When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

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  “THERE’S AN OLD FABLE that a guard is a fullback with his brains knocked out—but it’s only a fable,” Lombardi once told Tim Cohane. “I’m not saying guards are smarter than fullbacks or other ballcarriers, but their blocking assignments lead them to see more of what makes a play succeed or fail. More linemen and quarterbacks than fullbacks or halfbacks become good coaches.” For a quarter of a century, since he took his first job at St. Cecilia in 1939 and worked alongside Handy Andy Palau, his old Fordham teammate, Lombardi had been outcoaching former backs. What made him better than the rest?

  The fact that he had played guard, and from that position saw how plays worked, could only be a small part of it. After all, he also had outcoached many former linemen. One of his friends, Jack Koeppler, tried to explain Lombardi by saying that he was not the best at anything—not the most intelligent, innovative, disciplined, organized, energetic or inspiring—but far above average at everything. Herbert Warren Wind of The New Yorker concluded that what set Lombardi apart was his purposefulness. “He really means to do the job, and there isn’t a moment when he isn’t working at it.” Others attributed Lombardi’s success to something more mystical, an ineffable spirit that he radiated. The coach himself seemed skeptical on that score.

  “What’s charisma?” he once asked W. C. Heinz.

  “What?”

  “You’re the writer. I keep reading that I have charisma. What the hell is it?”

  “Relax,” Heinz said. “It’s not a disease.”

  To Steve Sabol, the young producer for NFL Films, the secret of Lombardi was not so much what he said but the sound of it. “It was all the voice,” Sabol said. “The great leaders in history—Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Roosevelt, Hitler—all had these really unique voices. And Lombardi’s voice was so unique, so strident, so resonant, it could cut through anything. He could be on the other side of a room and talking in his regular tone and everyone would hear him.” The story of the little dog, in Sabol’s opinion, revealed the power of Lombardi’s voice. The Sabols were in Green Bay filming the Packers preparing for a season. As Willie Davis and Ray Nitschke led the team in drills, a little dog darted around the field, rubbing up to the players, a sideshow that brought gales of laughter from fans. Then Lombardi appeared, bellowing, “Get that dog off the field,” and the dog scampered away. “It was the power of that voice,” Sabol said. “Any animal would respond.”

  To others, Lombardi’s brilliance was his simplicity and dependability. Straight ahead all the way. Tell everyone what you are doing and do it better. That undeniably was an important aspect of his coaching character, yet it might also be the most misleading explanation of all, according to Lombardi’s son, Vincent. “People say the only constant in life is change. I say the only constant in life is paradox. My father’s life was a paradox. Everything about him.” A paradox is something that seems self-contradictory but in reality is possibly true, and by that definition Vincent was right. It is only by looking at Lombardi as a paradox that one can fully appreciate him as a leader and coach.

  Was it love or hate, confidence or fear, that drove Lombardi and his players? All—at the same time.

  Lombardi confessed in Look that he considered football “a game for madmen” and that he once pounded on a huge lineman with his fists to get him to “hate me enough to take it out on the opposition.” He struck the player, the coach said, because he believed that to play football well you had to have “that fire in you,” and there was “nothing that stokes that fire” like hate. Hit or be hit, that was the reality of football, Lombardi believed. He had coached much the same way since his days at Saints, when he had ordered his adolescent charges to hit him until they felt a surge of emotion that approached hate. In Green Bay, he strutted around the practice field screaming “Defy me! Defy me!”—at once testing his players’ resolve and fueling their anger. Jerry Kramer, Fuzzy Thurston, Henry Jordan, Jimmy Taylor—many of Lombardi’s best players at one time or another felt intense hatred for him and came close to throwing a punch. “There were times,” according to Max McGee, “when a lot of those guys would say ‘I hate this sonofabitch!’ ”

  And yet Lombardi simultaneously believed in love and said that love made the difference. “On this team, there is great love,” he declared of his Packers. He “had a tremendous amount of love in him,” thought Tim Cohane. “He loved his players and his teams.” He even gave sermons to his Packers about the meaning of love. “I remember once he began a speech to us by asking ‘What is the meaning of love?’ ” recalled Bob Skoronski. “And this is what he said. He said, ‘Anybody can love something that is beautiful or smart or agile. You will never know love until you can love something that isn’t beautiful, isn’t bright, isn’t glamorous. It takes a special person to love something unattractive, someone unknown. That is the test of love. Everybody can love someone’s strengths and somebody’s good looks. But can you accept someone for his inabilities?’ And he drew a parallel that day to football. You might have a guy playing next to you who maybe isn’t perfect, but you’ve got to love him, and maybe that love would enable you to help him. And maybe you will do something more to overcome a difficult situation in football because of that love. He didn’t want us to be picking on each other, but thinking, What can I do to make it easier for my teammate? It was more than football, but crucial to our football success. When I got home that day, I said to my wife, ‘That should have come from a pulpit somewhere.’ ”

  From the outside, Lombardi tended to be seen in stark terms, an avatar of love or hate. Francis Stann, writing in Washington’s Evening Star, called Lombardi’s Look article a “hymn of hate” that was unnecessary and dangerous. “Just because Lombardi vows that it is essential to hate in order to win doesn’t make it so. Certainly not on a level as relatively unimportant as athletics,” Stann wrote. “But he will be believed, alas, mostly by kids who regard Vince as a genius and put his Packers on a pedestal.” From the other side, hearing a different hymn, the Catholic Herald Citizen, the weekly newspaper of the Milwaukee Roman Catholic Archdiocese, extolled Lombardi as a theologian. “What better practical theology could there be” the Citizen asked, than Lombardi’s theology of team love? Stann was no more right or wrong in his assessment than the archdiocese: neither saw the larger picture that with Lombardi hate and love coexisted.

  There was a similar paradox in Lombardi’s emphasis on confidence and its opposite, fear. He instilled confidence in his players in many ways, beginning with appearances. His insistence that his players wear blazers on the road was based largely on a belief in the old saw that clothes make the man. Once when the Jets were playing in Oakland on the same weekend that the Packers were in San Francisco, the squads arrived at the airport at the same time. Most of the Jets were in faded T-shirts, and Lombardi pointed at them and said, “Take a look at them! We don’t look like that. That’s not us. We’re professionals.” Lombardi also encouraged his players to provide generous tips to clubhouse men at every stadium, believing that they would then get more towels, after-shave talc, better treatment all around, further instilling in them a sense of professional confidence.

  On the bulletin board of the locker room, Lombardi tacked a fan’s note as a reminder of the correlation between professionalism and confidence. “I have begun to notice something just as important as your winning games,” the letter stated. “Self-respect! The attitude you have instilled in your players is amazing. Too often conceit and a boisterous personality are symbols of stardom. If so, you have no ‘stars’ on your team. I think the quiet performance of the Packers shows confidence and respect for the other members of the team and is just an extension of the attitude you have instilled in them. You are doing more than just winning football games; you are teaching many more to compete in the game of life.” It was one more way, said Bob Skoronski, that Lombardi made the players “feel that we were something special.”

  If there is a fine line between exuding confidence and feelin
g comfortable, Lombardi intuitively found it. He used fear to make sure that his players never felt too comfortable. This happened in two ways. One was indirect: a fear arising from the unpredictability of his reactions. “He kept the players off balance,” said Pat Peppler. “When they thought he was going to raise hell, he might, but often didn’t. When they thought he’d be pleased, he’d raise hell. They were always trying to read him: How is the Old Man going to react?” If his use of fear had involved only fear of the uncertain, however, it might not have worked; his players would have considered him unfair and eventually that could have led to a loss of respect. And so beneath his volatile personality he constructed a foundation that was predictable and objective. He made sure that his players understood the standards by which they would be judged—and one way he did this was by quantifying every block and tackle they attempted on the field. This created a different fear: fear of the certain. It is why Tom Brown could look over at Forrest Gregg on the plane returning from a game in Dallas and see the square-jawed right tackle quietly muttering to himself. The Packers had won, the all-pro Gregg had played his usual dominant game, and yet all he could think about was a block he had missed in the third quarter, muttering, “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna dread films on Tuesday.”

  Nothing went ungraded each Monday when the coaches studied the previous day’s game: every play, every player. On offense, scores of zero, one or two were assigned, depending on the effectiveness of a block. Different positions had to meet slightly different standards, but the standards were immutable. The players became so familiar with the system that as they returned to the huddle after a play, they would think to themselves: that was a one or a two or, God forbid, a zero. On Tuesday they watched the film with the coaches. “When the movies come, you know about how many times you might have zeros, you’ve been thinking about it since the game,” said Skoronski. “And everybody’s gonna see it and Lombardi’s running that film back and forth and you’re deathly afraid that he’s going to dwell on your mistakes. He rarely passes over that zero performance.” Sometimes Lombardi directed the projectionist to run a play back and forward, no one saying a word, until that familiar guttural voice broke the silence with the dreaded “Mister….”

  The grades were posted in the locker room on Thursday, when Lombardi assembled his Packers for an awards ceremony. Players whose grades met the highest standard were called to the front. Lombardi presented the awards himself, pulling them from his fat wallet—crisp bills (fives in the early years, tens later). Here was the other side of fear, the confidence that came with meeting or surpassing the Old Man’s expectations. “It was amazing how prideful you would become,” recalled Gary Knafelc, the first of Lombardi’s tight ends. Knafelc’s blocking skills never matched those of his successors, Ron Kramer and Marv Fleming, but his experience with the grades was typical. With every bill he received from Lombardi, Knafelc’s confidence grew, and he found himself blocking better than he thought he could. “He gave you that five or ten in cash, and when he did that it meant more than anything. It could have been five thousand dollars, it meant so much.”

  Lombardi’s weekly grading system revealed another apparent contradiction. His coaching philosophy stressed the sublimation of ego for the good of the group, yet the weekly grades placed the emphasis on individual rather than team performance. This seeming paradox can be explained in part by his concept of individual striving, which was shaped by his Catholicism. Individual will and pride, the need to be better—all of this was not a selfish assertion of ego, it was what God wanted, the sincerest expression of holiness. “We have God-given talents and are expected to use them to our fullest whenever we play,” Lombardi once said. By relating individual performance to a higher calling, according to the Catholic Herald Citizen, Lombardi was offering “the profound, but often ignored admonition that everything we do should glorify God, and we glorify God the most when we ‘put out’ the most in whatever occupation or profession we have chosen.”

  There was a more practical explanation. According to assistant coach Phil Bengtson, Lombardi understood that team pride and his patriarchal family approach were not enough to motivate athletes. “I don’t really believe that a pro player does well ‘for the coach,’ even when he believes he is,” Bengtson once argued. “The player produces for himself and for the team as an extension of himself. That’s what made Lombardi’s approach so successful. He pushed each player to push himself, reward himself. Even when he spoke of team pride and performance, the basic appeal was to individual pride and performance.” And here was the essence of Lombardi’s coaching genius. It was once said by Henry Jordan, the defensive tackle, that “Lombardi treats us all alike. Like dogs!”—and though the phrase was a telling bit of gallows humor, it was not the truth. Lombardi studied each player on his team and constantly calibrated his use of love and hate, confidence and fear, until he found what worked.

  “There are other coaches who know more about X’s and O’s,” Lombardi once told Jack Koeppler. “But I’ve got an edge. I know more about football players than they do.” He knew that his quarterbacks, Starr and Bratkowski, were not to be yelled at: Bart took it as an affront to his leadership and Zeke was too nervous. Hornung could handle anything, absorbed all of the Old Man’s heat and kept going. Marv Fleming, the new tight end, was hugely talented, but Lombardi thought he required constant riding to play at his best. Taylor played better when he was mad at the coach, if not the world. Willie Davis was above reproach; Lombardi shrieked at him once, then explained the next day that he was only “trying to prove nobody is beyond chewing out.” Skoronski was sensitive to criticism and best left alone. Fuzzy would yell at himself, deflecting Lombardi’s wrath with premeditated self-flagellation. Forrest Gregg was such a monster by Wednesday afternoon that even Lombardi seemed afraid of him and stayed away for the rest of the week.

  Max McGee, the seemingly carefree receiver who was notorious for challenging Lombardi’s curfews, required special treatment. “If I got caught with a curfew violation during the season, Lombardi would chew my ass out. But he knew that I was the kind of player who couldn’t play with that over my head. I couldn’t play with people screaming at me,” McGee explained. “He’d scream at me early in the week, but it would get to be Friday and practice was over and we’d be walking up the hill and he’d come over and nudge me and say, ‘Hey, Maxie, how ya doin’ there, heh, heh.’ I hadn’t talked to him for three days because he’d embarrassed me, but he was afraid it was getting close to game time and I was a big play kind of guy and he didn’t want me going into the game mad at him, so the next two days he’d be making up to me for chewing my ass out in front of my buddies. It worked every time. He was the greatest psychologist.”

  Lombardi also calculated how his treatment of a player affected the rest of the team, a consideration that closed the circle, bringing his leadership approach back around to the precept that the group came first. He once told Dave Robinson that whenever he fined a player, he realized that the act of discipline could divide the team into three groups: those who thought he was right, those who thought he was too harsh and those who thought he was too lenient. How could he clearly demonstrate the consequences of breaking rules and yet not fragment the team? McGee was his foil. “Max was the type of guy Lombardi could fine and the entire team would accept it as no big thing,” Robinson said. “Everybody knew how much he liked Max. Guys like me would think, If he’s gonna fine Max a thousand dollars, what’s he gonna do to me? So actually he ended up fining fewer people less money than any coach I played for. He didn’t have to fine them. And when he did, he put it in a fund and used it for a postseason party. One year we were drinking champagne at the party and Max said, ‘Y’all have me to thank for this!’ ” When McGee negotiated his next contract, Lombardi gave him back the money that he had been fined.

  IN THE ELEVENTH GAME of the season, the Packers were soundly defeated by the Rams, 21 to 10, dropping their record to 8 wins and 3 losses. On the airplane ret
urning from the coast, defensive end Lionel Aldridge started singing a carefree tune. Lombardi was infuriated by this apparent lack of concern over their dismal showing. At the morning meeting the next Tuesday, he ordered his assistant coaches to leave the room and then excoriated his players. “Dammit, you guys don’t care if you win or lose. I’m the only one that cares. I’m the only one that puts his blood and guts and his heart into the game! You guys show up, you listen a little bit, you concentrate … you’ve got the concentration of three-year-olds. You’re nothing! I’m the only guy that gives a damn if we win or lose.”

  What happened next was recounted deliciously by offensive lineman Bill Curry in One More July, a memoir he later wrote with George Plimpton:

  Suddenly there was a rustle of chairs in the back of the room. I turned around and there was Forrest Gregg, on his feet, bright red, with a player on either side holding him back by each arm, and he was straining forward. Gregg was a real gentlemanly guy, very quiet. Great football player. Lombardi looked at him and stopped. Forrest said, “Goddammit, Coach … excuse me for the profanity”—even at his moment of rage, he was still both respectful enough and intimidated enough that he stopped and apologized—“Scuse the language, Coach, but, Goddammit, it makes me sick to hear you say something like that. We lay our ass on the line for you every Sunday. We live and die the same way you do, and it hurts.” Then he began straining forward again, trying to get up there to punch Lombardi out. Players were holding him back. Then Bob Skoronski stood up, very articulate. “That’s right,” he said. “Dammit, don’t you tell us that we don’t care about winning. That makes me sick. Makes me want to puke. We care about it every bit as much as you do. It’s our knees and our bodies out there that we’re throwing around.”