Lombardi loved Bloody Wednesday: out there on Fordham Field above the gymnasium on Rose Hill, trains from the New York Central rumbling along beyond the fence, Butch in the midst of his teammates, hours of work behind them, letting loose, darkness enveloping the Bronx, the smell of mud and grass and leaves and leather and sweat, thwack and thud, then a big heap on the ground, lying there, exhausted, and up for more.
But this time, on the Wednesday before the St. Mary’s game, Lombardi did not get up. He had playfully switched to the backfield in the free-for-all and carried the ball. As players disentangled, Butch was on the bottom of the pile, motionless, groaning loudly, kicked in the gut so hard that he could not move. He had to be carried from the field. Enough, said Crowley, sending his men to the showers. That night Lombardi felt so queasy he could not eat. He returned the next day, determined not to lose a chance to start, but collapsed before drills began and was carried off again, semiconscious. At the infirmary, doctors determined that he was bleeding internally with an aneurism in his duodenum. If nothing else, a glowing article in Friday’s New York Post must have cheered the young casualty, who had not started a game yet was portrayed as a most valuable player. “Fordham’s dreams of football glory in tomorrow’s intersectional gridiron classic with the highly-touted Galloping Gaels of St. Mary, which will pack the Polo Grounds to its historic rafters, were all but knocked galley west yesterday,” the story began. “An injury to Vincent Lombardi, the powerful young Brooklyn sophomore whom Jim Crowley, the Ram coach, had nominated for a starting position at tackle, did it.”
Lombardi was listed as a starting lineman in the game program, but in fact he was back in the campus infirmary when St. Mary’s beat Fordham 14 to 9, consigned to a bedridden row of maimed football players that included three other linemen and the star halfback, Joe Maniaci. Lombardi was put on a diet of soft foods: ice cream, heavy cream, milk, bananas. The next week students in his public speaking and religion classes gathered below the window of his infirmary room and shouted up songs and get-well wishes. “Gave him the little rah, rah, rah,” classmate Edward J. Schmidlein said. Inspired and still burning for his chance to play, Lombardi dragged himself out of the infirmary that Thursday and reported for practice, surprising Crowley and the Fordham beat writers, who hailed the return of “one of the cripples.” But Lombardi was so weak that he could play little that week or the next. He was in and out of the lineup the rest of the year, which Fordham completed with a 5 and 3 record. The Rams lost to three intersectional foes, but won two important games near the end of the season, 13 to 12 over Major Bob Neyland’s powerhouse Tennessee squad, and 39 to 13 against archrival NYU in the muck of Yankee Stadium on Thanksgiving Day. Most of the Fordham starting linemen graduated after that, opening the way for Lombardi and his cohorts to take over.
IT WAS NOT easy to meet women at Fordham, where even the cheerleaders were men. The Jesuits did not entirely discourage dating, but the only women on campus were a few elderly librarians and telephone operators. Joining an organization that traveled away from Rose Hill was the surest way to encounter women. The Fordham Glee Club was especially popular not just because of its musical tradition, but also its sex appeal. The male singers looked dashing in white ties and tails, and performed at the nearby women’s schools, including Mount St. Vincent’s and the College of New Rochelle. Most campus social clubs sponsored dances, none bigger than the spring formal held by the Brooklyn-Long Island Club. Four hundred Fordham men brought dates to the Hotel Pennsylvania’s rooftop across Seventh Avenue from Penn Station, where couples danced in tuxedos and gowns to the big-band music of Woody Herman and Tommy Dorsey.
Lombardi’s experience with women had been extremely limited. He played spin the bottle as an adolescent with his cousins over at Grandma Izzo’s, but during his years at Cathedral Prep, as he trained for the priesthood, even that innocent game would be considered sinful, material for his confessions. During his year at St. Francis Prep, he was allowed to date, but the girl he asked to the spring prom was his cousin Dorothy Izzo. Finally, at Fordham, largely because of the gregarious attitude of Jim Lawlor, his big, glad-handing roommate, Vinnie entered a new world of romance. Lawlor had a first cousin at Fordham named Arthur Planitz, whose two sisters, Marie and Marge, were then living with their mother in the Bronx in a first-floor apartment at 2564 Creston Avenue, a third of a mile up Fordham Road from campus. Marie had studied nursing at Roosevelt Hospital, but dropped out after getting sick. German Catholic on her father’s side and Irish Catholic on her mother’s (a Sheridan), she was tall, blonde and blue-eyed, with a figure, recalled several Fordham men, that elicited from them a familiar, ungrammatical locker room exclamation: “What a built!”
With the approval of Marie and Marge, Lawlor began bringing Vinnie and other football players to the apartment, sometimes on Saturday nights after the team’s banquet of Italian food at the Riviera Restaurant on Kingsbridge Road, more often late on Sunday afternoons. Lawlor, Lombardi, Leo Paquin, Andy Palau and a half-dozen more pals sat around munching on pretzels, drinking beer and telling lies. Marie was quickly taken by Lombardi; overwhelmed, she said later, by his maturity, his dark curly hair and brilliant smile. She became his girlfriend, his first and only. Soon after Marie and Vin met, Lawlor accompanied them down to Fair Haven, the New Jersey shore town where the Planitz family came from and where they maintained a residence.
As Marie told the story in later years, after a long day swimming and roaming the beach she said goodbye to Lombardi, walked into the house and announced to her father, “I’m going to marry that man.”
“No you’re not, Rep,” she remembered her father answering sternly. “He’s Italian.”
“Rep” was Mortimer Planitz’s pet name for his daughter, short for reptile. On the surface Mortimer Planitz appeared to be a reserved figure, conservative and status-conscious. He was a stockbroker who dressed in suit and bow tie every day, whether staying home to receive guests or heading to Wall Street to buy and sell on the New York Stock Exchange. He did not like the idea of his daughter dating the rough-looking son of an Italian butcher from Brooklyn. But Marie’s father was in no position to dictate proper behavior to others. He had long been involved in an illicit intrafamily romance that haunted his wife, Mary, and Marie herself, for the rest of their lives. When Marie was entering high school at Red Bank (New Jersey) Catholic High near Fair Haven, her father became seriously ill with blood poisoning when his cut foot was infected from the dye in dark socks. He was cared for by Mary’s sister, Cass, a nurse, at the family’s apartment in the Bronx. During the recovery period he and Cass fell in love, and they stayed together from then on.
It was a debilitating family melodrama, played out in silence and shame. The Planitzes, Marie said later, did not yell and scream or even talk about what was going on. There was no divorce and remarriage, just an unofficial rearrangement. Marie blamed everything on her aunt Cass, not her father. Her mother, Mary, became a quiet alcoholic and eventually suffered a stroke. She stayed in Fair Haven until her children finished high school, then moved to the apartment in the Bronx, switching residences with Mortimer and Cass. Marie and Marge stayed with their mother while son Arthur attended school at nearby Fordham. Disaffected and confused by the family trauma, Marie tried to lose herself in fun: in search of the next dance, another party, a new young man to meet. Then she encountered Vin Lombardi, who seemed to offer everything that her life lacked: he was emotional, he had a huge family, he was full of life, a varsity athlete, religious and dependable, a relief.
Lombardi had been shy in his dealings with women, inarticulate about his deepest feelings, but Marie awakened his dormant romantic side. He showered her with gifts and pastel-colored greeting cards to “Rie Dear” from “Vin.” She became, almost immediately, the first promoter of his career. During her high school years she had preferred to watch football games by standing on the sideline near the boys, and now she was figuratively standing next to her Vince. One day she was with him
at an ice cream parlor near campus and saw big Ed Franco coming through the door. Franco, recruited to Fordham from Jersey City, New Jersey, a year after Vin, was also an interior lineman, with more raw talent, and loomed as a threat for playing time as Lombardi began his junior year. “So you’re Ed Franco. You’re the fellow trying to take away my boyfriend’s job,” Marie said to him. She bet Franco a box of candy that he would not be able to do it.
Vin brought Marie home several times in the summer after his sophomore year, when he worked as a lifeguard and special policeman at Brighton Beach, one beach down the shore from his family’s summer locker at Manhattan Beach. The Lombardis by then had moved off Fourteenth Street to a new house at the corner of Avenue S and Twenty-ninth. Vin’s brother Harold adored Marie, finding her more artistic than anyone in his own family. But the Lombardi women had trouble with her. Mother Matty seemed jealous of anyone who threatened to steal the love of her beloved son. “My mother was a very domineering woman and she would never relinquish Vin,” said Harold. Sister Madeline befriended Marie and visited her at the Bronx apartment, occasionally sleeping over, but remained suspicious. If Marie had so much money, as she boasted, why did she keep borrowing clothes from Madeline? To her, Marie seemed a bit aloof. “I don’t remember her ever showing emotion like I would,” Madeline said later. “I thought she was pretty cold, but to an Italian if you weren’t Italian I guess everybody seemed cold.”
THE YEAR 1935 in the Bronx: Lombardi told the Fordham publicist that his favorite actors were Leslie Howard, Ann Harding and Helen Hayes. He claimed to be a “voracious” reader of the books of Richard Halliburton, the daring Hoosier who wrote adventure stories romanticizing his travels around the globe. Vinnie and his Fordham teammates paid a quarter to see motion pictures at the Paramount. Another quarter got them a sixteen-inch pie at the Italian pizzerias up on Arthur Avenue. They received free season passes to Giants games at the Polo Grounds (paying only the 20 cents federal tax). Old Golds, Luckies, cork-tipped Herbert Tareytons and menthol Spuds (“When Rah! Rah! Rah! makes your throat Raw! Raw! Raw! Light a Spud Cigarette”) went for 15 cents a pack. A night out with Marie, dancing to Irving Conn and his Orchestra at Ben Riley’s Arrowhead Inn on Riverdale Avenue, set Vin back a dollar per ticket. Subway fare: a nickel. The Bronx Buick Company on Jerome Avenue advertised a 1934 Pontiac Sports Coupe, eight cylinders and rumble seat, for $495. Tickets to Fordham football games at the Polo Grounds cost 50 cents for students; other fans paid $1.10 to sit in the bleachers, $2.75 for reserved seats and $3.30 for box seats. A pittance, in retrospect, but 50 cents was hard to get in the Depression; it was a half-day’s work for Al Lucchi, one of Lombardi’s classmates, who spent several hours before and after school as an elevator operator at the Barbizon Plaza in Manhattan.
The scale of life during Lombardi’s college days now seems manageable and innocent, but that is looking through the distorted lens from present to past. Life did not appear entirely innocent then. In fact, as Lombardi began his junior year at Fordham, a dominant theme in American academic circles was the loss of innocence. Leading scholars feared that universities, reflecting changes evident in modern society, were deteriorating into incoherence, with an emphasis on the particular instead of the whole, on uninterpreted fact instead of fundamental principle, encouraging a hollow worship of fame and success. The inevitable results, they said, were confusion, greed and self-centeredness.
Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, delivered a paper asserting that bewilderment was becoming the characteristic feature of the modern world. If a university was to combat that, he said, it “must be intelligible as well as intelligent.” But “if we look at the modern American university we have some difficulty seeing that it is uniformly either one. It sometimes seems to approximate kindergarten at one end and a clutter of specialists at the other.” The fall from grace of American universities, declared Ralph C. Hutchinson, president of Washington and Jefferson College, was “evidenced by the shocking number of graduates who have been discovered in … corrupt professional practices, in the concealment of corporation assets or liabilities, in the watering of stock, the peddling of questionable securities, the evasion of income and other taxes, the distribution and acceptance of bribes, and the predatory exploitation of public resources.”
The rise of major college football was part of the debate. After a brief slump at the beginning of the decade, the game had become increasingly popular and profitable again during Lombardi’s college years: Attendance figures rose 10 percent every season from a Depression-era low in 1932, and bulging gate receipts loomed ever larger in the considerations of athletic directors and administrators. Notre Dame drew more than 53,000 spectators to every game. Navy led eastern schools with an attendance average of 44,000, with Fordham close behind. But along with enormous growth came complaints that the sport had compromised the integrity of the universities and made laughable the ideal of amateur competition. Even the Marx Brothers were laughing: their 1932 Horse Feathers was a send-up on the college recruitment of dumb football players.
The professionalization of college football dated back at least to 1891, when the University of Chicago hired the first coach at a professor’s salary, Amos Alonzo Stagg. Now Chicago’s president, Hutchins, was questioning the relevance of football to the educational mission. He had forced Stagg to leave in 1932 and was in the process of deemphasizing football; before the decade was out he would eliminate it at Chicago altogether. The college game was all but invented by Yale’s Walter Camp, who conceived the modern scrimmage rules, attempted to deepen the significance of the game with his analogies to warfare and corporate management, and glorified the players with his annual All-American teams. But in 1931 the death of an Eli player had led some to conclude that the warfare analogy had gone too far, and now Yale’s president, James Rowland Angell, stood out among the game’s leading critics. During the 1935 season Angell lambasted the commercialization of collegiate athletics, saying that football had succumbed to a “hired man” policy. “College football has become in many instances big business,” he said. “Today in college football it is the crowd, the winners, the receipts, that count above everything else in 70 percent of the institutions.” Angell offered three alternatives: (1) seek endowments to make athletics independent of gate receipts; (2) allow athletics to carry on unaided by college; or (3) abandon college sports. His comments received major coverage. Most sports columnists ridiculed his preaching (“A careful perusal of the Constitution fails to reveal that the makers of that document were greatly concerned with the possible advantages which might accrue to a youth weighing more than 150 pounds and lucky enough to kick a football more than 40 yards,” wrote Hugh Bradley).
Most editorial writers picked up the cause, however, as did other public officials. Governor Martin L. Davey of Ohio sarcastically called football “the supreme purpose of higher education” and complained that Ohio State players were stashed on the state payroll. To recruit top players, the university and its boosters found no-show or easy jobs for fourteen athletes in the state highway department, sales tax division and motor vehicle department, or at the capitol as legislative pages, elevator operators or clerks. The Reverend Patrick J. Mahan, S.J., of Creighton University said that big-time college football presented an inherent contradiction. “I am convinced, and reasonably so, that no regular player is on a big team without being paid. He does not, out of his own pocket, pay for his tuition, fees, board and lodging. Yet authorities of universities decry the subsidizing of athletics,” said Mahan, concluding: “If you sit in at a crooked game you must be crooked if you expect to win.”
During his first three years at Fordham, Jim Crowley heard no complaints from his Jesuit superiors about the dominance of big-time college football on campus. His problem with Father Aloysius J. Hogan, the school’s president, was of an entirely different sort. Hogan had little use for academics who disliked football. Crowley’s problem with his boss was that here was a Jesuit
who thought he knew everything about sports. Every Monday during football season, shortly after lunch, Hogan would slip into Sleepy Jim’s blue Packard parked outside the campus’s Bathgate entrance, puff on his pipe and launch into a soliloquy on the tactics the coach might employ for the next game. Crowley ignored the advice but endured the lectures, which were a quiet source of amusement to others in the athletic department, though not to Jack Coffey, who faced the same situation with his baseball team. Once, after Coffey’s ball club lost a game 18 to 2, Father Hogan was beside himself, saying there was no reason they should have lost by such a score. “I help out as much as I can,” the father lamented. “But the exigencies of the job are endless, and I cannot be in two places at one time.”
HIS JUNIOR YEAR was the most frustrating of Butch Lombardi’s career. He began the season as the regular right guard, but injured his shoulder in a 13 to 7 victory over visiting Vanderbilt, and soon lost his job to Ed Franco. Whether this prompted Marie to pay off her bet and give Franco a box of candy is lost in history, but it did cause her boyfriend to sulk. Franco not only played, he became a star, part of a tough front line that shut out Pitt in a scoreless tie and stifled the offense of talented St. Mary’s in a 7 to 7 tie. The front seven linemen performed so strongly that Fordham’s publicist gave them a nickname, The Seven Samsons. Lombardi was relegated to a backup group of “shock troops” who spelled the regulars at the start of the game and again in the third quarter. Still, his injury jinx persisted, even with limited playing time. He twisted an ankle against Pitt and got elbowed in the mouth so hard in the St. Mary’s game that his lower teeth were knocked loose. He wore a bridge for the rest of his life. He was the constant companion of trainer Jake Weber, the diminutive Dutchman known as Eighty Minute Jake, who could single-handedly tape the ankles of the entire forty-man squad, eighty ankles in eighty minutes. Harry Lombardi’s old admonition to his son—“Hurt is all in your mind!”—was only partially true. Vinnie was hurting body and soul. One Saturday night, stuck alone in his room at St. John’s with an injury, he spotted classmate James Ambury walking down the abandoned hallway and called him in for help. “Would you get me a priest?” Lombardi asked. “I need to go to confession but I can’t move.”
When Pride Still Mattered Page 5