The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  Of course, for Youso, blood was the least of his worries. He had to figure out a way to play defensive tackle, and quickly, against one of the best offensive lines in the game. You'd think a rookie offensive lineman who'd been thrown onto the defensive line would be getting some pointers, but you'd be wrong. "They never said a thing to me at half," Frank says now. "Never said a word to me. No one did. Not Landry, not Huff, not nobody. I guess they figured I was a pro, I could do the job. Besides, they wanted to give us a rest.

  We were working our buns off."

  Instead, Landry addressed his whole unit, over in the training room-calmly, firmly, and quickly: "If you keep doing what I'm telling you to do," he said, "we'll be all right." That was Tom, and that was his system: studying tendencies, teaching keys and execution. As far as he was concerned, we knew the Colts' tendencies.

  "Now it's up to you."

  Normally, Sam would have been the vocal one, if he felt it was needed. But he didn't rant or rave that day. It wasn't as if this wasn't a position we hadn't been in before. Sam knew that if the defense could shut them out, then even our offense could come back from eleven points. Basically, in the entire first thirty minutes, the defense had given up one long drive. Not a bad half-day's work. All they had to do was shut the Colts out the rest of the day.

  I remember what Lombardi was saying to the offense, in the locker room. It's kind of hard to forget. "Frank," Vince said, calmly, "you've got to hang on to the football." As if he had to tell me. Then he addressed the unit-again, calmly: "What we have works. We know it does. What we're doing is working-we're just not executing it properly. We know we have to execute. Just execute. We have to stay with it, work with it, make our reads a little quicker. If we execute, we will win this ball game. So settle down; pick it up a notch."

  He wasn't screaming. He wasn't ranting. He wasn't even raising his voice. Vince wasn't into the legendary yelling yet. His voice was measured. His restraint had nothing to do with the fact that he wasn't the head coach; to us, he was. His calm demeanor reflected nothing more than his confidence in a system he'd drummed into us in countless hours in front of a chalkboard, through countless practices-never like a drill sergeant, but like a teacher who respected his students, like a friend who trusted us to believe in our talents, and his system.

  Vince would take that football philosophy of simplicity and execution to forge an amazing Hall of Fame career. As for me, I feel blessed and honored to have been there when it all began with the man I came to first respect and then love-and finally, dearly miss.

  Where to start, when remembering my friend Vince Lombardi?

  With the man we called Vinnie, and liked to joke with-and play jokes on? The grinning guy with thirty-nine white, pearly teeth-all of them seemingly on top? With the guy who liked nothing more than to huddle in front of a projector in his living room, with his friends from the offense, while Marie cooked up something delicious over in the kitchen in his small house in Oradell, New Jersey?

  The most effective motivational tactics of the Vince who coached me always showed a soft side, and a love of the guys. Let's flash back to the beginning of that season. After we'd lost our fifth of six preseason games, he called a meeting after practice up at Bear Mountain, at 7:30 that night. We all bitched and moaned as we filed into the meeting room-until we found out that the meeting would be downstairs, at a basement rathskeller on the campus, and would include a keg of beer. We stayed on with Vince until after midnight. That was the Vince Lombardi I knew: the sometimes excitable, always emotional guy, but a good guy, who cared about each and every one of the men on his offense.

  I know where I won't start when I describe Vince Lombardi: with this idea that Vince was some sort of dictator. I knew him well, first for five years on the field, and then for many years after that. I really came to know him after he'd left us and gone to the Packers, when our relationship could grow free of the player-coach constraints. But on the field, off the field, in our homes, at Toots's and Manuche's, I never saw the man the Packers talk about, or the journalists wrote about once he got to Green Bay. Vince Lombardi was no screaming madman. He was a man who loved football, yes, but it was far from the only thing in his life. He was a deeply religious guy who cared about his family, his friends, and his Catholic faith.

  But the Vince who, according to a national magazine profile in the early sixties and cited in David Maraniss's biography of the man, When Pride Still Mattered, hit one of his own linemen in Green Bay, yelling at him, "Hate me enough to take it out on the opposition!" The guy who supposedly made most of the Packers, at one point or another, want to take a swing at him? Not the Vince I ever knew-and would know until the day he died.

  Now, I think the former Packer lineman Jerry Kramer is a really smart guy. Don't get me wrong. Jerry made a fortune on the banquet circuit because of Vince and all of those championships rings. A good guy, a hell of a football player. But did Vince act the way Jerry said he did-with the "my way or the highway" attitude?

  Not with us, not back then; not with a veteran team that had been through the wars already-all kinds of wars.

  Sure, he yelled. But all those clichés ("He treats us all the same-like dogs"): that wasn't Vince when he was with the Giants. It couldn't have been. It wouldn't have worked. And the man I knew would never have acted that way. I'm not saying he wasn't volatile with the Packers. Fuzzy Thurston, the offensive lineman whose later career in Green Bay would earn him well-deserved accolades, assured me that he most definitely was. Fuzzy was a rookie on the Colt roster that day, playing special teams, and when we talked about Vince recently, Fuzzy laughed and said: "You guys got to know him when he wasn't such an asshole yet. You guys got to know him when he was young and wasn't the boss. Oh, man, he never ever socialized with us at all. I never knew him as a person at Green Bay. He was never friendly at all. Very, very tough."

  Bill Curry, the great center, played for Lombardi in Green Bay before coming to Baltimore. Bill tells me that he found Vince to be a complex, brilliant man who had a method to most of that madness in Green Bay: "He could exert great force, and get your attention. When the boiling point of the team got to where we were ready to mutiny, he'd back off. He knew when to be gentle. It would last a few weeks. Then there'd be a moment when he'd march into the room and put the hammer back down-especially after a game we'd won when we'd played poorly. Then he'd try and motivate you by putting you down. He'd come by my locker and say, in a real low voice, 'Butkus owns you, doesn't he?' He knew I couldn't respond. He knew I couldn't hit him. You know what I think? That in his heart of hearts, he really wanted to be one of the guys. But, of course, he couldn't be."

  With the Giants, as an assistant coach, and relatively new to the game, Vince would listen to what we had to say. He even did calisthenics with us, in his classic rubber jacket and baseball cap. If I had to make a judgment call, I'd agree with Curry: I think Vince would have loved to have been one of us-and in many ways, he was. With the Giants, his popping off was innocent and fun; it was the give-and-take of a relationship where the respect was mutual.

  We'd get all over him about some of his sillier rules. When we were practicing in training camp, if we weren't in the play that was being run, he'd make us stand ten yards behind him. But we'd get right up behind him, just to irritate him. One really hot day we were right on top of him; it was so freaking hot we didn't want to walk any farther than we had to for our next turn in the offensive drill. Finally, he turned around and bumped right into us. He lost it: "Get back! Move back!" As practice grew longer and hotter, and the day warmer and warmer, we refused to have to slog ten yards to get back to the huddle. We loved to get under his skin. On this day he picked up this little Band-Aid, and walked back ten yards, and put it on the ground. "Stay behind the Band-Aid!" he screamed.

  So, of course, we just kept moving the band-aid closer to him, as soon as he turned his back. Finally, he just began to laugh, that big rolling laugh.

  We loved hiding his blackboard c
halk, too. Drove him crazy.

  He'd be ranting and raving, "Where's my chalk? WHERE'S MY CHALK?"-and then he'd eventually figure it out, and give us that wonderful laugh again. With us, Vince never took himself that seriously, and that's the mark of a man who knows how to gain the respect of a team. When Vince pushed someone too far, he knew it. Sure, he swore a lot, but he always knew when to stop. He absolutely did not behave like a dictator with a megalomaniacal ego. He behaved like a man who knew how to motivate professionals.

  I'm not saying Vince didn't overstep the boundaries every now and then, particularly with rookies. He'd lose it sometimes. The brunt of his temper often turned toward Youso. Frank may have been a rookie, but he didn't act like one. From the day he showed up that summer (in street shoes), with a big smile and a lot of confidence, Frank was his own man. You couldn't intimidate Frank Youso. Vince would try, but it never worked.

  "One day," Don Maynard recalls, "Youso did something that got Vince angry, and Lombardi said to him, 'You big, blind, dumb tackle.' Youso answers, 'Well, Coach, I may be blind, but I'm not dumb.' " Our backup lineman Buzz Guy remembers another day when Vince was riding Frank pretty hard, and Youso forgot to bring his sense of humor to practice: "Frank finally told him, 'Shut your goddamned mouth, or I'm going to come rap you.' Vince shut up."

  If that had happened in Green Bay, I imagine that Frank would have been on the next Greyhound out of town. But back then, Vince knew that each guy needs a different kind of motivation. Vince's style wasn't to treat everyone in lockstep; he was always willing to learn with us, to adjust.

  Maynard has another memory that puts Vince in a much better perspective, during another film session. Vince didn't want to pick on Triplett that day; he'd learned his lesson about riding Mel.

  So he put the spotlight on our rookie kick returner. "On one of the games I'd gotten in as a backup safety, on defense. On Tuesday, about nine-thirty in the morning, Lombardi is running the film.

  He shows some play where some guy broke through the middle of the line, and I came up as a safety, and I didn't hit the guy. Hell, he was being tackled already, I figured, 'Why pile on?'

  "So Lombardi runs it back a few times. Then, in the dark, he says, 'Aintcha hungry, Maynard?' I said, 'No sir, I had breakfast right before I came over.' The projector goes off. There's a little giggle.

  Then he starts laughing."

  Pat Summerall's recollection of his first meeting with the man says it all very well: "Coming from the Cardinals and the staff we had, it was a real eye-opener. The first meeting I went to at our training camp in Oregon, nobody had seen each other for a period of time; we'd been out drinking beer, everyone welcoming each other back. The line coach, John Dell Isola, couldn't get the room quiet. I'm sitting next to Heinrich. Suddenly this guys walks into the room and clears his throat and the whole room falls into a hush. "I say, 'Who the hell is that?' Heinrich says, 'That's Lombardi. You'll know soon enough.' Before long, he was 'Vinnie.' The Packers never called him Vinnie. That's not to say he wasn't without ego.

  He never made a comment [like], 'You're playing well,' or 'You're playing terribly.' He just said, 'You didn't do what I told you,' and that was his simple way of correcting and praising. 'You did what I said, so we won.' "

  We always did it Vince's way. And that meant acting not only like a pro, but like a man. Celebrating was never tolerated on our offense-partly because, as I've said, your teammates wouldn't put up with any showmanship, but partly because of Vince's insistence that sportsmanship was part of our repertoire.

  "I'll never forget one time," Alex says now, "when I ran a screen pass of about sixty yards, down the right part of the field, and when I went into the end zone, I turned to run under the goalpost, and put in an extra little high stride. On the sideline, he grabbed me and said, 'We don't do any of that here.' I hadn't even realized I'd done it, either.

  "He made me into what I was," Alex says now, matter-of-factly.

  "Period. I was a lazy sonofogun when I come in. I just was never focused. Once, we were doing our calisthenics, and I was in the back, and he caught me goofing off, he made me come up front, and stood right over me from then on. That taught me something.

  "Vince and I became close friends-in the off-season; but that's where it'd stop. He lived down in Rumson, New Jersey, and I was in Sea Girt, so we'd go out to dinner on Saturday nights. Strictly social.

  He never talked football when he was away, with his wife around. She ran him. As tough as he was, his wife could handle him. "But he knew how to separate the social stuff and the football stuff. One year we went out on a Saturday night, and training camp was starting Monday. The end of the night, we're all saying good night. I say, 'See you Monday.' He says, 'What do you mean? We're parting friends, but when you come to camp, I don't know you.'

  "See, come Monday, he wanted me to be like the rest of the ballplayers. He said, 'You'll see me next year-at the end of the season.' "

  The Lombardi the Giants knew was a New York guy, a Brooklyn guy, finally coaching back in his hometown after his years coaching at the high-school level and at West Point. With the Giants,

  Vince was more or less in heaven: coaching with the team that, as a teenager, he used to take a ninety-minute subway ride up from Sheepshead Bay to watch in the Polo Grounds. The team whose head-coaching position, he'd told a friend when he was coaching at Army, was something he wanted "worse than anything in the world."

  Vince definitely had the Giant pedigree. As a key member of the "Seven Blocks of Granite" at Fordham, the Maras' alma mater-a team that the greatest of the old sportswriters, Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon, glorified with all the power of their lyrical pens-he was working for his old Fordham classmate, Wellington.

  After graduating from Fordham, Lombardi briefly played minor-league football, spent five years turning a small parochial school in northern New Jersey called St. Cecilia-just across the George Washington Bridge-into a football powerhouse, then joined the staff of the legendary coach Red Blaik at West Point.

  Under Blaik, Vince helped turn Army into a powerhouse. In fact, when the Maras fired Steve Owen after the '53 season, after a run of twenty-two years, they actually wanted Blaik to replace Owen, but settled on our part-time assistant, old Jim Lee: a former end with the Giants, from 1937 to 1947.

  Vince got the Giants' backfield-coaching job, but in one of Jim Lee's rare strokes of genius, he told Lombardi that he was completely free to run the offense. And Vince quickly dove in to the task: studying film of all our games, studying the techniques of other coaches-with an eye, in particular, to what Paul Brown was doing in Cleveland. Brown was the pro game's guru, ever since his AAFC Browns had joined the league in 1950-and had won the NFL championship in their first year.

  Vince realized from the start that he had to put a flanker system into our offense to beef up the passing game. And he knew that we needed a stronger running game. As one of those "blocks of granite" on Fordham's offensive line, Vince always saw things through a lineman's eyes. He also knew that the key to everything was a possession running game that could control the clock. The first set of running backs to go with our revamped offensive line were Alex and me. (In Vince's dominant years in Green Bay, Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor would play those roles.)

  Vince knew that shortcuts, in this league, would never work; the key to winning in the NFL would always be the brilliant simplicity of his schemes, and the repetitions. You'd never find your attention wandering during a Vince Lombardi lecture. Between the man's command, demeanor, and presence, he could be riveting. The message would always get through.

  "I've been in quarterback meetings with Sid Gillman, with Buddy Parker, with Lou Saban," Jack Kemp told me. "I have never seen a quarterback meeting as precise, and as strategic, as Lombardi's. He had a mind that could see beyond the first two or three plays. He was the Garry Kasparov of football minds. I learned more in the first hour-long quarterback meeting with Lombardi than I learned in all my years before."

 
; More simply, Alex puts it this way: "He was a real professor."

  On the field, Vince had this energy inside him, an enthusiasm that just rolled right out of him, in the way he walked, in the way he rocked back on his heels, and in the way he talked. This wasn't a coach whose voice you'd tune out as he corrected you, as he implored you to get it right. You'd listen to every word.

  As innovative as Vince was, as many hours as he spent watching film, he possessed an indefinable quality of being able to command immediate respect. For me, that respect was established very early on in our relationship, when he first came on board in 1954 and I found myself surprised and delighted to meet a brand of coach I'd never known: a man who was willing to listen to what the players had to say.

  For my first few years, I had been used in just about any and every way a man can be used on a football field: as a wide receiver, as a defensive back, as a running back, as a field-goal kicker, as a kick returner, and as anything else that Steve Owen, and then Jim Lee, could think of (Landry took care of the punting). The arrangement exhausted me, and frustrated me. Where did I belong? When were they going to let me do the one thing I knew, instinctively, how to do?

  In Salem, Oregon, in August of 1954, during his first training camp, at Willamette University, the first thing Vince Lombardi ever said to me, rocking back and forth, was "Frank Gifford, you're my halfback." Man, that was great to hear. (He'd say the same thing to Paul Hornung, who had struggled at quarterback, a few years later in Green Bay, which worked out pretty well for both of us.

  Hornung would go on to have a tremendous career. In fact, most of the plays that Hornung grew famous for up there had originally been designed for me by Vince in New York.)

  But my respect for the man really grew on the night he visited the dorm room Charlie and I shared in Salem, that first August.