Dr. Bamfield, a Redskins fan who had played football through his freshman year at Princeton, was thrilled at first “to be called to see Vince Lombardi.” When he arrived at the suite at 8 p.m., Marie and Jackie were waiting in the outer living room, along with Lew Anderson and a few assistant coaches. And there sat the coach, still dressed in shirt and loosened tie; he had refused to go to bed. Dr. Bamfield took him into the bedroom for an examination. Lombardi was shaking, had chills, and his temperature was 102 degrees. The diagnosis: he had “a roaring urinary tract problem,” probably prostatitis, an infection of the prostate. Dr. Bamfield treated him with ampicillin and said he would check on him again in a few days. When they emerged from the bedroom, Dr. Bamfield recalled later, Marie gave him a look “like, ‘Oh, God, what have you done to my husband?’ ” Three days later Lombardi visited Dr. Bamfield’s office. He was sweating profusely, but the kidney pain had diminished and his fever was gone. One week later Dr. Bamfield brought him in for a third checkup and performed a more thorough examination. Lombardi’s blood pressure was 120 over 60. He told the doctor that he had had no serious ailments in his life, glossing over a long line of problems going back to his sophomore year at Fordham when he had been knocked unconscious and was hospitalized with internal bleeding in his lower intestinal tract.
Urine tests indicated that the infection had improved, and a rectal exam revealed no noticeable mass in Lombardi’s prostate. But his reaction to the rectal exam was one that Dr. Bamfield would long remember. “He hated the rectal exam,” Dr. Bamfield said later. “He screamed so loudly the nurses came running into the room. He was very unhappy about it.” That was the last time Lombardi would see Dr. Bamfield. After he recovered from that “bad spell,” as Marie later called it, he still seemed tired all the time, especially in private when only she was around. This renewed her nagging concerns about his overall health, reminding her once again of how exhausted he had been during his final year coaching the Packers. She pleaded with him to go in for a complete physical, including a proctoscopy to check for tumors in his colon, but he ignored all such entreaties from Marie and Dr. James, just as he had in Green Bay. No way he would let any doctor do that, he said. This was part of Lombardi’s squeamishness and stubbornness that Marie knew all too well. Her husband had just arrived in Washington, his first game with the Redskins was still a long way off, and as she noted later in a letter to their son, Vincent, “of course he couldn’t quit.”
Marie’s outlook brightened somewhat when Connie Boyle showed her a house that had just been constructed at 11013 Stanmore Drive in Potomac Falls, an upscale development in suburban Maryland beyond the Beltway, about forty-five minutes by car from downtown. It was a spacious four-bedroom colonial made of orangish tan brick with yellowy cream trim, designed on the slope of a hill so that the paneled family room in the basement opened out to an expansive two-acre yard. Stone steps led up a manicured terrace from the two-car garage on the side to the front portico. “This is my dream house. This is what I want!” Marie said, and though Lombardi had preferred an old house closer to town, in the Somerset neighborhood, he deferred to his wife, saying, “I promised her she could have whatever she wanted.” Edward Bennett Williams called Boyle to see if he could get the price down—another contest, what he thought life was all about—but the young widow with five children held firm, kept the price at $125,000 and made the deal of her lifetime. When the contract was signed, she came home with an autographed picture of the coach for one of her boys.
Lombardi would not be home much in any case. There was a football team to turn around, and he went about it the same way he had in Green Bay a decade earlier. Repetition had always been his mantra, so there was no reason for him not to repeat what had worked for him before. Again he assembled a coaching staff of loyalists, looking not for innovative young football minds or future head coaches but seasoned pros who understood his methods and could carry out his directives. From his early Green Bay days he brought back Lew Carpenter, one of his first halfbacks, and Bill Austin, his first line coach, recently fired as head coach of the Steelers. He wanted to hire two of his retired players, Forrest Gregg and Zeke Bratkowski, but the Packers would not allow it. For the defense he turned to Harland Svare, who had played for him with the Giants. George Dickson was hired to coach the backfield with a glowing recommendation from Bob Blaik, the colonel’s son. Don Doll and Mike McCormack were retained from the Graham regime.
What kind of material did they have? Lombardi had been studying game films every night, and assigned each of his assistants to assess the players at each position. He took the quarterbacks himself, by far the easiest task. Sonny Jurgensen had been in the league for a dozen years, and Lombardi had always loved the way he passed. The films confirmed his impressions: Jurgensen was the best pure thrower he had ever seen, with a quick release and unerring accuracy. “My God,” he was heard muttering in the darkness of the film room one day, “if we’d had him in Green Bay …” His voice trailed off. Bart Starr had been his brain on the field, the most committed and disciplined of his ballplayers, but in terms of pure talent he was not in the same category as Jurgensen.
Jurgensen’s reputation as a playboy did not bother Lombardi. If anything, it reminded him of his favorite son in Green Bay, Paul Hornung. The Golden Boy might break curfew, but he had uncommon talent and did not waste it; he was the best money player Lombardi had coached. People who did not know Lombardi often held the misimpression that he expected his players to be as conservative in their private lives as he appeared to be. That is what Jurgensen feared at first. When he heard that the Old Man was coming to Washington, he called Hornung and asked, “Jesus, Paul, what am I to expect?” Hornung chuckled and said, “Sonny, you’re gonna love the guy.” Lombardi announced at his opening press conference that he was giving Jurgensen a “clean slate” and noted that despite his autocratic image he had never been obsessed with rules. “The city of Washington may have a lot of bars but I assure you Green Bay has fifteen times more,” he said. “We will have as few rules as we can get away with.” After his first meeting with Lombardi, Christian Adolph Jurgensen came away saying he wished the season could start the next day.
Who would carry the ball? George Dickson studied films of the returning running backs and presented Lombardi with a pessimistic assessment, the last line of which read: “If we are going to win here, none of these guys will be here when we do.” Lombardi was a realist. He knew that Dickson was probably right, but the report angered him nonetheless. “He came in after he read my assessment, threw that paper on my desk and said, ‘Goddamn it! But you’ve gotta coach ’em! Maybe you don’t think these men are any good, but you’ve gotta coach ’em!’ ” Dickson recalled. “I said, ‘I know I gotta coach ’em, but you only asked me what I thought of ’em!’ ”
It was typical of Lombardi to expect the world to bend his way. He established the expectations, the routine, and people adjusted. The barber at the Mayflower knew when to expect him for his weekly haircut. The administrative staff quickly learned about Lombardi time and arrived at meetings ten to fifteen minutes early. His assistant coaches knew that they would be expected to work late on Monday nights and go to Duke Zeibert’s for dinner. He had been a daily early-morning communicant at St. Willebrord during his years in Green Bay and wanted to establish the same pattern in Washington. One morning, a priest answered a knock at the door of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and there stood a man who introduced himself as Vince Lombardi. What time was the first daily mass? Lombardi wanted to know. At 7:30 a.m., came the reply. “Why don’t you change it to seven; it would fit my schedule better,” Lombardi said. The priest was a kind man; it amused him that a football coach would try to reschedule his mass, but that was asking a bit much. Lombardi might be bigger than the president, but there was still a higher order.
Devoting endless hours to the film room, watching, rewinding, grading, was second nature to Lombardi; he had been doing it for twenty years, since he joined Red Blaik�
��s staff in 1949, but it could never replace the thrill he felt being around players. Even this off-season, during which he had far more than usual to do as he analyzed what it would take to make winners of the Redskins, seemed far too long for him. He visited relatives in New York, played golf with Ockie Krueger at Congressional and Burning Tree, attended more social functions in Georgetown in a few months than he had in Green Bay in years, but still he was itching to get on with it. Marie saw the telltale sign; they had been in their new home only two months when he started cleaning the closets.
ON THE EVENING of June 9, the Lombardis sat in the steamy armory at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul and watched their son receive his law degree from William C. Mitchell Law School. Vincent was twenty-seven, and he and Jill now had three young children: three-year-old Vincent II, two-year-old John and Baby Gina, five months. As his father said of him that day, “it was a long, hard pull for the young man.” He had entered the University of Minnesota law school after graduating from St. Thomas, but dropped out, uncertain that he wanted to be a lawyer. He reconsidered and attended Mitchell at night, while working several jobs, first at a bank, then an insurance company, then a law office. Newspapers in the Twin Cities, which published feature articles about his graduation, noted that in getting his law degree he was following in the footsteps of his famous father. It was reported that Lombardi received a law degree from Fordham but never used it, choosing instead to go into coaching. Of course this was one of the old Lombardi myths. He had dropped out of Fordham Law during his first unimpressive year there.
In his rhetoric, Lombardi had little use for quitters or losers. Success, he liked to say, is “not a sometime thing—it is an all-the-time thing.” He called it “a matter not so much of talent and not so much of opportunity but rather of concentration and perseverance.” Vincent had struggled with this philosophy for most of his life, fearing that he could never live up to his father’s expectations. But here was one time when he had persevered when his father had quit. He went back to law school, he said, because he did not think he could compete with his dad in the world of sports. He had been as uncertain about whether he truly wanted to be a lawyer as his father had been—he had a family to support during law school, while his father had still been single—and yet he kept going and got the degree.
Vincent, as his dad and Colonel Blaik would put it, had paid the price. “I think maybe I appreciate the degree more because I had to work for it,” he said. Lombardi never seemed prouder. “My son the lawyer,” he boasted. God, family and the Washington Redskins. After mass the next morning, before rushing back to D.C. to make final preparations for the season, Lombardi announced to the press that Vincent and Jill and their children would be moving to Washington later that summer, arriving in time for the first exhibition game.
On June 16, Lombardi was finally with his football players, taking his first look at candidates for the Redskins roster at a four-day minicamp of skull sessions and drills on Kehoe Field at Georgetown University. The first practice was scheduled for 2 p.m. and most of the players were there twenty minutes before, revealing an early appreciation of Lombardi time. Tom Brown, the former strong safety of the Packers, showed up, having been acquired in a trade for a draft choice. He sensed the beginning of another era, convinced that players who stuck around Lombardi would “someday feel on top of the world.” As passers and receivers went through basic drills, Lombardi was back in his element. No signs of physical exhaustion, no outward indications of worry, just pure football again. “I missed it more than I can say,” he said. “It feels good to be back.”
That night in the dressing room with his assistants, Lombardi expressed his private hopes and concerns about one of the running backs. Ray McDonald had been the team’s No. 1 draft choice in 1967 from the University of Idaho. On paper, he was an incredible talent—huge, fast and powerful, six four and 248 pounds. Edward Bennett Williams, in his most conspicuous intrusion into the realm of player personnel, had selected McDonald himself, and had been disappointed by his choice’s performance during his rookie year. Surely Lombardi could get the best out of him. It so happened that McDonald was gay. All the players and coaches knew it; some felt uncomfortable about it and talked about him behind his back. Lombardi knew and did not care. His brother Harold was gay. He had made it a point throughout his coaching career that he would not tolerate discrimination of any sort on his teams. “George,” he said to Dickson. “I want you to get on McDonald and work on him and work on him—and if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood you’ll be out of here before your ass hits the ground.”
Confidence and fear, that was how Lombardi coached the game. He needed his quarterback to be confident, not afraid, and from the first day treated Jurgensen like a leader, something other coaches had been reluctant to do. They had considered Sonny talented but self-oriented. Lombardi saw more. “Take ’em down to the goalpost, Sonny,” he said at the start of practice on the third day. Jurgensen running ahead of the pack—an unheard-of thought before, but there he went, holding the lead for several strides. Sonny was Lombardi’s man, and after only a few days he realized what that meant. Jurgensen had been around great quarterbacks much of his career, including Norm Van Brocklin in Philadelphia and Otto Graham in Washington. Yet it was not until he hooked up with the undersized guard from Fordham that he understood the best way to play his position. Lombardi’s system, he said, was “completely different” from anything he had seen before. It placed the emphasis on reading the defense and giving the quarterback fewer plays but more options. As had happened to Bart Starr earlier, as soon as Jurgensen got into Lombardi’s system, the game seemed to slow down. What had been chaotic suddenly made sense; everything became clear and comprehensible.
When training camp opened at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, at high noon on July 9, Lombardi was surrounded by old friends and familiar faces. Not just Austin and Carpenter, Brown, Bob Long and Krueger from his Green Bay days, but also Sam Huff, who had played for him in New York and now came out of retirement for one last year, and his traditional army of priests, this time led by Father Guy McPartland, who had played fullback for him at St. Cecilia, and Father Tim Moore, the jovial Carmelite who had been the athletic director there. Father Guy, who had been known as Iggy in high school, said mass for Lombardi in the morning and heard confession in the afternoon, then went to the traditional Five O’Clock Club in shorts and T-shirt and knocked down scotches with everyone else. Father Tim preferred to go out on the field to run under Charlie Gogolak’s kicks, then chatter on the sidelines with Joe Paterno, the onetime Brooklyn Prep halfback visiting from the Penn State coaching staff, and Mike Manuche, the Manhattan restaurateur.
Ed Williams came up from Washington, along with his pals Art Buchwald and Ben Bradlee, whose young son Dino was a ball boy. Lombardi took one look at the shaggy-haired adolescent and compulsively barked out, “Get a haircut!” as though he was talking to his own son or one of the ballplayers. Dino showed up the next day with a crew cut. It was the same for Sam Huff as it was for the young ball boy: Lombardi ruled as the voice of authority. On the first night of camp, he gathered the squad together for his opening speech, similar to the one he had delivered for nine straight years in Green Bay, and though it was always effective, in this case it hardly mattered what he said. All he had to do was gesture with his big hand and let his Super Bowl ring glisten in the light and the message was clear. “He was like God himself to these players,” George Dickson said. “This was the be-all and end-all of knowing how to win.” He told the Redskins that night that he did not have many rules. “But, gentlemen, there is just one thing that I want you to understand. If you do anything to embarrass me or the organization, in any way, you will answer to me and me alone.”
Lombardi talked himself hoarse, riding the seven-man blocking sled, daring his linemen to knock him off, hollering at his troops during grass drills. He was a perfect gentleman in social settings and loved a good joke,
but in the film room and on the football field he could not stop cursing and yelling. His voice was so loud, and his language so purple, that a college official called David Slattery, Lombardi’s administrative assistant, and asked whether he could tell the coach to calm down. When Slattery broached the subject with him, Lombardi seemed contrite. “You know, David, I don’t understand it. I go to mass, I never use bad language in my life, until I get to the football season.” Then he laughed and said, “I’ll try to watch it.”
Many of the Redskins were not accustomed to Lombardi’s style and had as hard a time with it as the college secretaries who had complained to the dean. Within a week three rookie draft choices from Ohio had bolted camp. Once, fifteen years earlier when two rookies named Sam Huff and Don Chandler had packed up and headed for the airport at the Giants camp in Vermont, it was Lombardi who had talked them back. This time he let the rookies go, berating the “moral code,” or lack of one, that would allow them to take signing bonuses and then go home. In some ways he seemed as gruff as ever, especially when he was lost in thought on the football field. Joe Lombardi, his little brother, who was then a regional salesman for Rawlings Sporting Goods, visited camp with two company executives and approached the coach at afternoon practice to see if he had time to meet them.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 69
