For the third game of the season in early October, the Army team rode the train out to Ann Arbor to face Michigan in the college game of the year. Michigan was top-ranked, unbeaten in more than two seasons, and Blaik had been preparing for this game for ten months, since that first staff meeting on New Year’s morning. Every down and distance tendency that Michigan had revealed in previous games, what play they most likely would run on first and ten, third and long, third and short, what plays they preferred from left formation, what plays they relied on in their own territory, in their opponent’s territory—all of that had been seen on film and plotted before the season by Lombardi, Warmath and the other assistants, Kenna, Paul Amen and Johnny Sauer (perhaps Blaik’s finest staff ever; all but Kenna, who opted for the business world, became successful head coaches).
They also studied the Michigan offensive players individually, scrutinizing their movements for inadvertent tip-offs of what play was coming. The laborious process of looking at film with scientific precision was a revelation to Lombardi, who had done little of it at Fordham and none at Saints. “It’s surprising how many players tipped by the position of their feet, the angle of their body. You could tell whether it was a wedge play, pass play, dive play, sweep,” Lombardi said later. “You see whether a lineman can be had to the inside. You make notes on paper and put books together on the formations and the personnel.” The key discovery from the Michigan game films was that their defensive linemen were inordinately tall, with high centers of gravity; Army’s offensive line could handle them by blocking low, coming in under the forearm charge. In the week before the game Lombardi drilled the linemen relentlessly, taking the defensive position himself and having them charge at his shins and ankles. Such comprehensive analysis and adjustment would become routine among football coaches decades later, but it was rare then. It gave Blaik an advantage on the field not unlike a cardplayer who is expert at counting cards competing against opponents relying on the luck of the draw; the talent, or hand that is dealt, is of primary importance, but analysis can make a crucial difference between consistent winning and losing.
Blaik’s signature talent was using all this data to create something clean and simple. He had what Lombardi called “the great knack” of knowing what offensive plan to use against what defense and then “discarding the immaterial and going with the strength.” All the detailed preparations resulted not in a mass of confusing statistics and plans, but in the opposite, paring away the extraneous, reducing and refining until all that was left was what was needed for that game against that team. It was a lesson Lombardi never forgot, and the benefits of that system were apparent during the big game in Ann Arbor. Playing before a full house of 97,000 Michigan fans, Army defeated the seemingly invincible Wolverines 21 to 7. But the game did more than enhance Army’s standing in the national polls. It also inflamed Blaik’s reputation for dirty play. During a reverse play Michigan’s passing right halfback, Chuck Ortmann, was knocked unconscious as he was trying to make a block. To Michigan fans, Ortmann’s concussion became the symbol of West Point thuggery. After the game, the Michigan Daily printed an interview with W. H. Hobbs, an eminent professor of geology, who charged that Ortmann had been kicked between the eyes by Army’s fullback Gil Stephenson. Hobbs wrote letters to colleagues around the country accusing Army of intentionally trying to cripple its opponents. He found an ally in a Harvard professor who watched Army defeat the Crimson 54 to 14 the following week and declared that in his twenty-two years working as an official, this Army team was the dirtiest he had seen.
“Army had more mud slung at it than a dredge could discover under the Mississippi,” wrote Blaik’s friendly scribe, Tim Cohane, in Look. Was it deserved? Army indisputably played a ferocious brand of football, its games marked by bruising tackles and bruised feelings. But Bennie Oosterbaan, Michigan’s coach, disagreed with Professor Hobbs, saying that Blaik’s team played hard but fairly. Game films later showed that Ortmann had been accidentally clonked on the head by the knee of one of his own blockers, and he could not have been kicked by Stephenson in any case, since Stephenson played only offense that day.
Army’s notoriety as a corps of bullies had been established nonetheless, and only spread further as the season progressed. A few more members of the New York press corps joined the anti-Blaik chorus after the Cadets overwhelmed Columbia 63 to 6; the next day’s game stories sounded like reports from the front, elbows flying, Columbia players staggering from the field in a daze. This served as mere warmup for the commotion at Michie Stadium in early November when Army was host to Lombardi’s old team, Fordham. The Rams came to West Point with much to prove. They had run through the season unbeaten to that point, surprising even themselves, and an upset of Army would bring national recognition for the first time since Sleepy Jim Crowley’s final year at Fordham before World War II. Fordham’s best players had played for Lombardi and wanted to show their old mentor that they could excel without him. This group included Joe Lombardi, who had transferred to Fordham only after his older brother’s departure. Then there was the coach, Ed Danowski, to whom the game was a venue for revenge against the former aide who had tried to overthrow him. “We went up there with a chip on our shoulder,” said Herb Seidell, Fordham’s center.
In a sense Tim Cohane was responsible for it all. In his strategic position as Fordham alumnus and Blaik confidant, he had pressured both sides to schedule the game, thinking the prestigious opponent would help Fordham regain national stature. As was his custom, Cohane drove to West Point from his home in Scarsdale, New York, several hours before kickoff, singing college fight songs all the way up, and went directly to the press box to take in the thrill of a football Saturday. This was his notion of heaven on earth. No sight stirred him more than Michie Stadium and its environs along the Hudson. “They have likened its beauty to the Stade in ancient Athens,” he once wrote in a letter to a friend. “The gridiron, running north and south, as well groomed as the front lawn of a palace. Along the west side, a tier of concrete stands roofless, slopes up to the wooded hills, and extends around to both end zones, forming a square cut letter C. Atop the steep wooded hill to the north sits old Fort Putnam, first built in 1798…. Michie was built less for size than for beauty. The spectator in the west stand repeatedly catches himself looking beyond to the breathtaking backdrop of the road, the reservoir, the knoll, the observatory, the colonial homes, and the Cadet chapel.”
So much for the splendor of the setting. When the game started and Fordham and Army went at each other, there was nothing beautiful to be seen. Army eventually won 35 to 0, but the score was secondary; the fight was the game. Even Cohane had to confess that it was more brawl than football, as he wrote later in Look: “With a complete disregard for the sensibilities of the assemblage, including the Jesuits and the Army brass, the Cadets and the Rams went to work on each other with everything short of stilettos and strangling cords.” Doug Kenna remembered the game as “probably the roughest I had ever experienced in college football. There were penalties all over and most of them for unnecessary roughness. I always sensed that part of it was because of Lombardi. Fordham wanted to show him.” True enough, said Joe Lombardi. He felt that way about his big brother that day. “It was terrible and it was because of Vince’s leaving and going to West Point. We wanted to show we could play them, but we just fought.” We do or die, taken literally. Seidell, the Fordham captain who had been a strong Lombardi supporter during the power struggle with Danowski, said he “got the hell kicked out of” him by Army. “They called it the ‘Donnybrook on the Hudson.’ I was told that seventeen teeth came out of nine different mouths. I lost one. I got my whole face pranged when I was blindsided coming off the field after a punt. That was the kind of game it was.”
One sportswriter acknowledged that he enjoyed the melee. “I hope there will be no hollering, bellowing nor deploring over the Army-Fordham game. After all, BOYS WILL BE BOYS,” Frank Graham wrote in his game column for the New York Sun. But th
e brotherly feud was not dismissed so easily by the antagonists. Even Lombardi and Cohane found themselves in a shouting match afterwards over who started the mess. At a postgame dinner at Blaik’s house, Cohane chided Lombardi and said Army precipitated the fighting; Lombardi said his alma mater was responsible. Blaik, as Cohane recalled it, “adopted the attitude of one who had been treated contemptuously by an old friend.” But in the end, Lombardi took a lasting lesson from that game that had nothing to do with the fighting. For the rest of his career, he would remember how Fordham reacted late in the second quarter when it was trailing 7 to 0. “Fordham panicked,” Lombardi said years later. Twice in a row the Rams tried to score quickly with passes and were intercepted both times, leading to quick Army scores. Instead of trailing by seven points at halftime, they faced an insurmountable three-touchdown disadvantage. “I never forgot this,” Lombardi said. From then on, whenever a quarterback pleaded for a last-minute touchdown strike before the half, Lombardi said no, remembering Fordham’s 1949 collapse at Michie Stadium.
The season ended perfectly for Army, with a 38 to 0 thrashing of Navy, and Blaik’s maligned but victorious squad won the Lambert Trophy as the best team in the East. After two glum losing years on Rose Hill, Lombardi was feeling the thrill of WORK and PLAY again. At the postseason luncheon honoring the team, Red Blaik seemed untroubled by the controversy that had stalked him all year. He confessed that before the season began he had thought about retiring, but now he was glad he had stayed. “You have to pay the price,” was his favorite motto, and he felt that he and his team had done so and were now reaping the reward. “Once in a while you are lucky enough to have the thrill and satisfaction of working with a group of men who are willing to make every sacrifice to achieve a goal, and then experience the achieving of it with them,” Blaik said. “In this, believe me, there is a payment that cannot be matched in any other pursuit.”
DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY, FOOTBALL. What about family? The Lombardis were given a house at 1101 Bartlett Loop on the academy post, a cul-de-sac known informally as Coaches Loop. Most of the staff lived there, including the effervescent Red Reeder, who had a son about the same age as the Lombardi boy and three daughters with whom young Vincent was infatuated. West Point was so different from Englewood, exotic and contradictory, rules about everything and yet wild and free, with a foreboding sense of danger and mortality. World War II was four years distant by the time the Lombardis arrived, but lingered in the culture. Most of the officers, like Red Reeder, had fought the Nazis in Europe. Their wives had been transformed by enduring four years on the post alone; they were accustomed to running the house without men. The kids tended to be independent, if not forgotten. “We probably fought a bit more than other kids,” recalled Russell Reeder III, who was nine years old when young Vincent moved in down the street, and became his first West Point pal. “We probably had less support from our parents. It was an awkward place but a wonderful place at the same time.”
Most wondrous was the sense of freedom. “Maybe it was the times, or maybe the community, but you could go anywhere and do anything,” remembered Russell’s sister Julia. Hide-and-seek up at Fort Put. Sardines in the Cadet Chapel. Swimming in the academy pool. Tennis courts. Young Vincent rode his bike everywhere, and always found something to watch. Cadets marching across the Plain, the football team practicing on the nearby field, a baseball game, Colonel Reeder, the assistant coach, hitting fungoes on a prosthetic leg, hurdlers scraping by at a track meet. Once young Vincent walked into the officer’s club and ordered a hamburger and milk shake and put it on the Old Man’s tab. This life, he thought, was “an ideal deal.” Until his father examined the monthly bill, that is, and quickly put a stop to the freeloading. (“Geez,” Vincent said decades later, remembering the scene, “he’d liked to have taken my head off.”)
By the time young Vincent entered third grade, some of the roughness of the place had rubbed off on him. Wanting to be considered “one of the guys,” he became a goof-off in school, and one day was ordered from his seat in the back of class to sit in confinement in the well under the teacher’s desk. At recess, he made his escape and walked off the school property unnoticed. His teacher reported him missing when the class returned inside. School officials called Marie at home and Vince at the gymnasium. The post was mobilized to find Coach Lombardi’s son. Had he been kidnapped? Students who could recognize him were taken out of class to help MPs comb the grounds. For hours, as the frantic search continued into surrounding woods, young Vincent sat hidden from view in the back of an abandoned building near their house on the loop, unaware of the commotion, taking in the sun, chewing on a stalk of grass. Near the end of the day, he got to his feet and walked over to his house and calmly said hello to his little sister and frantic mother. It was never easy being the namesake son of Vince Lombardi. That childhood moment of rebellion came to symbolize young Vincent’s lifelong dilemma, trying to find his own quiet place in the sun.
To say that Lombardi was a strict father at West Point would be accurate and misleading. He had no qualms about hitting his son as punishment for apparent wrongdoing, the backhand thwacks of his mother, Matty, imprinted on his brain as an effective means of discipline. But mostly Lombardi was missing; he was largely an absentee father and husband, when not physically, then emotionally. At work from eight in the morning until late into the night. Away on road trips with the team, or recruiting prospective cadets in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin (he found himself trapped in the snowdrifts of Green Bay on a recruiting mission with Doug Kenna and muttered, “Can you imagine living in this godforsaken place?”). When he did spend an evening at home, it often seemed to his family that he was not there, especially during spring drills, fall practice and the regular season—half of every year. The dining room was his extra office, strewn with papers, thick with smoke, two ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts before the night was out, three packs a day, four cartons a week, as he diagrammed plays and planned what he would tell his troops the next day.
Ten years into their marriage, even after all those years at Saints and Fordham, Marie was still uncertain about her place in Vince’s football life. She desperately sought more of his time and attention, and alternately loved and hated the game that possessed him, now embracing it as the most effective means of reaching Vince, now rejecting it roundly as the temptress that lured her husband away from her. She often strolled down to the practice field to watch Vince lead the Cadets through drills. The practices were open to the public, and many wives and professors came out to see them. Blaik, by nature a secretive man, never liked the tradition and largely ignored the well-wishers. Lombardi was more gregarious, though not with Marie. Once she returned from a trip to Manhattan with Doug Kenna’s wife wearing a tight new knit suit, and was delighted with her thin and striking appearance until Vin looked over at her and ruined her mood, shouting loud enough for heads to turn, “God, Marie, you look like a sausage!” If Marie was embarrassed, she did not take this abuse meekly. “She just leveled him, I mean totally leveled him” with words, said Doug Kenna, who had been standing next to Vince on the field.
Marie yearned for social standing. She wanted to be accepted by the elite and appreciated that West Point was a notch up the social ladder from Englewood. With other football wives, she made periodic trips to Manhattan, where they shopped on Fifth Avenue and dined at Leone’s on West Forty-eighth Street, the boisterous Italian restaurant run by Gene Leone, who was Army Fan No. 2, if MacArthur was No. 1. Leone, whose son-in-law was a popular major at West Point, had been made an honorary member of the class of 1915, Eisenhower’s class. He bought a nearby estate, catered at least one gourmet meal a year to the gang at Bull Pond, and made his restaurant the New York headquarters for all West Point officers and football coaches. Their wives were golden at Leone’s: free parking in the lot, best tables and service. Marie enjoyed the special attention, but just as in Englewood, her Manhattan interludes could not fill the void. Nor could her children. She spent mo
re time with young Vincent and Susan than Vince did, but she was not a doting mother. Rearing children was largely a distraction to her; she wanted to be with Vince and adults. It was the talk of the post once when little Susie wandered off unnoticed by her mother until a minister called and said he had found the toddler, stark naked and crying inside his church.
Marie’s drinking worsened at West Point. She attended several Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sought other counseling to help her deal with the frustrations of married life. “A lot of Army wives used to drink too much; they’d have these coffee klatsches or liquor klatsches in the early afternoons,” said Vince’s middle brother, Harold, who had long been Marie’s confidant. “A lot of Marie’s drinking came because she idolized Vin and he was off with his own little group.” Marie spent many hours over at the Reeder house unloading her problems on Reeder’s wife, Dort. Daughter Julia Reeder would eavesdrop. One day she heard Marie say, “Dort, I figured it out. He really is easy to live with—as long as he is not thinking about football.” Which meant not often enough. When Vince was in a loving mood, sometimes his timing was off. Once at a tea for Army Athletic Association wives, Marie confessed that her husband was always in a rush. “Last week he came home from the football office at 11 a.m. when I was baking a cake. He wanted to make love to me and got flour all over the both of us.”
When Pride Still Mattered Page 15