When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  At several stops along the route, Lombardi had been calling conference officials in New York to update them on his progress. It was slow going, he told them, but not to worry, he was on his way. By early Wednesday morning he had reached Philadelphia and called again. There were more delays on the corridor, he reported, and he feared it was now “touch and go” whether he could make it on time. Lawrence A. Appley, president of the American Management Association, suggested that Lombardi might consider staying in Philadelphia. He could deliver his speech from there over a speakerphone piped into the conference hall at the Americana Hotel. Calling it in—no way Lombardi would agree to that. He had worked too hard on the speech, he had gone through too much already, and phoning from Philadelphia would have drained the power from his message on strong leadership. “I’ve gotten this far,” he said, rejecting Appley’s offer. “I’ll get there. Hold them if you can.” Appley turned to his director of conference arrangements, George Disegni, and said, “Look, I don’t know if he’s going to make it for lunch, so we’ll have to delay a bit. Let’s put on a big cocktail party for our guests.”

  As the twelve hundred executives sipped cocktails in the hallway outside the grand ballroom, Appley announced that Lombardi was slowed by the snowstorm and that lunch would be delayed an hour. Since this was the final session of a three-day conference, anyone who had to leave would be excused and reimbursed for lunch. Virtually no one left. This was a predominantly male huddle, hopped up about seeing the famous football coach, and by one o’clock it was a decidedly well-lubricated crowd as well. Still no speaker. Jim Cabrera, an assistant program director, was sent down to Penn Station to greet the slow-moving train. He kept a taxi idling outside for the trip back to the hotel at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third Street.

  Cabrera knew the car and compartment number, and was there ready to grab a suitcase as soon as Lombardi stepped onto the platform. “He’s here! We’re on the way!” he reported back to Disegni from the nearest phone, and the personnel executives were ushered into the ballroom for lunch. They were finishing the salad course when a murmuring began, and suddenly the crowd was on its feet and the large ballroom exploded with applause. “An unbelievable standing ovation,” as Disegni recalled it. “Vince had made it!” Lombardi strode to the podium in a dark suit, his hair freshly trimmed, a championship ring shining from his left hand (he loved to wear rings and had just designed the Super Bowl version, which had the word CHARACTER etched on one side and LOVE on the other). For someone who had been rushed to the Americana after enduring an exhausting overnight journey, he looked amazingly fresh and neat.

  William D. Smith, who covered the event for the Times, wrote in his story the next day that the audience “listened almost spellbound” as Lombardi lectured them on leadership. Joe Lombardi, the coach’s youngest brother, was in the audience as a special guest, and remembered that when Vince finished the room was silent. Joe looked up to the lectern and noticed a startled look on his brother’s face. “There was a moment of almost panic—did they like it? what’s going on?” Then the silence broke, another rousing standing ovation. As Smith described it, “The mostly paunchy and out-of-shape audience” seemed ready to “carry Lombardi out on their shoulders” and then “go out and take on the Kansas City Chiefs.”

  The speech itself was not recorded beyond a few snippets in Smith’s article and the AP, and the prepared text seems to have been lost to history. Lombardi’s hosts did not receive a copy. His secretaries in Green Bay maintained an archive of his speeches for posterity, but that one was not among them. In many of his later speeches, however, Lombardi referred to the American Management Association address as the first of its kind. He considered it a seminal moment in his emergence as a public figure known for more than winning football games. Virtually every major speech that he delivered in later months and years was a variation of what he said that snowy Ash Wednesday in 1967.

  LOMBARDI STRUCTURED his standard speech around seven themes, his seven square blocks of granite that fit one atop the other. These themes went deeper than his mentor Red Blaik’s axioms, which did not seem to cohere into a larger philosophy (Axiom: Inches make the champion, and a champion makes his own luck), but it was nonetheless clear that Lombardi lifted some of his thoughts and words from Blaik. This was especially true for his first theme: the meaning of football itself.

  Many of Blaik’s long-held thoughts on football were contained in his autobiography, You Have to Pay the Price, first published in 1960. In it he described football as “the game most like life.” In Lombardi’s speech it was “a game very much like life.” Blaik said it was “a game that is 100 per cent fun when you win and that exacts 100 per cent resolution when you lose.” Lombardi called it “a game which gives 100 per cent elation, 100 per cent fun, when you win, yet demands and extracts a 100 per cent resolution, 100 per cent determination when you lose.” Blaik described it as “a game of violent body contact.” Lombardi characterized it as “a violent game and to play it any other way but violently would be imbecilic.” To Blaik it was a game “played in some form by over a million young Americans, a game uninhibited by social barriers.” Lombardi said it was “a game played by millions of Americans, yet is completely uninhibited by racial or social barriers.” Blaik called football “a Spartan game” that required “sacrifice, selflessness, competitive drive, and perseverance.” Lombardi said it demanded “the Spartan qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication and fearlessness.”

  That this was some minor form of unattributed borrowing is beside the point. It is even possible that the precise words came originally from neither man but from Tim Cohane, the erstwhile Fordham publicist who collaborated on Blaik’s autobiography and wrote several articles with Lombardi for Look. Lombardi, in his speech, said that he had been in football all his life, and that although he sometimes wondered why he “stayed in an occupation as precarious as football coaching,” he did not feel “particularly qualified to be part of anything else.” The point is that he was a Blaikian in football in the same way that he was a Catholic in religion. It was what he knew and what he believed in without question, and if he recited verbatim from the colonel’s football missal, it was only as an expression of true devotion.

  Lombardi’s second theme, a block fitting onto the first, concerned the value of competition, what he called “the American zeal” to compete and win. Over the years he had grown increasingly “worried about the lack of interest in competition, particularly athletic competition among our young people.” He took particular note when the trend away from competition hit close to home, when small Catholic colleges like his own Fordham deemphasized sports, for instance, or when Admiral Hyman Rickover complained that the military academies stressed competitive sports too much. Men needed the test of competition to find their better selves, Lombardi insisted, whether it was in sports, politics or business.

  Fifteen years earlier, as an assistant at West Point, he had traveled to New York to show Army game films to General MacArthur, and he had listened attentively as the old soldier, in his tattered gray bathrobe, lectured him on the merits of competitive sports. Although he had coached for five years at West Point, Lombardi was not a military man. He knew little about the military controversies of MacArthur’s career: leaving the Philippines in World War II, driving his men to a bloody Red Chinese ambush at the Yalu River in Korea a decade later. He knew that Red Blaik adored MacArthur and that MacArthur had a stirring rhetorical style, which he could not help drawing on in his speech. “I need no greater authority than the great General MacArthur, and I would like to quote some of the things he said to me. Namely: ‘Competitive sports keeps alive in all of us a spirit of vitality and enterprise. It teaches the strong to know when they are weak and the brave to face themselves when they are afraid. To be proud and unbending in defeat, yet humble and gentle in victory. To master ourselves before we attempt to master others. To learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep, and it gives a predominance of courage over timi
dity.’ ”

  The third block in Lombardi’s speech was about striving for perfection, what he called “a man’s personal commitment to excellence and victory.” Perfection was to be considered on a more ethereal realm than mere competition. Winning was part of it, but not all of it. His mother, Matilda, had instilled in Lombardi an anxious perfectionism. The Jesuits had taught him that human perfection was unattainable, but that all human beings should still work toward it by using their God-given capacities to the fullest. While “complete victory can never be won,” Lombardi said, “it must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might. Each week there is a new encounter, each year there is a new challenge. But all of the display, all of the noise, all of the glamour, and all of the color and excitement, they exist only in the memory. But the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win, they endure, they last forever. These are the qualities, I think, that are larger and more important than any of the events that occasion them.”

  In the sixties, Lombardi feared, more people were turning away from competition and fewer were striving for perfection. Why? His answer was the theme of the fourth block: too much freedom, not enough authority. Though his speech addressed the changing world of that decade, his words here echoed the lessons he had learned thirty years earlier in the ethics class of Father Ignatius Cox. For most of the twentieth century, Lombardi said, “we as individuals have struggled to liberate ourselves from ancient traditions, congealed creeds and despotic states. Therefore, freedom was necessarily idealized against order, the new against the old, and genius against discipline. Everything was done to strengthen the rights of the individual and weaken the state, and weaken the church, and weaken all authority. I think we all shared in this rebellion, but maybe the battle was too completely won, maybe we have too much freedom. Maybe we have so long ridiculed authority in the family, discipline in education, and decency in conduct and law that our freedom has brought us close to chaos.”

  When Father Cox was teaching young Vinnie Lombardi from his textbook, Liberty: Its Use and Abuse, back in the mid-thirties, he feared that liberty already had taken a dangerous turn. “The evidence for this lies all around us,” Cox wrote. “Such liberty unrestrained by law, which ultimately proceeds from the Supreme Lawgiver, God, has eventuated in license. Disintegralization has become the characteristic of modern life in morals, in science, in education, in government, and in international relations…. The vaunted liberty which was to make us free has eventuated in a more galling servitude to man’s lower nature—especially to sex on the one hand, and to autocratic political power on the other. It is only the truth which can make us free and the truth is that liberty unchecked by law, the Natural Law of God and human law in accordance with the law of God, leads to license and thence to servitude.”

  In his lament against license, Father Cox drew on the 1888 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII attacking the doctrines of liberalism. Lombardi could not turn to his church now for the same traditionalist material. U.S. Catholicism was in the throes of liberalization itself in the aftermath of Vatican Council II. English was replacing Latin in most services, parochial schools were turning away from the rote memorizing of dogma, abstinence was no longer required on Fridays, and a majority of American Catholics were telling pollsters that they disagreed with church policy on birth control and divorce. Lombardi had mixed feelings about the reforms, according to his friend Jack Koeppler, who attended several religious retreats with him at St. Norbert during that period. He welcomed the ecumenical spirit and the church’s renewed emphasis on solving secular issues such as poverty and racial discrimination, but on the rituals of the mass, Koeppler said, Lombardi was “essentially a pre—Vatican II type of Catholic.” He knew Latin and liked the old traditions. During an era when some young Catholic clerics were shedding their collars to work in experimental urban ministries, Lombardi was turning the other way, retreating in his mind to the days when he had trained at the preseminary Cathedral Prep and a father had led the boys in a chant: “I want to be a priest!”

  Father Lombardi? His secretary Ruth McKloskey walked up the stairs at work one morning and noticed that the door between their offices was shut. It was never closed; this made her curious. “And all of a sudden the door opened and there he stood in the doorway with all these priest robes on, and he had a miter with a tassel, everything. He stood there and I said, ‘My God!’ He said, ‘How do I look?’ I said, ‘I’m afraid to say. You look like a bishop or something.’ Then he heard somebody else coming up the steps and closed the door and reopened it five minutes later wearing his regular suit. Mr. Lombardi never mentioned it to me again and I never brought it up.”

  Lombardi could adjust to some of the reforms within the modern church in 1967, but he was surprised and alarmed by the larger counterculture movement emerging in America. As he acknowledged later, he had been “so wrapped up” in his own world, in his God and family and especially the Green Bay Packers, that he had not seen it coming, and then “all of a sudden there it was”—all around him. As he was embarking on his journey to deliver the speech in New York, students at the University of Wisconsin were burning draft cards to protest the war in Vietnam. The U.S. troop buildup in Southeast Asia had recently doubled to 400,000. The number of young American men who had fled to Canada to avoid military induction had exceeded five thousand. At a national gathering of student body presidents in Ann Arbor, a letter was being drafted attacking President Lyndon Johnson for his handling of the war. Plans were being set for a massive antiwar march on Washington in April. Noam Chomsky, an influential radical intellectual, was announcing in the New York Review of Books that he was withholding half his income taxes to protest the war, arguing that the time had come to resist authority.

  The February 6 edition of Newsweek featured a story on the other side of the movement, the disengaged hippies. The article described a “Human Be-In” staged at Golden Gate Park on January 14—the day before the Super Bowl—at which “10,000 long-tressed hippies of both sexes and various fellow-trippers” gathered around a psychedelic maypole, burned incense, played recorders, chanted Hare Krishnas with Allen Ginsberg, and were encouraged by Timothy Leary to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” Hendrik Hertzberg, a Newsweek writer, visited a “pad” in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, near where Harold Lombardi had lived a few years earlier. The hippies there told him that repetitive work was “blasphemy” and that God intended for people to play. They lived cooperatively in reaction to the competitiveness around them. “You’re brought up in a competitive society and you’re taught to grab first because if you don’t everyone else will,” one said.

  All of this was deplored by Lombardi as a dangerous disregard for authority and an abuse of liberty. In his speech he put it this way: “I am sure you are disturbed like I am by what seems to be a complete breakdown of law and order and the moral code which is almost beyond belief. Unhappily, our youth, the most gifted segment of our population, the heirs to scientific advances and freedom’s breath, the beneficiaries of their elders’ sacrifices and achievements, seem, in too large numbers, to have disregard for the law’s authority, for its meaning, for its indispensability to their enjoyment of the fullness of life, and have conjoined with certain of their elders, who should know better, to seek a development of a new right, the right to violate the law with impunity. The prevailing sentiment seems to be if you don’t like the rule, break it.”

  This led to Lombardi’s next theme, block five of his speech: discipline. It was not just an abuse of liberty but a lack of disciplined leadership that had brought disarray to modern society, he maintained. “It could be that our leaders no longer understand the relationship between themselves and the people they lead.” To properly understand that relationship, Lombardi believed, a leader had to appreciate a paradox. “That is, while most shout to be independent, [they] at the same time wish to be dependent, and while most shout to assert themselves, [they] at the same time wish to be told what to do.”

&n
bsp; In that sense, Lombardi thought the youth rebellion was not a reaction to stifling authority so much as a response to ineffectual leaders. This line of thinking went back directly to Colonel Blaik. In December 1950, during Lombardi’s second season at West Point, Blaik made a similar argument in a letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower. “I have been closely associated with youngsters for the past 20 years and am convinced that our youth is more bewildered than at any time in our history,” Blaik wrote. “As for the training of these youngsters, I hope it is realized as in football any course of training which envisions softness will not win the respect of the youngster. After he once gets into a system of training, all a young boy needs is understanding, fair treatment, and a two-fisted approach to the objective.”

  What makes a great leader? This was Lombardi’s next theme, block six of his speech. Here again, one could hear the echoes of the Jesuits and West Point. “Leaders are made, not born,” he said. “They are made by hard effort, which is the price all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.” In those two sentences he combined the free will of Ignatius of Loyola and the price-paying of Colonel Blaik.

  From there, however, Lombardi became less reliant on his mentors. As he described a great leader, he was describing himself as coach of the Green Bay Packers. “A leader must identify himself with the group, must back up the group, even at the risk of displeasing his superiors. He must believe that the group wants from him a sense of approval. If this feeling prevails, production, discipline and morale will be high, and in return he can demand the cooperation to promote the goals of the company. He must believe in teamwork through participation. As a result, the contact must be close and informal. He must be sensitive to the emotional needs and expectations of others. In return, the attitude toward him should be one of confidence and, possibly, affection. The leader, in spite of what was said above, can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk, as it were, a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control that he must exert.”