When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  In his search for the old order, Lombardi turned to symbols. He enthusiastically embraced a proposal by a group of Green Bay women to stage a Pride in Patriotism Day ceremony at Lambeau Field for the December 7 nationally televised game against the Colts. It was to be a flag-waving answer to young antiwar demonstrators and draft card burners. NFL team banners ringing the stadium were taken down and replaced by American flags. Before the game, the St. Norbert choir sang “This Is My Country” and “God Bless America.” More than fifty thousand miniature flags were distributed to the sellout crowd, and after the Pledge of Allegiance by the Boy Scouts the swelling sea of fans waved little flags in the brilliant winter afternoon sunshine. The scene brought tears to the eyes of Ruth McKloskey, whose son Neil was fighting in Vietnam. It reminded Lombardi of boys he had lost to war over the years, the fallen quarterbacks whose mass cards he carried in his Bible: Billy White and Dick Doheny from Saints, both killed two decades earlier in Korea; and Don Holleder of West Point, killed a year ago in Vietnam. At halftime, Lombardi received a one-word cable from the league office: wonderful. Then the Packers lost again, and finished the season with a losing record, something they had never done when Lombardi was the coach.

  SUPER BOWL III was held in Miami that January, the first Super Bowl without the Packers. This time the Baltimore Colts represented the old league, favored by eighteen points over the AFL’s New York Jets. Lombardi had thought about coaching the Jets off and on since 1963, when David “Sonny” Werblin first tried to lure him back to New York, but the deal had never been struck. He was intrigued by this team, which seemed utterly unlike a Lombardi team. The Jets had an unassuming coach, Weeb Ewbank, and a daring quarterback, Joe Namath, who was from Alabama like Bart Starr, but Starr’s opposite in demeanor, with his long hair and white shoes and cocksure boasting. Broadway Joe was wild, in need of taming, but he had the quickest release Lombardi had ever seen and he was a winner, like the Golden Boy. When Lombardi spoke of the Colts, he used the pronoun “we,” a term of loyalty to the old league, but he had a hunch about the Jets. “They’re going to beat us,” he told several friends.

  In the press frenzy before the game, word spread about other jobs for Lombardi. He was going to the Eagles, the Patriots, the Redskins. There were so many reports of his secretly buying real estate here or there that Pete Rozelle came up to him and said jokingly, “Congratulations, Vinnie, on your real estate holdings.” And another rumor: He would become the next baseball commissioner. Howard Cosell asked him about it. The Times promoted him for the job. “But do the diamond fathers really want a strong man?” asked New York’s Arthur Daley. “Or do they prefer to watch their life blood drain away with stooges? Can they subordinate individual selfishness for what’s best for the game?” Lombardi roared when Daley mentioned the baseball job, and said he had not heard anything about it, but added: “I’ll tell you one thing. I love baseball.”

  If he loved baseball, he was committed to football. On the Friday night before the game, in the bar of the Kenilworth, where he and many of the NFL brass were staying, he ran into George Dickson, a lifelong assistant coach who shared dozens of mutual friends with Lombardi, including Johnny Druze, one of the Seven Blocks. “Are you committed for next year?” Lombardi asked him. Dickson knew the insider jargon. That meant Lombardi was surreptitiously putting together a staff, getting ready to head back into coaching. The next night Lombardi went to dinner at Tony Sweet’s restaurant. At the table with him was Edward Bennett Williams, who by one account appeared practically lovesick. The Redskins had not had a winning season in a dozen years, a streak that Williams was determined to bring to an end. He had first met Lombardi in Miami six years earlier, after Green Bay’s second straight NFL title win over the Giants. He had tried to hire the coach before the 1966 season but had no stock to offer then, and settled on Otto Graham. Since the Packers game in Washington in November, their meetings had become more productive, though not always as clandestine as Williams wished. Their last dinner meeting, at Joe and Rose’s restaurant in Manhattan, had been interrupted when Commissioner Rozelle and a party of league officials came in and stumbled upon Lombardi and Williams. It was, Williams said later, like being caught with another woman.

  Whenever the two men met, along with practical discussions of what it would take to bring Lombardi to Washington, they talked about their shared obsession for competition, what Williams called “contest living.” Williams lived life and practiced law that way, ferociously, going for the win. He loved boxers and ballplayers, jocks of all sorts, and in his pantheon of sports figures, Lombardi stood at the top. Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post and Williams’s close friend, said, “Lombardi was the first guy Eddie loved.” He courted Lombardi with everything he had: stock in the team, unlimited power as general manager and coach, the biggest office, his own driver, access to the most powerful people in the world.

  Lombardi was listening. He had to get his wife out of Wisconsin, he wanted the stock, he dearly missed the players, he needed to be needed, he longed for a cause. And he was addicted to success, just as the president of the Redskins was addicted to him. When Edward Bennett Williams set his sights on Vincent Thomas Lombardi, he was sure that he had found the best man for the contest of life. “You know,” Williams said to him that night in Miami, “you’re the only one I want.”

  26

  The Empty Room

  NOT SINCE THE DAYS of Scooter McLean had there been such disarray in the leadership ranks of the Green Bay Packers. The team’s brain trust had gathered in the coaches room across from Lombardi’s office on the Tuesday morning of January 28, 1969, for the annual rite of selecting players in the college draft. Scouting reports were spread across tables, several phone lines were buzzing, one large magnetic board ranked four hundred players by position, another kept track of the twenty-five other teams and players they had selected, and a chalkboard listed the select group of athletes coveted by the Packers. After a disappointing season Green Bay held the twelfth pick in the first round. O. J. Simpson went first to Buffalo, then Atlanta took big George Kunz of Notre Dame. There were plenty of high-profile players left when it came around to the Packers, including running backs Calvin Hill and Ron Johnson, quarterback Terry Hanratty, and linemen Dave Foley, Ted Hendricks and Fred Dryer. Phil Bengtson passed them up and instead drafted Rich Moore, an unheralded defensive tackle from Villanova.

  As soon as Bengtson made the choice, unilaterally, personnel director Pat Peppler left the room in dismay. Moore was an interesting prospect, but Peppler and several scouts had him listed lower, and they thought they had persuaded Bengtson to wait until a later round to pick him. As Peppler fumed in the hallway, Lombardi, still the general manager, stepped out to talk to him. Peppler said he was upset about the way Bengtson had made the selection. “Pat, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to stay out of it,” Lombardi responded. “It’s Phil’s team.”

  A short time later Lombardi emerged from his office again and saw a familiar figure walking toward him. W. C. Heinz had arrived to oversee more work on The Science and Art of Football, an instructional film series on how to play football the Lombardi way. Heinz had written new material for Lombardi to narrate, but the coach did not seem eager to see him. “You came at the wrong time,” Lombardi said. No surprise in that response: Heinz had heard similar words often enough over the years from his preoccupied friend, but this time Lombardi motioned him into the office, closed the door and confided, “Bill, don’t tell anyone about this, but I’m going to the Redskins.” The rumor had been around for weeks, but it was still just a rumor, not confirmed fact, and Heinz would tell no one, not even his close friend Red Smith. He understood why his old collaborator had to leave. Expecting Lombardi to stay in Green Bay would be like asking someone who had written a great novel to do it again without changing the setting or many of the characters. It could not be done, Heinz thought, “and he couldn’t make anything of that ball club after that.”

  Stuck in Green Bay
with no chance of getting work done, Heinz accompanied Lombardi across the hall to watch the draft. As the selection process continued at its slow pace, Heinz could barely repress his amusement at the way Lombardi was reacting. No one on the coaching staff had been told yet that Lombardi was leaving, or where he was going, but his refusal to interfere in the first-round selection was only one piece of evidence that something had changed. He seemed to be following Washington’s selections with more interest than Green Bay’s, and was becoming increasingly annoyed. Washington had traded away its first, second, fourth, ninth and tenth choices. “My God,” Lombardi said at one point, “the Redskins are getting nothing!” A thousand miles away in the Redskins draft room, Otto Graham was feeling the same way, and his nervousness over a lack of draft picks was compounded by fear that he might soon be displaced as head coach. “I think I’ll call Lombardi in Green Bay and see if he wants to trade Donny Anderson and Jim Grabowski for A. D. Whitfield,” Graham said sarcastically to his staff. “If he says yes, I might as well go home.”

  That weekend Lombardi traveled to New York, where he met privately with Williams and completed their deal, and by the time he returned to Green Bay late Sunday the story had broken, once in a speculative report by a Detroit television sportscaster and then with more authority in the Washington Post. “Vincent Lombardi on Monday will ask the Green Bay Packers to release him from the remaining five years of his contract so that he may become the head coach and general manager of the Washington Redskins,” the Post story began. It was written under the byline of sports editor Martie Zad with utter certainty, even though it said that Williams “had turned aside” all press inquiries involving Lombardi and there was no mention of other sources. In fact, while the Redskins president was not answering calls from sportswriters that week, he had spilled the beans to the Post’s Ben Bradlee.

  Williams, Bradlee and Art Buchwald, the humor columnist, were best pals and regular lunch partners at Sans Souci and Duke Zeibert’s restaurant in downtown Washington. Their lunches were ostensibly off-the-record, but Williams seemed to have inside information on everybody in town, and Bradlee would return to the paper with a week’s full of delicious tips. Sometimes he would dish them out indirectly by asking a reporter a pointed question. Other times he would hold them until a reporter or editor came into his office knowing that he might have the scoop on a rumor that they could not pin down. Zad’s pro football writer, Dave Brady, had picked up the Lombardi-to-Washington speculation but could not confirm it. “Know anything about it?” Zad asked Bradlee that Saturday at the office. “If I tell you Williams’ll kill me. You sons of bitches are gonna get me in trouble,” Bradlee responded at first, smiling. Then he confirmed the report, ending with the warning, “Whatever you do, don’t quote Ed.”

  Lombardi’s mind and spirit were already in Washington, but breaking the news in Green Bay was not easy for him. After getting home on Sunday evening, he called Dick Bourguignon, his closest ally on the Packers executive board, and invited Bourguignon and his wife, Lois, to come over to Sunset Circle at nine o’clock. “Dick had a sense of what Vin was going to say and told him he didn’t want to hear it,” according to his wife, who had become Marie’s best friend in Green Bay. “But Vin persuaded us to come over. When we arrived, he and Marie were waiting in the living room, and Vin took Dick into his study. They were there a long time, and when they came out, Vin walked over to where I was sitting, kneeled down and draped an arm around the chair. He said, ‘This is so hard.’ Tears welled in his eyes and he started to sob. We told him that he went with our good wishes.” Lombardi left it to Bourguignon to pass the word to other key members of the executive board.

  At his stadium office the next morning, Lombardi called in secretary Lorraine Keck to take down a letter. He sat at his desk and began dictating:

  To Dominic Olejniczak, president, and the Board of Directors of the Green Bay Packers:

  It is with sincere regret and after many hours of deliberations that I am requesting a release from my contract with the Green Bay Packers.

  Keck had heard rumors, but had held out hope that they were not true. Now, as she took down Lombardi’s words in shorthand, it began to sink in that he was leaving. “I started crying,” she recalled. “Then the phone rang and it was a call he had to take, so I went into the bathroom and composed myself. When I came back in he started dictating again.”

  This was not only a difficult decision, but a highly emotional one. I have made many close friends in Green Bay and in Wisconsin. Many of those are among the board of directors and the executive committee. I sincerely hope we will continue in that friendship.

  My decision was based upon a number of factors. One was the equity position with the Washington Redskins and I do not believe I need to go into the advantages of a capital gain position under today’s tax laws.

  The ability of Lombardi to better himself as a shareholder in the Redskins is what would allow him to break his Green Bay contract, which still had five years to run. The NFL’s policy was to allow coaches and general managers to break contracts only if they were moving to higher positions. Lombardi was by no means a business expert, but he had made the capital gains argument earlier to Olejniczak when he sought a share of ownership in the Packers. Early reports indicated that Lombardi might get a 13 percent share of the Redskins, which was the amount held by the estate of C. Leo DeOrsey, who had been team president before Williams. In fact, Lombardi was offered less than half the DeOrsey shares, totaling 5 percent of the team stock, worth about half a million dollars, and with a provision that his shares could be bought back at any time. When his business friends, Jack Koeppler and David Carley, looked over the contract and told him he was getting into a weak position, Lombardi brushed aside their concerns. “He grabbed the paper right out of my hand and said, ‘Oh, hell with that!’ ” Carley recalled later. “He was so eager to go to Washington and a new life.”

  The other factor was really altruistic in that I need a challenge and I have found the satisfaction of a challenge is not in maintaining a position but rather in attaining it. I can no more walk away from this challenge than I could have walked away from the one ten years ago. I am the same man today I was ten years ago.

  This was the most disingenuous paragraph in the letter. Perhaps Lombardi was using the term “altruistic” to separate his need for a challenge from his desire to make himself rich, but altruism involves the unselfish concern for others instead of oneself, and his reasoning here was self-centered. It was typical of Lombardi that he would try to soften perceptions of his outsized ego by explaining his actions in the rhetoric of his public speeches: here he was not bailing out of Green Bay for a better deal, but bravely meeting a challenge. For obvious reasons, he did not mention what might have been his one altruistic motive: his desire to move his troubled wife back to the East Coast.

  The future of the Packers is in good hands; the front office, ticket office and the football field. The Packers have a good football coach, who will be a better one without the pressure of having Vince Lombardi looking over his shoulder and without the players wondering how the man upstairs might have done it.

  It was in Lombardi’s interest to leave the team in good hands, but there was increasing concern that the Packers were on a downward slide that would only worsen when and if he left. Many citizens remembered the bleak decade before his arrival and feared that the losing season in 1968 was the first sign of a significant relapse. It was. Bengtson coached three years, and was fired with a losing record. The Packers without Lombardi fell into a dark age that lasted for more than a quarter-century. After winning Super Bowls I and II, they would not win again until Super Bowl XXXI.

  Each of us, if we would grow, must be committed to excellence and to victory, even though we know complete victory cannot be attained, it must be pursued with all one’s might. The championships, the money, the color; all of these things linger only in the memory. It is the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win; these are
the things that endure. These are the important things and they will always remain in Green Bay.

  This riff came straight out of Lombardi’s standard speech, but who wanted to stay in Green Bay to find out if he was right? Keck, with tears still streaming down her face, interrupted the dictation to ask whether she could go with him to Washington. The same question was asked in ensuing days by Pat Peppler, the personnel director, and Forrest Gregg, the offensive tackle (who had just retired and wanted to get into coaching), as well as several other players. Lombardi’s answer was that as part of his contract obligation he could not steal anyone from Green Bay for at least one year.

  There has never been a question of remuneration. After making a decision a year ago not to coach, I think you can all well understand the impossibility of my returning to the field in Green Bay. It would be totally unfair to coaches and players alike.