When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  “Good morning, sisters!” he says cheerily as he encounters two young nuns walking in the other direction.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Lombardi!” they respond in unison.

  “It’s nice …” (he has stepped on their lines)

  “Nice to see you back,” they go on.

  “Well, thank you. It’s nice to be back here at St. Norbert. It’s a beautiful day, too, by the way, isn’t it?”

  There are scenes of Hawg Hanner driving to camp from Arkansas in his pickup truck, of Willie Davis and Ray Nitschke toting a football as they lumber down the practice field in wind sprints, of a quartet of rookies singing an earnest if painful version of “Hello, Dolly!” for the veterans in an after-dinner ritual, of Jimmy Taylor talking about how football is a contact sport and how much he and his coach love contact. There are two interviews with right guard Jerry Kramer, whose accounts of the inner game reveal an honest and articulate sensibility that will be put to profitable use years later in his own books, and a multitude of scenes involving Hornung, the man of the hour: sipping soup, stepping on the scale, running the stadium steps, gliding behind Jerry and Fuzzy on the sweep, talking into the camera about getting in shape, reminiscing on the fears he felt as a rookie, and to some extent was feeling again now, hoping that the other players would accept him “as a football player and as a man”—and finally, in the last frame of the film, the Horn steps toward the ball and kicks a field goal, straight and true.

  Lombardi is the film’s main character. In many scenes he seems painfully conscious of the camera and microphone recording him for posterity. Even when he is stationed at his favorite practice field post, riding on the back of the blocking sled, imploring his troops to hit harder and drive him farther, there is a sense that he is not so much an obsessed coach lost in work as Lombardi trying to play Lombardi. Perhaps the camera captured something that otherwise would have gone undetected: there was always an element of performance in his coaching routine. Through the years several of his assistants and his son, Vincent, at various times entered his dressing quarters and found him in unguarded moments standing in front of the mirror rehearsing the facial expressions—sober, grimacing, intense, inspiring—that he would use minutes later in the locker room as he exhorted his players.

  The most authentic Lombardi moment was also the most planned, though scripted by him, not the producers. Every year, on the opening Sunday night of training camp, he delivered a speech to the players in which he defined what it meant to be a member of the Green Bay Packehs. Lombardi is standing behind a lectern; his players are seated at classroom desks in the lecture hall, some taking notes, all appearing to give him their undivided attention. The theme of his oration is pride and how much it matters. “I’d like to welcome you all, of course, and tell you how proud we are to have you as part of the Packers, just as you should be proud to be here with this team,” Lombardi begins. “Now, one thing about the Packers, it’s a team with a great tradition. A great and wonderful tradition. And that tradition, or that whatever you want to call it—that glory that is the Packers—has been developed from one thing only, and that’s pride. Everybody has ability, but pride in performance is what makes the difference. Now how do you develop pride? Pride is developed from a winning tradition.”

  While Lombardi’s speech is timeless, the documentary as a whole, which ran for an hour on prime time on ABC, did not transcend its time and place, although it got good reviews. From the remove of decades it has the feel of a quaint period piece, an innocent narrative set to tinkly music, produced before the era of quick-cut action accompanied by jazz riffs and slow-motion montages set to uplifting pop ballads. But it holds a special place in the Lombardi mythology for several reasons. It introduced him to a larger television audience beyond those who watched the Packers on autumn Sunday afternoons, and it also marked his first association with Howard Cosell, who was beginning his rise as the dominant mythmaker of the modern television sports era.

  Cosell’s nasal voice was nowhere to be heard, his declarative ego not yet fully unleashed in front of the camera. The narrator was Horace McMahon, whose deep, rumbling delivery bore a haunting similarity to Lombardi’s, and who was best known for his iconic introduction to a popular television show: “There are seven million stories in the Naked City….” Lou Volpicelli was the director, and Cosell, who had read Run to Daylight! and considered Heinz a “great writer,” produced the show in partnership with ABC, putting up half the money. Cosell and Lombardi had been casual acquaintances for decades. Each grew up in Brooklyn and attended college in New York, Lombardi at Fordham and Cosell at NYU. Cosell followed Lombardi’s rise from West Point to the Giants to Green Bay with increasing interest. He admired Lombardi’s straightforward style, his will to win, and his ability as a leader to see beyond race, class and culture to build a loyal and dependable team out of disparate characters. While others viewed Lombardi as the archetypal opposite of another Cosell favorite, the young boxer Cassius Clay, one symbolizing authority, the other freedom, Cosell saw them as singular personalities with compelling stories.

  What Lombardi thought of Cosell is less clear. According to Heinz, the coach was not enthralled by the prospect of having the sportscaster lurking around training camp that summer. “He said Cosell was a pain in the neck,” according to Heinz. “I said, ‘C’mon, Coach, he’s putting up half the money. This is a good thing. It’s good for you. It’s good for the Packers. It’s good for football.’ ” Lombardi was playing golf in Neenah the day that Cosell arrived. He had lent his Pontiac to Heinz, who picked up Cosell at the airport and drove him to meet the coach. “Listen, tread lightly with Vince,” Heinz warned, fearing that Cosell’s overbearing nature might antagonize the overbearing coach. “I know, I know,” Cosell said. Lombardi was sitting in the clubhouse in Neenah, and when he saw Cosell he shouted, “How are ya, Coach?”

  Cosell was struck dumb. “He called me Coach,” he whispered excitedly to Heinz. Cosell thought it was a sign of intimacy. Coach was Cosell’s own nickname for himself. “Raymond,” Cosell could be heard announcing to the bartender at Les Artistes, his hangout near the ABC studios in Manhattan, “keep the martini chilled for the Coach. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” Heinz did not feel like telling Cosell that Lombardi was indiscriminate with the nickname; to him everyone and anyone might be Coach. Two days later Heinz entered Lombardi’s office and found the real coach in a foul mood.

  “Out!” Lombardi growled.

  “What?”

  “You know who! Cosell! I don’t want him around anymore!”

  “He’s going home tonight, Coach. Relax,” Heinz said.

  Cosell had been asking questions nonstop, propounding his own theories on football, beating Lombardi at gin, using words that Lombardi only vaguely knew, exhibiting no apparent fear of the coach, showing an ego just as large. Cosell might have thought he was bonding, but Lombardi considered it too much. The story went around the locker room that Cosell once said to Lombardi, “Coach, how many great sportscasters do you think there are?” and Lombardi responded, “One less than you think, Howard!” It sounded unlikely, Lombardi rarely displayed such wit, but it might have accurately expressed his exasperation with his fellow New Yorker. “You had to play Lombardi carefully. Don’t interrupt him and push him too far at any time,” Heinz said. “Howard was always so aggressive. But he was a great reporter. You’ve got to give him that. A great reporter.” And from then on Cosell considered himself the coach’s close friend and the world’s leading expert on the genius of the great Vince Lombardi.

  MUCH WAS AT STAKE in the season opener in Green Bay. It was not only Hornung’s first game since 1962, but also an opportunity for the Packers to gain revenge against the world-champion Bears. None of that seemed to faze the Golden Boy, who remained easygoing in the days leading up to the game. He declared himself in the best condition of his life, down to 212 pounds, and ready for a season that would make everyone forget about his forced year off. After practice on Friday
, he picked up his mother at the airport, then drove over to the Northland for a haircut. Lombardi was already there, and they took their trims two chairs apart. Just having Hornung in the lineup reassured the coach; he had felt better since the first intrasquad game, when Hornung had made his patented cutback on the sweep and found his way to the end zone. “Hornung’s back! Hornung’s back! The Golden Boy is back!” Lombardi had yelled on the sidelines that day. Now he was silent, dozing in the barber’s chair, and soon enough, so was his halfback. Like father, like son. “You put on the clippers and he goes to sleep,” the barber explained to Tex Maule, who was spending the week with his favorite team.

  As Sunday broke bright and cool, there was a sense in Green Bay that everything was right with the world, restored to the way it was supposed to be. Lombardi had his boy back and played him for nearly the entire game. Hornung remained on the field for all but two offensive plays, completing an option pass, kicking three field goals and gaining seventy-seven yards on fifteen carries, including one classic Packer sweep, the Horn gliding to the right, then cutting back sharply and loping downfield for forty yards. As if to show off the renewed dynamism of the Lombardi-Hornung partnership, the coach drew on his daring and rulebook expertise to send Hornung in for a rare free-kick fifty-two-yard field goal with eight seconds remaining in the first half. Elijah Pitts had received a punt near midfield with a fair catch, which according to an obscure rule allowed the Packers to place the ball on the line of scrimmage for an uncontested free-kick field goal. Hornung’s boot was low and unpretty, but with no Bears rushing in for the block, it sailed over the crossbar. Green Bay won, 23 to 12, and Maule had the headline he wanted: “Shining Hour for Golden Boy.”

  It was, as it turned out, the last shining hour of the season for Hornung, Lombardi and the Packers. Jerry Kramer played in the opener despite a piercing pain in his abdomen, and that was the last time he suited up all year. Doctors feared that he might be suffering from life-threatening cancer, until they belatedly discovered that he had been infected by a seven-and-a-half-inch sliver of wood that had been lodged in his body undetected for years, going back to an incident in his Idaho teens when he was chasing a calf and slammed into a fencepost. With Ringo traded and Kramer out, Lombardi’s offensive line, the key to his running attack, was not the same. Kramer was missed even more in another way. The difference between winning and losing that season was so narrow that the major problem turned out to be the inaccuracy of Hornung’s toe, and the unavailability of Kramer to replace him as the kicker. The Packers lost the second game of the year to the eventual conference champions, the Baltimore Colts, 21 to 20, and the difference in the game was a missed Hornung extra point. In the fourth game, the Vikings blocked an extra point that proved decisive in a 24 to 23 Green Bay loss. In the sixth game, Hornung missed four field goals and had another blocked as the Packers lost to the Colts for a second time, 24 to 21.

  Green Bay outgained its opponents all year, and played vigorous defense, but won 8 games, lost 5, and tied 1 as Hornung missed twenty-six of thirty-eight field goal attempts. It was a measure of the respect with which he was held by his teammates and coach that they refused to blame him for another second-place season. Lombardi said he might have put Kramer in to kick if he had been available, but always believed that Hornung would regain his rhythm. He likened Hornung’s kicking woes to “a .300 hitter who gets in a slump, except we can’t bench him.” For the second straight year, Lombardi took his team to the Playoff Bowl in Miami, but this time he did not even feign interest in the game against the St. Louis Cardinals. In private meetings with his squad, he disparaged the whole notion of such a game. “He called it the ‘Shit Bowl,’ ” according to Bob Skoronski. “That’s the word he used. He said it was a losers’ bowl for losers.” The Packers lost to the Cardinals, and afterwards Lombardi fumed about “a hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players. That’s all second place is—hinky-dink.” He said that he would never come back and had no intention of ever finishing second again.

  It was an uncertain time for Lombardi, the most confusing period for him since he had reached Green Bay. He had thought about leaving the year before, when the 49ers made a covert inquiry and then the AFL’s Jets presented him with a lucrative offer to return to New York. But none of that had worked out, Olejniczak and the league would not let him go, nor would his pride; he wanted those three in a row, so he had stayed and appeared committed to Green Bay for several more seasons. Two years of losing, or not winning, had taken a toll, and Sunset Circle was a particularly depressed place after the season. Mr. High-Low was low and his wife was lower as the long Green Bay winter continued through the first months of 1965. The dark, dreary days, the agitated condition of her husband, her own psychological need to be the center of attention—all apparently combined to send Marie into a depression.

  On the afternoon of February 12 she apparently drank too much, swallowed too many prescription pills intended for headaches and depression, and passed out in bed. Susan found her, holding a bottle of pills in her hand. It was not the first time. Susan yelled to her father, who came into the room and shook Marie awake. They drove her to St. Vincent Hospital, where she was watched overnight. Her depression and pleas for help were obvious, but the family did its best to avoid the subject. Susan said that she and her father acted as though Marie had a bout with the flu. Vincent coincidentally arrived from St. Paul the next day, unaware of the trouble, and was looking forward to celebrating the most joyous event of his life. He had proposed to his girlfriend, Jill Butz, a senior at the College of St. Catherine, and was bringing her home so that they could both tell the family. They arrived at Sunset Circle only to discover that everyone was at the hospital. Marie was recovering by then, but news of her son’s engagement did not cheer her up. Jill showed her the engagement ring, which did not satisfy Marie. Perhaps nothing could then. The ring was a band of sapphires, not a diamond, and not big enough, Marie complained.

  That night Vince and Susan, Vincent and Jill went to dinner, leaving Marie at the hospital. It was also Susan’s eighteenth birthday, an event nearly lost in the commotion. There was no mention of Marie’s illness at the restaurant. Lombardi tried to act festive for his children, but appeared distracted. He spent much of the time talking about a new high-protein diet that Marie had put him on, limiting his carbohydrate intake: steak and salad, no bread. For Vincent, here was another bittersweet instance when he and his dad were not quite connecting. He was announcing his engagement and his father was going on about a new diet. The problem was not an absence of love. Love was there; the problem was how to show it.

  There was the time in Vincent’s junior year when the Packers were playing in Minnesota and Lombardi made a rare appearance at a St. Thomas football game. Vincent ran for sixty-four yards and scored two touchdowns against Gustavus Adolphus—and the only thing the father said to his proud son after the game was that he should lift his feet up higher when he ran. Or the time in his freshman year when he hurt his knee and was “limping around, not playing, feeling sorry” for himself. The Packers were in town, so he went over to the hotel to visit his father. “I walk in the lobby and there are a lot of players there and they’re all saying, ‘That’s too bad’—lots of sympathy and pats on the back,” Vincent said later. “I go up to Dad’s suite and he says come in here, and he’s got Dr. Nellen there, who looks at it and says it’s loose but there’s nothing serious. And Dad lights into me. Just rips me up one side and down the other. ‘You’re going to be running on that tomorrow,’ he says.” Vincent left the hotel with tears running down his cheeks, certain that his father did not understand him. Two weeks later he was starting.

  The Old Man had been right, and perhaps he had acted out of love, but it came out in uncomfortable ways. For the most part, Lombardi’s transference of ambition had been to his players, not his son, and perhaps that was lucky, otherwise the pressure might have been wholly intolerable. With thirty-eight other you
ng men to work with every day, Lombardi did not need so much to live through his son, try to attain success through his son and ruin his son, like Willy Loman and his son Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Lombardi was the successful salesman that Loman could never be, but there nonetheless are faint echoes of Willy and Biff in the frustrating scenes between Vince and Vincent. “When you hit, hit low and hit hard, because it’s important, boy,” Willy says to Biff in a dream sequence near the end of the play. They are on a football field, and it is a final yearning, plaintive, empty offering of advice on how to succeed and win in modern America. “Lift your legs up when you run,” Vince said to Vincent, and the meaning was almost the same.

  The wedding was scheduled for June 26 in Minot, North Dakota, Jill’s hometown. Marie arrived three days early for a series of luncheons and a society page interview with the Minot Daily News. Vince flew in through a summer squall in time to play golf with the Butz brothers and the club pro at Minot Country Club the morning before the wedding. At the rehearsal dinner that night, Vince and Marie received word that one of their old friends, Jack Mara, who ran the Giants with brother Wellington, was dying of colon cancer at age fifty-seven. Marie dabbed at tears the rest of the night. When asked why she was crying, she said it was for Jack. The wedding was held at noon the next day, a grand social event, drawing more than four hundred people to the Church of the Little Flower, many of them awestruck at the sight of the famous father of the groom. After a reception at the country club, dinner was offered at the Butz house; the gathering spread out from the patio onto their spacious back lawn. The rains came before dusk, and as guests traipsed into the house, their soiled footprints blackened Mrs. Butz’s white carpeting. After Vincent and Jill left for their honeymoon, Marie found a seat on the front porch and sat motionless for hours, rarely speaking, lost in the darkness of the northern plains, sobbing softly late into the night.