When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Cathedral Prep was three stories of gray stone, long rows of ancient windows, topped by spires and gargoyles. Lombardi reached it by taking the Brighton Beach Line to Prospect Park, catching the Fulton Street Elevated to Atlantic and walking two blocks through a working-class neighborhood. A diverse faculty of priests from the Brooklyn Diocese ran the school. Some of them were sarcastic, others gentle. The experience brought more discipline to Lombardi’s days and instilled in him many rituals he continued into his adult life. He was required to wake before dawn to attend mass at St. Mark’s, and his attendance was recorded with X’s and O’s in a book that the priests checked regularly. Daily mass became a lifelong practice, often cited as evidence of his extraordinary faith. True enough, but as Lombardi himself explained in later years, he was expected to worship every day when he was growing up, so it had become a habit; his religion was as much a matter of discipline and routine as devotion. The boys wore suit coats and ties, a formality that he maintained and expected of people around him in social situations thereafter. Along with academic subjects, he studied church doctrine, the Nicene Creed, martyrs in the church and articles of faith, and though the specifics of these lessons receded with time, the essence of the dogma stuck with him. He was imbued with the notion that success came with faith and obedience to superiors.

  He learned Latin from Father James Smith, nine parts taskmaster, one part humorist, whose teaching style, making the lessons clear to even the slowest pupil, was one that Vince would emulate. The coach in baseball and basketball, Jack “Jocko” Crane, was a levelheaded layman who treated the boys with respect, and drilled them in the importance of repetition and the necessity of mastering the fundamentals. The assistant coach, Father McGoldrick, was Lombardi’s sponsor and impressed him with an ability to make the boys believe in him without private doubt. That was not always an easy task; these would-be priests were full of vinegar. “We would try to get away with anything we could down there,” said the Reverend Larry Ballweg, one of Lombardi’s classmates. One teacher, a naive Irishman, tried to teach through dramatics, but “guys would run roughshod over the poor guy.”

  No student dared run roughshod over Spike Hyland, a priest with the disposition of a sweatshop foreman who was Cathedral’s disciplinarian and oversaw “the Jug”—after-school detention. Hyland often kept an entire class after school and gave the boys tedious assignments as punishment: write out the principles of geometry but PRINT every third word. He was a skeptic who doubted that most of the boys wanted to be priests or had what it takes to be one. “None of you have the vocation,” he would say dismissively to his charges. “You don’t, your mothers do.” There was a method to Hyland’s madness. The Brooklyn diocese was then overflowing with aspiring priests, many of them, as Hyland pointed out, sent to seminary by Irish and Italian mothers who wanted one of their sons to wear the collar. Matty Lombardi was among them. “My son’s going to be a priest,” she boasted proudly to neighbors.

  As a student and athlete at Cathedral, Lombardi was good but not outstanding, yet he stood apart from the boys anyway. He was scrappy and used his head. His grades were mostly B’s. He stammered while reciting Latin and Greek, but plowed his way through both languages. He was surprisingly light of foot but rather uncoordinated in basketball, where he played center on a lackluster team. He could win the center jump by anticipating the referee’s toss. His nickname was Two Points Lombardi. The derivation is unclear; more likely it meant that he might score two points a game than that he was a sure shot. As a utility outfielder and catcher, he barked out orders to his more talented teammates. He was also injury-prone. “Lombardi, by the way, has more injuries than Hoover has commissions,” a student journal noted dryly. He was remembered at Cathedral for three characteristics: his smile, a sudden, wide flash of teeth that heated the room; occasional eruptions of anger; and his physical maturity. He had the body of an adult at age fifteen—his own adult body, in fact. He was the same height and almost the same weight as a freshman at Cathedral, five eight and 175 pounds, as he was in his senior year at college.

  It was his intimidating physical presence, and his desire to lead, that helped Lombardi get elected president of his section of thirty-five classmates, known as Class B, four years in a row, unanimously every time. The student magazine proclaimed that he could have the job for as long as he wanted it. In his yearbook pictures—dark wavy hair, sharp suit and vest, arms folded in a menacing pose, always seated next to the priests in the front row—he appears several years older than his classmates. “He looked mature. He was a serious guy. He always had this smirk on his face,” said classmate Joe Gartner. “When I saw him look at me, I would always wonder: Is that unveiled contempt or veiled admiration?” As class president, Lombardi’s prime function was maintaining order, much as he did with his siblings and cousins in Sheepshead Bay. The boys stayed in one classroom throughout the day, with priests coming in to teach various subjects. Between periods they might be alone for five minutes, and Lombardi was determined to keep order. At the first rumbling: “All right, fellas, keep quiet.” A minute later: “Come on, fellas, quiet.” Then, if the hubbub persisted, he rose to his feet and let loose with a ferocious command: “SHUT UP!” Which everyone did, according to Larry Ballweg.

  Vinnie’s eruptions were often followed by “outbursts of laughter” that made him “a likable fellow,” recalled another classmate, John B. Healey. In his third year annual he was described as “the guy who wise cracks his way through class.” There was, along with his emotional manner, a bit of mystery to him during his Cathedral days. Few of the boys knew much about him outside the classroom. They called him Tony, a nickname that he used nowhere else. They knew that he played football on a sandlot team on Sunday afternoons (the boys had Thursdays and Sundays off, but went to school on Saturdays). Every now and then he arrived at school with a black eye, which he earned boxing in a Golden Gloves program under a pseudonym. The Cathedral priests disapproved of violent sports; the only thing worse was going out with girls. Boys found to be dating faced suspension. This was an essential part of the culling process; only a third of the students survived the first four years of high school at the seminary. During a retreat at the end of their third year, a Franciscan priest led the boys in a vocational incantation: “I vant to be a priest!” he intoned in a thick German accent, directing the students to repeat the phrase with him. “I vant to be a priest! I vant to be a priest!”

  In the end, Lombardi could not say the words with conviction. He left Cathedral in 1932 without completing the six-year program, overtaken by the realization, he said later, that he “was not intended to be a priest.” As much as he had tried to direct his thoughts to the peaceful realm of God’s salvation, he could not divert himself from earthly temptations. He loved physical contact more than spiritual contact, and could not shake his preference for the game of football. That sport was considered a virtual sin at Cathedral.

  An essay on athletics in the 1931 Cathedral Annual explains the school’s opposition to football, making a case that would echo through the decades:

  Many undesirable results and conditions, physical, moral and intellectual, are brought about by football. Athletes are very liable to physical injury and strain through overemphasis and over-specialization. Football tends to further the advancement of destructive and detrimental moral results. It indubitably leads to the adoption of questionable ethical practices and unsportsmanlike conduct. It sanctions the evasion of rules, trickery, undesirable recruiting practices bordering on professionalism, and a lack of courtesy. There is a regrettable psychological effect on the players. This effect is brought about by newspaper publicity, building up individual prestige instead of praising the machinelike functioning of a team. False attitudes are taken by the student body which revels in its athletic accomplishments while neglecting the real purpose of education.

  None of this meant much to Lombardi. He simply loved football. At the first opportunity, he persuaded friends to jump on the s
ubway with him and ride up to the Polo Grounds to watch the professional Giants and big-time college matches between Fordham and Pitt. He followed football avidly each fall in the sports pages. All through his Cathedral years, despite the discouragement of the school’s fathers, he kept playing sandlot football. As some of his teammates turned eighteen, the good ones who played on major high school teams told him stories about college recruiters dangling scholarships. Vinnie’s resistance to the outside world was already weakened—by uncertainty about a life of celibacy, by the demanding seminary curriculum and by what he thought, somewhat ashamedly, was his unpriestlike temper—and finally it broke down. Football was out there, and he wanted in.

  His timing could not have been better. The very summer that he went looking for a place to play football and win a college scholarship, in essence by repeating his senior year, St. Francis Prep was searching for boys like him. He had heard of the little school, and had even visited its crumbling yellow-brick building on Butler Street, because some of his Sheepshead Bay friends already went there. St. Francis, the oldest Catholic school in Brooklyn, was fighting to survive. At first it considered dropping football, then set out on the opposite course, striving to make a name in football by almost any means necessary, handing out scholarships to gridiron talent all over the metropolitan area. Here could have been Exhibit A in the Cathedral essay about football’s evils. Many of the athletes St. Francis recruited did not meet its academic standards. With his good grades, Lombardi was an honorable beneficiary of a dubiously conducted recruiting enterprise. He was nineteen years old, with four full years of secondary school behind him. The only reason he did not already have a high school degree was that Cathedral was a six-year program. He was more mature than most of the boys he would play against, a fact that would help him and his team. He took a $150 scholarship to St. Francis for tuition and books and signed on to play football.

  The sporting world tends to cling to the nostalgic belief that everything was simpler and cleaner in the old days. That is true in some ways, especially in the realm of money, but not completely. It is the fallacy of the innocent past. The sports of yesteryear might seem purer in retrospect because the larger culture keeps changing: money increases, information comes faster, and sources of temptation multiply. But human nature remains essentially the same, no more or less pure from one generation to the next. Schools employed questionable methods to build winning football programs before Lombardi came along and after he left the game. Even as he followed a relatively straight and narrow path himself, the fallacy of the innocent past would be apparent throughout his career in football, starting at a desperate little Catholic school in Brooklyn.

  THERE WAS NO practice field on Butler Street. The St. Francis boys trained for ten days in August at Camp Alverno in Centerport, New York, which felt like the Ritz compared with what they had to endure once school began. Back in Brooklyn, they put on their pads and cleats at school, then clambered into an old bus and jostled through the borough to what passed for a field on the edge of Todd’s Shipyard along the East River waterfront. The skyscrapers of Manhattan soared in the middle distance. The field was actually a storage lot, a hazardous dirt yard littered with chunks of scrap iron that had to be cleared away. But if the conditions were difficult, the football was the real thing.

  Harry Kane, the coach, ensured that much. He himself had been recruited to bring glory to St. Francis. He was an esteemed schoolboy tactician who had made his name coaching football and baseball at the High School of Commerce where, as he never stopped reminding later players, he had once instructed Lou Gehrig, the immortal Iron Horse of the New York Yankees. Kane was the prototypical football autocrat, a short bowling ball of a man with gray hair and a high-pitched voice who knew what he was doing and dismissed any alternative ways of proceeding. No patting on the head with Harry Kane. What he demanded of his players was undivided attention and commitment to winning. On the way back from the shipyard after a sloppy practice, furious at the way his boys were behaving, Kane shouted, “Stop the bus!” and ordered his players off, forcing them to walk the rest of the way back to Butler Street. It was a moment that Lombardi would recall with delight later, telling it to his own players when they complained that he was too unforgiving.

  When the year started, Kane’s top assistant, Tut Maggio, kept an eye on Lombardi, noticed the way he hit people and thought he should be moved to the line, which Maggio coached. Interior linemen who stood five eight and weighed 175 pounds were not undersized then. Vinnie wanted no part of the move. He survived the scare, playing in the backfield on offense as a spinning fullback, whose primary function in any case was to block, running only in short-yardage situations. There was another fullback on the team, a muscular, pug-nosed Irish kid with stunning speed, all light hair and laughter, who Lombardi realized had twice his own talent but none of his determination. Vinnie played. The gifted slacker mostly sat.

  Though he was there for only one year, a ringer of sorts, Lombardi became a popular student at St. Francis. He was called the class Floyd Gibbons, thought of as a bold adventurer. His smile left the greatest impression. “Lombardi is famous throughout the school for his smile that only seems to become bigger under adverse circumstances,” the SanFran yearbook said of him. “You must not think, however, that Lombardi’s smile is like those ordinary ones that some people seem to wear eternally merely to appear pleasant, and with which they mask their true feelings. Lombardi can no more help smiling than the sun can help shining.” The SanFran writer misunderstood young Lombardi, assuming that the smile reflected his “inner, happy nature.” People in Vinnie’s family knew that he was more complicated than that: the smile was also a product of the nervous energy and anxiety that drove him.

  The St. Francis football team won five of six games that year on its way to the mythical Catholic school title, defeating both Brooklyn Prep and Brooklyn Tech, and Lombardi, on the field for almost every down, performed well enough to gain some all-city recognition. He had his own intense rooting section of Izzos and Lombardis at every game, led by the tattooed Harry, who lit up a Lucky Strike before the kickoff for good luck. But the most telling moment of the season for Vinnie came at the conclusion of an early game against powerful Erasmus Hall, a public high school then in the midst of a long winning streak. Led by the golden arm of its crackerjack quarterback, Sid Luckman, Erasmus shut out St. Francis, 13-0. Yet Lombardi, who smacked Luckman with a few good licks on defense, felt like anything but a loser when it was over. He experienced what he later described as a locker room epiphany. As he sat slumped on the bench in his grass-stained red and blue uniform, he was overcome by joy, a rare feeling for him. Nothing on the sandlots felt quite like this. He understood that he was not a great player, but he had fought hard, given his best and discovered that no one on the field intimidated him, no matter how big or fast. He was confident, convinced that he could compete, puzzled why other players did not put out as much as he had. He felt fatigue, soreness, competitive yearning, accomplishment—and all of this, he said later, left him surprisingly elated.

  WORK and PLAY. It was an intoxicating sensation, one that he would want to experience again and again for the rest of his life.

  2

  Fordham Road

  NEW YORK CITY once was the place to play college football. During the twenties and thirties, three schools there, Fordham, New York University and Columbia, all had major programs that attracted the best teams in the country to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. Their contests on autumn Saturdays were held in front of thunderous crowds and covered by the most influential sportswriters in America, who competed in prose and poetry to glorify the college game in more than a dozen metropolitan daily newspapers. When he accepted a scholarship to play at Fordham in the fall of 1933, choosing it over Columbia, Lombardi remained in New York, but he was a long way from home. The campus on Rose Hill was about as far from Sheepshead Bay as one could get within the city, forty-four miles from the bottom of Brooklyn to n
ear the top of the Bronx. The trip by public transportation took an hour and a half of riding subways through three boroughs: aboveground on the BMT’s Brighton Beach Line from Avenue U to Newkirk Avenue, down under Prospect Park to Myrtle Avenue, up in daylight again to rumble over the East River at Manhattan Bridge, and back in darkness as the Sixth Avenue Line rolled north under the West Side of Manhattan and the Bronx on the way up to the Grand Concourse. At the end of that trip came a half-mile walk down Fordham Road to the school’s front gate.

  Vinnie’s cousin Richie Izzo, who had arrived at Fordham a year before him and had helped persuade him to enroll there, made that commute every day. Like most of the men of Fordham, Richie was a day hop, as commuter students were called. Many day hops traveled by train and subway from Brooklyn, Queens and outer Long Island. Another contingent hitchhiked or drove down in car pools from Westchester County; Ed Quinn, who inherited an old Ford from his aunt, took a group of four guys in from New Rochelle, often with just enough gas to reach the Bronx Zoo. In those days they could abandon the car in the middle of the street—“We wouldn’t even push it to the curb,” Quinn recalled—and hustle up the sidewalk to make their nine o’clock class, certain the car would still be there late in the afternoon when they returned with a canister of gas. Some day hops found their way across the Hudson River from New Jersey; Orville Leddy took the train down from Bergenfield to Weehauken, then rode across to Manhattan on a ferry, before shuttling north on the subway. And one of the 432 men in Lombardi’s freshman class, Wellington Mara, whose father owned the New York Football Giants, was occasionally seen riding up from his family’s luxurious residence at 975 Park Avenue in the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine.