“But there’s gonna be trouble with that Lombardi book,” Heinz added. “You remember it, Red. Up there at St. Michael’s. The Five O’Clock Club.” He was referring to the New York Giants training camp in Vermont, which Heinz and Smith and Frank Graham, now working for the Journal American, had visited every summer during the mid-1950s when Lombardi was a Giants assistant coach. At the daily Five O’Clock Club, the Maras, the coaching staff and visiting sportswriters would gather late in the afternoon to drink and tell off-the-record stories, usually in Doc Sweeney’s dormitory room. “Here’s the problem,” Heinz continued. “Did you ever hear Lombardi tell a story up there?”
“No, now that you mention it. I never did,” Smith acknowledged.
“He’s got a great laugh,” Heinz said. “But he doesn’t contribute. That’s gonna be a problem.”
Heinz agreed to take the work nonetheless, signing up for a $7,500 advance. A few weeks later, in the middle of January 1962, he and Smith drove down from Connecticut to Manhattan to meet Lombardi, Riger and George Flynn, the Prentice-Hall editor overseeing the project, at the Penthouse Club, a top-story restaurant and bar overlooking the south end of Central Park. In keeping with Lombardi Standard Time, the coach was the first one there, a half hour early, and sat at the bar nursing a scotch (flouting his own Packer prohibition against bar-sitting) as he waited for the others to arrive. The five men talked for several hours that night, and Lombardi was amiable throughout. These were his writers, New York guys, and Heinz could tell that Lombardi “respected Red tremendously” and that the feelings were mutual. At ten that night, as Smith and Heinz rode north along the West Side Highway on the way back to Stamford, Smith expressed delight with the way things went. “Gee, that was a good meeting,” he said. Heinz was less fervid. “You know what this sounds like to me, Red,” he said. “It sounds like Bill Heinz punchin’ that same ole Remington typewriter again as he has since he was seventeen. The whole load gets dumped on me.”
Wilfred Charles Heinz was then a lean and crisp man of forty-six who saw the world with uncommon clarity through his black-rimmed glasses. He was a perfectionist with a clean and unencumbered style, always seeking the precise word, phrase, metaphor, that would convey his meaning perfectly. He had covered sports most of his writing career, though at the start of World War II he served as a war correspondent with distinction for theNew York Sun. After that, he wrote a sports column, then turned to books and freelance magazine articles when the Sun folded. He was a favorite of Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon, and a close friend of Red Smith, who was ten years his senior. His writing models were Ernest Hemingway for novels and Frank Graham for newspapers. Graham, he thought, was a “classical stylist with prose so pure that you could always learn from it.” He also thoroughly enjoyed Smith’s writing, but considered him “more of a dancer and mover, with a style that you couldn’t imitate.” At the horse tracks during racing season, Graham and Smith were so inseparable that they became known as an entry, “1 and 1a.” While Smith was more celebrated outside the profession, within the sportswriting tribe it was clear that Graham was 1 and Smith 1a.
Graham not only taught Heinz the purest way to construct an English sentence, but also deepened his reportorial skills. He had a way of being unobtrusive, the proverbial fly on the wall, to catch athletes and coaches at their most authentic moments and then use their dialogue verbatim to re-create a scene. And he did it without a tape recorder—without even pulling out a notebook. “Frank never took notes, so Red and I learned how to do that too, how to look and listen,” Heinz recalled later. “The first time I tried it, Frank and I were both interviewing Rocky Graziano at Stillman’s gym. He wasn’t taking notes, so I didn’t either. When we came out I said, ‘You jerk! I don’t think I’ll remember.’ He said, ‘You will. When you get home tonight and Betty asks you where you were and what you did, you’ll tell her who said what and where you were and what you did.’ ” Graham was right, and the powers of memory that Heinz developed then stayed with him thereafter, so four decades later he could remember the smell in the air and the color of a tie. Still, as a backup, he continued to take copious notes in unhurried and, for a journalist, remarkably legible handwriting.
ON THE THIRTIETH of June, with The Surgeon completed, Heinz began his new life as Lombardi’s Boswell. He traveled the usual route west through Chicago and up to Green Bay on the flight of the Blue Goose, arriving at Austin Straubel Airport shortly before six that summer evening. He brought with him $130 for travel expenses, his old portable Remington and a briefcase holding the deceptively simple tools of his trade: a mechanical pencil and a supply of pocket-size Penrite memo books, sturdy and wirebound from the top for easy notetaking, each costing ten cents. As he strolled across the tarmac in the warm and gentle Wisconsin air, he was struck first by an aroma: heavy acid smells wafting over from the paper mills along the Fox River. And there stood Lombardi, neatly dressed in black slacks, white short-sleeved shirt and striped tie, waving at him from behind the Page outdoor fence. The coach seemed cheerful and eager, even offering to assist the visiting writer with his bags as they walked out to the Pontiac. Marie was waiting in the front passenger seat. Heinz slid in back, and Lombardi drove them to a restaurant in an old Victorian house that reminded the writer of an 1890s funeral parlor.
“So,” said Marie, as they relaxed with a drink in the bar before dinner, “what kind of book is this going to be?”
“I don’t know,” said Heinz.
“Don’t look at me,” said Lombardi.
“Well,” Marie concluded sarcastically, “it’s going to be some great book!”
After dinner they drove Heinz to his new living quarters, not a downtown hotel but the spare bedroom near the TV room at the Lombardi house on Sunset Circle. The Lombardis enjoyed housing guests, even writers, anything to change the often tense atmosphere. Heinz was keen for the idea, too. It gave him more time with his subject, more chance to penetrate Lombardi’s public persona and find the real man. Furthermore, he intended to stay in Green Bay for several weeks, and a room at the Northland or Downtowner would have used up most of the advance. Both children were there—Susan was entering high school and Vincent was preparing for his junior year at the College of St. Thomas—but they were rarely home and the house did not seem overcrowded. Heinz and Lombardi agreed on a work schedule: for the two weeks between then and the opening of training camp, they would meet every morning at nine o’clock, after Vince had returned from mass at St. Willebrord’s, and go at it, Heinz asking questions, Lombardi answering, until they grew tired.
The interviews began the next morning in the basement rec room. Lombardi sat on the couch, Heinz at a chair on the side of the coffee table. He pulled out one of his Penrite memo books, wrote the numeral I on the front and launched the first question. It was not his favorite approach, too open-ended, suggesting to him “the start of a long, arduous journey,” but he felt compelled to begin this way. “So,” he said, “give me the date of your birth.”
“June 11, 1913,” Lombardi answered.
Nothing came so easily after that. Heinz was a veteran interviewer, but Lombardi was a problematic subject, just as he had feared. No matter how shapely the question, the answer came back flat. The Day One session went on with all the depth of a hospital clerk taking information for an insurance form.
Page 1 of Notebook 1:
6-ll-13
2 brothers & 2 sisters
wholesale beef—father came
few months old, mother born
here—
Resort area—charter boat
fishing—flounder, snappers
Sunny Jim took me to Saratoga
each August—8th grade
No wants
Father stern
Came in 2 a.m.—took shoes off
at top stairs—got whacked—
mother—she went to bed & I
did too
Both parents perfectionist
2 story wooden frame
house—gray
Cathedral Prep—complete 4 yrs.
Atlantic Ave—Brooklyn
Heinz was not the sort to miss evocative details. They just were not there. On the second morning, Lombardi seemed anxious. He had things to do: players to sign, rounds of golf to play at Oneida before training camp. This sitting around talking was frustrating him. “How we doing?” he asked Heinz.
“All right,” Heinz answered halfheartedly.
“What do you mean, ‘all right’?” Lombardi asked.
“Well,” Heinz said, “you don’t have any audiovisual recall.”
“What the hell is that?” Lombardi asked.
“Well, I just made it up,” Heinz responded. “But you don’t remember what anybody said or what they sounded like. You don’t remember what anything looked like.”
“Whadaya mean?”
“Well, you told me that you decided that football was what you wanted to do in your life when you had a great game at St. Francis Prep.”
“You already got that!” said Lombardi proudly.
“I know I have it, Coach,” Heinz said patiently. “Now, as you pulled your jersey over your head … I asked you what color the jersey was and you said you didn’t know.”
“That’s right. I didn’t know.”
“That’s what I mean!” said Heinz.
Lombardi even forgot to offer a revealing explanation for why he could not recall the jersey color. He was color-blind. On the third day, Heinz could tell that “the romance of being an author” had clearly worn off on his collaborator. The interview was cut short when Lombardi said he had to leave to play golf with Don Hutson, the former star Packers receiver. Heinz was left alone in the house with Marie, who promised to be a far better source of information. She was not only able to remember details from her husband’s life, but also, as Heinz discovered, “was extremely sensitive to the ballplayers and their families,” and understood Lombardi’s football psychology, how he assessed and related to each of his players. Heinz realized that the book would be nearly impossible without Marie, but even with her he was uncertain about its potential. On the night after his fourth halting interview session with Lombardi, he retired to the guest bedroom and struggled through a long bout of sleeplessness brought on by anxieties over the project. I’m getting out of this! he said to himself that night. This is impossible. But how in the hell do I get out of it? These are nice people. I like them. How am I going to tell them, You don’t shape up, in my estimation?
Finally, late that night, a solution came to him. There’s one way to do it, he said to himself. And that’s the way I’ve done it before. It was the progressive narrative technique he used for the first major magazine piece he wrote back in 1946, when a dying Damon Runyon recommended him to the editors at Hearst’s Cosmopolitan. The article was on boxing, the day a prizefighter goes into the ring. He chose Rocky Graziano as his subject, and followed him from the break of dawn on the day that he fought Tony Zale at Yankee Stadium and was knocked out in the sixth round. The story later won the E. P. Dutton award for sportswriting, the first of five for Heinz. The beauty of the progressive narrative was that it provided a natural plot, established by the second, the minute, the hour, the day. Maybe this is the way I can do Lombardi, Heinz decided. I’ll start the Monday after a game and take it through the next game. I’ll get all the background material I need now, and then come back in the fall for a couple of games until I get a good game.
With his plan set, Heinz worried less about the limited amount of time Lombardi was devoting to the book. During his two weeks at Sunset Circle, he turned increasingly to Marie for tips that he could then use in sporadic follow-up interviews with her husband. Marie would tell him how Vince viewed Hornung or Jerry Kramer and he would then ask Lombardi about Hornung and Kramer, eventually gleaning the coach’s insights into all of his key players, which later could be fitted into the narrative. Inevitably during that period he also came to know about the Lombardis’ relationship. Once, when Lombardi was out of the house, Heinz talked to Marie about her husband’s temper, a subject about which he was sensitive because of his own father’s unpredictable disposition, which had made life difficult for his mother. Marie surprised him with a confession. “She said, ‘I wasn’t married to him a week when I said to myself, Marie Planitz, you have made the greatest mistake of your life.’ And she said, ‘But I found out what to do. When it gets so bad that I can’t stand it, I stand right up to him and he backs off.’ ” Another night, when he was at dinner with the Lombardis, Heinz listened as they talked about their marriage difficulties until Vince declared, “But when I love you, I really do!” And Marie responded, “Yes, you do!”
In the middle of July, Heinz followed Lombardi across the river to St. Norbert College, the two occupying the commodious dean’s suite where the coach lived during training camp. Heinz went to practice, interviewed players in their dorms, attended Lombardi’s version of the Five O’Clock Club, and sat in on film sessions with the coaches. He was at once unobtrusive and omnipresent, just as Frank Graham had taught him to be. Bill Austin, the line coach, called him the Shadow. It was at training camp that Heinz reached a conclusion on why Lombardi had such limited recall of his own past: Details of the past were not material to his mission. Discard the immaterial, Red Blaik had taught him at West Point, in the context of preparing for a football game, and Vince had become the master of discard. He purged from his life and mind as much as he could that did not have a direct bearing on the success of his Green Bay Packers. If it did not help the cause, it was a distraction. There were a few exceptions to the rule—daily mass at St. Willebrord’s, golf at Oneida, an hour of mindless television late in the day—but those were to relax his soul or clear his head or settle his nerves, and as such they could be considered necessary for the making of a successful coach.
THE BOOK with Heinz was granted a partial exemption from Lombardi’s policy of eliminating irrelevancies; the idea came from his New York pals, after all, and it stroked his ego. When the distinction could be made, he was driven by a will to prevail more than a desire to be famous, but he nonetheless enjoyed the notion of being a celebrity author. The Green Bay media were an altogether different matter. Lombardi considered the local press 95 percent immaterial, 5 percent public relations tool. He tended to treat Wisconsin sportswriters with indifference or cruel condescension. One morning after preseason practice, as Lombardi was changing his clothes in the coach’s dressing room on the south end of City Stadium, Lee Remmel, a writer for the Green Bay Press-Gazette, approached Heinz, who was standing outside the room.
“Bill, is the coach in there?” Remmel asked.
“Yes,” Heinz said. “You want to talk to him?”
Heinz entered the coach’s room and caught Lombardi’s attention.
“Lee Remmel’s out there,” Heinz said.
“What about it?” Lombardi muttered.
“He wants to see you.”
“What does he want?”
“Coach,” Heinz answered with a hint of exasperation. “He’s a reporter. He wants to ask you some questions.”
“All right,” Lombardi said gruffly. “Send him in.”
Heinz felt embarrassed. He and Remmel were brothers in the trade, and he was the interloper and Remmel was on his home turf. It bothered him to see any reporter feel compelled to so humble himself just to talk to a coach. With Lombardi driving them to lunch that noon, he decided to try to instruct him on the demands of journalism.
“I want to tell you something about Lee Remmel,” he said.
“What about him?” Lombardi growled.
“He’s a good writer.”
“He is?”
“Yes,” Heinz said. “He writes well enough to work for the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the Kansas City Star, Chicago Tribune—you name it. And I’ll tell you something else about him. He’s a married man. He has to make a living. And you make life awfully tough for him. You make it so tough that you�
�re giving him an inferiority complex. And that’s not right, Vince.”
As Heinz later recalled the scene, Lombardi responded with a noncommittal grunt.
Later that afternoon, at the end of the second practice session, Lombardi and Heinz walked off the field together. Remmel was about six paces ahead, and when Lombardi noticed him he shouted, “Lee! Got any questions?” The next day at the Five O’Clock Club in the basement lounge of Sensenbrenner Hall, Lombardi sat at his usual corner spot, reading the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Tom Miller, the team publicist, was at the bar getting some drinks, and other coaches were milling around. The door opened slowly and there stood Remmel, looking in. Lombardi perked up immediately. “Oh, Lee! Come in! Good. Good. Tom, get’m a drink.…”
“Well, I …” Remmel seemed uncomfortable with the attention.
“No. No. Tom, get’m a drink. Get’m a drink,” Lombardi insisted. “Lee, come over here!”
What was going on? Had Heinz truly softened the Old Man? A few days later the answer came. The co-authors were driving to lunch again, and Lombardi had had enough.
“You and your Lee Remmel!” he harrumphed.
“What do you mean?” Heinz asked.
“I’m getting an inferiority complex worrying about his inferiority complex!”
When Pride Still Mattered Page 45