When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  There was one hero among them already. Andy Robustelli, anchor of the defensive front four and part-time sporting goods man, had taken it upon himself to bring forty-eight pairs of basketball shoes down from Connecticut for the team to wear in case of icy conditions. The weather that Sunday was worse than predicted. It had sleeted all night, and the temperature plummeted to 13 degrees. The mimeograph machine in the press box froze. Fans warmed themselves by smuggling in pints of liquor; in the right-field stands they huddled around a raging trash fire. Red Smith set the wintry scene of 56,836 New Yorkers heading to their seats before kickoff. “They came trooping and whooping into Yankee Stadium in parkas and woolies and ski togs and furs with mufflers snugged about the ears, and everybody was ridiculing himself. ‘Hi,’ a guy would shout, meeting an acquaintance, ‘how about this? Am I an idiot or what?’ ” There was “a light dusting of snow” on the sidelines, Smith reported, and the playing surface was “virtually clear but hard as a tackle’s skull.” He spotted Jim Lee Howell on the field ninety minutes before game time, testing the turf with two of his halfbacks, Ed Hughes in cleats and Gene Filipski in sneakers. “The cleats didn’t hold,” Smith noted, “so the Giants showed up for the kickoff shod like roundball players.” The Bears came out in an assortment of cleats, none of which had the traction of Robustelli’s footwear.

  The one-sided nature of the game was established immediately by Filipski, the sneakers tester, a speedy back who had played for Lombardi at Army before being expelled in the 1951 cribbing scandal and finishing his college career at Villanova. Filipski took the opening kickoff and bolted between the skittering Bears on a fifty-three-yard return that set up the first touchdown two minutes later. Lombardi thought that single play by his fallen cadet proved that the Giants would win. “We were on our way,” he said after the game. “That good criss-cross blocking for the runner, who went straight up the field, showed the team was out for a 33-man effort.” Tex Maule described the rout that followed by drawing on his favorite theme of modern professionals at work. “For more than two hours of this gelid December afternoon the New York Giants played football with the savage precision of true professionals. Chuck Conerly, the old pro (SI, Dec. 3) who directs the Giants offense, loosed his aerial salvos with meticulous aim; the thunderous Giant runners moved with sure-footed power over this slippery field. The Giant lines—both offensive and defensive—administered a thorough cutling to the opposing Bear units, and the Giant secondary defense, which had given away two late and tying touchdowns in a regular season game between these two same teams, leaked not at all with the world championship in the balance. Against a team so well equipped and so well prepared, the Bears never really had a chance.”

  The final score was 47 to 7. Jim Lee Howell was the toast of the town after the game, but in large measure the championship win could be attributed to the coaching skills and persuasive powers of Vince Lombardi. The Giants offense was never better than on that ice-slicked afternoon. The quarterbacks Heinrich (who played the first quarter) and Conerly (on the field for the final three, wearing golf gloves at first) effectively changed plays automatically at the line of scrimmage, using Lombardi’s system of reading and adjusting. Webster, with the new work ethic Lombardi instilled in him, banged in for two touchdowns. Gifford ran for daylight all afternoon and scored on a fourteen-yard pass from Conerly. Rote and Triplett also scored, demonstrating the balance of Lombardi’s attack. And Sam Huff, the rookie middle linebacker whom Lombardi had refused to let quit back at training camp, “dogged Casares all afternoon,” as Tex Maule reported, “keying on the Bear fullback with each play.” Maule was right: these Giants were professionals.

  The ascent of the modern—or what seemed modern in 1956—was evident in other ways that week. The Chicago Tribune sports section, unable to brag about the game itself, ran a front-page box detailing the speed with which it got action shots taken by veteran Tribune photographer Ray Gora into the paper overnight. “After shooting the game in Yankee Stadium, Gora took off from LaGuardia airport in New York at 5:25 p.m. (Chicago time) and arrived at Midway airport here at 8:35 p.m.,” the Tribune reported. “A chartered helicopter, piloted by George Snyder, met Gora at Midway and took just five minutes to fly the films to Navy pier, from where they were rushed by car to the Tribune photo room.” On the financial side, the game also set modern records, with numbers that appear exceptionally modest in retrospect but were substantial at the time. The total gate receipts were $517,385, with $205,000 of that coming from radio and television rights, and the Giant players took home unparalleled playoff shares of $3,779.19. A reporter suggested after the game that the Giants won because they were hungrier for that playoff money, but Jim Lee Howell disagreed. “It wasn’t the money,” he said. “It was their pride.”

  Money was just then emerging as a communal concern among the players. That very weekend player representatives from ten of the twelve NFL squads met with lawyer Creighton Miller in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria and voted to form the National Football League Players Association. Kyle Rote represented New York, joined by Billy Howton of Green Bay, Norm Van Brocklin of Los Angeles, Y. A. Tittle of San Francisco, Adrian Burk of Philadelphia, Norb Hecker of Washington, Bill Pellington of Baltimore, Don Colo of Cleveland, Jack Jennings of the Chicago Cardinals and Joe Schmidt of Detroit. Miller, their counsel, a Notre Dame grad and former assistant coach in Cleveland, challenged the owners to accept the players organization as a logical step in the spirit of the professional. “The players obviously want a continuous improvement in their economic condition with some control over their own destiny,” Miller said. “The football man, when dissatisfied, thinks not of revolt but of negotiation. It is hoped that the modern club executive, faced with player grievances, will think not of the divine right of management but of making feasible adjustments.”

  Van Brocklin, the veteran quarterback, took detailed notes during the Waldorf meetings and drafted a memo for his fellow Rams. The players, he reported, had agreed on three areas of primary concern: training camp expenses, a pension plan and compensation for injured players. It became apparent during the sessions that there were wide disparities in how players were treated from team to team. The Eagles were paid only five dollars a week during training camp. In Detroit, some players were paid for exhibition games, but not all of them were, which Schmidt said “causes dissension on the club.” The Giants, according to Rote, received ten dollars a week in training camp, wanted severance pay for veterans cut during the final days of preseason and were “100 percent for the association.” Redskins had laundry and cleaning paid during training camp, but those expenses were deducted from the salaries of players who made the club. Green Bay players had no complaints about preseason pay, but were pushing for a pension plan. The 49ers, according to Tittle, were nervous about asking the owners for more money, but felt strongly that they needed a clause assuring that injured players would be compensated. Colo said that Paul Brown in Cleveland was against the players association but felt that one was inevitable.

  The prevailing attitude of the player representatives was one of mild consternation, as Van Brocklin’s memo described it, not rebellion. They were not eager for Creighton Miller to turn them into a labor union. They were not seeking to negotiate with the owners as adversaries, but rather thought they “should get their confidence and friendship before taking further action.” They were still open to the courtesies of Bert Bell, the commissioner, who told them that there was no need for an association, that he was for the players, and that his door was always open. If the meeting at the Waldorf forever rearranged the relationship between workers and owners in professional football, the ten men at that historic first meeting did not fully realize it, for as they were moving inevitably toward the new, their thinking was still shaped by the old.

  ALLSMILES when the Lombardi family posed for the photographer from the Long Branch Daily Record that winter: Vince seated in his favorite Danish modern chair in the wall-to-wall carpeted living room, s
harp in pressed gray slacks, blue sport coat and striped tie, wife Marie in sweater and skirt, perched on the chair’s left arm, daughter Susan, nine years old, same pose on the right, son Vincent, fourteen, sentinel in back near the floor lamp, a strapping young man with the no-nonsense Lombardi jaw, and Wrinkles (known as little Ricky), the family dachshund, a brown sausage yapper at his master’s feet. It seemed like the archetypal portrait of an American family circa 1956. Marie the housewife, driving her husband to the station in Red Bank every morning where he caught the 7:19 into the city, Vince playing gin in the club car on the ride north, reaching his office at ten minutes before nine, getting back to Fair Haven for supper Monday and Tuesday, but staying late at the office Wednesday through Friday as the workload piled up. Out of town all weekend half the time during the season. Selling insurance for the Equitable Insurance Company during the off-season; playing golf at Beacon Hill Country Club with his pals Johnny Ryan and Harold Kerr. The breadwinner doing what he thought he was meant to do, making a living, preoccupied with his job, the thoroughly professional man.

  Marie had been married to Vince for sixteen years, and they had found an uneasy balance. They still argued frequently, most often when Vince put her down for something she said. “Shut up, Marie” and “That was a dumb thing to say, Marie” were common refrains. But she often stood up to him, giving as well as taking. She had long since accepted the fact that her husband was an obsessed football coach, and every year adapted herself more to his world. She tried never to miss a home game. Sometimes on the way up to New York she dropped Susan in Englewood at Matty and Harry’s (Nanna and Poppop to the grandchildren), but more often she took her daughter with her to Yankee Stadium. This was not an occasion for mother-daughter bonding, however. As soon as she and Susan reached the stadium, she hired an attendant inside the ladies’ room to babysit. Women entering the washroom would hand the attendant a tip and were given a towel; Susan sat on the counter and handed out the towels. For five years she went to Giants games and might never have seen a play, might never have known what action caused the roars she heard when the ladies’ room door opened. She rarely left the washroom counter, not even for a hot dog and Coke—the attendant went out and bought it for her. She had little idea what her father did.

  Susan said later that she enjoyed her Sunday afternoons inside the ladies’ room at Yankee Stadium. It was in her nature to find entertainment in small things, which might have been a blessing considering her life situation. When her mother did show an interest in her, it was often to express concern about her appearance to the outside world: how she talked, how her hair looked, how much she weighed. For solace she carried around a security blanket, which she called her “ray-ray.” She hated school from the start, struggled to learn to read and twice was held back in elementary school, repeating the first and fourth grades. At her first parochial school in Oradell, the nuns seated the smart students in front and the slow ones in back; Susan was pushed to the farthest row and largely ignored. At Fair Haven she took a battery of intelligence tests and was diagnosed with a learning disability.

  In those few moments when Lombardi was there and not preoccupied with football films, he devoted himself to her. “Give Daddy a kiss,” he would say, and make her rub her cheek against his beard to see if he needed a shave. He tried to find ways to teach Susan to read and count. “Being a schoolteacher himself, he tried to make me smarter,” she later explained. “I’m not sure he didn’t feel it was his fault sometimes that I was not that sharp. Maybe he felt he did something wrong, I don’t know, but he was always trying to educate me.” When they were riding in the car together, he pointed out road signs and asked her to read them along with him. He was always interested in making a competitive game out of life, and competed with her to find letters in billboards as a way to teach her the alphabet. At night he brushed her hair, counting aloud the strokes to one hundred and having her count along. He told her he loved her long hair. Marie was less fond of it, preferring Susan in short pigtails. Vin and Marie could argue about anything, and they bickered over Susan’s hair; Marie cut it short once and when Vince came home and saw it “he hit the ceiling.”

  The tension in the family was felt most keenly by young Vincent, who had become accustomed to a house in which his father was rarely present. There are family pictures of Lombardi holding his toddler son proudly on his knee, handing him a football, but that image was not stored in Vincent’s early memory bank. He went through childhood feeling distanced from his father. His dad had all the time in the world for players, but less for him—rarely read to him or played catch with him, never went through the daily rituals that other fathers performed with their sons. “We were not buddies,” Vincent said decades later, his tone more matter-of-fact than resentful. Though more was expected of Vincent than of Susan, Lombardi expressed this mostly in a negative sense; Vincent did not feel pressure to excel, to “accomplish something that he didn’t do,” so much as pressure not to fail—not to misbehave in school, not to fumble on the football field, not to bring home a bad grade, all of which he did in the normal course of youth.

  Vincent had conflicting feelings about his father’s long work hours. His friends were envious of him for having a dad who worked for the Giants. Vincent would rather have had a father who was around every day. Yet he could not help feeling uncomfortable when his dad was home: “You knew he was in the house even before you saw him. You could feel it. He was there, you knew it, he changed everything, the air felt different. You were walking on eggshells most of the time. You never knew when he was going to be angry at you, or over what. You didn’t know when he was going to overlook something or the next time when he wouldn’t. It was how he would say it that would irritate you. He wouldn’t say, ‘It’s raining out,’ he’d shout, ‘Put your boots on!’ He would erupt over little things. A look. He’d take your head off for a look. He would swat you if you looked at him wrong.” Like many fathers of that generation, Lombardi tried to discipline his son by hitting him. How often? “Quite often. It didn’t hurt that bad, but it would hurt.”

  Once Vincent surprised himself by standing up to his old man. He was being ordered around and was tired of it, so he marched out of the house, slamming the door in defiance. Lombardi ran after him. Vincent could hear him coming, rage and righteousness churning down the sidewalk, and he sensed the pain that was about to be inflicted on him, and without considering the consequences, with the sort of move he might have made on the football field if he wasn’t carrying the load of his father’s judgment with him, natural and swift this one time, he boldly spun around with a hard right, punching his dad smack in the face. Lombardi was so stunned that he did not respond, returning silently to the house. Then he reconsidered, his face reddening, and went for Vincent again, but Marie stepped in and prevented another confrontation.

  At Red Bank Catholic High, Vincent was an occasional underachiever (his dad grounded him for an entire marking period when he brought home poor grades). He did not get along with some of the nuns, and wanted no part of their plans for him to be a student leader. A leader is what his father was. Vincent did not much like the type; to him it meant constant tension, unrelenting pressure. He was tense enough already, but less directed and ambitious, more like his mother, and he believed that his dad thought less of him for that. “I think he thought I took after my mother in many respects. He thought she was weak. He thought I was weak.” Once his father yelled at him in front of Frank Gifford; they were driving somewhere, Lombardi and Gifford in front, Vincent in back, and all of a sudden the Old Man laid into him for saying something wrong—one of the most embarrassing moments of his life.

  It is not uncommon for fathers to misunderstand their sons, and for sons, their lives shaped by that difficult relationship, to wonder retrospectively whether they had misunderstood their fathers. That is how it went with Vincent Thomas Lombardi and Vincent Henry Lombardi. Looking back on his adolescence decades later from the perspective of his own adulthood,
the son remembered not only the occasions when his father intimidated him, but also the time when the nuns sent him home from school for goofing off, and how fearful he was that his dad would hit him, and how instead the Old Man said something comforting and patted him on the back and let it go, and how that single pat on the back, an unexpected sign of love, meant the world to him.

  There is no suggestion that Lombardi did not want to be a good father or that he had no interest in creating his own loving family. Few things in life meant more to him than family. He was born among the Izzos of Sheepshead Bay, when the whole world was family. But Marie, Vincent and Susan were victims of his obsessions and misdirected love. The football brotherhood could better satisfy his psychological needs: his longing for the adult equivalent of the embracing Izzo clan; his unslaked thirst to fight and prevail against the world. He tried to let his little brood into that more exciting world. He brought Vincent along to training camp and let him stand on the sidelines at every home game. He took Marie to dinner after the games, and brought players home sometimes rather than hanging out all the time at Toots Shor’s or Mike Manuche’s in midtown Manhattan. To his outside friends, who knew the social Lombardi, with his white-flash smile and contagious laugh, who heard him speak solemnly about the importance of family, he seemed to have a healthy balance in his life between God, family and profession. But like many people obsessed to achieve, his life listed heavily toward his profession. His little nuclear family saw him from the inside and found it hard to compete with the world: Susie struggling to read, Vincent stubbornly refusing to snap to, Marie, in the solitude of night, furtively tinkling two ice cubes into a tumbler and pouring her drink.