When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  These are his people, yes, and he is their favorite son, former altar boy at St. Mark’s, grandson of Tony the Barber. His homecoming harks back to a Sheepshead Bay that is fading from view, like Brooklyn, stores closing, families moving out to Jersey and Staten Island, Dodgers gone to the California sun. Like any aging small town now, a departure place, not a destination. As the program for the evening states: “Since we cannot root for a home team, we root for home talent. We are grateful, Vince, your deeds have done us proud.” But if there is, unavoidably, a touch of sentimentalism to the occasion, there is more to Lombardi as he strides through the room. Square and awkward he might be, yet he overpowers people with his will as he walks by. Character is the will in action, his Fordham tutors used to say, and here it is, embodied, magnetism of the will, asserting that life is not merely fleeting luck or chance, that discipline and persistence can prevail, even if it takes twenty years, and as he presses forward the crowd seems certain that he knows the way, the right way, that even if he has not won everything, he will, that he is beyond Sheepshead Bay and Green Bay, and the applause wells up in the hall, deafening now, and it lifts them out of their seats as he goes by and they want to follow him.

  IT WAS A SNAP to draw the organizational chart of the Green Bay Packers then: Vince Lombardi in a box at the top, alone, everyone else below him at about the same level. If he was the Pope, there was no College of Cardinals. Assistant coaches, ticket office clerks, players, members of the executive committee—they were all equally afraid of him. As one assistant later explained, “It became a reciprocal thing: Don’t tell on me and I won’t tell on you. Sooner or later you knew you were going to screw up in a way he wouldn’t like if he found out. That bonded everyone together.” When Dominic Olejniczak confided that he would rather have his legs amputated than lose Lombardi, the sentiment was one-sided. “No other club had given a coach as much authority as we gave Vince,” the Packers president said. Lombardi seized the opportunity and wanted as little to do with the executive committee as possible. “He’d let a few on the plane with us, but they were more like the players,” according to Bob Skoronski. “If we lost they wanted to sit in the back with us.”

  During the off-season, grateful that Lombardi had not fled to New York, Ole and his executive committee rewarded him with a new five-year contract, tearing up his original pact, which still had three years to run. His salary was not revealed at the time, but records indicate the raise pushed it above $50,000. The new contract only strengthened his iron rule. Even his closest pals on the committee, Tony “the Gray Ghost” Canadeo and Dick Bourguignon, understood the imbalance in the relationship. “If you don’t agree with me, I’ll take away your vote,” Lombardi once said to them. It was a joke, but he meant it; he expected a rubber stamp from the board of directors. At league meetings he and attorney Fred Trowbridge did most of the talking for the club, with one notable exception; at sessions limited to owners, Olejniczak stayed in the room and Vince was asked to leave. It always “bothered the hell out of him” to face this reminder that he was not complete master of his universe.

  Lombardi was not the sort of boss who slipped into the office unnoticed. People sensed him coming before he arrived, like a meteorological phenomenon, a weather front rolling into Green Bay from Saskatchewan. His mood, high pressure or low, was going to define their day. If he smiled as he hung his camel’s hair coat on the rack near the Crooks Street entrance, and began with a pleasant “Good morning, Ruth,” to Ruth McKloskey, the staff responded in kind, with great relief. If he tramped in with a scowl, they tried to steer clear of him until the storm passed. The storm in most cases featured a sudden tirade, often directed at Tom Miller, the mild-mannered publicist. If Lombardi strolled over to the duplicating machine and told one of his corny jokes and laughed loudly, they all laughed with him. Although he seemed to have a one-track mind, the track was long and wide—anything to do with his football operation. Lorraine Keck had been working at H. C. Prange’s that year when she was told that “the Packers needed a girl” to help with secretarial duties. She walked over to the team’s downtown office—and there was Lombardi, waiting to ask her how fast she typed and whether she could take shorthand.

  Keck quickly learned Lombardi’s philosophy of perfecting the little things, a trait that he had acquired from Colonel Blaik at West Point. When he spoke into the dictaphone, he meticulously included all punctuation. After letters were typed they went back to him so that he could double-check the spelling. He demanded precision—letters answered quickly, documents neatly filed, no unfinished tasks lingering at the end of the day. The office hours were nine to five, but anyone arriving at nine was considered fifteen minutes late—the same Lombardi Standard Time that his players had encountered. One morning, before leaving for an off-season vacation with Marie, he called the staff into his office. “While I’m gone, I don’t want any slovenly work around here. Do what you’re supposed to do!” he said. A few days later he called from the Caribbean to check on them.

  One young receptionist was “scared to death” of Lombardi. Whenever she got near him, her hands shook uncontrollably. She could not speak when she saw him coming. At night she dreamed about him, all nightmares. Finally, after a few weeks of torment, she went to Ruth McKloskey and said she had to quit. For the most part, though, Lombardi knew when to pull back. After lecturing McKloskey one morning on the proper way to list assets and liabilities—a subject she knew more about than he did—he approached her at the mail counter later and poked her on the arm. “Still mad at me?” he asked, breaking into a grin. She laughed and said no. There were other saving graces that counterbalanced his autocratic bearing. He was a “softie at heart,” according to Keck, and would not hesitate to send people home to attend to sick relatives. Though it was impossible not to hear him swearing in the film room, he was courteous around the women. McKloskey approached his desk once when he was screaming into his phone at a league official—“What the hell is going on, goddamn it!”—until he saw his secretary, covered the receiver, turned to her and said, “Excuse me, Ruth.” Keck discovered that the more outspoken she was around Lombardi, the more he seemed to enjoy it, as long as she did her work. “I was dumb enough and green enough that if I thought something was not right, I would tell him. He got so little of that pushing back. Everyone was ‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir.’ He liked a little ‘No, sir.’ ”

  That was true only when it served his purposes. Lombardi was decidedly less open to argument when it came time to negotiate new contracts with his players, and he would thwart their efforts by any means necessary. The players union was not yet a bargaining force, there were no agents to haggle with and players had little freedom or security. Along with these advantages, Lombardi brought to the negotiations the skills of a psychologist. He knew just when to stroke and when to intimidate. When Bob Skoronski began making a case for a raise, Lombardi pulled a piece of paper from his drawer and said, “You had a pretty good year, but, heh, heh, against the Rams we had a third and one and we ran a 36 and you didn’t get the job done, did you, Bob?” As Skoronski tried to counter by citing a crucial block he had made against San Francisco, Lombardi rose from his chair, walked around the desk and affectionately rubbed his tackle’s crew-cut scalp. The tactic silenced Skoronski and settled the debate—a preemptive strike that compelled Skoronski the following year to open by saying, “Coach, I want you to sit in that chair and not come over and touch me during these negotiations.”

  Gary Knafelc was so certain that he would be tongue-tied that he came in with a typed sheet of accomplishments. As Knafelc later recounted: “I walked in and he acted like he was on the phone and left me just standing there. I was just perspiring. He looked at me and said, ‘Sit down!’ I sat down. I said, ‘Coach, I have this … ’ He stopped me and said, ‘Just a minute.’ He had to make another call. I knew I was dead already. He hung up and said, ‘Yes?’ And I said, ‘Please read this.’ It listed my passes caught to passes thrown, blocking awards, grasping
anything I could. He didn’t look at it a second and a half and then threw it back to me and with that big finger he had he pointed clear across the table at me and said, ‘Gary, all you played was offense. You were not on the kickoff team. You were not on the punt return team. All you played was offense!’ He said he would give me two thousand instead of four. And I got up and left the room. I was so happy just to be invited back to training camp. But that’s the kind of guy he was. He would build you up, but never to the point too high where you thought you could tell him what to do. He was still the master and you were the slaves.”

  “I’M SCARED,” Lombardi said on the first day of training camp in July 1961. Coaches are notorious worrywarts, constantly underrating their squad and inflating the opposition, but in this case his apprehension was more informed. During his first two seasons in Green Bay, Lombardi had been concerned about the team’s talent and whether it knew how to win. Now his fear was different—a fear not to lose. The will to win became not just a positive goal but a neurosis, an obsessive hatred of losing. The Packers had not won it all, they had not established the winning tradition of the New York Yankees, his sporting model, yet they were being portrayed as sure winners. On the schedule of every other team in the league, he said, there would be a circle around the date of their game against Green Bay.

  Lombardi carried this dread with him to St. Norbert that summer. In an effort to overcome it, he took nothing for granted. He began a tradition of starting from scratch, assuming that the players were blank slates who carried over no knowledge from the year before. He reviewed the fundamentals of blocking and tackling, the basic plays, how to study the playbook. He began with the most elemental statement of all. “Gentlemen,” he said, holding a pigskin in his right hand, “this is a football.”

  To which Max McGee, from the rear of the squad, delivered the immortal retort, “Uh, Coach, could you slow down a little. You’re going too fast for us.” McGee’s line had even Lombardi chuckling, but not for long. He seemed more intense than ever at the daily workouts. “This guy was full of piss and vinegar from the first day of camp,” remembered Willie Wood. “I mean he was hot! You had to work your tail off. He took no nonsense from anybody. He knew that he had a big challenge and he was determined not to lose again.” Lombardi was right, of course. The other teams were gunning for the Packers, making winning more difficult than before. The coach who never wanted to lose drove his team through an undefeated preseason, then lost the season opener to the Lions in Milwaukee.

  There were two major changes in the starting lineup. Ron Kramer took over for the veteran Gary Knafelc at tight end. It was not that Knafelc played only offense, as Lombardi had complained during negotiations, but that Kramer was bigger and a ferocious blocker who could add another dimension to the offense. And Willie Wood replaced Em Tunnell at free safety. In his final year, Tunnell had taught Wood the lessons learned during a long career. “I used to sit around and quiz Em all the time. What do you do in this situation? How do you know when your man’s coming inside? He taught me how to anticipate what would happen,” Wood said later. “Em was a very bright guy who helped me tremendously. He had been around so long, one of the first black stars in the league, and for me just to have the opportunity to hang around him, I was awed by that. Em was so cool.”

  Wood looked rather cool himself back at free safety, though he was anything but relaxed in the locker room beforehand. His pregame routine was to sit alone at his cubicle, chewing worriedly on a fresh white towel, then another one, before he traipsed over to the bathroom and threw up. But once he took the field, he was all intuition and grace: No. 24 in green and gold, closing ground in a sudden burst to knock away a pass or upend a runner with his unorthodox tackle, flinging his body at the ballcarrier’s ankles, cutting the feet out from under him so that he flipped wildly into the air, cleats over helmet. It looked effortless, but no one could tackle low like Willie Wood. He and Herb Adderley, a fleet rookie from Michigan State, brought another weapon to the Packers that year, the threat of returning any punt or kickoff for a touchdown. In the first game after the disquieting loss to the Lions, it was Wood’s score on a punt runback that led the Packers to a 30 to 10 win over the 49ers, restoring the hint of a smile to Lombardi’s face.

  THE MYTHMAKERS were finding their way to Green Bay, and none of the coach’s fears about losing could stop them. The first to arrive that autumn was Tim Cohane. Ever since his days as Fordham’s publicity man, Cohane had been Lombardi’s Great Mentioner, praising his talent in almost any discussion of football coaches. Lombardi’s success could be traced back to his old college promoter, in a sense. It was Cohane who had persuaded Colonel Blaik to hire Lombardi as an assistant at West Point, and it was Blaik who then shaped Lombardi’s coaching persona. As sports editor of Look, Cohane decided that now was the time to write a piece about Lombardi and the rise of professional football. He reached Green Bay during the week of practice for the third game of the season, against the Bears, and settled into the guest bedroom at Sunset Circle, bringing with him a passel of books and opinions, which he shared freely in his booming voice, lighting up the house.

  In their discussions, Lombardi presented a case as to “why the pros play better football” to Cohane, who dutifully recorded it. There was no nostalgia in the coach’s perspective. He said that football had improved so much since his days at Fordham that “today, I couldn’t even make the team.” The pro game, he said, had improved most of all. Once he had experienced it, he was hooked on its sophistication, two platoons of specialists, the swiftest and biggest athletes in the country, every team with a first-rate quarterback and receiving corps. He came to appreciate that “full-time concentration, and the opportunity to play for several more years, make a better player.” His ambition once had been to lead a revived Fordham team, but now he doubted that he could ever be satisfied in college. “In fact, I think I’d be unhappy if I didn’t have the added duties of Green Bay’s general manager. Tickets, salaries, TV and radio contracts all pose headaches beyond the migraine of trying to win games, but I thrive on work. I’m restless, demanding, sometimes impatient and hot-tempered. For these characteristics, a full schedule is the best antidote.”

  That Sunday morning, as Cohane and Marie were driving to City Stadium for the Bears game, the sportswriter could see that Lombardi’s wife also had a deep understanding of Vince’s needs and motivations. Her observations were offered with detachment and objectivity. “That beating by the Lions two weeks ago was a good thing. Lombardi needed to be taken down a few pegs. Did he ever!” she told Cohane. “But you’re going to see quite a football team today.” She could tell by the way Vince had moved spiritedly around the house that week. She anticipated that both he and his players had tasted just enough defeat to drive them through the season.

  Pro or college, the spirit was there, and from his vantage point in the press box before the game Cohane had a moment of sweet serendipity that left him “deeply stirred.” He looked down on the field and saw Lombardi in his camel’s hair coat and fedora stepping gingerly around the field, testing the wet turf, and just then the loudspeaker began playing a familiar tune—the old Fordham Ram fight song. “The impact was weird,” Cohane said later. “Almost as if a faded dream—that Fordham would restore itself to football power under Vince Lombardi—had come true vicariously there in Green Bay, far from Rose Hill in the Bronx.” And what a power it was. The Packers, as Marie had predicted, were quite a football team that day. Bart Starr threw two touchdown passes in the 24 to 0 win, one to his favorite new target, the big bull at tight end, Ron Kramer. The defense shut out the Bears for the first time since 1935. In the first series of the game, the Bears had the ball on the Packers one but could not score, and the thunderous roar in the stands after the fourth-down stop transported Cohane back through the years—back to the tumult in the Polo Grounds on that afternoon in 1936 when the Seven Blocks, with Butch Lombardi at right guard, stopped the Pitt Panthers at the two and secured a sco
reless tie.

  That evening at Manci’s Supper Club, past and present merged again as the two old Fordham Rams, in boisterous and throaty voice, with Cohane doing harmony, belted out the fight song for Ole, the Gray Ghost, Father Burke and the other dinner companions: “Once more the old Maroon, wave on high; We’ll sing our battle song: WE DO, OR DIE!”

  After his return to New York, Cohane began spinning the new Lombardi myth. The headline for his photo essay tied past and present again, evoking Colonel Blaik’s favorite phrase. It read:

  Vince Lombardi …

  Under this Green Bay Gridiron Genius,

  the Packers Pay the Price

  The praise continued with a caption under a photograph of Lombardi on the sidelines, pondering the action: “Profound as an ocean depth, yet voluble as a summer cloudburst, Lombardi had to learn to modify his explosive temper.” And a closing sentence in the story’s lead paragraph lifted Lombardi above the coaching crowd: “Brilliant and tough-minded, a driving perfectionist, natural leader and born teacher, Vince Lombardi seems certain to become one of the greatest coaches of all time, if, indeed, he is not that already.”

  The following week Lombardi’s men played as though no praise could be too purple. Johnny Unitas and his Colts came to Green Bay and left in disarray after a 45 to 7 loss. Willie Wood returned a punt seventy-two yards for a touchdown, and the rest was left to the one-man scoring gang, Paul Hornung. He ran for three touchdowns, took in an eight-yard pass for another, and kicked a thirty-eight-yard field goal and six extra points—scoring thirty-three points by himself. And it could have been more; on the option play, he threw a forty-yard touchdown pass that was nullified by a penalty. Tony Canadeo, the color man in the television booth next to Ray Scott, and himself the leading ground gainer in Packers history, watched Hornung’s performance with his jaw agape. The majesty of No. 5, the way he glanced inside, saw a Colts linebacker plugging the hole, so cut outside to daylight and glided down the left sideline fifty-four yards for a score; then, later, how he plowed through three Colts, carrying them with him into the end zone on a ten-yard sweep. It was, in the estimation of the Gray Ghost, “the greatest day ever by a backfield man.”