When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  For the most part, the outside world knew little of this. Vince and Marie were considered a fun-loving couple. In social settings, Lombardi was almost universally regarded as warm and jovial. Margaret Cohane, Tim’s wife, considered him “very much a man’s man” who paid little attention to the women in a room, but even she was taken by his enthusiasm, especially “that wonderful laugh that would start way down low and then expand.” Vince was the godfather of the Cohanes’ third child, Mary Therese. He seemed especially friendly with children other than his own. During the summer months families in the athletic department got together for ice cream socials, with five-cent movies and badminton tournaments, and Uncle Vince was always right there playing with the kids. Of course he could not just hit the shuttlecock back and forth. “If he was going to play, it had to be competition, a real game,” said Russell Reeder, but his good-natured participation was appreciated nonetheless. When Doug Kenna’s wife came to football practice with their six-month-old daughter, Vince “made a beeline to her and started dancing around the practice field singing ‘Toot toot tootsie, goodbye, Toot toot tootsie, don’t cry.’ ” The Kenna girl was known by her family as Tootsie for the rest of her life.

  Lombardi certainly had strong feelings for family. Harry and Matty drove up from Englewood every few weeks, Old Five by Five hauling a few thick, delicious filets from the meat market, and various Izzo cousins were also frequent guests. Jim Lawlor, his roommate from Fordham, and several Englewood friends often dropped in. One of young Vincent’s strongest memories of West Point was of his father and Tim Cohane sitting on the couch in the living room late at night, “talking and talking and talking. Tim did most of the talking. He was probably the forerunner of Howard Cosell—one of those guys who always had an opinion and it sounded better by virtue of the way he delivered it” with his deep, authoritative, melodious voice. Vincent and Susan were sometimes puzzled by how talkative their father could be with other people, how cuddly he was with other kids, in contrast to the way he acted at home. He was not the same person with them that he was with his players and friends. There were times when the wife and kids wondered whether they were at fault, somehow not living up to the concept of family that Vince carried with him from his childhood in Sheepshead Bay.

  THE FIFTIES—nothing placid about the way the new decade began at West Point. By the end of June 1950, America was at war again, and many of the cadets who had played on the fields of friendly strife were now on muddy fields in Korea, led by General MacArthur, Supreme Commander Allied Powers, commander of United Nations military forces, fighting the North Koreans and Communist Chinese. At the academy, casualty lists were posted weekly, many of the names all too familiar to the cadets. As the football season opened in September, word arrived of the combat death of Tom Lombardo, captain of the 1944 national championship team. The players were distracted by events in Korea from then on. As part of his hazing duties as a plebe that year, Lowell Sisson, a tenderfoot end from Waterloo, Iowa, had to report to an upperclassman’s room every day before meal formation, where he stood “in stiff brace” at the doorway and summarized all the dispatches from Korea in that morning’s New York Times. “All the seniors knew they might be over there in a few months,” Sisson recalled. “It was a very tense time for them.”

  Even in that anxious state of mind the football team began the season performing better than it had the year before. Lombardi, whom Blaik had entrusted with the Cadet offense, devoted himself to the development of the coach’s son Bob Blaik, Galiffa’s replacement at quarterback, and the effort paid off. Bob became the leader of a team that routed Michigan again and shut out five teams as it rolled through the first seven games undefeated. For the eighth game, Army took its first road trip by air out to California to play Stanford. It had rained unceasingly in northern California and the game was played in a blinding downpour, the field all mud and muck. Bob Blaik passed for the lone touchdown. That night, after the 7 to 0 Army victory, the old man and Lombardi and the rest of the staff partied in Blaik’s suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Tim Cohane was there along with the aging Granny Rice and a coterie of eastern writers. They told stories and recited corny epic poems late into the night, Blaik and his men exhilarated by what was now a twenty-eight-game unbeaten streak.

  The overconfident Cadets had two weeks to prepare for the game against Navy, the traditional season-ending rivalry. Scouting reports on the Midshipmen had been coming in all year, and they were invariably encouraging. Navy was becalmed, going nowhere in a miserable losing season. All prognostications were of an imminent rout. Blaik was nervous, as always, against Navy; the game could ruin an otherwise glorious season. “There was tension among the coaches,” Lombardi said later, but “Blaik hid the tension from the players.” He was nervous, fearing that his players were losing their “feel of the game” because heavy rains had forced them to practice indoors. Then, a few days before the game, during what was called Navy Week, when corps enthusiasm usually reached a feverish pitch, a report came in that Johnny Trent was dead, killed in action earlier that month in Korea. Trent had been the captain of the 1949 team, an ebullient end from Memphis who had begun the year as a graduate assistant working with the plebe squad before he and classmate Arnold Galiffa, the quarterback, were sent across the Pacific with the Third Army. The “ever increasing sad news from Korea, which has been brought closer to the cadets than to any group in the land,” Blaik said, had “relegated thoughts of the Navy game to second place.”

  Perhaps they were excuses. The Navy team, which had received brilliant scouting reports on Army and played flawlessly, might have won anyway that day, and win they did, 14 to 2. There was a touch of poetic justice to the upset. Army was beaten at its own strong-arm game. “The Navy beat us and beat is the proper word, as our men took a physical beating which completely bewildered them,” Blaik wrote later in a long letter to MacArthur. “[Gilbert] Reich, our only safety, went out the first five minutes of play and did not clear mentally until late Saturday night. Ordinarily we use three or four ammonia inhalers during a game, but against Navy our trainers used four dozen boxes. With Reich out, the only long pass for a score which had been made against the cadets in several years was completed. It was the play that gave Navy a surge which could not be denied.”

  It is doubtful that Blaik’s lament moved MacArthur much in this instance, for at the same time that Army was losing to Navy, MacArthur’s United Nations forces were at the Yalu River in Korea suffering a loss of incomparably greater dimensions. MacArthur, convinced that the Red Chinese would not enter the war, or if they did that it would be without much firepower, had pushed his troops to the Korea-China border. He ended up leading his men into a trap, and three thousand soldiers from the Second Infantry Division were killed or wounded as they retreated south through a gauntlet of Red Chinese guns firing down into a valley clogged with abandoned vehicles and the bloody detritus of war. Hardly in the same realm as Blaik’s four dozen boxes of ammonia inhalers in the Navy game. If there was a comparison to be made, it was that both the coach and his favorite general were victims of their own success.

  On the special academy train returning to West Point from the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, Blaik entered a compartment shared by his assistants, Lombardi, Warmath and Kenna. He appeared utterly disconsolate. “I want to talk to you,” he said in a deep, low voice. To Lombardi and Warmath’s relief, he was looking at Kenna. Kenna knew that he was in trouble. He was in charge of the defensive backs, and they had been beaten on some key plays. “I thought he was going to chew me out, but he really didn’t. He explained it was my fault, but that was that. He was in agony and wanted to talk to somebody. I sat and listened to him all the way back to West Point,” Kenna said later. “I don’t think Blaik ever lost a game that hurt that much.” In his letter to MacArthur explaining the loss, Blaik acknowledged the depth of his despair. “There are many who had said that it is well that a friendly series such as ours should be more even, but I
confess that there is no philosophy in me that accepts such a theory,” he wrote. “We got the heck kicked out of us, and there is much to be done at West Point before we can get into the win column.”

  More, much more, than Blaik then realized.

  7

  Blaik’s Boys

  AN UNRAVELING had begun. The loss to Navy lingered at West Point for months, largely because of Blaik, who remained inconsolable. He could not forget what had happened that bleak afternoon in Philadelphia, nor would he allow himself to try. He might as well have installed a Navy blue neon sign on his furrowed forehead flashing night and day: 14 to 2! 14 to 2! He compulsively rehashed the loss and replayed the game films looking for explanations. He had “viewed the pictures and studied the individual performances of each man until the game is close to a nightmare,” he confessed in a letter to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the West Point alumnus who by then had become the president of Columbia University. Blaik’s assistants had seen the game so many times that they had memorized the precise sequence from kickoff to final gun, every mistake, every moment when Blaik predictably stopped the film to draw an agonizing lesson one more time. It became ritualized, a morality play performed daily in the darkness of the projection room. The staff sat in the same seats and repeated yesterday’s dialogue. Once Murray Warmath blurted something out of turn and was chided by Lombardi: “Hey, you stole my line!”

  Navy was not supposed to win the game, they had not beaten Blaik’s boys since 1943, but somehow every time the film ran to completion the final score came out the same. Anything was possible now. The Blaikian world of balance, order and certitude seemed shaken and vulnerable to collapse. In football, there is a natural tendency to develop an us-versus-them complex, but now “them” was not just Navy. Blaik believed there were forces inside West Point, especially officers in the tactical department, seeking to undermine his program and rid the academy of his best players. He noticed a warning sign before 1951 spring drills began in March when Warmath accompanied several players to Manhattan for dinner at Leone’s. During the meal a West Point officer approached their table and berated the athletes, saying their social skills were embarrassingly deficient. As Warmath described the confrontation to Blaik, the coach mused aloud that the message was meant not for his free-spirited boys so much as for him.

  He already seemed besieged when he received word the following month of a casualty on the political battleground. On April 11 his hero MacArthur was summarily fired from Supreme Command in the Far East by President Truman. The move was predictable, yet shocking to the general’s acolytes; for months MacArthur had defiantly challenged military and foreign policy directives from the Pentagon and White House, pushing his troops beyond the defined limits in Korea and declaring that the United States had been too cautious in its dealings with China. Blaik was among his most ardent supporters. Hours after the dismissal, he cabled MacArthur at Tokyo headquarters: “AMERICAN PUBLIC IS STUNNED. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE TO OFFSET ADMINISTRATION HATCHETMEN. MY AFFECTION AND DEVOTION TO YOU.” In the weeks that followed, when he was not sitting in the darkness of the tower witnessing grainy footage of the Navy fiasco, Blaik busied himself with the task of ensuring that his favorite old soldier did not fade away. He believed that the best solution was for MacArthur to become the Republican candidate for president in 1952. Employing the metaphors of his sports universe, he wrote MacArthur that “the best hope for the future lies in fielding a new team in Washington.” American military policy in Asia, he said, was “comparable to a football team with a strong ground game and air game always punting on first down and through fear presenting the initiative to the opponent.”

  Not long after MacArthur’s forced return, Blaik visited him at his suite-in-exile atop the Waldorf-Astoria Towers in midtown Manhattan. At that meeting Blaik argued that the general, then seventy-one, was not too old to run for president (“The years have touched you so lightly,” he wrote in a follow-up letter), and belittled the potential candidacy of MacArthur’s longtime military competitor, General Eisenhower. As solicitous as the ever-political Blaik was in his separate running correspondence with Eisenhower, his private opinions of Ike were cutting. “I like Ike. We all like Ike—but not as president!” he wrote to one political associate that year. He called Eisenhower “the world’s foremost compromiser,” which in the political lexicon he had adopted from MacArthur was intended as a wounding insult. Lombardi watched Blaik’s maneuvers with only moderate interest. He was intrigued by Blaik’s readiness to transfer his philosophy to the political realm, awed by the strength of MacArthur’s rhetoric, but less impressed with the specific politics. Since his days among the Jesuits on Rose Hill, Lombardi had been a Democrat, and he shared with fellow Fordham grad Tim Cohane, also a Democrat, an ability to draw lifelong lessons from Blaik’s philosophy and style without becoming submissive to his beliefs, to revere St. Blaik without following him blindly.

  The spring of 1951 was a difficult time to follow him at all. Given Blaik’s state of mind, agitated by the Navy loss and MacArthur’s undoing, it was providential that Lombardi could escape West Point for a while. The opportunity came late in April, when he and five other members of the Army athletic staff were dispatched to the Orient to conduct football clinics. It began as a merry junket. The coaches lounged in luxury suites at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco before boarding an old military transport plane that took them across the Pacific to Tokyo. The trip had been arranged before MacArthur’s recall, during the days when he was trying to instill in the Japanese the traditions of American culture and democracy. The introduction of football, MacArthur thought, might ease the process. Lombardi and his colleagues were not burdened with the mission of selling democracy. Their goal was to teach football and enjoy the sights. Kenna, who had made several recruiting forays with Lombardi in the States, was not surprised to discover that Vince had connections in Tokyo. It seemed that wherever they traveled there was an old Fordham man—usually an FBI agent; Fordham was a dependable supplier of federal gumshoes—who knew the best places in town. Here it was even better: Vince found a Fordham man in charge of the officer’s clubs in Tokyo. “Vin and I toured quite a few nightspots that the other guys didn’t get to,” Kenna said later. “We had a good time. This guy took us everywhere.”

  The football instruction was tedious. The Japanese had not played American football and were learning the game from scratch. They were earnest if bewildered and undersized students, and Lombardi, as ever, was an aggressive teacher. For the most part the instruction was mental rather than physical, which meant that he generally refrained from his hands-on methods of teaching blocking and tackling—and avoided injuring a student or himself. After three weeks in Tokyo, the Army coaches received a surprise telephone call from Arnold Galiffa, the quarterback for the undefeated 1949 team, now a decorated aide to General Matthew Ridgway, who had taken over the Supreme Command from MacArthur. Galiffa passed along word that “the Old Man”—in this case Ridgway; all brass in the military culture were the Old Man—wanted them to go to Korea and entertain the troops “like a USO tour.”

  Blaik would never allow it, Kenna responded. The colonel was uncomfortable having his assistants away this long. Certainly they had more Navy film to examine back at the gym. No problem, Galiffa said. It was already arranged. Ridgway sent a plane to retrieve them in Tokyo and take them to the war zone. Lombardi was dressed in military guise. Army fatigues, at least. No stripes. Green cap askew, though not on backward the way the devilish Warmath wore it to irritate fussbudget lieutenants. Their first experience in Korea was unnerving; at the landing strip near Seoul, an American jet fighter-bomber came in right before them with its bombs jammed and about to explode.

  At military posts in Korea they showed game films to the fighting men and told stories about the Army football team, the heroic backfield of Davis and Blanchard, how the Cadets seemed loaded again at the recently completed spring drills, oozing with so much talent, said Lombardi, that “no one in
the country could touch us.” From the troops they heard accounts of war and countless tales about MacArthur. They kept the negative comments to themselves and remembered the positive for retelling to Blaik back at West Point. Blaik treasured few things more than chances to praise and flatter his patron. (Indeed, in his first letter to MacArthur after debriefing his assistants, Blaik wrote: “This is the part that will interest you a great deal. They spoke with hundreds of soldiers, officers, as well as many civilians in Tokyo and Korea, and from all these sources without exception came words of respect and veneration for General MacArthur. Our coaches were amazed that it was so universal.”)

  What amazed them more was their nearness to real, rather than symbolic, warfare. One day the coaches were escorted by Army guides to advanced positions held by the First Marine Division under the command of Colonel Wilburt S. “Bigfoot” Brown. Here the distinction between football and war became patently obvious, and made any equating of the two seem preposterous. Colonel Blaik might draft battle plans in the secrecy of a tower, but he did not need the protective cover of sandbags piled ten feet thick like Colonel Brown’s command bunker. Troops on the right and left had given way to enemy thrusts; Bigfoot (shoe size 14E) and his Marines were holding the precarious line when the coaches arrived. They were invited to his command bunker for lunch. With lanterns illuminating the scene, the guests sat on canvas cots as a captain prepared meals over a Coleman stove. Beans and franks. What the hell are we doing here? Warmath thought to himself. Just as the meal was to be served, an enemy bomb exploded nearby. Powerful concussion. Lanterns knocked out. Mess kits flying, food tossed. In the chaos of the moment, a shaken Lombardi reached up and felt “an awful mess” on his scalp. “God!” he shouted. “My brains are coming out!” He “really thought he had been hit,” recalled Kenna, who had been standing a few feet away. Until, that is, he was informed that the hot mush simmering atop his head was not brain matter but an airborne serving of baked beans. Lombardi’s military sojourn had its comic aspect, but it was also truly frightening; he was a civilian facing enemy fire, an experience thousands of servicemen never encountered.