Huff, a two-way lineman who was the team’s third-round draft choice, felt homesick in Vermont, was upset that Jim Lee Howell never seemed to stop picking on him, and felt undersized against behemoths like the Roosevelts of the line—offensive tackle Rosey Brown and defensive tackle Rosey Grier. He had a sore knee and missed the simpler life in rural West Virginia: the coal fields that his father once mined, the little grocery in Farmington where the checkout girl was Mary Fletcher Huff, his childhood sweetheart and bride since they were seventeen. One morning as Huff and another uneasy rookie, kicker Don Chandler, were resting on the beds in their dorm room listening to a country western station, Huff said that if a homesick song called “Detroit City” came on they should just pack up and leave training camp. “Damn if it didn’t come on the radio right after I said it,” Huff recalled. “And I said, ‘Let’s go.’ Chandler was quiet and lonesome and ready to go with me.”
The two rookies went downstairs to turn in their playbooks and found Lombardi taking a catnap in his first-floor room. “We walk in and say, ‘Coach,’ and he jumps out of bed and starts screaming, ‘What the hell do you want!’ ” Huff said later. “Jesus. We held out our playbooks. We’re quitting. He goes off on us. He says, ‘We’ve got two weeks invested in you guys. You may not make this ball club, but you’re sure as hell not quitting on me!’ ” While Lombardi was yelling at Huff, Chandler slipped out of the room and went back upstairs to pack. After listening to Lombardi and another assistant coach, Ed Kolman, Huff decided not to quit, but then Chandler changed his mind again and they made their escape in the borrowed station wagon of another rookie from Ohio. They were sitting in the airport lounge an hour later when Lombardi drove up like a truant officer, announced that he would not allow them to leave and escorted them back to training camp.
Huff and Chandler both eventually made the team and played in the NFL for more than a decade each. Huff was moved to middle linebacker, the key position in Tom Landry’s mobile 4-3 defense, where he emerged as a star, the prototypical linebacker of his era, slashing violently from sideline to sideline. From then on, for the rest of his long career, even when he and Lombardi were on opposing teams scrapping for championships, he considered himself a Lombardi man. So did Chandler, who ended up in Green Bay nearly a decade later, where his strong foot won one of the most important games of Lombardi’s career.
For the most part it was the sophistication of his playbook, not the mental fragility of his players, that preoccupied Lombardi that summer. His satchel overflowed with new configurations of X’s and O’s, more plays to transpose from the page to the playing field, some exotic, others basic. There was the bedazzling belly 26 reverse pass that he had brought in for his triple-threat left halfback: the quarterback fakes a handoff to Triplett, the fullback, then to Webster, the right half, and finally gives the ball to Gifford, who at the snap moves left, then reverses field and glides right behind a pulling guard, looking to pass but with the option to run.
It was a play that could be used only a few times a year, but its success was dependent upon a simple concept that was now the foundation of Lombardi’s offensive philosophy: freedom within structure. Get the running backs in positions where they could react to the defense with several options, run or pass, cut inside or outside. After watching Gifford dip to the outside and into the clear when a defensive end closed the off-tackle hole where one play was designed to go, Lombardi began to teach his running plays differently. “That was the first time that I realized that in the pro league it is to your advantage to run to daylight and not a specific hole,” he explained later. “And that’s the way I began coaching it.”
Run to daylight—later the phrase would become the trademark of Lombardi’s offense in Green Bay, but it was conceived in 1956 on the practice field in Vermont. And so was the seminal play of his pro offense, the power sweep. Before it became famous as the Packer sweep, it was the Giants sweep, and apparently before that it was the Rams sweep. Lombardi first saw the play while watching films of Los Angeles in 1955. He analyzed the movements of every offensive player, stuffed his research into his playbook satchel and showed it to the Giants that August. From the first time he taught it, Lombardi was in his element. This play defined him. It was at once old and new. It was seemingly simple and yet offered infinite complexity, demanding swift decisions by all eleven offensive players. It was not size that mattered—Bill Austin, the left guard, prayed for the sweep call because he weighed only 218 pounds and “wasn’t big enough to go straight ahead” against the league’s bigger tackles. Nor was it speed alone—if Gifford or Webster sprinted ahead of the blockers, the play was lost. The sweep required precision, teamwork and brains. Lombardi loved it. Once, at a football seminar, he talked about it nonstop for eight hours.
SPECIAL BULLETIN NO. 12A arrived at Giants camp that August from NFL headquarters at 1518 Walnut Street in Philadelphia. It was written by Bert Bell, the league commissioner, and was intended for the Mara family and head coach Jim Lee Howell.
Wellington Mara had been sending notes to the commissioner every week. In his “Dear Bert” correspondence with Bell, a former colleague who had once owned the Philadelphia Eagles, Mara had passed along “constructive criticism for the good of our league” about bad officiating and cheap hits by opposing players. Bell usually took the notes in good humor, but this year he wanted to ensure that Mara’s complaints stayed within the family. “You and I know that all the men connected with football are aggressive or they would not be in the game,” Bell wrote. “And I can readily understand how, after losing a tough one, it is very easy for anyone to give off steam by criticizing the officials, the roughness of the other team, an individual player, the management, etc…. You will undoubtedly agree that this is not the way to build good public relations, as it certainly does not do anyone any good, and might do some person, a team, an official, a player, or the league itself, a great deal of harm.” Bell went on to plead with the owner not to show game films to the press with the intention of pointing out mistakes by officials, and warned the coach that “abusive and/or foul language” on the field would result in penalties.
The bulletin had an unusual tone of urgency, and near the end Bell revealed why: “This year the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the local sponsors will present to the public all our games on television, giving us our greatest opportunity to sell the National Football League and professional football. Everyone must do all in his power to present to the public the greatest games in football combined with the finest sportsmanship.” Bell anticipated that his league was on the cusp of something new, and he was nervous about the prospect.
It had been seventeen years since New York City’s W2XBS, the NBC station, hauled two iconoscope cameras out to Randalls Island and undertook the first ever telecast of a football game. The event was mundane, though it had a synchronistic connection to Lombardi. It was a nonconference college match between Fordham, still coached by Jim Crowley and still a national power, and Waynesburg College of Pennsylvania, played in front of a small crowd at Triborough Stadium. The images from the two cameras, stationed on flatbed carts at the fifteen-yard lines, were sent by RCA, which owned NBC, to a nearby relay station and then by cable to a transmitter on the roof of the Empire State Building. There were perhaps a thousand television sets within broadcast range in metropolitan New York; TVs were rare and dearly expensive before the war (Piser’s Furniture in the Bronx, in the vanguard of television retailers, offered a Clifton model for $600). It is doubtful that many viewers were tuned to the game anyway—the telecast was largely unwatchable because of regular patches of interference marring the already grainy black-and-white reception. One month later, at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the first professional game was televised, another forgettable contest involving the mediocre Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles.
Another twelve years passed before the first national broadcast of an NFL game: the 1951 championship between Los Angeles and Cleveland, televised by the Du
mont Television Network. Two years later, for the 1953 season, Dumont experimented with the first regular national broadcasts of NFL games, launching the Saturday Night Game of the Week. The broadcasts were sponsored by Westinghouse, which had tried the three other networks before settling on Dumont. CBS executives were approached first, but would not interfere with the Jackie Gleason show and instead offered to broadcast Monday night games if Westinghouse would move its Studio One live dramas to another night during the football season. No deal. NBC had a conflict with Sid Caesar’s popular comedy show, and ABC was also unwilling to rearrange its programming. The play-by-play man for the 1953 Saturday night national games was Ray Scott, a former adman and pioneer local TV sportscaster from the Dumont-owned station in Pittsburgh. With his nasally resonant voice, Scott described a football game in spare but authoritative style, imbuing every run and pass completion with grave importance. He did this not by shouting or using dramatic voice modulation, but simply with earnest articulation. He loved the narrative of NFL football and was a believer in its future. By 1956, after Dumont folded, CBS and NBC negotiated deals with Bell to televise the regular season (CBS) and championship (NBC), bringing the sport into more living rooms than ever, and prompting the commissioner to send out his good-behavior bulletin. The nation’s leading networks had their cameras in the stadium just in time for the rise of the New York Football Giants.
It was also in 1956 that Sports Illustrated, the national sports magazine, began publishing weekly reports on pro football written by Hamilton Prieleaux Bee Maule, whose byline was the more appropriate Tex Maule. As a former public relations man for the Rams and defunct Dallas Texans, Maule had had a career that paralleled pro football’s rise, and he had become the game’s resident expert. His column, “The Pros,” reflected a transformation in sports journalism in the postwar era. Unlike the old scribes of the Grantland Rice mold, who offered impressionistic portraits of the rite of football, using romantic poetry as a favored device, writers at Sports Illustrated and other magazines were now taking readers deeper inside the game, describing the preparation and play in documentary style, placing less emphasis on outcome than on process. Among the masters of this new art was W. C. Heinz, a New York magazine writer who got his start when Damon Runyon, dying of throat cancer and unable to talk, was asked in 1946 by an editor for Hearst magazines to name the best young writer in the city, and scrawled “W. C. Heinz can write” on a cocktail napkin, underlining the name three times. Later, Heinz would write a memoir in the new style detailing a week in the workday life of Vince Lombardi. During 1956 he was writing a novel of natural realism about boxing entitled The Professional. What Heinz undertook in long form, Tex Maule, with help from his editors in New York, attempted in more modest fashion every week. His accounts were essentially positive, but in a modern way, glorifying the pros by documenting how mentally challenging the NFL had become.
As the Giants started winning in 1956, “The Pros” focused on the New York team. By the end of November the Giants were in first place with a 6-2-1 record, and Sports Illustrated, for its December 3 cover, ran a compelling photo of quarterback Chuck Conerly, chin strap tightened, a single face bar crossing his nose, his eyes intense and penetrating, reading a defense at the line of scrimmage. “Old Pros Don’t Make Mistakes” declared the headline. At Yankee Stadium the previous Sunday, when the Giants had played the Chicago Bears, Maule had positioned himself on the bench near Conerly and watched the game unfold from there. “The noise of conflict could be heard clearly from where Conerly sat,” he wrote. “This thunder in the line starts with the muffled slap of the football against the palm of the quarterback and, as much as anything, it is the difference between college and pro football. It comes from the solid thump of well-armored men in violent contact, and it is augmented by their grunts and groans and curses. It is one of the things a rookie back finds unsettling when he plays his first game of professional football.”
Lombardi used his two quarterbacks as parts of the same machine that year. Heinrich, the second-stringer from the University of Washington, lean and sharp, started each game, probing the defense, testing out runs and passes, allowing Conerly to watch from the sideline until the situation required him. Heinrich was not overjoyed with his setup mission—“I’d pull him out and he’d be yelling ‘You guinea sonofabitch,’ ” Lombardi later recalled—but he nonetheless performed his job well, giving Lombardi the information he could “spoonfeed to Charlie.” Against the Bears, Maule wrote, “Conerly watched quietly” for three quarters, “hunched deep in the heavy sideline cape against the gray cold of the afternoon” as the Giants methodically rolled to a 17 to 3 lead. Lombardi inserted Conerly at the start of the fourth quarter, confident that he would not make crucial mistakes. “Be cautious out there,” Lombardi said as Conerly trotted onto the field.
Old pros might not make mistakes, but relatively new pro coaches do. Conerly killed as much of the clock as possible in careful drives, but the Bears came back on two sensational touchdown catches by the winged Harlon Hill, and the game ended in a tie, 17 to 17. It was a lesson that Lombardi filed away for the rest of his career: Never try to sit on the ball for an entire quarter, needlessly stifling an offense. “From then on,” Lombardi said later, “we played every game like the score was nothing to nothing.”
The Giants offense scored 264 points in 1956, the most in the East, and Lombardi received more notice in the press. His image then was not of a ranting tyrant but a sporting intellectual, the bespectacled, chart-toting teacher of a thinking man’s game. The Daily News ran a Sunday photo spread with a one-word headline—“THINK!” The top picture showed Lombardi from the back, gazing onto the field in trench coat and hat, his hands clasped behind him, clutching the plays “he’ll call when opponents come up with anticipated defensive alignments.” Next came a sideline shot of Lombardi huddling with Landry and Howell, the brain trust, who, it was said, looked “more like detectives than they do the traditional apoplectic, cigar-chewing coaches of old.” Closer to home, the Long Branch Daily Record in New Jersey ran a feature describing Lombardi as “a genial, soft-spoken individual” who, as the headline said, “Cites Value of Brains for Pro Grid Success.” The game had become so specialized, he told the reporter, that the pros needed to have brainpower to succeed and “the old type tobacco chewing burly ball players often referred to as tramp players are through.”
This was indisputably true; the league was more specialized and the players more sophisticated. But Lombardi was not simply making a cultural observation, he was also filling a psychological need, still seeking absolution for his decision to dedicate his life to a game rather than to the priesthood, law or business. When he moved to the professional football ranks, it was more difficult for him to portray himself as a teacher who molded the values of young men, so he noted that he and the players were professionals in every respect: he and Frank Gifford worked in the insurance business during the off-season. Kyle Rote hosted a television show in New York and owned a kitchen cabinet franchise in Texas. Herb Rich was a lawyer with a degree from Vanderbilt. Landry and backs Jim Patton and Gene Filipski were engineers. Andy Robustelli owned a sporting goods store in Connecticut.
Lombardi did not have to wait long to seek redemption for the professional mistake he had made in the Chicago game. The Giants and Bears were to meet again at Yankee Stadium on December 30, this time playing for the 1956 NFL championship. When the Bears squad flew east on a chartered United DC-6 on the Friday before the game, they boasted the better record (9-2-1 to the Giants’ 8-3-1), the best running attack in the league, led by the swift and powerful Rick Casares, and were established by oddsmakers as three-point favorites. But Lombardi was confident that the Giants would win. “I smell something,” he said the week before the game. He sensed that his team had found what he was looking for, his holy grail—a perfect balance between new and old; the sophistication of a modern offense combined with old-fashioned team spirit and camaraderie.
The Gian
ts not only played well together, they liked one another. Many of them lived in the Concourse Plaza apartment hotel near the stadium in the Bronx. Gifford, Conerly, Rote and Webster bonded even more with Lombardi, driving south to Fair Haven frequently for a pasta dinner and a few hours of chalk talk and film study in the coach’s den. Alex “Red” Webster, the six-foot-three, 225-pound bruiser from North Carolina State who had joined the team the year before after playing two seasons in Canada, had been a tough sell at first. A self-described “lazy” player, he initially bucked at Lombardi’s insistent drilling, but eventually realized that it was making him a better running back. As the results of that forced labor became clear in 1956, his relationship with Lombardi improved. It was difficult for him to show affection for the coach, but he did it indirectly by playing harder and developing a special affinity for Lombardi’s son. (“Alex Webster was my favorite,” young Vincent said later. “He always had a kind word for me.”) In any case, the closeness of the players had the effect Lombardi desired, what Webster called “a sensational feeling of unselfishness” on the field.
New York against Chicago usually offered something special. This was the fifth time they had played for the NFL title, going back to the inaugural championship match in 1933 involving teams from the Eastern and Western Conferences, a game the Bears won on what was called “the Stinky Special”—a fake line plunge and jump pass from the great Bronko Nagurski for the decisive score. They met again in 1934 in the renowned Sneakers Game in which the Giants outmaneuvered the slip-sliding Bears by donning basketball shoes. The Bears won the title games in 1941 and again in 1946, a postwar debacle in which New York gamblers attempted to fix the game by influencing the Giants fullback and quarterback. Now, ten years later, the two teams were competing for the title again. The Bears had practiced all through the Christmas holiday, while the Giants had taken five days off and seemed remarkably relaxed, an easygoing atmosphere encouraged by Jim Lee Howell, whose wife had given birth to a son two days before the game. Howell was passing out cigars in the locker room on the morning of the game, but he and Lombardi became concerned that perhaps there was “too much levity” among the troops. Rather than sitting alone at their lockers, silently steeling themselves for battle, the players were “laughing and joking” and “acting like a bunch of heroes already installed.”
When Pride Still Mattered Page 24