When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  When not in the classroom, Lombardi spent most of the day in his office, which he shared with Father Tim Moore. Father Tim was a bright and lighthearted priest, more interested in forgiveness and redemption than the wrath of God. Although he did smack a football player for stealing one too many apples, his customary role as assistant football coach was to take players aside and reassure them after Lombardi had chewed them out. If he entered a classroom and noticed that a nun had marked down names for detention, he might back up to the blackboard and surreptitiously erase them. Since he heard confession at the church next door, he knew the secret lives of nearly everyone in the school, and handled their sins with equanimity. “He would open the sliding window and you would confess your sins to Father Tim without fear,” recalled Don Crane, who played on the basketball team. “We used to steal our sweatpants and jackets and confess to him. He’d tell us to bring them back. We’d bring them back on Monday and steal them again on Friday.”

  For Lombardi, who attended mass daily and went to confession several times a week, Father Tim’s proximity was particularly handy. “We’d be sitting there talking about something and all of a sudden Vinnie would say, ‘Tim, I want to go to confession,’ ” the priest remembered later. “So I’d take his confession right there from my desk, and when he was done we’d start right back into the conversation we had going before.” Father Tim used to say that when he was too busy to hear confession he just sent Lombardi over to church to substitute for him; people would laugh, but they were not sure that he was joking. Often it was hard to tell which of the two was the priest, especially during off-hours. Father Tim grew close to Lombardi’s parents, and was a regular at their house on Knickerbocker Avenue. He stopped by on Saturday afternoons with a few of his brothers of the cloth, dressed in Hawaiian shirts. Vince often came over, too, much to Marie’s dismay, but usually napped in a big chair as Pops and the priests entertained each other long into the evening, knocking down scotches, devouring an enormous pot of Matty’s famous clam chowder and regaling one another with stories as they bickered over hands of gin rummy.

  THE HEADLINE in the Bergen Evening Record ran across the top of the sports page on Tuesday, May 15, 1945: “LOMBARDI TO LEAD HACKENSACK GRIDMEN IN FALL.” Underneath was a dour picture of the “New Comet Grid Tutor” and a story that began: “Vincent Thomas Lombardi is Hackensack High School’s new football coach. The black-haired, bespectacled (but he hates wearing ’em and takes ’em off for pictures) 31-year-old coach comes to the County seat with a glittering record for his Englewood St. Cecilia-coached teams lost only one game in 3 years, tying three and winning 27 games.” The move to the big public high school, the story went on, had been “kept under many Stetsons the last few days” as the Hackensack school board waited for Lombardi to get his release from St. Cecilia, where he still had two years to go on a four-year contract. Lombardi said he regretted leaving Saints, but felt compelled to make the move because Hackensack provided tenure and more earning potential. “I feel it’s a move I must make when I consider my family,” he told the Record.

  The story was true in every respect—and ultimately wrong.

  Hours after he had informed Hackensack officials, and the Record reporter, that he had been released by Saints, he changed his mind again, or had it changed for him. Father Tim refused to accept his decision. He said Vince was making a grievous mistake. By going to Hackensack he was resigning himself to a career in the high school ranks, the priest argued. “You have more ability than that.” Marie also was opposed. The years at Saints had been traumatic enough for her. After the birth of Vincent she had endured another tragedy; her next pregnancy ended with the birth of a baby girl who died within two days of her birth. The fact that she saw this infant girl alive, and had to bury her, made it even more traumatic than the earlier stillbirth. An ill-informed doctor told her that she would never be able to have another successful birth, would never be able to have a baby girl. She had turned to alcohol again, and found that among the few things that made her happy were her husband’s successes. The better his teams performed, the more recognition he gained, the better she felt about herself and her lot in life. One image stuck with her: sitting in the stands the day Vin’s long winning streak ended, looking down at him on the sidelines where he stood in the middle of a puddle, looking smaller and smaller as the game wore on and the rain fell harder. Friends had suggested that she leave, but she insisted on staying: if he could take it, she could take it. There was some larger purpose. She worried that he might be satisfied as a high school football coach; furthermore, she was growing tired of sharing him with his family, especially Harry and Matty, who seemed more connected to the local high school culture than she was. Father Tim was right, she said: Hackensack is a dead end. Stay at Saints until something bigger than high school comes along.

  That night little Joe and John DeGasperis and Al Quilici led a band of boys from the football team over to Vince’s house on Mountain View Road and begged for Coach Lombardi to come out and talk with them. Gassy and Joe, known as the Gold Dust Twins, left guard and right guard, best friends and captains, had tears in their eyes when they asked Lombardi to stay with them through their senior year. He was brought to tears himself and relented, revealing a paradoxical pattern that persisted down through the years. Here was a man who seemed to the outside world to be in complete control, certain of what he was doing and where he was going. Internally it was never that way. Vince Lombardi was often conflicted, constantly changing his mind. Father Tim called Hackensack and said there had been a misunderstanding, Vince had not been let out of his contract at Saints. He would fulfill his obligation and stay two more years.

  5

  Lost in the Bronx

  THE AMERICAN LIFE, abundant, was there for all to enjoy in the shade of the grape arbor behind the old Izzo homestead in Sheepshead Bay on the last Sunday of August 1947. Dozens of hot dogs and garlic-rubbed hamburgers from Lombardi Bros. sizzling on the grill, buns toasting, mounds of black olives, hot red peppers, sliced Bermuda onions and cold cuts heaped on picnic tables, barrels of draft beer flowing free and easy. All thirteen adult children of the late Antonio and Laura Izzo making the pilgrimage along with their spouses. J. C. Sapp, husband of Matty’s little sister, Amelia, greeting everyone in barbecue apron and tall white chef’s hat. Harry Lombardi, recovering rambunctiously from a heart attack he had suffered earlier in the year, arriving gaily in spatlike two-tone shoes with white laces and dress shirt rolled up to reveal his tattoos, a pack of smokes in his breast pocket. The swelling throng of thirty-three grandchildren (Vince and his cousins) and their families, including husbands, wives and twenty-one great-grandchildren. In all, the backyard on East Sixteenth Street pulsating with ninety-six Izzo relatives, six namesakes of the patriarch Tony the Barber among them, along with four Claras, four Richards, two Vincents and two Humberts. Not a long-lost stranger in the crowd; only two living beyond the boundaries of Brooklyn, one family out in Floral Park on the edge of Nassau County, and the Lombardis across the Hudson in Englewood.

  Festively colored paper streamers were draped high from tree to tree. Dangling from the boughs were exotic Japanese lanterns brought home by some of the fifteen Izzo veterans who had been stationed in the Pacific during the war. As rumba tunes vibrated from the radio, young adults danced on a sheet of linoleum laid out on the grass and children competed nearby in potato sack and three-legged races. This was the first official gathering of the family in a dozen years, conceived for the Labor Day weekend as a way to honor the relevance of work in the Izzo family story: the older generation of barbers, beauticians, plumbers, tailors, carpenters, butchers, coal business operators, and the next generation’s rising lawyers, teachers, coaches, insurance brokers, army intelligence officers. In the midst of their energetic consumption, three generations of Izzos also consecrated the memory of Laura and Antonio, the southern Italian immigrants from the mountain village of Vietri di Potenza, and toasted the family’s continued good health
, including the safe return of all its servicemen.

  For Vince Lombardi at age thirty-four, the reunion was in line with an emerging theme of home and rebirth. He and Marie had two children of their own now, five-year-old Vincent and infant Susan, born the previous February 13 despite a doctor’s ominous prediction that Marie would never bear a healthy baby. And while maintaining his home in Englewood, Vince had returned to work on familiar fields east of the Hudson. During his last year at Saints he had scoured the college ranks for an assistant coaching position, sending feelers as far away as St. Louis with no success. One rejection letter, from a former Fordham teammate coaching at a midwestern school, included a quote from their old coach, Sleepy Jim Crowley: “No future in coaching. Try something else.” Among the jobs Lombardi sought was the head position at Fordham, which had resumed playing football in 1946 after dropping it for three years during the war. The school instead hired another football alumnus, Edward F. Danowski, who had been a senior during Lombardi’s freshman year, then went on to quarterback the New York Football Giants from 1934 to 1941 before enlisting in the Navy.

  Danowski had only one season of high school coaching experience and a modest interest in the profession. He began with a paltry $5,000 salary, a late start on recruiting and one assistant coach, and his first year at Fordham was a predictable disaster. After that season the football boosters raised money to fund thirty new scholarships and beefed up the coaching staff, bringing in Lombardi as one of several new assistants. The first day of fall practice was scheduled on Rose Hill for the Tuesday after the Izzo family picnic.

  Lombardi’s official responsibilities at Fordham were to teach physical education, coach the freshman squad and install the T formation offense, all for $3,500 a year. Behind the scenes came intimations from several influential alumni, as well as athletics director Jack Coffey, that Lombardi would be the head man himself soon enough, the one to lead a Rams football renaissance, returning the school to the pride of the days when Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon covered the Seven Blocks of Granite. This was the job Lombardi coveted. There was nowhere he would rather be, he told friends, than leading young men in maroon on the sidelines at the Polo Grounds on Saturday afternoons in late October, head coach of Fordham in games of national consequence against Tennessee or Syracuse or Army. Big-time football meant the same thing to Lombardi that it did to most sports fans in those early postwar days. It meant the college game.

  Lombardi’s dream in truth was more romantic than realistic. The fact that Fordham’s Jesuit administrators had scrapped football for three years during the war was only one signal of their diminishing interest in the game, at least at the highest collegiate levels. The Reverend Robert Gannon, who had once suspended young Lombardi for fighting, was still Fordham’s president, and his distaste for the professionalization of college football had only intensified in the decade since Vince’s playing days. His philosophy corresponded with the latest concerns of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which had recently adopted what was alternately called a Sanity Code or Purity Code calling for “strict amateurism” and limits on financial aid and recruiting. Scandals seemed to be erupting with regularity on campuses around the nation, some of them, too many for Gannon’s taste, involving Catholic institutions. The coach of the University of San Francisco Dons was soon to resign with the announcement that twenty-two of his top players had been paid for their talents.

  Gannon was so fearful of scandal that he hoped Fordham would never be good enough to get caught up in one. He had concluded, he acknowledged to one local alumni group, that football brought his school little benefit “financially, scholastically, socially or athletically.” The more successful teams, he said, merely attracted gamblers and their corrupting milieu. With the intention of keeping Rams football “strictly collegiate,” Gannon and his faculty adviser for athletics, the Reverend Kevin J. O’Brien, had developed a policy even stricter than the NCAA code. Along with a deemphasis on recruiting, the Fordham plan called for the construction of a small stadium on Rose Hill so that football would seem more connected to college life and less a separate business enterprise. Gannon was already withdrawing, rhetorically at least, from the addictive narcotic of sellout crowds at colossal city stadiums by calling the Mara family “extortionists” for the rents they were charging at the Polo Grounds.

  The trend surely must have been apparent to Lombardi, but he plunged into his new job with only winning football on his mind. He had been separated from the college game for ten years, away from the tumultuous big-city crowds, the inflating Gotham press corps, the prospect of national recognition, and he told friends that he was determined to recover lost time. After accepting the Fordham position in late January 1947, he taught at Saints for the remainder of the second semester, but began commuting over to the Bronx in the afternoons to work out with the Rams and lead them through spring drills. On at least two occasions he brought along a carload of Saints seniors and suited them up in Fordham uniforms to practice with the returning veterans, a surreptitious and perhaps illegal recruiting move that ran counter to Gannon’s dictates. It was difficult to distinguish the college players from the Saints, Lombardi noted afterwards, boasting and complaining simultaneously, except that the Saints hit harder. One among them, his little brother, Joe, was eager to free himself at last after being physically and emotionally banged around by his big brother all his life, and escaped north to St. Bonaventure, but many of the Saints former backfield stars followed Lombardi to Rose Hill, in accompaniment with his T formation and his cause to rediscover lost Fordham glory.

  FORDHAM HAD NEVER had a freshman class quite like the one that arrived in 1947. This was not just a collection of pink-faced teenage boys from Catholic prep schools. Here were many men in their twenties who had gone directly from high school graduation into the military during World War II and were now finally in college, as eager as their new freshman football coach to recoup lost time and move on quickly with their careers. Lombardi’s squad of first-year players included three of his old backs from Saints, Dick Doheny, Billy White and Larry Higgins, all returned from the service, along with a twenty-three-year-old center named Herb Seidell, who had been in the Navy with Leo Paquin, left end in the Seven Blocks. Seidell certainly was not the poster boy for Father Gannon’s restricted recruiting guidelines. He was a blatant ringer who had already played varsity football at Purdue before the war. In theory, he should have sat out a year before resuming his playing career, but in practice, as he later recalled, “all the rules were looser because of the war.” Once again, the fallacy of the innocent past. Seidell not only played for Lombardi’s freshmen, he was also elected their captain.

  Again on Rose Hill with all the familiar sounds, sights and smells, dank gymnasium office, trainer Jake’s old barber chair, the Keating Hall clock tower, Jesuits in cassocks clucking along, lunches of linguine and calamari on Arthur Avenue, leaves and mud on the practice field, thud and smack of leather upon leather as dusk enveloped the Bronx, maroon and gold, we do or die notes drifting over from band rehearsal—Lombardi was in his element, restored. Football as religion. The T a catechism from which he preached. And God was in the details.

  In Lombardi’s pedagogical style there was an exact method to hundreds of precise movements in the T. Some coaches concerned themselves with how laces were tied or shirts tucked or helmets held on the sidelines before a game. Lombardi concentrated on the minutiae of play itself. He had refined the T in the years since Doheny and White had played for him at Saints, and was refining it still. He was the patient scholar, devoting hours each day to breaking down and analyzing the elements again and again. The SNAP. There had to be a quarter-turn rotation on the ball, no more or less. Hold it right there! Let’s see. Quarter-turn, Seidell. That’s right! Now pop the ball against the fanny. The CHEATER. The halfback three and a half steps back behind the quarterback. The fullback four. Now he got them to cheat up another half-foot to run them through the hole a split second quicke
r. Not a foot, that would throw off the timing completely; it had to be a half-foot.

  The BALLET. Lombardi’s favorite, he could work on it all day. He stood there with the center and his three quarterbacks and a posse of running backs and got out his stopwatch to time the play from snap to handoff. It was all in speed and dexterity, he said. The center had to anticipate the count to snap the ball in a split second. Then the quarterback had to jump-spin to the handoff position in time for the cheater running back. Faster. One fluid movement. The jump spin was ballet, he said. When Doheny did it right, beautiful ballet. And Doheny could do it right. He was unflappable, concise in everything he did. Not much of a runner, but Lombardi did not ask him to run. He had to hand off and pass. Not the greatest arm, but he knew when and where to throw it. His teammates called him “a cool cat.” He was Lombardi on the field, the earliest coming of Bart Starr, the coach’s star quarterback in Green Bay decades later.