WITH EVERY national scandal come shock, surprise and lamentation on the fall of man. The event is seen by some as substantiation of decline, as though human imperfection were a modern-day phenomenon. Along with diatribes come complaints of public apathy; the righteous express bewilderment that no one seems to care. When the Army cheating scandal broke, one columnist attached it to a list of moral decline that he had been accumulating for decades. George E. Sokolsky, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, took what happened at West Point as proof that the world in 1951 was a wretched hell, nothing like the good old days. “When the morals of man are considered we are halted by the astonishing retreat of the 20th century with its excess of divorces, its broken homes, its emphasis on homosexuality, its acceptance of materialistic Marxism in wide areas that were so recently Christian, its avoidance of faith, honor, dignity, sacrifice. We need to know why our people are not outraged at the shameless corruption of our century. Something has gone terribly wrong with us and we need to know what it is and why it happened.”
Colonel Blaik and General MacArthur, who shared some of that larger philosophy, might have taken exception to the manner in which Sokolsky linked the erring ways of Blaik’s boys to all modern acts of perdition. On the other hand, nine Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee employed the red scare vocabulary of that era to blame the scandal on the Truman administration and Democrats soft on crime and communism. The cadets, the GOP legislators argued, “were scapegoats, while the real scoundrels—the appeasers, the fixers and the five percenters—not only have free rein in Washington but are defended and protected by the White House.” Another debate focused on the narrower question: Did the troubles at West Point arise from an overemphasis on football? Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas (and former placekicker for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks; whooh, pig, sooey!), was threatening to hold congressional hearings in Washington and called for the immediate suspension of the Army-Navy game. “It’s a disgraceful situation,” Fulbright said. “Intercollegiate athletics have become so perverted that it’s a corrupting influence in the big universities.”
In an effort to head off congressional action, West Point officials convened another board of officers, this one headed by a professor of electrical engineering, Colonel B. W. Bartlett, to probe the roots of the scandal and its relationship to big-time football. Blaik argued that his boys should receive sympathy because of the heavy load they carried in athletics and academics, but the Bartlett board found that the players were pampered from the time they entered West Point to the day they left. They were offered six-week cram courses (known as the “Monster Course”) to help them pass the entrance examinations, provided with tutors throughout the year and exempted from dozens of minor rules that circumscribed the lives of other cadets. All of this special treatment, the board said, convinced the athletes that the success of the football team “was more important than anything else.” The board was careful not to blame the football coaching staff for the cheating, but suggested that Blaik bore some responsibility for the academy’s overemphasis on football because of the very characteristics that made him a successful coach—his “tremendous driving power, absolute singleness of purpose, and very strong personal convictions.”
The summer of 1951 was a season of scandal in college athletics. Fourteen former basketball players at New York area colleges had pleaded guilty in July to conspiring with gamblers to fix games at Madison Square Garden. In August, while the Army scandal was breaking, a New York grand jury indicted eight more gamblers and three basketball players at Bradley University for fixing games. Those acts were criminal, infinitely more sinister than the academic misdeeds of Blaik’s boys, yet they appeared less complicated, attributable to need and greed.
What happened at West Point, both what it signified and how it should have been resolved, raised complicated points of contention at the time that remain debatable even now. They raise larger questions that address the core mythology of football and of the man who went on to become its patron saint, Vince Lombardi. What is the value of competitive team sports? Where is the line drawn between a single-minded desire to excel and a debilitating obsession to win? Are football teams essential to the well-being of institutions and communities? Do athletes deserve special consideration because of this? In a realm where the ultimate measurement is wins versus losses, do ends justify means? The contradictory ideals of unity and independence, conformity and rebellion, run deep in the American psyche, and along that divide football is the sport most clearly aligned with unity and conformity, for better and worse. When asserting that football builds character, coaches invariably speak of teamwork, discipline, perseverance and loyalty. But even granting football those qualities, are they inherently positive? Or, as the Army honor code scandal suggests, can they also lead to group thinking, peer pressure, blind obedience and an emphasis on team solidarity over individual integrity? Those were the questions raised in 1951, and in one way or another they would follow Lombardi and define him for the rest of his life.
8
No Substitute for Victory
NOTHING COULD HAVE seemed less relevant to Blaik and Lombardi on the afternoon of August 29 than a debate over whether West Point should put less emphasis on football. As the coaches looked out at the ragtag assemblage of athletic irregulars who reported on the first day of fall practice, it appeared that the question had been resolved. A team that would have been a contender, stocked with skilled players at every position, was prematurely gone. Here instead, as the raw material of the 1951 Army team, were the plebes of the year before, talented but untested, along with a few remaining fringe players promoted from the B squad and a legion of eager but overmatched cadet volunteers from the physical education intramural programs—“anyone who would agree to go out and get killed on Saturday afternoons,” as one coach confessed. For seven seasons, from 1944 through 1950, Army had played the best football in the East, earning two national championships and five eastern titles while compiling a 57-3-4 record. Now mere survival was the first concern. As Blaik told the curious press corps on the practice field sidelines that first day, “We are only thinking of how we can field a team.”
Blaik was so unfamiliar with his personnel that he was unable to present General MacArthur with his annual preseason analysis of the three-deep roster. “We have started our football,” he wrote in a September 4 letter. “Soon I shall write you when I have better knowledge of the squad. At the moment the defense looks pitifully weak and our every effort will be to bring it along fast. Villanova is a burly outfit and our only chance to even contain them is with a good punter and a spirited defense.” (Villanova was the first opponent on the schedule, and Blaik’s bleak outlook went beyond his normal pessimism. During the glory years of the late forties, the schools had met five times and the cumulative score was Army 213, Villanova 0.) Blaik devoted the rest of the letter to reliving the scandal. He thanked MacArthur for persuading him not to resign after listening to his “sad story,” denounced the “pious righteousness” of Pentagon officials, and urged the general and his wife to take in a few home games. “Any desire you may wish to eliminate official parties and crowd congestion is easily avoided by coming to our quarters which is adjacent to Lusk on a dead-end road about one block from the stadium,” wrote the colonel. But there was no substitute for victory, and MacArthur stayed away.
For Lombardi, as he stood near Blaik during those first days of fall practice, all seemed uncertain and unexpected: the uncertain abilities of his charges and the unexpected fact that he and the colonel had returned to coach them. During the tense August days when the scandal was unfolding, Vince had prayed daily to St. Anthony and St. Jude to help the coaching staff find its way in what appeared to be a lost cause. He had told friends that he feared Blaik would resign. Imagining himself in the colonel’s position, he wondered aloud whether he could have withstood that level of pressure as head coach. During his own unhappy spell at Fordham as top assist
ant to Ed Danowski, after all, he had bailed out after the first round of conflict. Decades later, looking back on his rise, Lombardi came to regard Blaik’s decision to stay at West Point as a pivotal moment in his career. “If I ever needed a lesson, and I guess everybody does sooner or later, I got it with Colonel Blaik. Red showed me … what could be done by perseverance.”
In truth the lessons flowed both ways, from Blaik to Lombardi and back again. In the profession of coaching, there are two essential challenges. One is to build a winning team from scratch, the other is to sustain excellence after a club has reached the top. They are distinct tasks, perhaps equally difficult, but usually requiring different intellectual and psychological skills. Even the best coaches are inherently more proficient at one than the other. Lombardi was by nature a builder and molder who during his first two seasons at West Point learned crucial lessons from the methodical Blaik on how to be a sustainer. In the aftermath of the honors scandal, the relationship changed, and Blaik became more reliant on his impassioned assistant to burn the white heat back into Army football.
The cadets on the roster of the 1951 squad found themselves in a more confusing situation than their coaches, torn as they were by contradictory pressures. Though not implicated in the academic scandal, they were the most visible reminders of it to the rest of the corps, and the players sensed a need to eradicate old stereotypes of Blaik’s boys. This meant appearing unpretentious and self-effacing rather than apart and self-satisfied; not much of an act, given the dilution of the squad, but one that nonetheless had a psychological effect. Lowell Sisson, then a third classman, said later that the notion that football players were special “went straight down the tubes” that first autumn after the scandal. “We had to depress ourselves to a point where we began to get respected again. We had to keep bringing ourselves down until the corps decided that maybe these guys aren’t so bad after all.” Yet on the practice field, the coaches demanded more of them; especially Lombardi, who was relentless: yapping, roaring, laughing, encouraging, needling, teaching, pushing, in their face until the final drill before showers, the dreaded wind sprints: Faster, give it your all, all the time, by God, don’t let up now, faster, keep it up, be winners!
Even with this makeshift crew, Lombardi established the goal of perfection. Always, every block: Get your shoulder on this side and drive him that way. He brought his backfield players into the projection room on Sundays and force-fed them hours of game film, showing not Blaik’s depressing favorite, the ignominious 1950 loss to Navy, but rather the best and fleetest runners, his standards of the ideal, Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. Lombardi intended these films to work as positive reinforcement, but inevitably his narrations aroused stronger feelings in the Cadets. You can be as good as you want to be, better than you are, all you need is the desire and will to do it, he would say, while on-screen the incomparable Glenn Davis glided downfield against powerful Michigan. Watching Davis, listening to Lombardi, worrying about the distance between the coach’s expectations and their own talents, many of the young Cadets felt intimidated; some thought of quitting, but, no, they couldn’t quit, that would depress them even more; they became angry, determined to show that blankety-blank coach—and Lombardi had them right where he wanted them. As Blaik later said of the relationship between Vince and the players in 1951: “He was a driver. Not all the boys liked him, but he brought out the best in each of them.”
Halfback Sisson broke his nose against Northwestern in the second game of the season and asked Lombardi at practice the next week whether he could wear a single bar across his helmet to protect himself. Lombardi took this request as a sign of meek surrender. Face guards were for sissies, he thundered. During his louder moments on the practice field, he could seem brutish, maniacal even, yet Lombardi usually knew where the line was that could not be crossed, where he would lose the respect of his players and of the even-tempered Blaik. His exhortations were counterbalanced by occasional hugs, unexpected pats on the back and shared laughter—and also by his brainpower, which by football coaching standards was superior. He could be screaming one minute and coolly dissecting an opposition defense the next, seeing things that no one else saw, quickly conceiving a counterattack that required complex thought and yet seemed so clear and obvious when he laid it out, the scholarly priest of the gridiron peering out at his students over his glasses, interpreting football’s good book. He was “a very smart guy,” said Gerald Lodge, then an offensive guard in his sophomore season. “He came across as an intellectual.”
Working with a talent-drained corps, the coaches realized that their 1951 team had to rely heavily on intellect and ingenuity. From the Blanchard-Davis era through the seasons of Arnold Galiffa and Bob Blaik, Army tended to be quicker, deeper, faster and better organized than the opposition. The other team generally knew what was coming—three backs behind the quarterback in a tight T formation, straight ahead in the belly series or around the end—but could not stop it. Now Blaik and Lombardi improvised more, making use of the positive characteristics that all cadets possessed, even if they were comparatively slow, undersized and inexperienced, traits shaped by the repetitive physical and mental training of a military environment: first, they were all in top condition, fitter than the other team; and second, they were steeped in the tradition of receiving orders, memorizing them and carrying them out. As Gerry Lodge said: “Everybody was smart enough to remember his plays, so we could have relatively complex offensive schemes and change them weekly. That was one of their ploys that year—to have totally different plays every week and the element of surprise.”
The technical aspects of the game had always intrigued Lombardi—his notion of a must read was a satchelful of offensive diagrams, all X’s and O’s and arrows—and he went out looking for new line splits, variations of the T formation, anything he could find in the vast uncatalogued library of technical football literature. To him this was both a vocational and an intellectual pursuit. Johnny “Tarzan” Druze, his old linemate on the Seven Blocks of Granite, was then an assistant at Notre Dame working under Frank Leahy, their former Fordham line coach who had risen to become an extremely successful head coach with the Irish. When Herb Seidell paid a visit to practice at South Bend, Druze quickly asked him, “What’s with Lombardi?” Seidell drew a blank. What did Druze mean? “Well,” said Druze, “there isn’t a week that goes by that there isn’t a pound of mail going from Vin to Leahy and back again.” Lombardi and Leahy had been exchanging play diagrams, and Druze simply could not recognize that intense level of football curiosity—another manifestation of the drive that separated Lombardi from other assistant coaches.
There was still a limit to how far ingenuity and mental and physical conditioning could take the 1951 team. As Blaik had anticipated, Army lost the opener to “burly” Villanova by two touchdowns, beginning a four-game losing streak that included losses to Dartmouth and Harvard from the usually overmatched Ivy League. The winless slide stopped with a 14 to 9 victory over Columbia, prompting a congratulatory cable from MacArthur. “The team was thrilled over your telegram,” Blaik quickly wrote in return. “Like all cadet football players of the past generation, they share my feeling that you are our number one rooter.” But next came a trip down to Yankee Stadium to meet Southern Cal and its dashing star, Frank Gifford, who was posing for Look magazine as an All-America tailback. In his pregame missive to MacArthur, Blaik noted that he would employ an “unorthodox defense” to try to stop the Trojan attack, but added that “we are so completely outclassed physically there is reason to fear that we may not be able to withstand the impact of such a fast and strong squad.” Many in the press box observing that game thought Southern Cal could have scored 50 points, but stopped mercifully at 28. Looking back decades later on that trying season, assistant Doug Kenna spoke of “many long afternoons,” but said it could have been worse: “The opposing coaches were good to us—they didn’t run it up.”
The Cadets were 2-6 by the t
ime they boarded the train for Philadelphia for the season finale against Navy. It was Blaik’s worst record ever and more losses for Lombardi than he had suffered during any season in two decades, with the exception of his abortive attempt to resurrect Fordham under the somnolent Danowski. In the internecine world of service academy rivalry, this single contest was as meaningful as all other games on the schedule combined: a victory redeemed the most ghastly season, and an upset loss, like the one Blaik’s boys had suffered the year before, ruined an otherwise exceptional year. To say that the outcome determined twelve months of bragging rights probably underestimated its significance: Army and Navy were in unending competition elsewhere—at the Pentagon, in the halls of Congress, in the realm of public opinion—fighting for prestige, new weapons, more money, recognition of singular prowess in battle, and all of those struggles were played out symbolically in the game of football. The only national setting where one branch could say indisputably that it was better than the other was on the playing field once each year in Philadelphia.
As the Army coaches, their families, the struggling team and the entire corps rode the train south to New York and down through New Jersey for the game, one uncomfortable thought prevailed. Could Army sink any lower? Still reeling from the academic scandal, too many of its recent graduates slogging and fighting and dying in the confounding war in Korea, Blaik’s adversaries around the country taking inordinate pleasure in his troubles—one game could ease some of the pain. If there was a shard of false hope, it was expressed by Lombardi’s son, little Vincent, then nine, who, when the delegation reached Philadelphia, busily set about making a fleet of paper airplanes that he flew out the hotel window. BEAT NAVY was scrawled on the wings.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 19