As Lombardi’s audience grew, his message inevitably took on larger dimensions, and he came to be seen as an important voice in the national cultural debate. The personal was transformed into the political, and people began talking about a football coach as a political leader. The suggestion was raised publicly in an editorial in the Milwaukee Sentinel at the start of the 1968 election season. “If Hollywood movie stars can sit in the California statehouse and the United States Senate, what bar exists to the election of a good football coach?” the editorial asked. Lombardi’s speeches, the paper said, were “a cut above some pronouncements made in the halls of government” and demonstrated that “he is articulate in matters of national concern as well as in athletics.” At the evening ceremony on Vince Lombardi Day in Green Bay, when the lights were dimmed in the Brown County Arena, a bright white banner could be seen in the dark: Vince for President.
This was not merely the wistful speculation of home state boosters. In his search for a vice presidential running mate on the Republican ticket that year, Richard Nixon apparently became intrigued by Lombardi. Nixon loved football and was a student of strong leadership. He was impressed by Lombardi’s charisma and old-fashioned philosophy, and assigned one of his counselors, John Mitchell, to conduct a background check on the coach. By Mitchell’s later account, he returned with disheartening news—they had the affections of the wrong Lombardi. Marie Lombardi was a conservative Republican and longtime Nixon supporter, but Vince Lombardi was aligned with the Kennedys, too much of a Democrat, and had little regard for Nixon. They had misread Lombardi, mistaking his conservative cultural rhetoric as a signal that he was on their team. In fact, he had been an ardent supporter of Robert F. Kennedy, and the affection was mutual. “Vince, now would you come and be my coach?” Kennedy had cabled him after his resignation announcement in February. When Kennedy was assassinated in June on the night of the California primary, Lombardi lamented “a complete breakdown of discipline in this country.” The next month he joined a group of sports figures pushing for strict gun control legislation, which was not Nixon’s favorite issue as he strategized to capture the South.
During that turbulent summer of 1968, many Democrats were as intrigued by Lombardi as Nixon had been. Despite his private doubts about Lombardi’s depth, David Carley, from his position on the Democratic National Committee, promoted his business partner as a possible vice presidential candidate. “This might sound like the craziest idea you’ve ever heard, but it isn’t crazy,” Carley said to the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert H. Humphrey, at a private meeting. “Think about Lombardi.” At the Democratic convention in Chicago late that August, before the clash between young protesters and Mayor Richard Daley’s riotous police overwhelmed the scene, the hotel lobby gossip included rumors about Lombardi, as reported by Miles McMillin, an iconoclastic editor and columnist of the Capital Times of Madison.
“In this town where rumors of sensational events to come are born every second and shot down the next, there is one speculation that persists and it concerns Wisconsin and one of its most famous citizens,” McMillin wrote from Chicago. “It is the talk of Vince Lombardi’s developing fascination for politics. His name is sometimes even connected with the speculation about who will be the candidate for vice president. This speculation made the papers in Texas recently after he delivered a speech there. When he was recently asked by the sports writers during the All-Star game festivities about his political intentions he replied cagily, ‘I’m too much of an idealist. Those fellows would eat me up.’ One political pro … remarked when he heard Lombardi’s response, ‘He sounds like a pro already.’ ”
Nothing came of this talk, though both parties continued to court Lombardi, nationally and within Wisconsin. Gaylord Nelson, the Democratic senator who was seeking reelection that fall, asked Carley if he could “get Lombardi to say something nice about me anywhere at any time of his choosing.” Lombardi was reluctant. He had avoided the endorsement game with the exception of the Kennedys. But he admired Nelson and eventually agreed to attend a banquet in Oshkosh. Nelson could not have wished for a better endorsement. Lombardi praised him as “the nation’s No. 1 conservationist”—and the scene was so good that Nelson’s campaign staff swiftly turned it into a commercial and began playing it around the state. The next time Carley saw Lombardi was at a postgame party in the Sunset Circle rec room. “He called me aside and said, ‘You sonofabitch. Who gave you the right to have Gaylord Nelson use my name like that?’ ” Carley recalled. “He knew chapter and verse about it. The Republicans had called him, furious. Marie was angry. He was very upset with me. He thought he had been used and set up.”
THE LOMBARDIS had a favorite new hangout in 1968, Alex’s Crown Restaurant on the south side of Appleton, operated by Milton and Marge Arps. It was plush in a quasi-Victorian style, dimly lit with deep red walls, gold-cushioned chairs, elegant continental cuisine and soft music provided by Frank Ripple, a pianist studying at Lawrence University’s music conservatory. The Crown was thirty-two miles from Green Bay, still deep inside Packer country, yet far enough away from the local haunts that reminded Lombardi of things past and a team he no longer coached.
The first time he and Marie went to Alex’s Crown, it was with the Canadeos and W. C. Heinz, and they took two cars. Canadeo had been selling steel in the Fox River valley for years and recommended the restaurant. “I knew Appleton like the back of my hand,” he recalled, so when Lombardi asked him how to get there from Sunset Circle, Canadeo gave him the fastest route, taking Highway 47 and turning left and coming in the back way. “Nah,” said Lombardi, “I’ll come in the other way.” Canadeo knew that Lombardi was going ten miles out of his way, but he also understood how stubborn the Old Man was, and how insistent he was about being right. “Jeez, let’s let him win,” Canadeo said to his wife as he started the trip south. “He’ll be so much more sociable tonight if he wins.” Canadeo drove slowly, imagining Lombardi in the other car burning down the highway. Winning wasn’t everything, but what else was there to compete over during that long teamless year?
Lombardi developed a routine at Alex’s Crown. He wore the same outfit every time: powder blue sports coat and navy blue pants. Before leading his party to a back table for dinner, he would stroll over to the piano on the left side of the room near the bar and make the same request—a My Fair Lady medley. “He would eat it up,” Ripple said. “Just sitting there at the bar, beaming.” Marie sat nearby, drinking scotch stingers, mouthing the words to “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
It was not only his football celebrity that made “Mr. Lombardi” so welcome at Alex’s Crown. He was also a grand tipper, matched only by one of the Kelloggs of the cereal fortune who would come over from Michigan to court a local woman. Everyone who attended to Lombardi’s table received a $10 tip—maître d’hotel, waiter, salad server, coat and hat check girl, bartender, piano player. He had one peculiar rule, however, a variation of a concept he had first used with Red Blaik when they golfed at West Point and Red Reeder’s son served as their caddy. They had tipped young Reeder handsomely, but deducted a dollar for every lost ball. At Alex’s Crown, it was not lost balls but interruptions that resulted in a penalty. If anyone on the restaurant staff asked Lombardi for an autograph or allowed a customer to get to the table, he deducted a dollar from every tip. When a new waitress unwittingly requested two autographs, he signed them graciously, then at the end of the night got $80 in ones from the bartender and distributed $8 tips.
Before leaving Alex’s Crown and heading back to Green Bay, Lombardi and his party always returned to the bar, and Marie, loosened by her night’s libations, took the microphone at the piano. This was an elegant bar, singing by customers was against house policy, but Marie was exempted. Ripple knew what to play without being asked. It was the tune of “You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You”—but Marie had her own words, and with her husband looking on proudly, in her deep, throaty voice, she crooned, “You’re Nobody ’Til Lombar
di Loves You.”
The trips to Alex’s Crown ended that fall, abruptly and loudly. Lombardi had made reservations for a party of fifteen to celebrate an anniversary, but was distraught when he arrived to find an unfamiliar piano player. “Where’s Ripple!” he demanded of Milton Arps. It happened to be Ripple’s night off, but that was unacceptable to Lombardi. He walked over to the reservation book, pointed his thick finger at his name and time, and bellowed, “You knew I was coming! Why isn’t he here?” He eventually calmed down and proceeded with the meal, but the Arpses were offended by the public display of petulance and were not upset that their famous guest never came back. “He was God around here,” Ripple said later. “Only a god could be that fussy about a piano player. Celebrities pay a price.”
You’ve got to pay a price, Red Blaik always said. But he was not talking about paying the price of fame, nor was he talking about paying the price of a regrettable decision. Yet those were the prices Lombardi was paying now. For the first time since 1938, a football season was beginning without him on the sideline. He had never been more a part of the popular culture as the quintessential coach—with his speeches, with a prime-time documentary on CBS produced by Ed and Steve Sabol, with the Second Effort motivational film being gobbled up by insurance companies and sales organizations, and yet he wasn’t even coaching. “I miss the fire on Sunday,” he told Bill Heinz, who came out to Green Bay for the home opener that September. Doing a piece for Life on Lombardi’s first game out of coaching, Heinz observed Vince’s perspective of the world of pro football widening. Lombardi noticed, for the first time, that fans actually held tailgate parties outside Lambeau Field before games—“Look at these people!” he shouted, motioning out his window to the ritualistic scene of middle-aged men in Packer jackets grilling bratwurst over charcoal fires. It fascinated him for a minute, but then he lost interest. Now what?
At Lombardi’s direction, Chuck Lane had overseen the construction of a special booth for Lombardi on the left-hand side of the second level of Lambeau Field’s press box. It was furnished with a small refrigerator and a television monitor, and soundproofed so that Lombardi’s commentary could not be overheard as he watched his old team put on one hapless display after another. When the Vikings visited Milwaukee County Stadium early in the year, Mitchell Fromstein sat next to Lombardi, who seemed more animated than the losing Packers on the field. “He was pissed,” said Fromstein. “He was fidgeting and walking back and forth in the box. He never sat down. I don’t think he was happy with somebody else coaching.” But that early-season anger at times gave way to something else, an expression of ego that Max McGee, who had retired, noticed when he sat in Lombardi’s box one Sunday. “I think it’s human nature that he didn’t think just anybody could take this team and win a championship. He wanted the feeling that he was the reason. And he was. But I caught that once when the Packers scored on a lucky play, and he said, ‘Those lucky sonsofbitches!’ I got the feeling he would rather Bengtson lost every game he coached. That may be too harsh, but I got that impression.”
As difficult as this new life seemed for Lombardi, the consequences for Marie were worse. She had a new granddaughter to brighten her days, Susan’s daughter, Margaret Ann, had arrived in August, but family never seemed enough. Earlier that summer Marie had traveled east with Jill Lombardi and Jill and Vincent’s two sons, Vincent II and John, showing off her grandsons to East Coast relatives, but from what Jill saw, the trip brought as much pain as joy. After spending a few days with Harry and Matty and the Izzo clan in Sheepshead Bay, they drove through a blinding rainstorm across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Brooklyn to Staten Island and down to New Jersey, where they visited Marie’s father in Fair Haven. Marie could not see her father without also encountering Cass, her aunt and virtual stepmother, the woman who had broken up her parents’ marriage. She refused to acknowledge Cass the entire visit, Jill remembered, “except to tell her to get out of the pictures. It was very awkward.” But Marie loved the East Coast, and longed for it again the moment she returned to Green Bay, where she was no longer the center of attention. She had relished her role as the coach’s wife, and now that had been taken from her. “I don’t think she could handle it,” Susan said. “She had a hard time dealing with the fact that Dad was no longer the coach. Plus, he wasn’t handling it so well himself.”
That fall Marie slipped into another depression. Jack and Ethel Clark, old friends from New Jersey, paid a visit for a home game and brought along their daughter DeDe, who had just returned from Europe. Marie drank too much at the game and had to be helped from the stadium by Doris Krueger and another friend. Ockie Krueger was already at Sunset Circle, setting up the bar for the postgame cocktail party, when Marie was carried in and taken to her bedroom. “I have one ear out and I hear Vince’s car come in,” Krueger later recalled. “So I go out and get Vince and I say, ‘Coach, it ain’t good.’ He didn’t ask what happened. He just said immediately, ‘Where is she?’ I said, ‘She’s in the bedroom with Doris.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got to get her out of here.’ ” That night Susan and Paul went out with DeDe Clark and a date. Susan called home during dinner and came back to the table with frightful news: her mother was in the hospital again after taking tranquilizer pills mixed with the alcohol.
It was a mild overdose, not life-threatening, but enough to draw her husband’s attention. “I think my dad was stunned by it,” Susan said later. “He had been living in a little denial.”
As the season entered its final stretch, the Packers had sunk below .500, but with their 4—5—1 record they were still mathematically alive in the mediocre Central Division’s playoff race. Lombardi’s mailbag was now overflowing with letters and telegrams from Packers fans deploring his decision to quit coaching. (“What are you doing to my Packers?” implored Bruce Bouche, an “ex-resident” of Green Bay, in a telegram from Rialto, California. “Dear Mr. Lombardi. I am from Chicago and I am a Packer fan. You never should have went to management. The Packers need you at coaching,” wrote Richard Menke, age eleven.) Lombardi could stay away from his boys no longer and entered the dressing room at midweek before a game against the Redskins in Washington, reminding his players in an emotional plea that they were defending world champions, that it was time to show they could still win, and that he would “despise” anyone who quit now. After the speech he retreated to a side room, where Pat Peppler was working, pulled a chair close to the wall and broke down in tears. “There were so many damn things I wanted to say to them,” he said. “So many things.”
Lombardi traveled to Washington with the team, accompanied by Marie, and stayed in a suite at the DuPont Plaza Hotel. After covering Lombardi for a decade, Lee Remmel of the Press-Gazette had become accustomed to his routines. He knew that Lombardi traditionally ate breakfast with Marie on the morning of a game. But this time, when Remmel entered the dining room, he noticed someone else at Lombardi’s table—Edward Bennett Williams, the president of the Redskins. “I noted it,” Remmel said later. “But at the time I didn’t think too much of it, except that it wasn’t Marie.” Later that day Lombardi viewed part of the game from Williams’s box, and though much of their conversation was in hushed tones, he was overheard gushing about the nation’s capital, “Washington is really a great place, isn’t it? This is where it all happens.” Chuck Lane, who sat near Lombardi for part of the game, noticed that he appeared unusually relaxed. It might have been that the Packers were winning easily that day, but Lane thought there was more to it than that. “It was like two guys sitting in a bar and having a beer together. He’s talking about the players analytically. He’s relaxed but his mind is clicking.”
To what end, Lane did not then know, though he did notice the banner several fans had carried around the stadium that day: “Save Our Skins—Hire Lombardi.” Not long after his return from Washington, Lombardi started quietly laying the groundwork for his next move. “How long would it take you to get ready to move to Washington?” he asked Ockie Krueger, his
aide-de-camp. “About ten minutes,” Krueger replied. “And my wife about ten seconds.” Pleased with the answer, Lombardi urged Krueger to keep quiet but stay on the ready. The following Sunday, before the Packers played in San Francisco, he addressed the team once more, rekindling the old spirit, but Starr and Zeke Bratkowski both got hurt, an early lead over the 49ers slipped away, and with it the season. All that was left was a final home game against the Baltimore Colts and then a road game in Chicago.
Over the years Lombardi had ordered the world around him so willfully that he had virtually forced life to make sense to him: his soul cleansed at daily mass, short hair, crisp clothes, clean desk, everything in its place, reduced to its basic elements, nothing more complicated than the Packer sweep, authority respected, hard work rewarded, God, family, Green Bay Packers. He insisted in his public speeches that there was a clear purpose to life, that one’s daily efforts added up to something great and enduring, that with the will to excel one could prevail “not only now, but in time and, hopefully, in eternity.” Yet life intruded, chaotic and ambiguous, overpowering his perfectly disciplined will. As general manager and not coach, he had chosen the wrong job, and nothing in his daily efforts now satisfied him. His supportive but brittle wife was depressed and desperately seeking attention, and nothing he had done eased her suffering. Where was the full reward of family when his daughter was married in secret, without him there, without a ceremony, in a faraway church by an unfamiliar priest? Where was order, discipline and respect for authority when players went on strike against his game of football and young men burned draft cards and berated his beloved country?
When Pride Still Mattered Page 66
