The style of the remodeled office in this instance was less important than the message Lombardi meant to impart. The hapless losing ways of the old days were gone. The “Green Bay Packahs,” as Lombardi called them, were starting over, in the spirit of the new. “We’re not just going to start with a clean slate,” he said. “We’re going to throw the old slate away.”
John Thurman Cochran and John Philip Bengtson, two of Lombardi’s four new assistants, reported for work that Monday morning, walking from the downtown YMCA at Pine and Jefferson, where they had stayed overnight. Cochran, a feisty Alabaman who went by the nickname Red, had arrived from Detroit in what amounted to an informal swap, having been let go by Lions coach George Wilson to make room there for former Packer coach Scooter McLean. Bengtson, a soft-spoken Minnesotan who was brought in from the San Francisco 49ers to run the defense, had originally expressed greater ambitions; he had wired Olejniczak the day after Scooter’s resignation to say that he was interested in the top job. Cochran and Bengtson, along with Bill Austin, a former New York Giants guard, the offensive line coach, and defensive backfield coach Norb Hecker, formerly of the Washington Redskins, all met Lombardi’s first requirement for members of his staff—he wanted only assistants with professional experience. That standard would have precluded Lombardi himself from being hired by the Giants in 1954, but he remembered that his first year in New York had been a difficult adjustment and felt that there was no time for learning on the job now. He wanted to win immediately, and to do that he needed people who knew the pro athletes and the pro game.
In the job interviews, Lombardi focused intently on the arcane details of pro football, a variation of the pop quiz Red Blaik had thrown at him in the gym tower office at West Point a decade earlier—what offenses the assistants knew, how they taught the sweep, the option, the belly series, the trap, the audible, rule blocking, making cuts, the 4-3 defense, man-on-man coverage. After the interview (conducted in a lounge at Willow Run Airport in Detroit while Lombardi was changing planes from New York to Green Bay) Cochran felt as though he had endured an entrance exam for football graduate school. Still, Red and Phil were not the most confident fellows as they walked up Pine to Washington Street and took a left toward the Packer offices that first Monday morning. With the wind whipping across the Fox River into their faces, Cochran looked up at a bank building and noticed a below-zero temperature reading. Tucking his chin deeper into his inadequate winter coat, he muttered to his new colleague, “What in the hell are we doing here?”
Lombardi delivered no stirring speeches to his staff that first morning—“no ringing pronouncements” to define their mission, as Phil Bengtson later remembered it. This did not mean that Lombardi disdained pep talks, but rather that he rarely interacted with his assistants in that manner, then or thereafter. He viewed them largely as technicians and teachers; he did not expect them to be emotional leaders. He jealously guarded that role for himself, and saved his emotion for his players. He was not inclined to cede power to his assistants or anyone else. On the night before his first meeting with the executive board, he stayed late at the office and went over his contract again with secretary Ruth McKloskey, crossing out clauses that in any way appeared to limit his power. “One that I distinctly remember him crossing out is a paragraph that he couldn’t drink in public places,” McKloskey later recalled. “That was in the contract originally, and Mr. Lombardi said, ‘No one’s going to tell me where I’m going to drink!’ ”—an assertion of independence that he would not allow his players. At the board meeting, he announced that in the unlikely event that he needed help, he would ask for it. “I want it understood that I am in complete command,” he declared. If President Olejniczak still harbored notions of being the overseer, Lombardi quickly disabused him of those by usurping his parking space.
His imperious leadership style was partly a manifestation of his innately bossy nature, shaped in childhood by his mother Matty’s perfectionist personality and his status as the oldest son and alpha wolf among the Izzo cousins; then refined at Fordham by Ignatius of Loyola, Father Cox and the Jesuits, from whom he learned the philosophy of sublimating individual desires for the common good; and further influenced by several strong leaders he encountered during his football career, from Harry Kane at St. Francis through Sleepy Jim Crowley and Frank Leahy at Fordham, Red Blaik, Red Reeder and Douglas MacArthur at West Point, and Paul Brown and George Halas in the National Football League. Past was prologue for Lombardi in all of those ways, but his present circumstances also played a role in determining the coaching persona he assumed with the Packers. He felt that he had to be the antithesis of the happy-go-lucky Scooter McLean, and part of that necessarily meant distancing himself from the people in a small, busybody town. He had given “considerable thought” to the adjustment he would have to make, he mused aloud one day, not only the psychological transition from assistant to boss, but also the cultural shift from New York to Green Bay. “I realize it will be different here, where most everybody knows” everyone else, he said. “The coaches and players have an entirely different problem” compared to those in large cities “who can easily get lost.”
The one matter that required the least adjustment from Lombardi’s New York days was football itself. He brought the Giants offense with him and set about teaching it to his assistants that first week, using his football bible (the tan satchel) and a chalkboard as his pedagogical tools. “We knew Lombardi was going to be disciplined because he started with us on Day One,” Cochran said later. “Every day Vince took a certain amount of time that we sat down and went through football just like we were learning it for the first time. He was on the blackboard teaching us with the same techniques that we eventually would use with players. He told us what plays we were going to run, how they were going to be blocked. We were making up our own notebooks at the time, putting all the plays on cards like he had—eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch notebook cards with holes in them, just like his bible. I’d call mine my brains. I’d say I left my brains somewhere if I didn’t have my notebook. It was Lombardi’s brains.”
If Lombardi knew exactly the type of football he wanted to see on the field, he was less certain about the players he would put out there. His knowledge of the roster was limited. Since they came from different conferences, the Giants and Packers had rarely played against each other and had few common opponents. One was the Baltimore Colts; no heartening news there—the Colts split with the Giants in 1958, losing in the regular season before winning the dramatic sudden death game, but they obliterated the Packers on the most miserable afternoon of Scooter McLean’s sadsack season, 56 to 0. Since his days with Red Blaik, Lombardi had been a true believer in the value of game films, and now he found them more important than ever. He set up a film room on the second floor of the Washington Street office and studied reels of old Packer films late into the night as he and his assistants graded the technique, speed and hustle of every player. It did not take him long to make his first crucial decision. His offense was built around the left halfback position, which in New York was filled by Frank Gifford, the triple-threat star who could run the sweep, throw the option pass and catch passes out in the flat. Could any Packer play Gifford’s role?
In the dark hum of the film room, Lombardi found his answer. He was watching Paul Hornung, who had been an option quarterback in college and had been used by McLean at quarterback, fullback and halfback. Hornung loped out of the backfield at left halfback one game, followed his blockers perfectly, and cut upfield through the tackle slot with power and ease. “Run that play again!” Lombardi barked to Bill Austin, the line coach operating the projector. It was not raw speed that Lombardi was looking for—Gifford was not the fastest back around—but a combination of timing, grace, power and determination. He watched Hornung again. And again. The Heisman winner from Notre Dame, disappointing in his first two years, had what Lombardi sought. “There’s my offense,” he said. The next morning he placed a call to Hornung, who was home
in Louisville, disillusioned with football, making money in real estate development with his family friend and patron, Henry Hoffmann, and thinking of retiring from the game. “I want you to know one thing, you’re not going to be my quarterback,” Lombardi told him. “Your quarterback days are over. You won’t have to worry about playing three positions anymore. You are my left halfback. You’re my Frank Gifford. You’re either going to be my left halfback or you’re not going to make it in pro football.”
Hornung knew about Gifford and his success in New York, and hung up eager to give Green Bay one more chance. “I had been ready to bail out,” he said years later. “And would have if Lombardi hadn’t called.”
It was easier for Lombardi to decide on a halfback than a quarterback. He had removed Hornung from consideration, and Randy Duncan, the first-round choice from Iowa, had decided to play in Canada. That left Lombardi with three choices from the remaining material: Vito “Babe” Parilli, who had been in the league since 1952, but had not yet been able to repeat the success he had at Kentucky; Joe Francis, a second-year man from Oregon State who had played mostly halfback in his rookie year; and Bart Starr, a late-round draft choice in his third year from Alabama. Starr had shown glimmers of talent—in one game film Lombardi studied, Starr attempted forty-six passes, completing twenty-six for 320 yards—but he seemed more mistake-prone than Parilli, with four times as many interceptions as touchdowns. Bengtson’s analysis of Starr was that he might prove “adequate as a backup,” but no more. “We’ve got a helluva problem,” Lombardi agreed. “We’ve got to find somebody who can move this club.”
The dominant figure in the Packers clubhouse during the long dry spell of the fifties was not a quarterback but an end, Billy Howton, who had been both a star receiver and a leader of the incipient National Football League Players Association. Howton was a tall Texan, quick and cocky, the sort who would return to the huddle and announce that he could get open on a deep fly pattern if only the quarterback could throw it that far. One night in February, Gary Knafelc, another Packers end who was Howton’s roommate during the season and lived in Green Bay during the off-season, got a call from Howton, who was back in Dallas. “Vince called me,” Howton began.
“Wait a minute, Billy. I sure wouldn’t call him Vince,” Knafelc cautioned his buddy. Knafelc had already had his first encounter with Lombardi—they had met in the stands at a Green Bay Bobcats minor league hockey game—and came away “scared to death” of him. Howton was undeterred, telling Knafelc that “Vince” wanted him to catch a flight to Green Bay and “talk about how we can make the Packers a winner.” He asked Knafelc to pick him up at the airport. Knafelc had one last word of advice before hanging up. “Billy,” he said, “I’m gonna tell you again—I would not call him Vince.” The next day, when Knafelc picked up Howton at the airport, Howton said that he expected to spend several hours with Lombardi and made arrangements for dinner with the Knafelcs that night and for a return flight to Dallas the next morning. “So I dropped him off and my wife had some errands for me to run at Prange’s,” Knafelc later recalled. “I went there and got back home and my wife says, ‘Bill wants you to pick him up right away. He’s got to get back to Dallas.’ And I say, ‘I just dropped him off!’ and she says, ‘Well, he’s waiting for you.’ So I drove down to the office on Washington Street, and he’s standing on the corner and gets in, and he’s silent, and I say, ‘What happened?’ and he says, ‘Nothing,’ and wouldn’t talk about it anymore.”
What happened is that Lombardi had decided to get rid of Howton, who before long was traded to the Cleveland Browns for halfback Lew Carpenter and defensive end Bill Quinlan. Howton was among those who believed that he was shipped out of Green Bay because of his union position, which Lombardi might have perceived as a threat to his autocracy. That view appears to be half true at best. It is certain that Lombardi wanted nothing—certainly not a players organization—to get between him and his team. But Lombardi had no similar difficulties with Kyle Rote, who had been a players association activist with the Giants, nor with the Packers player representatives who succeeded Howton. His decision to trade Howton was triggered by their prickly meeting in Green Bay, at which the coach concluded that the wide receiver was a divisive force, but at bottom it resulted from a cold assessment of personnel. Lombardi was a skilled offensive coach, but he came to Green Bay realizing that he had to build a great defense to prevail in the NFL, just as the Giants had, and thought that Bill Quinlan—a freewheeling defender from Michigan State who had a reputation for being every bit as rebellious as Howton—would be more valuable to him.
It was a talent appraisal that improved the team, as did most of the trades Lombardi made as general manager preparing for his first season as head coach. He acquired another lineman from Cleveland, Henry Jordan, a future all-star tackle, to fortify the defense, and also picked up Emlen Tunnell, the veteran all-star safety from the Giants—both for midround draft choices. For the offense he brought in guard Fred “Fuzzy” Thurston in a trade with Baltimore and quarterback Lamar McHan from the Chicago Cardinals. Quinlan and Jordan constituted half of the Packers front four. Em Tunnell, who had intercepted seventy-four passes during eleven years of ballhawking in New York, brought class and experience to the defensive backfield, along with an intimate knowledge of the defensive system Lombardi wanted to implement with his new team. Tunnell became an informal coach on the field, and as the first black star to play for the Packers, and a player who greatly respected the new coach, he also made it easier for Lombardi to bring in many more skilled black players over the next few years. Thurston, an agile basketball player in college at Valparaiso, fit perfectly at left guard in Lombardi’s sweep offense. McHan, who had always played well for his underdog Cardinals when they had faced the Giants during Lombardi’s New York years, was brought in as the favorite to be the starting quarterback.
Lombardi vacillated between optimism and despair during those early days in Green Bay. He was Mr. High-Low again. At times he was surprised by joy, the feeling that overtook him back at St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn when he first realized that he loved football. Now football in Green Bay was his whole world and he was the master of it, a sublime state of freedom that the Jesuits and Colonel Blaik, in different ways, had predicted would be his if he was disciplined, obedient, willing to pay the price. Now he was even free to relax and show some of the jovial Harry in him. One night during their first week in town, he stunned his son, Vincent, twice—first by asking if he wanted to go to a hockey game, then by picking up two hitchhikers on the way to the arena, something he had never done back in New Jersey. One of the hitchhikers became young Vincent’s best friend at school.
Pat Cochran, the wife of assistant coach Red Cochran, was brought to tears late one Sunday morning as she struggled with the difficult conditions she found herself in—trapped by snow in an alien city, two toddlers, not enough room or furniture, her infant daughter sleeping in a dresser drawer. Red looked out the window and was shocked to see that Lombardi had stopped off on his way back from church and was now walking up their front steps. “Here comes the Old Man!” Red said, opening the door. After surmising that Pat was “not having any fun here,” Lombardi invited the Cochrans over for dinner. “It was the best time I ever had with him,” she said later. “We were all in the same boat. I remember Vince let their little dachshund out to piddle, and he laughed and laughed about the way it melted the snow.”
A week later Lombardi invited the entire staff out to the house on Mission Street for a party—not just the football people, but also the secretaries and clerks and their spouses. Marie had the food catered and Vince played bartender. The guests were nervous and hesitant at first, uncertain about how to behave in an informal setting with Mr. Lombardi. After a few drinks Pat Cochran said her feet hurt. “Anyone mind if I take off my shoes?” she asked, flinging her high heels aside. The other women were startled, and a moment of awkward silence passed until Lombardi broke into his toothy grin and said, “T
hat’s a good idea. Let’s all take our shoes off!” He untied his wingtips and lined them up at the side of the couch. “This feels good,” he said, wiggling his toes. He was still in his stocking feet at the end of the night, standing at the door, saying goodbye.
But on other days Lombardi felt isolated and out of his element. Yes, he was master of this world, but what kind of world was it? There was more excitement on one block of midtown Manhattan, or the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, or Sheepshead Bay Road out in Brooklyn, than in all of this dark, snow-slushed, wide and empty place. In a strange environment, the most trivial deprivation can feed the largest worry. He couldn’t find a hard breakfast roll anywhere in town; his team might not be any good—both thoughts jangled around in his mind, increasing his anxiety. Yes, he had freedom, but that meant freedom to fail. Late one afternoon, after being closeted in the film room since eight in the morning, he slumped down the stairs and sat behind his desk in brooding silence with his head in his hands. Ruth Mc-Kloskey had never seen him disconsolate before—she had known only the assertive side of his personality—and his melancholy alarmed her. When she looked closer from across the room it appeared that her new boss had tears in his eyes. She walked over to him and asked what was wrong. As Mc-Kloskey later recounted the scene, “He said, ‘I think I’ve taken on more than I can handle. Will you pray for me and help me?’ ”
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