When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Little Ricky was gone by then. The dachshund scrambled for daylight whenever the front door opened, even on the bleakest of northern Wisconsin days, and one morning he made a vain effort to flee across the street and was struck by a snowplow. Marie took him to the vet and had him put to sleep, then broke the news to Susan and Vincent, a more difficult task than the time back in New Jersey when she had to tell them that she had gassed their pet duck. The house would become even emptier with Vincent leaving—bound for college at St. Thomas, a small private school in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he could play football with minimum pressure. Vincent had matured during his year and a half at Green Bay Premontre, but his teenage life as the namesake of Vince Lombardi was still stressful. His father, preoccupied with coaching duties, did not find time to watch any of his football games, a paternal absence that was in dramatic contrast to the devotion with which old Harry had followed Vince’s playing career at St. Francis and Fordham. Vince was Harry’s life in a way that Vince could not repeat for Vincent. He did attend one meeting of the parents club, but Father Tom Dewane, then a teacher at Premontre, recalled that he appeared “bored to death and never came back.” Vincent always felt the Old Man’s stern judgment looming over him even when his father was not there physically.

  The conflict between father and son worried Marie, who tried to ease the tension. She attended Vincent’s games and cheered him on, believing that he could be a superior athlete, but “because of this thing with his father, he was too tense.” Vincent’s grades improved considerably at Premontre, but one time he received a deficiency slip, which was sent home to Lombardi, who resorted to his favorite disciplinary measure by grounding the son. Marie felt that Vincent was isolated enough in Wisconsin and did not deserve such harsh punishment. She called the Premontre principal and pleaded, “If my son ever gets in trouble again, please don’t send it to Vince, send it to me.”

  Even when Vincent tried to emulate his father, it seemed to backfire. In his senior year at Premontre, he revealed to his dad that his ambition was to become a coach. Football was Vincent’s world, like his father’s. He could not imagine anything else. Yet when he announced that he intended to major in physical education in preparation for a coaching career, Lombardi reacted coldly, saying, “That’s fine with me, but if you do, I’ll not put one penny toward your education.” It turned out that Lombardi wanted his son to be a lawyer, the same ambition his parents once had for him. In the summer before college, Vincent worked at a pickle factory, a job his father had arranged. His function on the assembly line was to take jars of pickles off a conveyor belt and load them into crates. If this was meant to toughen Vincent, he reacted the same way Lombardi had back when he was forced to haul huge slabs of frozen meat at Harry’s wholesale butcher shop—he hated it. The one image Vincent carried with him decades later was of a bored worker “pissing into the vat” of pickle brine. It was a relief for him to quit that job and serve as a ball boy at training camp in late July, and even more of a relief to flee Green Bay for a new life at college.

  One person unmoved by Vincent’s departure was his younger sister. Susan and Vincent, separated by five years, were also distant emotionally and intellectually. They scrapped constantly. When their parents were out and Vincent was forced to babysit, he sent Susan to her room and imprisoned her there, chasing her back if she tried to escape. Seeking revenge once, she and Mary Jo Antil slipped into his room before he had returned from football practice and placed thumbtacks under the bedsheet. After plopping down on the bed and yelping in pain, he chased her out the back door with a baseball bat. Their differences were so evident that later in life Susan asked her brother in puzzlement, “How could you and I get raised in the same family?” Vincent was anxious, earnest, intelligent, with an outward appearance of arrogance that hid his inner struggle to understand himself and to overcome the guilt he felt for failing to live up to his father’s image. Susan was carefree, loud, open, friendly, never a good student, struggling to hold down her weight, more frustrating to her parents than to herself. She was disarmingly candid about her shortcomings and her difficult position as the daughter of the coach in a town where football was everything. I know the truth! she would declare forthrightly. I know they only like me because I’m Lombardi’s daughter. Yet she thirsted for affection and would take it any way she could get it. Her favorite place was not at home nor at school, but at the stables at Oneida Golf and Riding, where her horse, Captain Gladys, greeted her with unconditional love.

  Marie at times seemed harsh in dealing with Susan’s appearance. At social gatherings at Sunset Circle, Susan often served hors d’oeuvres to the guests. One evening, as she moved around the room with a tray, her mother blurted out, loud enough for all to hear, “God, I wish that girl could lose weight!” The grief Susan took from her father was louder but less personal. “What you saw on the field where he’d be yelling and screaming—he came home and did that. We never questioned it,” Susan remembered. “My father was a great one for screaming and yelling at you, then turning around and saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ ” When he yelled at Susan, it was usually over some trivial matter such as his socks. He maintained a precise order in his sock drawer—black, blue, brown, white—and took inventory every day or so, largely because he was color-blind and did not want to be embarrassed wearing an inappropriate color with his shoes and slacks. Susan often slipped into his room and filched a pair of white socks, but rarely got away with it. “He knew how many pairs he had. And he’d come out screaming and yelling until I coughed up the socks. It could be pretty explosive.”

  For the most part, though, Susan’s relationship with her father was less tense than Vincent’s. When Lombardi found time for her, he showed uncharacteristic patience. She long remembered the few times he brought her into the living room, where they sat together reverently listening to Madame Butterfly on a reel-to-reel tape, with her father narrating the story (“This is when she is going to try to kill herself”). Unlike his brother Harold, who was then working for an insurance company in San Francisco, Vince was unsophisticated in the arts, but he enjoyed opera, along with the popular music of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin and Bobby Darin. “He thought he could sing,” Susan later said of him, sarcastically. “He’d walk around the house trying to sing ‘Mack the Knife.’ ” He was also entranced by modern contraptions: once he had appeared at the front door of the Antils’ house holding a battery-operated, portable record player under his arm. “Listen to this,” he said, when Mary Jo Antil answered the door, and he pushed a button and beamed as though he were witnessing a miracle as the tinny sound of his favorite song crackled out: “… and when that shark bites, with his teeth, babe …”

  This autocrat of the football world found pleasure in unexpected diversions and habits. His favorite method of easing tension at home was cleaning closets. He also enjoyed reading mathematics books and was an ardent collector of cookbooks, accumulating scores of them, even though Marie preferred to eat out and his own culinary skills stopped at char-grilled steaks and wet scrambled eggs. It was an escape into fantasy for him; he would read a cookbook with the same narrative delight that he had long ago taken in the adventure tales of Richard Halliburton—not skipping around from the table of contents to favorite selections, but moving page by page, from front cover to back, engrossed in the plot line from tomatoes Provençal to Italian Parmesan and egg soup to braised rack of lamb to marzipan cake. “You know what, we really ought to make this,” he declared now and then, but they never would. Another of his fantasies was that he was a magician. He took childlike delight in magic tricks, and practiced a few of the simplest ones involving strings, balls and handkerchiefs over and over, though never nearing mastery. “Mr. Lombardi, you blew it!” a neighborhood boy screamed one day when Lombardi tried to perform a trick making a cigarette move on the table while rubbing the youngster’s head.

  Everyone in town seemed to know the coach, but Lombardi’s inner circle of Green Bay friends was relativ
ely small. It included Canadeo and Bourguignon from the Packers board of directors, and several cronies from the foursomes at Oneida Golf and Riding, among them Jack Koeppler, an insurance man who underwrote the Packers’ team policies; Ray Antil, Mary Antil’s husband, a salesman who specialized in a line of Packers memorabilia; Jake Stathas, the auto dealer who provided Lombardi with his choice of Pontiac Bonnevilles and Catalinas every six months from Brown County Motors; and Harry Masse, who owned a local printing company. Father Dennis Burke, president of St. Norbert, and various other priests and doctors also were allowed into his coveted inner circle, along with old friends and sportswriters visiting from the East. The Green Bay press was decidedly not part of the group, nor were his assistant coaches or other members of the Packers front office. He socialized only on weekends during the season and followed a familiar routine.

  Friday night began with cocktails at Dick and Lois Bourguignon’s. Then down to the strip on Washington Street in a caravan of cars and inside Wally Proski’s Food and Cocktail Lounge for the Green Bay Catholic ritual of Fish Fry Friday, the proprietor greeting Vince at the door, all smiles and pats on the back, the other regular patrons looking up, seeing the coach, murmuring, but allowing him his privacy, the party ushered into a back room, plates of fish and fries and slaw and pitchers of beer, then out into the dark northern night for the ride back to Allouez. Saturday found Vince relaxed, surprisingly at ease just at the time when most coaches would be unapproachable—which he seemed to be almost anytime except then. With preparations complete, the game plan set, for a few hours at least Mr. High-Low was demonstrably high, free and easy with his pals on the golf course in early autumn, playing gin in the clubhouse, treating himself and Marie to sixteen-ounce porterhouse steaks at the elegant Stratosphere Club out on County Trunk N.

  There was more socializing on Sunday after the game. Friends, priests, visiting journalists thawing out, chatting, drinking whiskey and Budweiser and Hamm’s in the wood-paneled basement rec room on Sunset Circle, smoke curling toward the low ceiling. Jake Stathas as bartender, pouring Lombardi’s liquor into glass tumblers, bourbon for himself, scotch for the coach. Father Burke of St. Norbert munching away on the chips and Marie’s hot crabmeat dip—cream cheese, crabmeat, mayo, mustard and a touch of wine, fresh from the oven. Lombardi leaning on the bar, sipping his drink, a Salem burning away in the groove of his big glass ashtray, taking calls and greeting guests. You could tell how the game went without going to City Stadium; if Lombardi was booming, laughing, illuminating the room with his teeth, the Pack had played well, no doubt. Then off to another restaurant, alternately the Zuider Zee or Manci’s Supper Club, Lombardi seated next to a priest, growing quieter by the minute, until finally Marie would look over and realize that he was gone, lost to the world, drained from the last game, anxious about the next one. This was his worst time, Sunday night around eight o’clock, when, as he once described it, “that deep, dull, indescribable weariness … began extracting the cork, or so it seemed, from my whole being.” The only way he could overtake the weariness was by thinking about the next game. Marie could see precisely what was happening and thought to herself, she said later, “Oh, boy, he’s coaching again. The curtain’s come down.” The change was so dramatic and predictable that she took to calling him Cinderella.

  Marie fell into a depression after her son left for college, a mood for which her drinking was alternately cause and effect. She seemed to disappear occasionally during parties at her home; only her family knew that she had passed out in bed. She had conflicted feelings about her situation in Green Bay. She told friends that she felt it was her role to control her husband’s pride and temper and to serve as a buffer between Vin and his players and the community. Yet the fact that he was becoming an esteemed public figure made her feel more worthy. Some in Green Bay saw this response as an expression of regal arrogance, and they found it offputting, particularly in combination with her sharp Jersey accent, her loud voice, direct manner, tailored clothes, and preference for long fur coats and jewelry. There were whispers around town about Marie’s aloofness, an easterner who could not fit in. She in turn expressed puzzlement at what she considered the too-cozy behavior of the locals. In Green Bay “they would say, ‘There’s a new painting at the museum,’ and collect forty people to go see it,” she once explained. “I’d rather go by myself.”

  But she was not a recluse. She formed close friendships with a few women, including Lois Bourguignon, and became a presence in Green Bay social circles, participating in the Christian Mothers Society, the Antiquarian Society and the Republican Club, making dazzling ornaments, beaded flowers and crocheted tablecloths for church bazaars, instructing the younger wives of Lombardi’s assistants in the ways of being a coach’s wife. That last was the mission she took most seriously, bringing to it more devotion than she demonstrated as a mother. She became expert in the art of explaining her husband—which days he would be distant and distracted, which days she could talk to him. She studied the players, assessing which ones had talent, quietly soothing the feelings of those who had encountered Lombardi’s wrath. Can you get him off my back? a player would ask her, to which she would reply, How would you like to live with him? The exchange was at once lighthearted and truthful. The players unavoidably caught a few uncomfortable glimpses of the tension within the Lombardi marriage. As much as Marie tried to adjust to her husband’s life, sometimes it was not enough. At the training table one evening, Marie had ordered a special ice cream dessert for herself when the team was being served pie, and when Vince noticed it he banged his fist on the table and shouted, “Goddamn it, Marie! When you’re with the team, you eat what the team eats!”

  Yet no one could better interpret Lombardi’s psyche than Marie. Many Packers came to accept his punishing style, or at least endure it, after Marie let them in on the secret she had learned after twenty years at his side: If Lombardi was on your case that meant he saw something in you. There was more reason to be concerned if he didn’t yell at you; that usually meant you were a goner.

  WILLIE WOOD seemed an exception to that rule. As a twenty-three-year-old rookie in 1960, he sprinted through training camp without encountering any disparaging words from the coach, or many words at all. After the first two weeks Lombardi walked past him on the way off the practice field and muttered, “Keep up the good work, Willie.” Later, before the exhibition game in Jersey City honoring the Seven Blocks, the coach warned Wood that he should play through the pain of a strained ankle. “If you want to make this team, you can’t make it being injured,” Lombardi said tersely in the locker room, walking away before his young player could respond. “Well, I better get well,” Wood thought to himself, according to his later account. “The first thing I can’t do with this man is complain about injuries.”

  That William Verneli Wood was challenging for a place on the Packers at all was a measure of his mental strength and perseverance. It also underscored the determination of Lombardi and his personnel man, Jack Vainisi, to ignore the prejudices then prevalent in most NFL front offices in their search for the most talented players. Not that Wood came out of nowhere. For most of his junior year and all of his senior year, he had been the starting quarterback at the University of Southern California, one of the nation’s leading programs, yet NFL scouts left him off their lists of prospects, partly on the advice of his college coaches, who claimed that he lacked the skills to make it at the next level. When the rookie draft was held before the 1960 season, 240 players were chosen, five from USC, but Wood was not among them. He was neglected, considered a man without a position, said to lack the arm of a quarterback or the speed of a running back. Left unstated, but influencing his situation as much as anything, was the fact that Wood was a black quarterback in an era when black athletes were seldom allowed the opportunity to play that position. Their numbers were slim in college and virtually nonexistent in the pros. (The Packers were among the few teams that had ever carried a black quarterback on their roster: Ch
arlie Brackins from Prarie View A&M had been drafted in the seventeenth round in 1955 and made the roster briefly; he suited up for seven games and played once, but completed no passes and then was cut.)

  Wood “looked raw failure in the face” and refused to accept it. After being shunned on draft day, he retreated to the cramped one-room studio apartment that he shared with his wife on the USC campus and typed a letter introducing himself, detailing his college record and stating that he could contribute to some team if only given the chance. Where should he send the letter? He had already made one painful but crucial decision, offering his services as a defensive back rather than quarterback. He studied the rosters of all thirteen NFL teams (the odd thirteenth club, added that year, was the Dallas Cowboys, originally named the Dallas Rangers), analyzing which ones might need a ballhawking safety. Wood had grown up in Washington, D.C., in the shadows of Union Station, and was a star athlete at Armstrong High near the corner of 1st and O Streets NW (from where a young USC assistant named Al Davis had recruited him to junior college and then to USC). But he never considered playing for the Washington Redskins, even though they were woefully in need of defensive talent. His hometown was still segregated, the most southern city in the league, and its owner, George Preston Marshall, was an unreconstructed racist who did not want black players on his team. Wood decided to send his letter to the Giants and 49ers, which had well-established traditions of hiring black players, and to the Packers. He “didn’t know Lombardi from Adam,” he said later, but he had heard that Green Bay had a new front office and surmised that they might be interested in him.