When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Tim Cohane received notice for creating the Seven Blocks, but for the rest of his life he graciously refuted any claim to authorship, acknowledging that it was the work of a wire service cutline writer who never took credit for it himself. In all events, the phrase was transformed into myth. Sports sections competed for the fiercest-looking picture of the Seven Blocks of Granite: in three-point stance; charging downfield; standing tall and impenetrable. Other bards in the sportswriting tribe competed with Rice for memorable stanzas. Dan Parker, columnist for the Mirror, worked up a military analogy:

  Hindy’s well-known front wall

  Took a million troops to man it

  Whereas Fordham has but seven

  In its famous Wall of Granite.

  Linemen unaccustomed to the celebrity usually afforded gifted runners and passers were now treated as stars, worthy of feature stories in the press. Stanley Frank of the New York Post wrote a story on “the least conspicuous guard”—Vin Lombardi, whose Brooklyn boyhood provided a local angle.

  “It is a pretty good stint for anybody to clinch immortality—for one season at least—as one of the Seven Blocks of Granite, particularly for a citizen whose speech is not distinguished by a broad ‘a,’ ” Frank wrote. “The broad ‘a’ is almost standard equipment for a Fordham player since the majority of the squad and six regulars are pilgrims from New England. Lombardi comes from Brooklyn and can contribute only a broad beam to the panoramic picture.” Butch was the least known of the Seven Blocks, Frank surmised, because “he doesn’t wander at large in the manner of Wojy, the backer-upper; he hasn’t Ed Franco’s knack of getting into pictures, and he doesn’t caddy fumbles as Nat Pierce does.” He was just a “stout” fellow who kept plugging along without notice until “the epic battle in the Pitt game,” when “opposition scouts went away speaking most kindly and at greatest length about Lombardi.” At the start of the baseball season, Lombardi had correctly predicted that the Yankees and Giants would win the pennants, so Frank decided to ask him who would win the Rose Bowl: the champions of the Pacific or Fordham. “Lombardi maintained a complete and dignified silence. He probably knew the answer, but he is one of the gladiators who considers premature talk an ill omen.”

  Lombardi’s reticence on the Rose Bowl issue seemed his alone. The motto at Fordham after the Pitt victory became “From Rose Hill to the Rose Bowl.” Anticipating more of the national spotlight, the athletic department outfitted the Rams in brilliant new uniforms, with gilded helmets, bright yellow sateen pants, and maroon jerseys with gold numerals front and back. The expectations only increased that Saturday after Fordham gained revenge on Purdue, defeating the Boilermakers 15 to 0 in another impressive defensive performance that was keyed by Crowley’s decision to shift his defense. He moved Lombardi out from his middle guard position to a post across from the strong-side end, where he could help thwart the sweeps of Purdue’s star running back, Cecil Isbell. After the game, the Fordham band paraded out of the Polo Grounds blaring “California, Here I Come!” To the thousands of desperate families whose lives had been shattered by dust storms in Oklahoma and Texas that year, the popular tune was a bittersweet anthem of meager hope as they made their way west to California. To the football fans of Fordham, it was all rollicking fun as they marched behind the band. In their legion was Harry Lombardi, who had attended every game on a free ticket from his son (each player got two freebies; Harry sat next to Jim Lawlor’s dad, while Marie Planitz was usually with Lawlor’s girlfriend).

  In the press box, looking down on the merriment below, Damon Runyon typed another of his telegram leads:

  POLO GROUNDS, New York, Nov. 7. Night letter to whom it may concern in Cal-i-for-ni-yay. Collect.

  If youse are looking for real football trouble in Rose Bowl New Year’s day we got it for you. Stop. You spell it Fordham. Stop. Ask Purdue. Stop. Ask St. Mary’s. Stop. Ask anybody. Stop. How are youse anyway? Stop. Love and Kisses. Stop.

  (Signed)

  Little Old New York

  All that remained after a week off were the last of the intersectional games, against Georgia, and the Thanksgiving Day grudge match with NYU. Georgia had endured an uneven season. The Bulldogs had been drubbed twice early in the season, but were coalescing late in the year, defeating Florida and Tulane in the weeks before meeting Fordham. Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon suspected trouble. In his “Sportlight” column, Rice reported that Sleepy Jim “turned white and started to shudder” when someone told him the Georgia game would be easy. On the morning of the game, Runyon cautioned in his “Both BarrelS” column, “This one today may be the tough one for Fordham.” His hunch was correct. Fifteen minutes before kickoff, the Fordham band strutted onto the field blasting out “California, Here I Come!” again. They played it while marching directly past the Georgia dressing room, firing up the visitors. After a scoreless first half, Georgia scored the first touchdown, on a pass against the Fordham second string, which Crowley had sent in because the first line seemed tired and uninspired.

  Halfback Frank Mautte, the Fordham captain, sparked his team with a stirring catch and touchdown run to tie the score, and his superior play in the third quarter appeared to be making the difference. But it was a dirty game, and Georgia’s roughneck tactics eventually got the better of Mautte. “I never lost my cool except in that game against Georgia,” he said later. “We didn’t wear masks in those days, and what Georgia was doing, three of them were on me at one time. One was scratching his nails in my face and smashing me while the other two were screening him from the ref. I complained to the ref. They stuck their fingers in my eye, really gouging me. But they weren’t getting caught. I got a little excited and got in two good rights to the jaw. The ref gave me the thumb.” Fordham’s offense, not the most potent to begin with, sputtered without Mautte, and the game ended in a 7 to 7 tie. “Yes, suh, folks,” Runyon opened his game story, “the perfume of the sweet magnolia blossoms wafting out of the dear old Southland today is too much for our stalwart boys, more accustomed to the fragrances of Bronx byways.”

  Lombardi had played vigorously, as usual, but was dismayed to see that some of his more illustrious linemates seemed lackadaisical or distracted. “Some of our better players … behaved as if we had already finished the season undefeated and had received and accepted the bid to the Rose Bowl we all wanted so badly,” he lamented later. The Georgia tie hurt badly, but was not ruinous. A win against NYU could still send Fordham to Pasadena. But the Rams could not recover the spirit that had carried them through the difficult stretch from St. Mary’s through Purdue. Instead, they performed even worse against their city rivals, when everything depended on the outcome. The Thanksgiving Day game, played in a quagmire of mud and sleet before 50,000 fans at Yankee Stadium, served as NYU’s bowl, a means of redemption at the end of a disappointing 4-3-1 season and revenge for the 1935 loss that had ruined their perfect record and ended their own bowl run.

  Fordham scored first, but missed the extra point because Palau, the regular kicker, had been knocked out with a lame ankle. NYU came back on a three-yard run by George Savarese, who thereby earned the nickname Stonecutter for being the first and only running back all year to rush for a touchdown through the Seven Blocks. Lombardi had hit Savarese at the one, but could not bring him down and rode on Stonecutter’s back into the end zone. The extra point ended the scoring; Fordham spent the rest of the afternoon backed up near its goal line by the thunderous punts of NYU’s Howard Dunney, who won the Madow Trophy as most valuable player. As the game ended with NYU winning 7 to 6, the Violets’ raucous cheering section turned Fordham’s chant around, shouting, “From Rose Hill to the Rose Bowl back to Rose Hill!”

  To Lombardi and several other Rams, it appeared again that a few Fordham players had not put forth maximum effort. “Some of our better players were completely sour,” Lombardi said. What happened? Was it overconfidence that did them in? No, there was more to it than that, a dirty little secret that would haunt the team for years. For several
weeks that Depression-era season, some Fordham players had been sneaking off to New Jersey on Sundays to play for modest pay under fictitious names in a semipro league. Francis Caulkin, then the student manager for the football team, recalled that it was “common knowledge that some of those guys would scoot over someplace to play on Sunday.” Dick Healy, an end on the team, remembered that “several of the guys were hurt in the semipro game the Sunday before the NYU game. Ed Franco was hurt in that game. But they covered it up.” Handy Andy Palau grimaced in pain when asked about the incident more than six decades later.

  “Sure, it’s true,” he said. “Ahhhhh, jeez! It’s true. Three linemen and one back. Can’t say who. Not Vinnie. That’s probably why we lost it. Yeah. Ah, Jesus. Some of the players were banged up. And they were pooped and it’s a shame. A shame! I was sure pissed off when I found out about it. A chance to go to the Rose Bowl and they screwed it up. Ahhhhh!”

  FOR THE REST of his life, Lombardi was identified as one of the Seven Blocks of Granite. He was unarguably the least talented of the Seven Blocks in 1936. And that front wall, while outstanding, had the least impressive statistics of four exceptional Fordham lines that could make some claim to be known as the Seven Blocks. Tim Cohane, the Fordham publicist who went on to a long career in sports journalism, years later took out a pencil and sheet of paper and drew a grid of the four Fordham lines. The Iron Major’s 1929 edition allowed no touchdowns on the ground while compiling a 7-0-2 record. In 1930 the line allowed one rushing touchdown late in the year while going 8-1. Sleepy Jim Crowley’s 1936 line with Lombardi at right guard finished 5-1-2 with one rushing touchdown. And the 1937 team, which retained Wojy, Devil Doll, Ali Baba and Tarzan, but lost Lombardi, Paquin and Pierce, was perhaps the best of all, with a 7-0-1 record and no touchdowns allowed.

  The other three lines fell into obscurity, while the 1936 version entered the realm of football lore, a lasting symbol of fortitude and inviolability. Lombardi himself was partly responsible for this. He alone among the men of the four great Fordham front walls emerged as a large enough figure later in life to carry the legend. But this was also the work of the storytellers. Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon and their brethren glorified the 1936 line above all others, and their fraternal heir, Tim Cohane, continued the tradition. There is something to be said for the way they presented the world, looking for the romantic aspects of human nature through the playing of games, preferring it to what would come later, the cynicism of modern journalism and its life-deadening focus on money, controversy and man’s inevitable fall from grace. The problem with the storytellers was not their exaltation of myth, but their pursuit of the ideal to the exclusion of reality, allowing for the perpetuation of the fallacy of the innocent past. Was the 1936 line inviolable? Not to hubris, not to heady distraction, not to temptation in the form of a few illicit dollars to be gained playing semipro ball across the river only days before the most important college game of one’s career.

  FROM HIS playing days at Fordham, Lombardi learned lessons that he carried with him into a life of football. His inner steel, he said later, was forged in those bloody college games, especially the scoreless ties with Pitt. “I can’t put my finger on just what I learned playing … in those scoreless games, but it was something. A certain toughness.” While he discarded the sarcasm of Sleepy Jim Crowley and the dourness of Frank Leahy, he came to understand from those coaches the importance of precision blocking, fierce tackling and the larger “truths of the game: conditioning, spartanism, defense and violence as distinct from brutality.” He also discovered what he called football’s fourth dimension. “The first three dimensions are material, coaching and schedule. The fourth is selfless teamwork and collective pride which accumulate until they have made positive thinking and victory habitual.” But the importance of Fordham in Lombardi’s life was far greater than learning what it took to play a game. From the Jesuits he acquired a larger perspective: duty, obedience, responsibility and the exercise of free will were the basis of a philosophy that shaped the way he looked at himself and his world.

  That is not to say that he was in all respects obedient to the Jesuit way. He was a typical college student, and there was a hint of his freewheeling father in him, old Moon the marauder of lower Manhattan. Vinnie enjoyed the action, especially when he was around his roommate, Jim Lawlor. They had a regular craps game going in their dorm room, playing at night after the prayers and bed check, a game of which the Jesuit authorities were not entirely unaware. There would be monthly raids, seemingly without consequence other than the appropriation of the collection of dimes, which the rector declared would “go to missions.” And the depth with which Lombardi absorbed Jesuit teachings was not obvious from his grades. His college transcript shows him to be at best a slightly above average student. In later years, friends, family members and publicists bragged that he excelled as a student; he was variously said to have been in the top 10 percent and to have earned Phi Beta Kappa or cum laude honors, none of which was true.

  His highest grades came in his freshman year, when he received B’s in seven subjects plus an A in French, making the dean’s list for the only time, though he was shaken by a midterm D-minus in trigonometry. From then on most of his grades were C’s, even in French. In his senior year he earned C’s in both of his business classes, with low B’s in psychology, religion and ethics. The highlight of his academic career was an A on the final exam in ethics, which was the school’s most rigorous course, taught by Ignatius Wiley Cox, S.J., who had a reputation for never giving away an easy mark.

  The values and ideas that became central to Lombardi’s thinking all seem to have roots in the lectures and writings of Father Cox. He was not just another Jesuit professor, but the most renowned teacher at Fordham and an important figure in American Catholic thought. Cox had his own Sunday afternoon radio program in New York, wrote articles for Liberty, America and Commonweal, along with frequent letters to the editor at the New York Times. He had completed the seminal work of his career, a little red-covered ethics textbook entitled Liberty: Its Use and Abuse, in time for Lombardi and his classmates to study it in 1936. His course on ethics was mandatory and served as the pedagogical culmination of four years of Scholastic theology. He lectured the entire class of senior men for two hours every day inside the vast bowl-shaped auditorium at the newly opened Keating Hall. Standing up there on the podium, stern and imposing with black cassock, glasses, whitish-gray hair and a slightly reddish face, he appeared as the embodiment of rational Jesuitism, meticulously explaining every point and enunciating each word, occasionally pausing to formally inquire of a student, “Is that clear to you, Mr. Lombardi?” When Lombardi or a classmate nervously assented, Cox pressed again, “As clear as a mountain lake in springtime?”

  Cox was often stereotyped as a staunch conservative, but that was not entirely true. He showed a strong distaste for his Catholic colleague Father Charles Coughlin, whose right-wing diatribes followed Cox’s more thoughtful presentations on the radio. He expressed sympathies for the working man, arguing in favor of the right to strike, and supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his reelection campaign against Republican Alfred Landon. And he was an early outspoken critic of Germany’s Adolf Hitler, not universally true among the Jesuit professors at Fordham, some of whom held antisemitic views. But on many issues of the day that pitted modernism against Catholic tradition, especially questions of morality, birth control and abortion, Cox was a fierce defender of the old way, constantly warning that excessive freedom was not man’s liberation but his ruination. He found himself in rhetorical battle with freethinking philosophers like Bertrand Russell and proponents of contraception like Margaret Sanger—even with the American Medical Association, which he said was providing “aid and comfort to the executioners of our American civilization” by condoning birth control. While a Fortune magazine poll indicated that two-thirds of all Americans favored birth control, Cox called contraception “sexual blasphemy” and argued that it went a
gainst God’s order by “frustrating a faculty from obtaining its natural end.”

  His students, who called him Iggy, were in awe of Cox but not always receptive to everything he said, no more than many Catholics on the issue of birth control. They seemed most taken by his arguments on liberty and responsibility, which were at the heart of his lectures, and it was in that area that he had his most profound effect on Lombardi. Every day Lombardi heard Cox lecture on the meaning of character—“an integration of habits of conduct superimposed on temperament, the will exercised on disposition, thought, emotion and action.” It was man’s obligation, Cox said, to use his will “to elicit the right and good free actions and to refrain from wrong and evil actions.” While man was blessed with intellect and free will, he was ennobled only when he sublimated individual desires “to join others in pursuit of common good.” Cox lamented that the modern world was turning away from that notion, and “the vaunted liberty which was to make us free has eventuated in a more galling servitude to man’s lower nature.”

  Cox’s lectures were a distillation of four hundred years of Jesuit thought going back to Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century after abandoning the unfulfilling life of a libertine Spanish army officer. When he formed his new order, Loyola transposed many of his military beliefs into his religious work, making the Jesuits the soldiers of Christ. There is a direct line in thinking from the Jesuits to football to what would become the philosophy of Vince Lombardi. The Jesuits rejected the notion of predestination, arguing that anyone could attain a state of perfection with enough zeal; perfection went to those who sought it most eagerly. They believed in man’s liberty to choose between action and inaction, good and evil, but like the military and football coaches, they also maintained a hierarchical order in which the inferior submits willingly to the superior. This willingness to accept a rightful order required believing that the chief—God, the general, the coach—loved each member of the group with the same love. The seeming contradiction between free will and blind obedience was resolved by the Jesuits through the vision of a mystical goal: only those with free will could surrender it freely to achieve a higher ideal.