When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Again, there was no public announcement of his condition. He was said to be “resting comfortably,” but beyond that, at the family’s request, there would be no comment. His fatal condition was an open secret among journalists in Washington, yet it was never reported. The most famous coach in America, the head coach of the local pro football team, was dying in a nearby hospital, and not one word of it in the newspapers or on the air-waves. “It was getting more and more rampant around town that he was dying,” said Martie Zad, sports editor at the Post, but those were still the days when the media would respect the wishes of family and friends, and self-censor the news.

  The cobalt irradiation began on July 30, blasting away at his entire abdomen. That same day, when he was wheeled back to his room, Lombardi noticed a large bouquet of flowers. The card read: “YOU ARE A GREAT COACH AND A GREAT INDIVIDUAL TO ALL OF US.” “Look at those flowers in the corner,” Lombardi said later to Ockie Krueger. “Now look at who they’re from.”

  The card was signed by the National Football League Players Association. Lombardi could lambaste the union all he wanted, the players still loved him. In absentia, in fact, he had been crucial to their solidarity that year. At a key meeting in Chicago, several big-name players were talking about bailing out of the strike and going back to camp, and it was Bart Starr, one of the most conservative members of the group, who put a stop to it, and he did it by evoking Lombardi. “I just want to say that two years ago, Coach Lombardi called me in and said, ‘I don’t like unions and I sure don’t like players associations, but if I were quarterback of the Packers, I’d sure as hell be a leader of the union,’ ” Starr said. The message was that Lombardi had taught Starr the meaning of teamwork and loyalty. “Starr became sort of a legend from that speech,” said Ed Garvey, the NFLPA director. Added Pat Richter of the Redskins: “That’s one great thing Coach Lombardi preached—singleness of purpose. He wants to keep a whole team together.”

  The coach was fading, and priests, nuns and football players streamed up to the sixth floor and waited in Marie’s side room for permission to see him on his deathbed. Boxes of letters came in, five hundred a day, and more flowers than Marie could find room for. Lombardi seemed haunted, embarrassed by his helpless condition, a relentlessly proud man whose body was giving up, forty pounds lost already in the struggle against cancer. IVs in his arm. A Cantor tube leading out through his nose evicted a copious flow of dry blood and gastric juices. His heart was beating too rapidly, his blood pressure was dropping. His face was so gaunt that he might have been unrecognizable if not for his top front row of teeth, appearing larger than ever within his shrinking face, taking their gaps from left to right like Skoronski, Thurston, Ringo, Kramer and Gregg at the line of scrimmage. His fingers—long, fleshy digits that were unforgettable to anybody who had ever been on the other side of one of his pointed lectures—now looked bent and withdrawn. The only part of him growing along with his cancer was his hair, despite the radiation treatment, untrimmed and free at last, as if to mock the myth of the Old Man. He had cut his hair every week of his life. “Vin a long hair, that’s beautiful,” said his wife.

  Even his eyebrows were growing wild.

  Father Bunn stopped by every day, praying for a miracle. Father McPartland drove down from New Jersey and gave his old coach a blessing. Little Joe made Washington a twice-weekly stop on his sales rounds for Rawlings, and stopped by Room 6100 so often that Lombardi gave him a double take once and, tough big brother to the last, muttered sternly, “Don’t you ever work?” Ed Williams came by every day and often left crying. Wellington Mara called Lombardi every afternoon at two, right before he went out for the Giants practice. When he forgot one day, Lombardi groused, “What the hell’s the matter with Well?” Howard Cosell and Toots Shor rang up Marie at night seeking medical updates. Jackie Anderson devoted herself to Marie, spending her days in the waiting room and nights in the large and lonely house in Potomac Falls. Marie virtually lived at the hospital, drinking endless cups of black coffee and chain-smoking Salems as she accepted condolences and directed traffic in and out of her husband’s room.

  His boys make the pilgrimage in August. Frank Gifford leans over the bed, feeling an urge to kiss him, thinking about the pasta dinners in New Jersey, hearing Vinnie tell him “God, Frank, it hurts!” In comes Bill Curry, played center for the Packers for two years, left hating the Old Man, now realizing that he resented him because he forced him to grow when he didn’t want to, and he tries to explain that change of heart and the coach looks up at him and says, “If you want to help me, Bill, pray for me.” Chuck Mercein, hero of the Ice Bowl, comes in, doesn’t know what to say and leaves crying. Sonny Jurgensen stops by and the coach is briefly alert, has a new idea for a pass play against the 3—4 defense, a way to fool the weakside linebacker, it’s got to work. Willie Davis makes the red-eye flight from San Diego. He had played for great coaches all his career, first Eddie Robinson at Grambling and then Paul Brown at Cleveland, but it was Lombardi, he says, who changed his life. He walks into the room and sees a ghost of his old coach and says if you’ll come back to Green Bay, I’ll come out of retirement, and Lombardi growls, “You’re a helluva man, Willie. Now get out of here!” In for maybe a minute and half, and even now he does what the coach says and leaves.

  Willie Wood is working in his hometown that summer. He thinks he owes his career to Lombardi, a black quarterback undrafted out of USC, but the Old Man “was all merit, straight down the line, and gave me a chance.” He thinks he will visit Lombardi in the hospital every week, but after one visit leaves so distraught that he cannot return, saying he doesn’t want to remember Coach like that. Jimmy Taylor, the roughneck fullback who had played out his option and jilted Green Bay for New Orleans in 1966, surprises Marie by showing up. She accompanies him into the room and “Vince takes his hand and holds it, and holds it, for such a long time.” Jerry Kramer, working on a book of recollections, visits the hospital on August 4, arriving as the coach is being brought back from cobalt treatment. Lombardi is tired and apologizes to his old right guard, saying they’ll have to wait for another time to do an interview, “until I get this thing licked.” Fuzzy Thurston and Bob Skoronski show up together and chat with Marie first. They can see that “she is losing the only thing she had in her life,” and after a while they ask if they can go in to see the coach. When they enter his room, he reaches out a feeble hand and they both grab it. His eyes start to flutter and the nurse says they had better leave.

  Paul is here, Marie tells Vince, and his eyes light up. The Golden Boy walks in alone. He looks at Lombardi but can’t think of what to say and leaves regretting that he cannot find the words to convey how much the Old Man means to him. (Lombardi already knows. Hornung found the words once before and put them in a letter he wrote on February 23, 1967, as he was leaving Green Bay for New Orleans. “I want you to know that I have always felt closer to you than any coach I have ever had or ever hope to have. I believe the greatest thing I have learned from your ‘Football’ has not only been the idea of winning but WHY you want to win! Each and every ballplayer who has had the opportunity of playing under your guidance in some ways will always try to mirror some part of your personality.”)

  The prodigal son is followed by the good son, Bart Starr, who comes in with Zeke Bratkowski and has the same experience, all words inadequate. A minute or two and they are out of the room, riding back to the airport in the back of a taxi, silent.

  On August 8 the Redskins played the Bengals in Cincinnati. Marie watched the game in Vince’s room. He seemed lively at first, chewing out players as though he were down on the field. When Marie told him that Charley Taylor dropped a pass, he growled, “I can see.” But he was exhausted before halftime, and when Marie noticed that he had fallen asleep, she turned off the television and left him alone. Curtis Wilkie, a young journalist, was staying on the same floor, recovering from gall bladder surgery. He looked across the hall when the sportscasters declared that Vince Lombardi was
watching the game in his hospital room. Not really, not anymore, Wilkie noticed. Lombardi’s room was dark and silent.

  Everyone in Washington now knew Lombardi was dying. President Nixon called on the night of August 11, wishing him well and saying that the whole country was rooting for him. “You are very kind,” Lombardi said. “What you have said is very flattering.” Both houses of Congress took time out to praise him two days later. “Mr. President,” said Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, “a remarkable man lies ill.” In a sense, said Representative Hugh Carey of New York, “he is the coach of our generation.” Lombardi was being eulogized before his death. The word of his condition had finally reached Harry and Matty in Sheepshead Bay, despite Marie’s efforts to keep it from them, and one of Vince’s Izzo cousins drove them down to Washington, where they stayed for two days, preparing for the blow that was soon to come. Susan also paid a visit, and though Marie warned her beforehand about how much her father had changed, the sight still shocked her. “It just wasn’t my father lying in that bed,” she said. He was strong enough to talk and asked about his grandchildren, and as Susan was leaving he turned to Marie and said, “Well, I guess everything is going to be fine.”

  By the twentieth his white blood cell count had dropped to 2100. He was having continuous heart palpitations. He began to have periods of disorientation. One night, as Marie sat nearby in the stillness of the room, he startled her by barking out a stern warning in his sleep. “Joe Namath!” he shouted. “You’re not bigger than football! Remember that!” Lombardi respected Namath’s talent; before the opening kickoff of the 1969 Super Bowl he had seconded the white-shoed quarterback’s bold prediction that the insurgent Jets would upset the Baltimore Colts. But Namath, a relatively tame character compared with what was to follow, nonetheless might have evoked something deeply troubling to the Old Man. It was as though, in his dying vision, he saw Michael Irvin and Brian Bosworth and Deion Sanders coming along behind Broadway Joe.

  Marie told friends that she thought she understood what her husband was expressing in his semiconscious state. As difficult as it was for her to accept the fact that he was dying, she tried to console herself with the idea that perhaps he was meant to die now because the world was changing in ways that he could not accept. He loved the players above all else, yet circumstances might force him to turn away from them, as his sleep-talking warning to Joe Namath suggested. She predicted that he would plead with the owners to hold the line but that they would be incapable of doing so and the players would end up with too much freedom, tearing away at the order that held his world together and destroying his concept of team. “In the end,” Marie told friends, “I think football will break his heart.”

  It could be argued that Lombardi was dying at the appropriate time. He was in danger of being reduced to a convenient symbol by then, his philosophy misused by all sides in the political debates of that war-torn era. The establishment had turned him to stone even while he was alive, hoisting him up as a monument to righteousness, patriotism and free enterprise. Counterculturists smashed him as a relic of old-line authoritarianism and a dangerous win-at-all-costs philosophy. Both were wrong—he was more complicated, his philosophy more authentic, than either side could then appreciate. But if he had lived for another two decades, he might have faced more frustrations. The age of skepticism was coming with Watergate, combining with a long era celebrating the self. Lombardi was meant for none of that, and leaving the scene was a way for him to survive in memory as a mythic symbol, the block of granite and steadfast coach of the glorious Packers, rather than staying around to become an increasingly frustrated coach fighting for relevance in the fickle modern American culture.

  Lombardi might have disagreed with that line of thinking. “I’m not afraid to die,” he told Father Tim Moore one day in the hospital room. “But there’s so much yet to be done in the world.”

  Vincent visited his father’s hospital room several times that month, coming from his home in St. Paul. He was twenty-eight, and for all of his life he and his father had never talked much. How many times had they driven to the stadium and back in silence? It was the same now. No deathbed reconciliation, at least not a verbal one. “My dad and I never made conversations, so this wasn’t much different,” Vincent said later. “I was just there.” He would not blame his father for this, and in time would blame himself. “There were things that could have been said that were not said. The time never seemed quite right. But we were getting there. I think you had to grow to my dad’s level. Having kids and graduating from law school helped. I was getting there.” There was one expression of love between father and son in those final days. Vince was strapped to tubes, his hair mussed and wild, and in came Vincent, short sideburns, hair neatly trimmed, wearing a conservative business suit. The Old Man smiled with approval. “You look like a lawyer,” he said.

  By August 31, Lombardi was slipping in and out of consciousness, but he remembered that this was a special day, their thirtieth wedding anniversary. “Happy anniversary, Rie,” he said to Marie. “Remember, I love you.” Earlier in the month, when he was more coherent, he had tried to start a conversation with Marie about what she should do when he died. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she had said. Now it was too late. On September 1 his liver and kidneys started to fail, clots formed in his lungs, his blood pressure dropped, and he became unresponsive. His organs were shutting down. Vincent was called again to come out from St. Paul, and Ockie Krueger arranged tickets for Susan and Paul to fly in from Chicago on United. The doctors suggested to Marie that she should stay by her husband overnight. The loyal communicant received last rites. The press was finally alerted to his condition. On September 2 the Post ran a small item saying that Lombardi was near death. Hours later a hospital spokesman announced that Lombardi had an “extraordinarily virulent” form of cancer. Vincent and Marie took turns napping and sitting by his side. At 7:20 on the morning of September 3, a nurse shook Vincent awake and told him that his father had died.

  Paul Hornung, who happened to be in nearby College Park, where he was to open a restaurant later that day, was jolted awake with an odd sensation. “It was freaky,” he said later. “I woke up and said to myself, We lost him. We lost him.” Tom Brown, who was in Minnesota trying out for the Vikings, bolted out of bed at the same moment with a similar foreboding. “I looked at the clock and it was six-thirty and all I could think of was Lombardi. Just Lombardi. That’s all I could see.”

  Susan was still packing her bags at her apartment, getting ready to leave for the airport. She zipped her suitcase and took it to the car, then said that she had forgotten something and went back inside. The phone rang and it was her mother telling her that her father had died. “I passed out. Fainted. Paul picks me up from the floor. My father-in-law is there. They’re shoving me out the door because now I can’t miss the flight. Get to the airport and Paul is guiding me. I’m totally lost. My father has died. We get on the plane and the stewardess comes down the aisle and says, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Bickham, the captain would like to move you to first class. We have two seats up there for you.’ The captain comes out of the cockpit and tells me how sorry he is that my father has died. My father flew United with the Packers for all those years. We get to Washington and they let me and Paul off first, and my father’s limousine is waiting for us, with my brother and Leroy Washington, and we drive out to the house and I’m just dazed. We get there and my mother is in another world.”

  Marie called her friend Jackie Anderson and asked her to come over to Stanmore Drive. They left the family inside and went out to the patio, where Marie collapsed into a chair. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I can’t go on.” Vincent and Ockie Krueger and old Fordham friends in New York began making all the calls and the arrangements. There were viewings at Joseph Gawler’s Sons funeral home in Washington and the Abbey Funeral Home in New York, open casket for the family only, the closed casket viewed by thousands of strangers, young men with long
hair, blacks in high Afros, nuns in black drape, boys in uniform carrying helmets and footballs.

  Four days after his death, at ten on the morning of Labor Day, September 7, the funeral was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There was an unfamiliar silence in midtown Manhattan that holiday morning, not the normal blare and pound of taxi horns and construction drills. Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Thirty-ninth Streets was closed to traffic. A late summer sun heated thousands of onlookers who stood somberly behind the police barricades across the avenue from the cathedral. On a side street a long fleet of black limousines waited to ferry family and friends to the burial site at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Middletown Township, New Jersey, not far from the Lombardis’ old home in Fair Haven. The casket was shouldered up the steps through a cordon of priests in white vestments and dark-suited honorary pallbearers, including Paul Hornung, Bart Starr and Willie Davis, Wellington Mara, Tony Canadeo, Dick Bourguignon and Edward Bennett Williams.

  Marie, in black dress and veil, took a seat up front with Vincent and Susan. Nearby were Harry and Matty and brothers Joe and Harold and sisters Madeline and Claire, protected by scores of Izzos. Cousin Anthony Izzo thought of all the years that had led up to this moment, all the games they had gone to see at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium and Michie Stadium up at West Point, all of the honor that cousin Vince had brought the family—“and now it’s all over.” To the side sat the team owners and Commissioner Rozelle, who three days later would name the Super Bowl Trophy after Lombardi. And behind them were row upon row of square-cut football players. The entire Packers squad flew out on a chartered flight from Green Bay. The Redskins came from Tampa, where they were playing an exhibition game. Most of the New York Giants were there. Retired Packers from the title years came on their own, as did former students from Saints, colleagues from the Giants and West Point, and classmates from Fordham, including the remaining Blocks of Granite.