When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  New York, NY 10020

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  Copyright © 1999 by David Maraniss

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Edith Fowler

  ISBN-10: 0-684-87290-0

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-87290-2

  TO WENDY

  My sister forever

  Contents

  Preface

  1 Tattoos

  2 Fordham Road

  3 We Do, or Die

  4 Saints

  5 Lost in the Bronx

  6 Fields of Friendly Strife

  7 Blaik’s Boys

  8 No Substitute for Victory

  9 Cult of the New

  10 This Pride of Giants

  11 The Foreigner

  12 Packer Sweep

  13 Trinity

  14 Remembering Jack

  15 Golden

  16 A Night at the Elks

  17 Daylight

  18 The End of Something

  19 Foot of the Cross

  20 Coming in Second

  21 Winning Isn’t Everything

  22 It’s the Only Thing

  23 In Search of Meaning

  24 Ice

  25 Until Lombardi Loves You

  26 The Empty Room

  27 Taking Charge in Washington

  28 Run to Win

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  WHEN

  PRIDE

  STILL

  MATTERED

  Preface

  THIS YEAR MARKS the fortieth anniversary of Vince Lombardi’s death. He died of colon cancer at Georgetown University Hospital on September 3, 1970, only eleven seasons after he had begun his incandescent run as the greatest professional football coach in history, a period during which his teams finished as champions five times. That he accomplished immortal status in barely a decade at the top is amazing enough, but there is something else about his life and death that is equally surprising. His players called him “the old man,” and that is the image the name Lombardi evokes—the quintessential father-figure coach, staring at us, pushing us, with his squat build and square jaw, his professorial glasses and camel-hair coat, his gap-toothed smile and satchelful of expressions, real and mythical, about winning and the pursuit of excellence. Yet most fans who grew up watching him during the glory years of the Green Bay Packers are now older than Lombardi was when he died. The old man was gone at fifty-seven.

  Four decades after his passing, Lombardi lives on, larger than his sport, while other great coaches of his era, from George Halas to Bear Bryant to Woody Hayes, recede with time, confined to the narrow world of football. Walk into the office of an insurance salesman in Des Moines, a college financial officer in Richmond, a hockey team president in New Jersey, and there is the Lombardi credo, framed and hanging on the wall. The Lombardi bust at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton has the shiniest nose, touched more than any other by the faithful, the sporting equivalent of rubbing St. Peter’s foot in Rome. The ambition of every player and coach in the league is to be associated with his aura, to bask in the glow of the ultimate prize awarded to the Super Bowl champions—the Lombardi Trophy. Watch any NFL promotion on television and, inevitably, there is the profile of Lombardi, the block of granite on the sidelines. Now Lombardi is even striding onto the Broadway stage in a new play written by Eric Simonson and starring Dan Lauria, who has the look, the voice, and the bona fides, a respected actor and former marine who grew up on Long Island and once played and coached football.

  The title of this book was taken from a scene in Richard Ford’s novel Independence Day, in which his main character, a former sportswriter named Frank Bascombe, makes a pit stop at the Vince Lombardi Service Area at exit 16W on the New Jersey Turnpike. The “Vince,” as Ford called it, then had a collection of Lombardi memorabilia from the days when pride still mattered. Ford put the phrase inside parentheses, and I thought when I first read the passage that he intended it with a certain irony, a suspicion that he later confirmed when I asked him. That is the spirit in which I use it as well.

  In examining Lombardi’s place in American life, one speculative question resounds through the decades: Could the old man prevail in today’s world? Several myths have to be dealt with before that question can be considered rationally. The first is the myth of the innocent past. The past was never innocent. The essence of human nature does not change. There were as many roustabouts, rabble-rousers, and cheaters in Lombardi’s era as there are today, and far more economic stratification and racism. The main difference is that the culture has changed, giving players more wealth, separating them more from the masses, providing them with more temptations.

  Next comes the myth of the most famous saying attributed to Lombardi—“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” He said it a few times, but it did not originate with him, nor did it reflect his philosophy. Another coach, Red Sanders, coined it decades before Lombardi came along, and it entered the broader public domain through a John Wayne movie in which it was uttered by a young actress, playing a tomboy daughter of a football coach, who is talking to a social worker played by Donna Reed—not exactly the most macho setting. To Lombardi, it was the pursuit of excellence that mattered most. He was often harder on his teams when they played poorly but won than when they played well and lost.

  And finally there is the myth of Lombardi’s leadership methods. It was Henry Jordan, a defensive tackle for the old Packers, who uttered the oft-repeated phrase “Lombardi treats us all alike, like dogs.” Memorable, but inaccurate. Lombardi was an adept psychologist who treated each of his players differently. He rode some mercilessly but stayed away from others, depending on how they responded. He did not mind oddballs—his teams were full of them—as long as they shared his will to excel. Lombardi was a Jesuit in his football instruction, as in most other things. Like Saint Ignatius of Loyola, he believed in free will, that each man was at liberty to choose between action and inaction, good and evil, the right play and the wrong play. He made things simple for his players by taking nothing for granted, repeating the same lessons to them over and over, every day, every year. He would spend hours diagramming one play, the Packer sweep, so that his players knew how to adjust to whatever defense the opposition might employ. The point of his repetition was a timeless idea that is as applicable in jazz and dance and writing and other art forms as in football—freedom through discipline.

  All of this—Lombardi the teacher, the psychologist, the adapter, the philosopher—would serve him well in today’s world.

  The man and the myth are always at play in the Lombardi story, converging and separating. Many yearn for the old man out of a longing for something they fear has been irretrievably lost. Every time a player dances and points at himself after making a routine tackle, or a mediocre athlete and his agent hold out for millions, whenever it seems that individual ego has overtaken the concept of team, people wonder, mournfully, what Lombardi would say about it. Others think Lombardi represents something less romantic, a symbol of the American obsession with winning, a philosophy that if misapplied can have unfortunate consequences in sports, business, and life. The concerns on both sides are valid, but the stereotypes from which they arise are misleading. Lombardi was more complex and interesting than the myths surrounding him. These are the contradictions—the depth of
a simple man, the imperfections of a perfectionist, the ambiguity of his meaning in American culture—that drove me as I researched this biography.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  MAY 2010

  1

  Tattoos

  EVERYTHING BEGINS with the body of the father. At the turn of the century, when Harry Lombardi was a rowdy boy roaming the streets of lower Manhattan, his chums called him Moon. He had a face that reminded one of a full moon, a round ball that surely would bounce on the sidewalk if it could be yanked off his shoulders. His thin lips, slatted eyes and disjointed nose seemed painted on, or imagined—as if they had been made by looking up at the moon and creating facial features from shadows of gray on a white-lit orb. His spherical face rested atop a frame that grew boxier year by year, evoking a second nickname given to him in adulthood: Old Five by Five. This was said mostly behind his back by members of his own family, including his children. To be precise, he stood several notches above the five-foot mark, the top edge of his brush cut reaching five five, and though his stomach protruded generously, his body seemed more square than fat. The little strongman was so powerful that he once loaded two kids on a coal shovel and lifted it up with one hand.

  The ornamentation of his flesh is what truly announced Harry’s presence. He was covered with tattoos. They rose up from his forearms, a swirling blue and red mural of devotion to family and country, each splotch symbolizing another of his simple beliefs. He even had messages tattooed onto his hands, one letter per finger in a row above the knuckles. The letters appeared upside down and backward from his perspective, looking down, but in legible order to someone reading them from the front. On the index finger of the left hand was a W, followed by an O on the middle finger, R on the ring finger and K on the pinky. His right hand lettering began with P on the pinky, then L and A, ending with Y on the index finger. WORK and PLAY, competing for attention on the beefy digits of an immigrant meatcutter in New York. There could be no more fitting passwords at the creation of an American myth.

  What Harry thought of his ink-stained body, which he acquired during his early teenage years, has been a matter of dispute within the family. It is known that his widowed mother, Michelina, was horrified by the tattoos, ordered him to wash them off (even the MOTHER on his bicep) and prohibited him from paying further visits to a tattoo parlor near their tenement house on Mott Street. Harry apparently scrubbed and scraped to little avail. The lasting image of maternal concern was a vestigial American bald eagle on his chest, only half complete. Some relatives insisted that he was embarrassed by the tattoos later in life, while others remembered that he displayed them with pride, wearing short-sleeved shirts when he might have concealed the artwork on his arms. In either case, the patriotic tattoos expressed his loyalties. He was born in 1890 with a foreign-sounding name in another country, Enrico Lombardi of Italy, but he arrived in New York at age two and from then on considered himself every ounce an American. He was Harry on city records, Harry to federal census takers, Harry to customers at his meat market. He said little about his Neapolitan ancestry and rarely spoke Italian, attaining fluency instead in a peculiar New York dialect in which these was dese, those was dose, them was dem and things were tings.

  By his thirtieth birthday in 1920, Harry Lombardi seemed to be living the modern American life. He and his brother ran their own business, selling wholesale meat from a shop on the Hudson River waterfront. He was married and the head of a household of four: wife, Matilda; son, Vincent, seven, and daughter, Madeline, three. Three more children were to come. The Lombardis lived behind a white picket fence in a gray two-story wood-frame house at 2542 East Fourteenth Street in Sheepshead Bay, a pocket of southeast Brooklyn nestled between Flatbush to the north, Manhattan Beach to the south, Gravesend to the west and Marine Park to the east. Shops and fruit markets throbbed along Sheepshead Bay Road. An array of restaurants lined bayside Emmons Avenue, including Lundy’s, a fish palace that occupied an entire block and attracted the diversity of Brooklyn to its tables: families, priests, businessmen, movie stars, boxers, Dodgers, gangsters. Across the street were rows of fishing shanties leading down to the docks where charter boats went out for snapper and flounder. Breezed by the sweet salt air of the nearby Atlantic, Sheepshead Bay had once served as a resort for New York’s gilded class, but now it was playing a more egalitarian role: a decompression chamber between old world and new for first-generation immigrant families who seemed as eager as Harry Lombardi to fit in.

  Next door to the Lombardis lived old John Murphy, who had escaped the poverty of Ireland as a boy. Two houses down was the family of Frank Rich, who emigrated from Austria. On the other side lived Ben Brandt, whose parents left Germany, and Thomas Wright, one generation removed from Scotland. While there were notable concentrations of Italians and Irish in that part of Brooklyn, the diversity of blocks like the Lombardis’ on Fourteenth Street seemed to hasten the Americanization of the people who lived there, and perhaps drew them to Sheepshead Bay in the first place, away from the ethnic density of Little Italy and Hell’s Kitchen. They were entering the middle class, turning away from some parts of their pasts. All the women stayed home except a young telephone operator, boarding with her parents. One man sold cars, two others brokered real estate, another clerked for Kings County. Most were craftsmen with skilled hands: barber, telegraph operator, bricklayer, stonemason, butcher.

  Matilda Lombardi, Harry’s wife, was a member of what many regarded as a first family of Sheepshead Bay, not in wealth, but in size and fraternity. She was born an Izzo in a brood of thirteen children—four sisters: Delia, Betty, Nicolina and Amelia; and eight brothers: Frank, Joseph, Richard, Louie, Jimmy, Pete, Anthony and Mikey. Their parents, Antonio Izzo and Laura Cavolo Izzo, were immigrants who had arrived at Ellis Island as teenagers from Vietri di Potenza, a tiny mountain village nestled in a brilliant green gorge of olive and oak trees below Mount La Serrapula, sixty-five miles east of Salerno in southern Italy. Many Izzos and Cavolos, who had been farmers, millers and carpenters, fled the impoverished and earthquake-ravaged village in an early wave of Italian immigration in the late 1870s and early 1880s. They were lured to New York by advertisements seeking laborers for the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was celebrated as the longest suspension span ever conceived, an eighth wonder of the world.

  The union of Antonio and Laura Izzo eventually created a new world wonder of its own. As the thirteen Izzo siblings reached adulthood and accumulated spouses and children, they all settled within a mile radius of their parents’ house on East Sixteenth Street in Sheepshead Bay, a homestead that throbbed with the daily rituals of a prodigious Italian Catholic family: engagements, weddings, birthday parties, picnics, feast days, Sunday dinners, comings, goings, births. That is where Vincent Thomas Lombardi was born, the eldest son of Matilda and Harry, named for his paternal grandfather in the Italian custom. He was delivered into the world in a second-floor bedroom on the night of June 11, 1913, and the Izzo homestead served thereafter as the womb of his childhood. Like his sister Madeline and the three other Lombardi children when they came along, brothers Harold and Joe and sister Claire, Vinnie grew up in the protective and unavoidable embrace of his mother’s extended family.

  There was unceasing commotion at the Izzo homestead on weekends as the thirteen siblings came in and out with their families. Grandma Izzo was a big-busted woman who wore thick black shoes and tied her deep black hair in a bun. She greeted her grandchildren by grabbing hold of their cheeks and squeezing tight while shouting “Bella! Bella!” Matty, as people called Matilda, and her sisters Nicky and Millie played the piano. Nicky loved ragtime; Matty improvised popular songs and sang in a sharp soprano voice. One of the Cavolo cousins plucked his banjo. Harry Lombardi joined the Izzo brothers down in the basement, where they shot billiards and late at night rolled dice on the green felt of the pool table. Grandma Izzo was a formidable card shark, fond of poker and tripoli, a form of rummy. She played for pennies against all takers, and month
by month her glass penny jar shone with more copper coins, which she emptied at year’s end to help pay the family taxes.

  Vinnie and Madeline and their Izzo cousins, Richie, Dorothy, Wally, Freddy and Joseph, often made fun of the way their grandparents scolded them in broken English for playing rough inside the house. Sent out to play, they skipped down the front porch steps, darted through the fence gate past the cherry tree and out into the vast yard, where they hid and chased and tackled until they were called inside. Here before them was a childhood wonderland, a virtual farm-in-the-city, with shed and coop, side garden of tomatoes, eggplant, corn and string beans, a grape arbor overhanging the brick terrace in back, and a grassy field that extended down Sixteenth Street to the corner of Avenue Y. Grandpa Izzo kept chickens in a pen, and had taught Vinnie and his other grandsons how to prick holes in an eggshell and suck out the yolk. Also in the yard was a small barn for a black-and-white Shetland pony that belonged to Uncle Richard, who bought it from a bankrupt circus troupe. Young Vinnie delighted in the creature and treated it as his own. Once he slipped out the yard to a bridle path that followed Ocean Parkway up toward Prospect Park, a solo adventure that ended when he and the pony were clipped by a slow-moving truck. No injuries resulted, only embarrassment.

  Sunday dinner was an endless feast consumed in shifts, with delegations of Izzos taking turns at the oblong mahogany table in the dining room, food and drink flowing for five or six hours. Matty and her four sisters did the cooking. The wine was homemade—Concord grapes picked from the back vineyard, featuring a strong and fruity bouquet that took some getting used to. After antipasto came homemade soup, usually minestrone, sometimes a tart dandelion, followed by spaghetti and meatballs with hot red peppers, or freshly made ravioli, then stuffed capons or braciola, and the Izzo specialty pies. Spinach Pie: Boil fresh spinach and dry. Place in piecrust with sautéed onions and olive oil, salt and pepper, add diced green onions and bake. Ricotta Pie: Mix ricotta with eggs and parsley, grated Parmesan cheese and Italian sausage. Array in piecrust and bake. There was no rush to leave the table.