiations were close to being resolved, but stalled over a pension plan. Shulman and Baum realized that they had nearly everything they wanted, but felt that a short strike would help emphasize the point that “we’d not take it in the future,” as Baum later described their reasoning. When the players announced their intentions to strike, the owners responded with a lockout, and veteran players who tried to report to camps were barred. Bart Starr and several Green Bay veterans showed up at the Packers training fields on July 10, but were intercepted by Lombardi, who politely asked them to leave. “I’m very unhappy about this,” Lombardi said. “I didn’t put thirty years into this business to have it come to this. But I always have hope.” The next day, as Starr and his teammates practiced at a high school in Green Bay, Lombardi left for New York and another round of negotiations.

  An agreement was finally reached on the evening of July 14 after a five-hour session at the Waldorf-Astoria. The players won a substantial increase in their pension benefits, retroactive to 1959, a boost in major medical insurance, as well as increases in minimum salaries and exhibition game pay. The new minimum salary would seem impossibly modest decades later, but it was a victory for the players then. Second-year players were assured of at least …12,000, minus exhibition pay. When the deal was struck, Lombardi came up behind John Gordy and Dave Robinson and patted them on the back. “Good job,” he said. The assumption in Green Bay was that Robinson might as well forget trying to get a raise from his boss after sitting across the table from him all spring and summer. Not so, according to Robinson. “I had less trouble negotiating a raise from Lombardi that year than any of the previous years. All he said was, ‘No hard feelings.’ Our negotiations lasted about half an hour.”

  IN THE OLD DAYS, when he was driving his Packers to five championships, Lombardi at times could seem callous, obsessed, self-inflated, but now the people around him almost longed for any of those qualities in place of what they encountered. Training camp opened, Phil Bengtson was in charge, and Lombardi seemed miserable, lifeless, confused, bored. For the first day or two, he lurked around the edges of the field, standing alone, rubbing the rosary beads in his pocket or sitting on the blocking dummies, watching everything but saying nothing, restraining his urge to bark out directions. “For him to be quiet on a football field was just unheard of,” said Chuck Lane. “But he had such discipline that he wouldn’t step in.” Soon the strain of silence became too much, and he stopped attending practice—and it was as though his life had lost its meaning.

  His routine started the same way each morning: St. Willebrord for early mass, in the office before nine, but then it quickly fell apart. The staff had everything under control—contracts, stadium accounts, tickets, vendors, scouting reports, press releases—and he was just getting in the way. In almost the tone of a volunteer intern, he would ask Ruth McKloskey what she thought he should do. He tried to discipline himself to sit down at his desk and push papers, but inevitably bounced up and paced the room. He had often complained about not having enough time; now he had a vast ocean of it. He slipped over to Oneida to golf in the early afternoons, added more speaking engagements to take him out of town, attended hearings and business meetings with Dave Carley, continued his private maneuverings with the 49ers, took a bit part in the movie version of George Plimpton’s Paper Lion (“Have you tried the AFL?” he ad-libbed to Alan Alda, who played Plimpton, turning him down for a tryout with the Packers), signed up to star in Second Effort, a best-selling promotional film for salesmen, as well as a less successful instructional film for football coaches. None of it was enough. “He didn’t know what to do with himself,” said his daughter, Susan. “He started to come home early. He was driving my mother nuts. She had handled all the household things, and now he was around questioning her.”

  The players at first expressed relief about the new regime. Bengtson was tall, calm, gentle, laconic, the opposite of Lombardi. Hawg Hanner, his defensive assistant, had advised him to run the players to the point of exhaustion during the first week, reminding them that the Lombardi tradition still lived, but Bengtson declined, saying he had to establish his own style. Where Lombardi conducted his practices with metronomic discipline, Bengtson was easily distracted and might pass the whole day dragging on his Camels and discussing the intricacies of a zone defense. The players called him Phil, an informality they rarely dared with Coach Lombardi. Willie Wood sat on his helmet one morning at camp and joked that he could never do that when the Old Man was around. Bob Skoronski, like most of his teammates, considered Bengtson “just a fantastic guy.” And yet by the second week of camp, Skoronski said, it was obvious that Bengtson “didn’t have a chance in hell of succeeding.”

  Under Lombardi, the players were motivated, instructed in philosophy, always on the edge between love and hate. Bengtson’s team meetings were boring. There was no inflection in his voice and no message in his speech. “You would go to sleep. He was a monotone,” said Skoronski. “And you knew if you didn’t play well it wasn’t a threat on your life as it was with Lombardi.” While the simplest detail seemed endowed by Lombardi with a grander purpose, the players could see no larger scheme in Bengtson’s details and dismissed them as trivial. “He was interested in how we lined up for the national anthem before the game,” recalled Chuck Mercein. “Lombardi would get us ready to go through a wall, and this guy would be telling you to make sure to put your helmet in your right hand and tuck your shirt in.”

  There was an odd sensation of afterlife, as though Lombardi had died and his ghost had returned to see how everyone was getting along without him. On August 7 the city staged “A Salute to Vince Lombardi”—yet another ceremony honoring him, this one with the trappings of a state funeral. Three of his Izzo cousins, Buddy, Eddie and Dorothy, came out for the day-long affair, along with Marie’s sister, Marge, Vinnie’s college chums Jim Lawlor, William O’Hara and Pete Carlesimo, writer W. C. Heinz, Paul Hornung and several other retired Packers, and ten NFL owners. Many of the out-of-town guests gathered the night before in the basement rec room at Sunset Circle for a traditional Lombardi cocktail hour. Lombardi, to borrow the image of his writing nemesis Leonard Shecter, was in full pigeon strut that evening. As much as he professed not to deserve the honor, it temporarily lifted his spirits. He was standing at the bar, chatting with his cousins, when Bill Heinz approached. “Bill Heinz, wait’ll you hear this!” he bellowed. The room hushed. “I got a letter the other day and the only thing on the envelope was my picture and a stamp—and it came right here!”

  Heinz gave him a blank look.

  “You’re not impressed?” Lombardi asked.

  “Coach,” Heinz said. “I’d be more impressed if your picture was on the stamp.”

  Lombardi roared. Heinz had a way of pricking his ego without wounding him. Eddie Izzo seemed to derive special pleasure from the irreverent comeback. “Thanks for doing that, Bill,” he whispered to Heinz. “Vin was just like that when we were kids in the neighborhood in Sheepshead Bay.”

  At 7:10 the next morning, courtesy cars arrived at the Beaumont Motor Inn to take guests and members of the press out to Resurrection Church in Allouez for an invitati
on-only seven-thirty mass celebrated by the bishop of Green Bay. “At least some good is going to come of this—I got you all up for early mass,” Lombardi joked to the bleary-eyed contingent. After mass and breakfast Lombardi rode in an open convertible out to the stadium for a formal dedication of Lombardi Avenue—the former Highland Avenue. “Most of these are usually named for dead presidents,” he said to friends on the way there, a theme that he repeated in his public remarks. “I hope this is not … I just want you to know that I’m not dead,” he said. When a reporter asked if, as a boy, he had ever wanted a street named after him, he answered quickly, “Yes, Broadway.”

  More than five thousand people filed into the Brown County Arena that night for the closing ceremony, or wake, “An Evening with Vince Lombardi.” Fuzzy Thurston, Max McGee and Paul Hornung bleated off-key to a musical rendition of “Run to Daylight!” Travis Williams wowed everyone with a stirring performance of “That’s Life.” And Lombardi, delivering his own benediction, gave a shorter version of his leadership speech. He reminded his audience of the difference between freedom and license, toasted the American zeal to be first, and praised football for providing the lessons of perseverance, competitive drive and respect for authority. At the close, he thanked his friends and family for their love and support, then turned to his deepest passion, borrowing the cadence of MacArthur, the old soldier who had faded away with memories of West Point “and the corps, the corps, the corps”—but now it was the old coach “and the team, the team, the team.”

  SINCE THAT SNOWY DAY in February 1967 when Lombardi addressed the management conference in New York, he had delivered the same speech dozens of times around the country. His message in one sense was political, a reaction against a culture that he feared was coming undone because of the excesses of freedom. But it was also in essence personal. He acknowledged that he knew little about the antiwar movement, the black power movement, hippies, sex, drugs and rock and roll, but he tended to think of them all as a single entity that challenged what he believed in and what he had accomplished. His life could be defined by three simple notions: he had led, he had built a team, and he had won. To him, the movements of the sixties seemed to prefer rebellion over authority, separatism and factionalism over teamwork, and losing, or sympathy for losers, over winning and admiration for winners. He could not see the hypocrisy or the inequities (with the exception of racism) that these movements were rebelling against, but focused only on their tone, which he considered negative or defeatist. As a football coach, when he encountered a negative ballplayer, he sent him packing on one of the planes, trains and buses that left Green Bay every day.