When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Lombardi was his salvation, a paisano who understood what he had been doing. They had known each other for years through mutual friends, and they shared the same passion for football and a desire to make the Packers a first-class organization. When the Packers began recruiting Lombardi, he bluntly informed the executive board that he would not have considered Green Bay if Vainisi had not been there. He did not tell them the full reason: that Vainisi was already on his side. It was Vainisi who had warned Lombardi that he had to demand full power as both coach and general manager or the board of directors would persist with petty interference in the football operation. “Jack was too much of a gentleman to ever say so, but he loathed most of the board members,” his wife said later. “They were small men.” Most of the board members were in Green Bay’s social elite, members of Oneida Golf and Riding, and despite their awe of Lombardi their attitudes tended to be condescending toward Italians. “There’s the Italian Mafia” was one of their common salutations when Lombardi and Vainisi were seen together. They smiled when they heard it, but considered the statement a slur, and after a time made a point of being seen together less often in social settings.

  Both men were in a hurry to win: Lombardi because he had waited so long to get his chance; Vainisi because he feared he would not have much longer. After every close game he would mutter only half jokingly that he did not know whether his heart could survive the tension. “I could go at any time,” he said one morning during the 1960 preseason to his pal Art Daley, the beat reporter for the Press-Gazette. The two men were taking a stroll around Bear Mountain near West Point, where Lombardi had brought the team for a week of practice. Vainisi was always a hulk, standing six foot one with immense shoulders and hands, but by then he had become seriously overweight, busting the bathroom scale at the maximum reading of 250 pounds. He smiled at Daley and patted his weak spot, his huge and fragile heart. “I’d like to see something good happen to the club. You know how it’s been for all these years.” Months later, after the Thanksgiving Day drubbing by the Lions, he appeared more troubled than usual. The Packers had lost twice in five days. There were only three games remaining: the season-closing swing on the West Coast, but before that the Bears, the team of his childhood, at Wrigley Field in Chicago. With the rest of the coaching staff, he was working eighteen-hour days. “This is it!” he said that Friday at his desk at the Packers office on Washington Street. “We gotta win now.”

  That Sunday morning he and Jackie had returned from nine o’clock mass and were preparing to visit her parents’ house in Green Bay for a late morning coffee. Jackie took their two girls upstairs to change clothes, and Jack went into the bathroom. He never came out. His heart stopped and he slumped to the tile, jamming the door with his massive body so Jackie could not get in. She went around the side of the house and looked through the small bathroom window to see her worst fear realized—her husband dead on the floor. She called the paramedics and her parents and then Lombardi, who came over with Marie. Word spread through the Packers team: Jack was dead. Vainisi was close to all of them. He was always doing something special for the players: finding circus tickets for Jim Taylor’s family, giving Bob Skoronski a $500 bonus to pay off his furniture bill at Sears, arranging travel plans for the wives, finding off-season jobs for guys who wanted to stay in Green Bay, letting them know if they were in danger of being cut. “We’re all deeply shocked,” Lombardi said to the press. “I have lost a close personal friend. I had known [Jack] several years before I came here. It will be hard to do without him.”

  On Monday it began to snow and the weather turned colder, and the Packers scrimmaged inside City Stadium instead of at their normal outdoor practice field on Oneida Street. Their sessions preparing for the crucial Bears game, as Art Daley described them, were “grim and quiet” and conducted with a “heavy heart” for their lost scout. Lombardi seemed more determined than ever, but kept his voice down, offering soft words of encouragement. On Wednesday morning they practiced at eight-thirty and were finished in time to attend Vainisi’s eleven o’clock funeral mass at the Church of the Annunciation. Players lined both sides of the entrance as the heavy casket was carried inside the church. The nuns at Annunciation’s grammar school next door let their students watch, eager little faces pressed against cold windows, as the team escorted the coffin out to the hearse and on to Allouez Cemetery. Paul Hornung approached Jackie Vainisi and asked if there was anything he could do. “Yes,” she said. “Become the kind of football player Jack knew you could be.” He had been Jack’s favorite, she said, the one who could make the Packers great.

  Later that week Hornung vowed that the Packers would beat the Bears in Jack’s honor. The year before in Chicago he had played his worst game as a pro, fumbling three times, but this time would be different, he promised. It certainly was. The Packers played their finest game under Lombardi that Sunday. It was the most lopsided Green Bay win to that point in their long history against the rival Bears—even more uneven than the 41 to 13 score. Willie Davis, the rangy defensive end, blocked a punt and pounced on the ball in the end zone for one score. Jimmy Taylor plowed for 140 yards. Bart Starr, back on target and feeling confident again, completed seventeen of twenty-three passes for 227 yards. And Hornung was incomparable, running for sixty-eight yards, catching three passes for thirty-two more, scoring two touchdowns on a ten-yard run and seventeen-yard pass, and kicking five extra points and two field goals for a total of twenty-three points, establishing a record season total of 152 points after only ten games. After his second touchdown Hornung casually tossed the ball into the stands, a gesture that infuriated Halas, a notorious penny-pincher and sore loser. Papa Bear threatened to seek a league fine against Hornung for the unusual gesture. “Don’t worry,” Lombardi said to Hornung. “If he tries to do something, I’ll pay for it.”

  Lombardi had walked off Wrigley Field with a ball of his own, the one that had been in play when the game ended. He wrote the date and score on it, passed it around the locker room and asked all the Packers to sign it, and when he arrived back in Green Bay he gave the game ball to the widow of his fallen friend, Jack Vainisi.

  THE COLTS lost again that Sunday, and suddenly Green Bay was in a three-way tie for first place with San Francisco and Baltimore, all with 6 and 4 records. The Western Conference title was within reach for Lombardi if his team could sweep the final two games on the West Coast. With the college regular season over and the pro schedule featuring the Packers and 49ers in a lone Saturday matchup on December 10, the game drew the attention of the national sportswriting corps, which would jump at any excuse to be in San Francisco. Football tends to be most exciting and poetic on either a crisp and radiant autumn afternoon or its opposite, a monsoon or snowstorm. San Francisco on that Saturday offered lousy conditions in full glory. A chill rain turned old Kezar Stadium into a muddy slop pile, the turf soft and slippery. Tex Maule was there for Sports Illustrated, and had brought along a New York illustrator and photographer named Robert Riger, who had been shooting pictures for a book with Maule titled The Pros: A Documentary of Professional Football in America.

  The images Riger came away with that day were taken too late to appear in the book, but were among the most evocative he ever made. They had a mythic, ennobling quality to them, their character enhanced by the brutal conditions, each picture revealing another element of what it meant to be a pro, as the Packers under Lombardi were coming to define the term.

  CLICK: Here comes “the Horn,” Paul Hornung, “with the square toe of his kicking shoe flashing,” looking for a hole behind the blocking of Jim Taylor and Fuzzy Thurston on a sweep.

  CLICK: There stands quarterback Bart Starr “coldly watching” after making the handoff as Jim Taylor cuts back “and mighty Jerry Kramer crumples one man and looks downfield for more.”

  CLICK: Here looms Forrest Gregg, the square-jawed offensive tackle, his face and helmet smeared in mud, shouting from the bench as a Packer defender intercepts a pass. This photograph,
entitled simply “Mud,” became a classic on its own, winning the grand prize in Look magazine’s sports photo contest.

  CLICK: There paces Lombardi in his lucky camel’s hair coat and brown fedora, as Riger describes him, “our friend the coach, the universal symbol stalking the sidelines—smoking his cigarette—his mind fixed on one idea alone—the next play.”

  Considering the field conditions, the Packers played their second near-perfect game in six days. With its high-flying passing game, San Francisco was stuck in the mud and never scored. Lombardi had Starr handing off the ball most of the day and throwing only one pass in the second half. Taylor bulled past the thousand-yard mark for the season with 161 yards on twenty-five carries (“You’re as tough as a rat!” linebacker Ray Nitschke snarled at him after the game), and Hornung ran nineteen times for eighty-six more yards, including a classic sweep around the left end for a twenty-eight-yard touchdown in which his timing behind the blocks of his guardian angels, Thurston and Kramer, was so perfect that the 49ers never touched him. He scored all of Green Bay’s points in the 13 to 0 win. On the bus after the game, Riger took a seat next to the coach and found him in an unusually chatty mood.

  Lombardi talked with the photographer for nearly forty minutes, diagramming plays on the back of Riger’s airline ticket, and praising his tandem of Thunder and Lightning. “Taylor has great balance and he can cut quickly, and our best play is a simple fullback slant,” Lombardi said. “He can run it over tackle and if that hole closes he can come back over the center or he can swing wide outside. Three plays right there off one because Taylor makes them work.” When it was noted that Hornung now had stretched his single-season scoring record to 165 points, Lombardi raved: “That Hornung is some ballplayer. That’s an awful lot of points for one man to score in one season. I don’t see how anyone will score more. It was just a simple sweep for the touchdown—the two guards pulled and gave him an alley, but the key was the flanker’s [Dowler’s] block on the safety. When he got that, he was in.” When he was asked about the defense, Lombardi praised the play-calling of his old safety, Emlen Tunnell. He “roared that rough Lombardi laugh” and added: “Their shotgun offense backfired!” Then, as Riger later recounted it, the coach perfectly distilled his football philosophy into one statement: “You know I think that spread formation is a lot of junk. You play this game with your power. You do what you do best—and you do it again and again.”

  While Taylor and Hornung were running toward records at season’s end, Lombardi realized that his Packers would rise only as high as their quarterback could take them. He would often tell his cronies at dinner that football was the perfect team game except for one glaring imbalance—the quarterback was too important. A pitcher might be more dominant in baseball, but a baseball team had a staff of pitchers; there was only one quarterback. A goalie was pivotal in hockey, but a goalie did not have to call plays or worry about much beyond his own performance. To win in the pros, Lombardi said, you needed a quarterback who could be a coach on the field, someone who was intelligent, rational, unflappable and occasionally daring, as well as a gifted passer.

  Did Bart Starr have those characteristics? Lombardi had vacillated on that question for nearly two years. His first impression of Starr, he once acknowledged, was that “he was probably just a little too polite and maybe just a little too self-effacing to be the real bold tough quarterback that a quarterback must be in the National Football League.” Starr felt otherwise, and was determined to prove himself to Lombardi no matter how long it took. “I could see in my own mind, day by day, week by week, that this was going to be a lengthy process because trust and respect should never just be handed out to somebody,” Starr said later. “You have to earn it.” If he lacked the raw talent of many other quarterbacks, he thought that he could compensate by working harder and overachieving. The more Starr studied Lombardi’s system, the more convinced he became that he could flourish in it. Other players barely tolerated the classroom aspects of practice, endless hours of studying film and analyzing plays. Starr could not get enough of it: “I loved it. I loved the meetings. I never, ever was bored or tired at any meeting we were in with Lombardi. I appreciated what he was trying to teach. He was always raising the bar.”

  If anyone could have been prepared for Lombardi’s methods, it was Bart Starr. After what Starr had endured at home with his father in Alabama, Lombardi’s treatment of him seemed benign. Ben Starr was a stern military man who had drilled his sons, Bryan Bartlett “Bart” and Hilton “Bubba,” in the practice of obedience and respect for elders. No differing points of view were allowed in the Starr household; everyone was expected to do and say exactly what the family “master sergeant” demanded. Bart, the oldest son, worried that he could never do quite enough. No matter how hard he tried, he felt that he could not win his father’s love or respect. It was not Bart but his younger brother, Bubba, who was considered the vessel of his father’s ambitions. Bubba was more athletic, stronger, decisive and fearless; Bart seemed too mediocre for Ben Starr. But Bubba died at age thirteen, before he could show the world much. The death of a child is devastating to any family; Bubba’s death was particularly traumatic for the Starrs. He had been playing barefoot in a vacant field and was cut on the heel by an old dog bone and died of tetanus three days later. Bubba’s mother had been reluctant to bring him in for the shot that would have saved his life, and she was plagued by guilt thereafter. And his father, believing that his dreams were lost with Bubba’s death, did not turn to Bart as his new hope, but rather shunned or belittled him even more.

  Ben Starr was not the only one who doubted Bart’s talents; he always seemed to be struggling to prove himself to older men. During his high school years he had to grind his way past several more talented boys who were favored by the coaches to play quarterback. At the University of Alabama, he was sidelined by an injury during his junior year, just when he was starting to perform well, then had the misfortune of playing under a new coach who benched him for his senior season even as the team lost ten straight, the worst record in Crimson Tide history. As a local boy, he was put on the Gray roster for the Blue-Gray All-Star Game in Montgomery, but barely got in and cried in frustration afterwards. Somehow, Jack Vainisi had heard enough about Starr to recommend him to the Packers, who made him the 199th college player selected in the pro draft. He floundered in Green Bay under Coaches Liz Blackbourn and Scooter McLean until Lombardi arrived and detected the same glimmer of promise that Vainisi had seen.

  Starr had flashes of brilliance when given an opportunity to play quarterback late in Lombardi’s first year, but then seemed to regress and was benched again after the 1960 season-opening loss to the Bears. “That was a real wake-up call for me. A real punch in the side,” Starr said of his benching. “I had let him down! Here’s the man who had brought me along and given me the opportunity and I failed when I got the chance. So I was even more determined to get it back.” Much as he had the first year, he used his time on the bench productively, studying the defenses and the best ways to respond to them. When his time came again, as the Packers began their drive for the conference crown, he was ready mentally and physically; ready even to stand up to his coach and prove that he had the toughness needed for the job. The change in their relationship came in practice one day when Starr threw an interception—one too many, as far as Lombardi was concerned. The coach exploded at Starr in front of his teammates. When practice was over Starr approached Lombardi in his office and asserted himself in a way that he had never done before.

  The intercepted ball was tipped, he pointed out; it was not his fault. Furthermore, Starr said, the coach should change his habit of yelling at players in public and then, if necessary, making up with them in private. “You’re asking me to be the leader of this team, and I’m challenged by that and I want to be the best leader I can be. But I can’t be if you’re chewing my butt out in front of the team you want me to lead,” Starr explained to the coach. “You’ll see later”—when the c
oaches watched film of the practice—“that the error was yours: the ball was tipped [by a defender] and intercepted. I can take any ass-chewing you want to deliver. And if you feel I have it coming, have at it. But please do it in the privacy of your office here where you make your apologies to me. I will be an even better leader for you if you do that.” Lombardi listened quietly. “I hear you,” he said contritely when his quarterback had finished his complaint. The challenge had worked. Lombardi never criticized him in front of the team again, Starr said later: “From then on we had a relationship that was just unbelievable. I don’t think it had been that bad before, but now it just took off and went to another plane.”

  Starr and Lombardi were an odd pair—Deep South and New York City; they looked and talked like the geographic and cultural opposites that they were—but each in his own way was shaped by his experience with military discipline, and each understood how much he needed the other. Starr hungered for Lombardi’s sense of order and keen football knowledge, and realized that it could make him excel. The full measure of respect that he had not yet won from his father came now instead from his coach. The good son found a father in the coach, and the coach found another son in the quarterback. Lombardi knew that if he told Starr to do something, it would get done. He did not have to worry about where Starr was at any time; he was always literally and figuratively within safe reach, which is not something that could be said about some other key players. If Lombardi fretted that the quarterback position was too important in football, at least he now had a quarterback who was loyal in every way, who would carry out his game plans flawlessly, who opened up his brain and let Lombardi pour his knowledge in. Murray Warmath, who had worked with Lombardi on Red Blaik’s staff at West Point, came down from the University of Minnesota to watch the Packers and concluded that Starr was the perfect athlete to run Lombardi’s huddle. “He and Vince,” Warmath reflected decades later, “were hand and glove.”