Lombardi was among the lucky few spared the daily grind. There were no day hops on the football squad. Most of the players were recruited out of the factory towns of New England or Pennsylvania coal country, but even the few who came from the New York area were given room and board on campus. They were an elite within the school’s boarding elite. Many of them, like Lombardi, had attended prep schools for a year or two after high school and were not only bigger but older than their classmates. They roomed on the same floors of Dealy or St. John’s Halls (in alphabetical order: Lombardi’s roommate was Jim Lawlor, a tackle from Astoria, Queens). They ate steaks and lamb chops together at the training table. They walked the campus in athletic brigades and played pool together in Dealy’s smoke-filled recreation room. The first memory many teammates retained of Lombardi was of an incident at the pool table; he was leaning over to make a shot during their first week on campus, and someone goosed him. His pool cue flew across the table, and he turned around with a look that warned everyone that here was a serious fellow.
The Fordham campus and its surroundings seemed isolated from the grit of the metropolis. A calming preserve of natural beauty extended from the world-famous zoo to the New York Botanical Gardens and onto the school property itself, seventy acres of cobblestone paths, gray stone Gothic buildings and rolling greenswards shaded by graceful elms. The faculty of Jesuits, robed in full-length black cassocks, strolled the paths of the Quadrangle, carrying missals and saying their office. The athletic director, Jack Coffey, prided himself on memorizing the birthday of every student. “Hello, June 11,” he chirped upon greeting young Lombardi. The campus was so evocative of academic serenity that it was a favorite choice for collegiate movie scenes. There was some clanging in the center of it all, where construction had begun on Keating Hall, but the noise was greeted as a sign of vitality, the majestic frontispiece of Keating rising skyward as a symbol that Fordham, founded in 1841 as the first Catholic institution of higher learning in the northeast United States, was flourishing even amid the economic hardship of the Depression years.
The Jesuits sought to impose strict discipline on the men who lived there, and Lombardi mostly accepted it. From his sparely furnished freshman room on the fifth floor of Dealy, high-ceilinged with a creaky wooden floor, he awoke each morning at six-thirty, dressed in coat and tie, put on his maroon-bowed miraculous medal depicting the Blessed Mother, and followed the path to chapel for daily mass before breakfast and class. He had few options in his coursework. Like many football players, he studied business administration, but only three courses separated that major from most others. All undergraduates essentially followed the same curriculum, the Jesuits’ favored Ratio Studiorum, which emphasized the retention of knowledge in the first two years and an integration of that knowledge into a spiritual philosophy in the final two. Freshmen were loaded down with as many as eight courses per semester, while seniors had only four, with an increasing emphasis on philosophy, psychology, religion and ethics. All Fordham men were expected to have an acquaintance with classical languages, which Lombardi already had fulfilled by taking Latin and Greek at Cathedral and St. Francis. At Fordham he studied French.
There was no sleeping in or skipping class. Attendance was mandatory and tests came unceasingly. The Reverend Joseph Assmuth, S.J., biology professor for underclassmen, perhaps seemed inimitable, yet he was representative of the Jesuits who instructed Lombardi. Most of them had idiosyncratic touches; all were demanding. Assmuth was considered a world authority on termites. Students could not chew gum in his class. “Zat is for cows,” he would proclaim in his German accent. “Ve don’t chew!” He did not use textbooks, but scrawled everything on the blackboard for students to take down, essentially creating a textbook over the course of the year. And he kept everyone anxious. One never knew which day of the week he would stride in and bellow “Blitz!” as assistants passed out the dreaded surprise quiz.
After classwork and football practice Lombardi was expected back in his room no later than eight on weekdays, with lights out by ten-thirty. The Jesuits conducted room checks; to demonstrate their obedience, Lombardi and Lawlor stepped out into the hall, fell on their knees and uttered their nightly prayers. On weekends, the boarders could escape the campus, but had to return by eleven, midnight for upperclassmen, and report to the residence hall prefect or dean of discipline, Father John W. Tynan, S.J. (Black Jack, the students called him), on the way back to their rooms. John Barris, one of Lombardi’s classmates, thought that it was “just like a monastery up there. They locked the gates. They wouldn’t let you out. Everything was a sin. You had this stuff drilled into you.” But football players often exhibit split personalities, willing to exist in an authoritarian environment, yet always looking for small ways to rebel. In their first weeks at Fordham, some freshman ballplayers learned how to sneak from room to room by climbing out the window and moving along the ledge while clinging to the mansard roof. Later many of them, including Lombardi, discovered they could fool the Jesuits, who checked their breath for alcohol at night, by chewing garlic cloves after drinking.
IT TOOK only one day of practice for the new head coach at Fordham to decide that his young recruit from Brooklyn was not going to become a backfield star. James H. Crowley watched Vinnie Lombardi play fullback that opening day, then motioned for freshman coach Ed Hunsinger to come over. Too slow, said Crowley, switch the kid to the front. The next day Lombardi was playing guard. He was frustrated by the move and had difficulty adjusting from the upright position of a fullback to the three-point stance of a lineman. His hip pads bothered him. Nearsighted and color-blind, he complained about what he saw up there on the line. The opponents looked too close to him, separated only by the width of the ball. But he became a guard.
That move of positions from fullback to guard in one sense marked the starting point of the mythology of Vince Lombardi. But the context of the Lombardi myth goes back another generation, to an earlier story involving his coach Jim Crowley. There is a remarkable circle of coincidence in Lombardi’s life that began, long before he had ever heard of the place, in the small northeastern Wisconsin city of Green Bay. That is where Crowley launched his own football career. He was the backfield star of the 1920 Green Bay East High team that won the state championship when he threw four touchdown passes in the decisive game against Green Bay West, the precision of his spirals aided by a deformed pinky finger on his right hand, which he said helped him better steer the ball. His first high school coach was Earl “Curly” Lambeau, a local athlete who had dropped out of Notre Dame and was also starting up a new professional team back home called the Green Bay Packers.
At Lambeau’s suggestion, Crowley left Green Bay to play for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame. There he became known as Sleepy Jim, a nickname that perfectly captured his appearance. His whole physical manner suggested relaxation: his ambling gait, his lazy hair parted down the middle, his tired, droopy eyes. It was Rockne who had coined the phrase by describing his recruit as “a sleepy-eyed lad who looked as though he were built to be a tester in an alarm clock factory.” But Crowley’s drowsy aspect disguised a quick wit. To the question of why he seemed so sleepy, he explained in deadpan: “I sleep all right at night and in the morning, but in the afternoon I toss and turn something awful.” On the practice field at South Bend, Indiana, one day, Rockne, who was called The Swede by his players, lashed out at Crowley for missing a blocking assignment. “Is there anything dumber than a dumb Irishman?” asked the coach. From Sleepy Jim came the dry retort, “Yeah, Coach, a smart Swede.”
Crowley was not just sleepy and funny, he was also a character in American mythology by the time he reached Fordham. He had been brought to fame in part by his own running skills, but more by the facile work of a publicist and the melodramatic prose of the greatest mythmaker in American sports, Grantland Rice, who over the course of a half-century wrote more than twenty-two thousand stories and seven thousand poems celebrating athletes and their games. Crowley played left hal
fback at Notre Dame in a backfield that included Don Miller, Harry Stuhldreher and Elmer Layden. The quartet, gritty and undersized, their average weight only 164 pounds, started twenty-two straight games from 1922 to 1924, losing only once. The fifteenth game in that streak came against a top-rated Army team at the Polo Grounds on October 18, 1924. Rice covered the contest amid the brotherhood of New York sportswriters in the press box, and in loose conspiracy with a sports information man for the Irish, he transformed Sleepy Jim and his backfield mates from mere mortals into football legends: the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame.
On the Wednesday before the game, back in South Bend, the Notre Dame players had traipsed over to the recreation center in Washington Hall for their ritual road trip eve movie. Playing on the screen that night was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a 1921 silent film starring Rudolph Valentino and based on the mystical book of the same title written by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. It was a story of greed, hedonism, honor, love and war set in Argentina and France before and during World War I. In the movie’s pivotal scene, the Valentino character encounters a Christlike prophet known as the Stranger who foresees “the beginning of the end,” the coming of world conflagration, and evokes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from Revelation. They appear as horrifying apparitions on horseback, the helmeted Conquest, the hideous War, then Pestilence, carrying the scales of famine, and finally the pale rider on the pale horse, Death.
George Strickler, the Notre Dame public relations man, said he “got goosebumps” watching the scene where the Four Horsemen, after appearing one by one, join together and thunder across the screen. The image stayed with him all the way to New York on the train. At halftime of the Army game, as he stood in the press box gossiping with a group of writers that included Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon, he mentioned that the Irish backs were running through the Army defense “just like the horsemen.” The next morning, when he leafed through the Sunday edition of the New York Tribune, he realized that Rice had appropriated his idea for what would become the most famous football lead ever written:
POLO GROUNDS New York, Oct. 18, 1924—Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden….
Strickler’s work was not finished. After reading Rice’s account he called his father in South Bend and arranged for him to rent four horses from a corral next to his saloon. At the first practice session after the team’s return from New York, photographers were led onto the field to snap the picture of a publicist’s dreams: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden on their mounts, wearing helmets and fearsomely stylish warmup coats. The shot was distributed nationally above the cutline: “The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame.” That phrase and the symbolism of the photograph combined to denote something beyond the prowess of a talented college backfield. All the elements were there for a new myth, born from the old.
The leathery men on horseback not only summoned the allegorical riders of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelations, they also connected football to something that had nothing to do with the movie but everything to do with the photographic image: the mythology of the American West. Swift justice and thrilling violence, the unambiguous world of black hats and white hats, valor and perseverance on the unspoiled plain—all that seemed endangered by the advent of the modern age. But here, within the hundred yards of a football field, was another way to play out America’s enduring national myth, the freedom of the frontier. The Old West might be disappearing, but the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame rode on in the nation’s romantic imagination, in league with the silent westerns then being filmed in Hollywood, yet with a more powerful combination of sport, legend and memory. High on horseback, invincible, Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden became honorable warriors of a lineage that reached deep into the narrative archive, as eternal and illusory as knights of the Middle Ages. Their power in the sporting imagination, like that of medieval knights, arose from the contradiction of the heroic dream described by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, whose seminal work on the legend of chivalric knights was published contemporaneously with Grantland Rice’s rendering of the Four Horsemen. “Reality continuously denies the ideal,” Huizinga noted, forcing culture to withdraw “further and further back into the sphere of festival and play.”
Jim Crowley brought the mythology of the Horsemen with him to Fordham a decade after leaving Notre Dame. On the first day of practice, when he encountered Vince Lombardi and decided to move him to guard, he unwittingly provided the connection from past to future, from one myth to the next.
YOU DID NOT have to be a big lug to play guard. Crowley copied the system he had been taught at Notre Dame, preferring what were called “watch charm” guards, often four inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than average linemen. The position demanded quickness and tenacity. Lombardi was squat and slow in sprints, with large feet that looked as though they belonged on somebody else’s body, but he was quick in short bursts and indisputably tenacious, as was his fellow guard Nat Pierce. What was most unusual about Lombardi was that he was from New York. The other key recruits in Crowley’s first class came out of New England factory towns: Pierce grew up in Biddeford, Maine, on a street whose name—Granite—would later define him; Leo Paquin, a rangy end, was from Brockton, Massachusetts; Joe Dulkie, a fullback, from Lowell; Andy “Handy Andy” Palau, a quarterback and kicker, and Albie Gurske, a halfback, both from Bristol, Connecticut; and Frank Mautte, another halfback, from New Haven. Among all the varsity and freshman players, only five were from New York, while eighteen were from Massachusetts alone.
During their freshman year, proscribed from varsity competition, Lombardi and his classmates spent most of their time on the practice field learning the Notre Dame box offense and mimicking the opposition in scrimmages against the varsity. The guards Lombardi and Pierce spent hour after hour practicing the crossover steps required of them when they pulled out to lead the blocking on sweeps. From his three-point stance at right guard, pulling right, Vinnie would drop his right foot back slightly at the snap, then cross over with his left foot and head out, swerving from the line enough so as not to interfere with other blockers, yet reaching the hole before the swiftest back would make his cut. Crowley’s assistants, including line coaches Frank Leahy and Judge Carberry, who also came from Notre Dame, stressed that the key to good line play was the quick start, the sudden hit, taking the momentum away from the defender. One day in practice, Lombardi and Pierce learned just how quick they both were; mishearing the play, Vinnie pulled left while Natty pulled right. They met, full force, behind center, “like a head-on car collision,” Lombardi later recalled. “We both went down. Our pride was hurt.” His nearsightedness might have hindered him in that instance, but for the most part his coaches and teammates thought he was a superior blocker precisely because he could hardly see. He hit opposing linemen a split second before he realized he was upon them, which gave him a reckless abandon, never holding back to cushion the blow.
Butch was the nickname his teammates gave Lombardi. Appropriate, perhaps, for the grandson of Tony the Barber. And it reflected Vinnie’s toughness. As rugged as he was, though, the history of his early career at Fordham is primarily a hospital report. He was held out of three freshman games with a broken ankle. During spring drills the next May, as Lombardi was preparing for his sophomore season, Crowley and the line coaches began mentioning him as a key backup, if not starter, and by fall preseason workouts his chances seemed bright. Upperclassmen on the line succumbed to injuries one after another: John Waldron dislocated his shoulder and was knocked out for the year, while Amerino Sarno, the roughneck tackle, fractured his ankle and was hobbling for several weeks. Butch Lombardi saw backup action at guard in the first varsity game of his college career, played at Yankee Stadium instead of the usual Polo Grounds, a 57 to 0 thrashing of tiny Westminster of Pennsylvania. Crow
ley used the mismatch to experiment, using a flexible shift formation in which the guards started in the backfield, aligned with the halfbacks, then jumped into gaps in the line before the snap. Neither the score nor Crowley’s offensive creativity proved to be signs of things to come. For the rest of that year, Fordham would be a low-scoring outfit with a conservative offense that relied on a sturdy defense to win ball games.
The next weekend, on Columbus Day, Fordham made a rare road trip (every team wanted to play in New York, where the big crowds and sportswriters were), taking the train up to play at Boston College. Early in the game a starting tackle broke two bones in his hand, further depleting the crippled line corps, and was replaced by Lombardi, who performed admirably despite his lack of size for that position. In several stories the following Monday and Tuesday, as Fordham practiced for its annual visit from St. Mary’s of California, Lombardi, projected to start at tackle, had suddenly ballooned into a bulky 200-pounder. Or so said the Fordham Rams publicity department and New York sportswriters. Butch actually still weighed about 183 pounds. The Lombardi buildup lasted one day.
In the day-to-day ritual of football practice, Wednesday was the most brutal day, the midweek session when the players went at it with game-situation ferocity. Crowley trained his men in secret, the workouts closed to students and the press. He was an adherent of long and physical practices, full of wind sprints and odd exercises like the one-legged bump, in which two players faced off against each other on one leg, holding the other behind them, and bumped shoulders until one hit the ground. Sleepy Jim thought it helped with balance. On Wednesday he kept the players on the field until they appeared as dim figures scrimmaging in the twilight, identified only by grunts. The final round was all hitting, with backs slamming into the line again and again, and blockers and tacklers, protected only by slender pads and leather helmets without face guards, pounding away in violent scrums at the line. The men often changed positions for the free-for-all; they were not rehearsing plays so much as toughening themselves for the bruises of Saturday and relieving the weekly boredom through unrestrained frenzy.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 4