When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  And you have made damn little effort to care to love or to understand him. So now I have to give up and face the fact that it can never be. All these years I have fought your battles, softened him up so to speak and you let me and now I know I was wrong.

  I also realize it was good you went back to Minneapolis cause out of sight out of mind and that way no one gets hurt.

  We all thought that Dad would endure forever—at least I thought he was so strong. I can’t tell you how frightened I am, but with lots of prayers and if he takes it easy and believe me he will take it easy if I have my way, he will be okay. The next thing they want to do is X-ray his kidneys cause his urine is cloudy and has a heavy odor, also the prostate is enlarged.

  This letter has rambled on but that’s my state of mind. I repeat please keep this down to a roar. I have written this cause I think you should know so you will understand a lot of things.

  So now I’ll end this and ask you to pray. Just phone or write if you get time.

  All my love,

  Mom

  Vincent had a more complicated perspective on the struggle between father and son and his mother’s role in it. He tended not to think of his mother as a unifying force, but rather as an insecure figure who jealously guarded her relationships, subtly turning one family member against another so that she would be the center of attention, needed by everyone. And Vincent suspected something that she acknowledged to him later—that she could never love her children nearly as much as she loved her husband.

  As a medical report, Marie’s letter is more revealing than the minimal documentary evidence concerning Lombardi’s condition that fall. He had not gone back to Drs. James and Bamfield since they treated him the previous February, but instead relied on the team physician, Dr. George Resta, who treated patients at Doctors Hospital downtown. Resta died in 1977, the hospital closed in 1979, and any records that might have shown Lombardi’s treatment that November are gone with them. Lombardi’s administrative aides on the Redskins staff, including Ockie Krueger and David Slattery, remember that he did pass his team physical. Later records indicate that a minor heart problem—moderate atherosclerosis of the aorta—was discovered only after his death, during a pathology report. But there is no reason to doubt the essential accuracy of Marie’s account. She knew her husband better than anyone else, and the letter shows remarkable and tragic prescience, her intuition taking her to a fearful place that doctors could not yet reach.

  Lombardi did not slow his busy schedule despite Marie’s vows to protect him from outside interests. He gave speeches, accepted awards, made frequent jaunts up to New York and continued his coaching duties without showing a hint of trouble to his assistants. Not long after Marie wrote the letter, Vince called two of his favorite old Packers, Paul Hornung and Max McGee, and asked them to come to Washington and hang out with his team. “I want these guys to see some winners,” he told McGee. Lombardi invited them to stay at his house, and McGee almost accepted until Hornung talked him out of it. “No, no, no, Max, we’re not gonna stay three nights at Lombardi’s. Shit, no way! Get us a suite.” The trip probably meant more to Lombardi than to his players. McGee and Hornung visited the dressing room, but stood around joshing with a few friends, nothing more than that. Vince and Marie took them to dinner, and when they walked into Duke’s the patrons again gave Lombardi a standing ovation. “He pretended he was embarrassed as hell, but down deep he loved it,” Hornung recalled. When it reached eleven o’clock, McGee started checking his watch, and Lombardi knew what that meant. “McGee, you guys haven’t changed a bit. You want to get the hell out of here, don’t you. Get the hell out of here.”

  Perhaps Max and the Golden Boy made no difference, but the Redskins won that week, defeating Pittsburgh. Their offense, led by Jurgensen’s accurate passing (completing 62 percent) and Larry Brown’s toughness (gaining 888 yards), was explosive all year, but the defense remained inconsistent. In the next-to-last game against New Orleans, the Redskins broke out to a quick 17 to 0 lead, then held on to win, 17 to 14, and the players gave Lombardi the game ball. Twelve years of losing were done and gone; the club had assured itself of a winning record, finishing 7—5—2. It was the same winning percentage that Lombardi had during his first year in Green Bay, but he was disappointed. “I thought we could have had a better won-lost record,” he said. “I hope we can find some better people. That’s what we’re going to have to do—find them.” In Green Bay, the talent was already there, and by his second year he was taking the Packers to the championship game. That seemed less likely now; it was a more competitive league, with smarter coaches, better scouting and twenty-six teams instead of the old dozen.

  He went to Super Bowl IV in New Orleans that year, watching in the stands as the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minnesota Vikings, the second straight loss for old NFL teams. Sonny Jurgensen was also there. They were too far apart to consult during the game, but every now and then they looked at each other and made hand gestures indicating what play they would have run against the Chiefs, nodding in agreement, the coach and his quarterback, both certain that soon enough they would be down on the field—playing for a championship and winning it.

  28

  Run to Win

  LOMBARDI’S STOMACH was troubling him again, and he was taking pills to ease his gastric distress, but he was just where he wanted to be on a sunny day in paradise, hacking away on a Hawaiian golf course with Wellington Mara, Tex Schramm and friends. The work of the NFL league meeting was over for March 26, 1970, and it was time to play. They were well into the back nine when Lombardi noticed a golf cart hurtling their way, and a woman waving her arms and screaming at them. “Who the hell is that?” he muttered. “Uh, Vinnie, it’s your wife,” said Mara. And so it was. Marie had commandeered a cart and gone driving all over the course looking for him. “She’s having twins! She’s having twins!” she shouted breathlessly. “Who’s having twins?” Lombardi asked. “Your daughter, dummy! Susan! She’s having twins!” Paul Bickham, their son-in-law, had just called to report that Susan was in the delivery room and the doctor had discovered that she was giving birth to twins.

  Lombardi did what any golf addict might do. He smiled and kissed his wife, and told her that he would meet her back at the clubhouse when the round was over, then teed one up and, as Schramm later recalled, “just whammed it, he was so proud.”

  When he returned to the clubhouse, Marie was there—nothing yet. While they waited, they drank and giddily warbled silly nursery rhymes. “Georgie Porgie puddin’n pie, had a set of twins and made ’em cry.” Georgie was Paul’s nickname. Finally the good news arrived. Susan had delivered two healthy babies, a five-pound, fourteen-ounce girl named Marie Ann and a six-pound, ten-ounce boy named Paul. Susan was back in her hospital room when her parents reached her on the phone. “My father was absolutely elated,” she said later. “He said, ‘Well, Susan, you have been unpredictable for twenty-four years and damned if you haven’t kept true to your word.’ Because nobody knew I was having twins. And he said, ‘Congratulations. I’ll be there as soon as I can get there.’ ” Marie flew directly to Chicago to help out—Susan had three infants in diapers then, and no cribs—but Lombardi had other obligations, speeches, business seminars, contract negotiations, and could not make the trip.

  In the second week of May, he and Marie went to New York for his induction into the Fordham Hall of Fame, and stayed through the Mother’s Day weekend. Their son, Vincent, was in Manhattan for a training program for stockbrokers, and Jill had come out to visit. The foursome met on the evening of May 9 at the Waldorf-Astoria, then continued their evening at P. J. Clarke’s saloon, where they were joined by little brother, Joe, and his wife, Betty. Jill sat next to her father-in-law most of the night and had an unusually intimate discussion with him. It was a tumultuous spring. Only ten days earlier Nixon had ordered the bombing of Cambodia, a decision that sparked protests across the country, culminating in the tragedy at Kent State University in Ohio, where Nation
al Guardsmen shot and killed four young people on May 4. Just trying to make her way around New York, Jill had been caught in a series of protests and counterprotests, a demonstration near the United Nations decrying the Kent State killings, then a patriotic showing of hard hats near Wall Street. Lombardi talked to her about those events and the effect that parents can have on children.

  He gushed about Vincent II, his grandson, what a sensitive child he was, how understanding and patient Vincent and Jill were with him, and how perhaps he might grow up to be less alienated than the current student generation. Lombardi was in a rare self-reflective mood, bittersweet as he looked back on his own role as a parent. “I made so many mistakes with my kids,” he confided to Jill. “I was too hard. You can’t be too hard on them. You have to be more understanding.” When the group finally emerged from P. J. Clarke’s, they encountered a street woman selling flowers. Jill thought the flowers looked old, as though they had been taken from a graveyard, but Lombardi pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and bought them all, handing some to Jill, some to Marie and some to Betty.

  The next day they all drove out to Sheepshead Bay to visit Harry and Matty for a Mother’s Day dinner. As everyone sat around talking, Vince fell asleep on his mother’s sofa.

  “You’re tired,” Matty said when he woke up.

  “I’m getting old,” Vince said.

  “I’m getting old,” his mother responded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I’m always tired. More tired than usual.”

  Lombardi had been named salesman of the year that spring by the Direct Selling Association, and was in more demand than ever as an after-dinner speaker. His standard fee was &5,000; sometimes he kept the money, other times he donated it to charity. Two days after his New York visit, on May 12, the Independent Insurance Agents of Wisconsin brought him to Milwaukee for a luncheon address. He gave his standard speech about the zeal to win and the need for discipline, but the events of the last few weeks had clearly affected him. In recent months his speeches had become increasingly strident as he complained that protesters were breaking the law with no recrimination, but the killings at Kent State jolted him. “The way to treat violence is not with violence,” he said in Milwaukee. “That only snowballs it.” While issuing his traditional call for discipline, he began acknowledging that the voices of the young protesters should be heard. “I think the students have a great deal to say, but I don’t think violence, disruptions and burning are the right way to do it.”

  From Milwaukee, Lombardi traveled north to Green Bay, which still seemed almost lost in time, removed from the turmoil of the big cities and major college towns. He arrived in time for a three-thirty golf match with Jack Koeppler at Oneida Golf and Riding, his old course. This was his first visit to Green Bay since he had left for Washington more than a year earlier, and there was some concern about lingering hard feelings, but he was welcomed back by old friends and journalists who wished he had never left. Koeppler had called Lee Remmel of the Post-Gazette the day before and alerted him that the Old Man was coming. “Would you like to interview him?” Koeppler asked, to which Remmel responded, “Is the Pope Catholic?” Remmel arrived at Oneida just after Lombardi had finished a round of 84, about his norm. He was in the locker room, getting ready to head upstairs to the Calcutta Room to play gin, when Remmel laid eyes on him. He was naked to the waist, wearing a pair of light blue slacks, and Remmel was struck by what he took to be the coach’s trim, tan, vibrant appearance.

  “Coach, you look great!” Remmel said.

  “I feel wonderful,” Lombardi said, breaking into his toothy smile.

  Later, as Lombardi and his cronies were playing gin, the Press-Gazette’s Art Daley approached the table. “Jack and all those guys were sitting around and I went in and saw Vince, and knelt down beside him and said, ‘Vince, you never should have left here,’ ” Daley recalled. “And those eyes of his, they bubbled up like crazy.” Daley, too, came away thinking Lombardi looked “good and tan.”

  Lombardi visited all of his stations of the cross during his two days in Green Bay. He stayed at the home of Dick and Lois Bourguignon, visited with the Gray Ghost and Ole, and they both gave him big hugs, no hard feelings, drove out to his old house on Sunset Circle, paid a visit to Father Spalding at Resurrection and Father Burke at St. Norbert, went to mass at St. Willebrord and swung by Lambeau Field, where he walked up to the second floor and surprised Ruth McKloskey and the other secretaries. There was another round of golf the second day down at North Shore in Neenah with Koeppler, Doc Brusky and Judge Robert Parins, known to his pals as the one-armed bandit (he had lost his right arm and played a mean round of golf with his left hand). Parins showed up in a pair of fake muttonchop sideburns, teasing Lombardi about the mod hairstyle sported by a few of his Redskins. That night the same gang that used to gather in the basement rec room at Sunset Circle reassembled on a boathouse on the Fox River and toasted Vince. It was only when he was alone with Dick Bourguignon during the final hours of the visit that Lombardi confided his troubles.

  He did not want to alarm anyone, so he told the others that he was feeling good, Lombardi said, but in fact he was not. He was having problems with his stomach, kidneys and bowels, he said. According to Lois Bourguignon’s later recollection, her husband told her that Lombardi had said “he’d had a physical but wouldn’t have a proctoscopy. Dick bawled him out and told him don’t be foolish and go in there and do something about it.”

  A few weeks later he at last reached Chicago to see his daughter and her infant twins. He had come to town for a Boy Scouts of America awards luncheon at the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where he was joined by David Carley, his old business partner. Carley noticed that Lombardi did not want to eat his meal that day, and was so tired later that he insisted on taking a cab to travel three blocks. Carley’s last memory of Lombardi was of the two men standing on the sidewalk arguing about Bobby Kennedy and Spiro Agnew. Lombardi said he liked them both, a notion that infuriated Carley. “That’s impossible! You cannot like both of those men except on a purely personal basis, because they stand for things that are completely different,” Carley said. But Lombardi meant it: he liked the way Agnew stood up for his country, but he also loved Bobby Kennedy’s energy and his urgency to solve problems.

  Marie had accompanied her husband to Chicago, but avoided the banquet. She rejoined him at the hotel and they drove together to Chicago Heights. A wrong turn sent them into an unfamiliar South Side neighborhood, and they wandered around for more than an hour before regaining their bearings, sniping at each other all the while. It was part of their routine, Vin and Rie, they could hardly go anywhere in the car without fighting. By the time they reached Susan’s apartment, the twins were asleep in a bassinet. Vince was awed by the sight and stood above them whispering, “One baby, two babies,” the miracle of birth compounded. He wanted to hold them, but Marie insisted that he not wake them up, so after a brief time chatting on the couch, he started fidgeting. They could not stay the night; from Susan’s they were heading to the airport and back to Washington. Marie could sense her husband’s discomfort. “You know something, Vin, why don’t you take Susan to the store and buy her some groceries,” she suggested. He jumped at the idea, and soon Susan and her father were strolling down the aisles of her local supermarket.

  It was as though Lombardi was on a game show where he had five minutes to throw as much as he could into the shopping cart. The more exotic the better as far as he was concerned. Caviar, canned hams and chickens, anchovies, Brie, delicate crackers, all piling up in the cart as he moved down the gourmet row, then on to the baby formula section. Here’s a case, that enough? He was reading labels, but no price was too steep. Susan could not help laughing; her dad let loose in a grocery, showering her with gifts for this one brief moment, as though each little package could make up for a week spent without her. It was not that he had to buy her love, the love was there, but time was not. He rang up a bill of more than &200—“and in 1970, that was
a lot of money,” Susan said. When they got back to the apartment, the prospect of lugging all those bags up the stairs was too daunting for him, so he found two neighborhood boys and paid them with a dollar and his autograph. They betrayed no hint of knowing who he was.

  PATRIOTISM AND GOLF occupied most of Lombardi’s time in early June. He had been asked by J. Willard Marriott to serve as honorary vice chairman of an Honor America Day program schedule for July 4, and accepted enthusiastically. When skeptical journalists asked if he was being used by the Nixon administration, he noted that former presidents Johnson and Truman were also on the committee as well as AFL-CIO chief George Meany. “This is not pro-administration, not pro-Nixon, not pro-anything, except one thing—America,” he said. “We’d like to show the world and maybe a lot of our own people that we are Americans and we are proud of what we have here.” Gordon Peterson, a local television and radio reporter, visited Lombardi at his Connecticut Avenue office to conduct an interview on Honor America Day. Peterson said that he had come in “prepared to shrink the legend,” expecting to be disappointed by Lombardi, but came away “taken by him.” Some of his rhetoric could sound harsh, Peterson said later. “But in person he seemed very open-minded, more so than I expected him to be. The protests were raging, and he said these people have a constitutional right to protest, but that the country had been very good to him. And he said the racial thing is a disgrace. He said that very forcefully.”