I have spent ten happy years in Green Bay. I know I will miss the city, the team, but most of all, my friends.
Sincerely,
Vince Lombardi
That morning Olejniczak called a meeting of the executive board across the river in the downtown law office of Fred Trowbridge Sr. on the fifth floor of the Bellin Building. Ole and Bourguignon were there, both realtors, along with lawyer Trowbridge, Press-Gazette editor John Torinus, H. C. Prange’s executive Jerry Atkinson, industrialist Les Kelly and steel salesman and former Packers great Tony Canadeo, the Gray Ghost. Ole had received news that Edward Bennett Williams had scheduled a news conference for one o’clock that afternoon (noon Green Bay time), but he felt several matters still needed to be resolved before the Packers could release Lombardi from his contract. The local press corps learned about the meeting and began a vigil outside Trowbridge’s office. Ole stuck his head out at one point and said somewhat obliquely, “The matter is under consideration.” Trowbridge emerged later to instruct his secretary to place a call to Commissioner Rozelle, a request that stirred more curiosity among the sportswriters, whose number was increasing by the hour as more arrived from Milwaukee and Chicago.
After returning from lunch, Olejniczak announced that he doubted anything would be resolved that day. His discussions with Rozelle had achieved the desired result, forcing Williams to delay any announcement from Washington until the issues in Green Bay had been settled. Just then the elevator door down the hall from Trowbridge’s office opened and out stepped Lombardi, his cheeks rosy from the near-zero temperature outside. He spent less than an hour in the room with Ole and the directors, then came out and held an impromptu press conference in the hallway, jumping the gun on his once and future bosses. “I might as well say it,” he began, unable to repress a smile. He said that he had asked the Packers to release him from his contract so that he could accept “a position as executive officer and coach—with equity—with the Washington Redskins.” He would be executive vice president of the Redskins, in “complete charge,” even though Williams would retain his title as president.
Someone asked him whether he worried that he might be risking his reputation by getting back into coaching after achieving such legendary status during his first round of coaching in Green Bay. “Reputation, schweputation,” he said with a thunderous laugh, then turned and walked toward the waiting elevator.
Nothing definitive happened on Tuesday. Lombardi returned to New York in the afternoon, this time to accept the Jack Mara sportsman of the year award from the Catholic Youth Organization. Williams waited anxiously in Washington, embarrassed that twice already he had had to postpone the press conference at which he could lay claim to bringing in the legendary coach. Olejniczak spent the day taking a census of his contentious forty-five-member board of directors and determined that an emergency meeting of the full board was needed to answer all the concerns.
They convened at 6:10 on Wednesday evening at the Forum Supper Club, in a room the Bilotti brothers had transformed into a Lombardi shrine, with a vast mural on the wall depicting St. Vince between the Roman Coliseum and Lambeau Field. Ten years earlier, in the last emergency session of this same group, directors had convened in the Italian Room of the Hotel Northland and argued vehemently about whether to hire Lombardi. Now they were in the Lombardi Room, debating about how to let him go—an unforgettable decade seemingly gone in an instant. Some directors were furious that Williams had never contacted Olejniczak to ask for permission to talk to Lombardi, but rather had gone through Rozelle. Others pointed out that Lombardi was not only breaking his contract but defying it, since one paragraph in the agreement stated that he could not coach any team other than the Packers for five years. They told Ole that he should demand heavy compensation from Williams and the Redskins, perhaps top draft choices for the next two years.
The discussion raged for three hours, and when it was over, Ole got in his car and drove across the lot to Lambeau, where he met with reporters inside the team dressing room. He sat under the locker of Chuck Mercein, hero of the Ice Bowl. He was uncomfortable and sweating, running a finger under his tight collar. His socks drooped, revealing his bare ankles. He was tired and distraught and almost incoherent. Yet this was Dominic Olejniczak’s finest hour, a moment when he showed a humility and grace that ennobled him as much as the man he was praising. He said that there had been much discussion at the Forum about getting compensation from the Redskins, but in the end he could not put a price tag on greatness. “Very seriously, I think if anyone would have offered me fifteen players on any one club for Vince Lombardi, I would have turned him down,” he said. “If I had been offered a million dollars for Vince Lombardi, I would have turned it down. I would not cheapen this deal by measuring his worth to us in dollars or in a couple of players.”
Word of Lombardi’s departure curdled like sour milk in some parts of America’s Dairyland. For all the recognition of what he had brought to Wisconsin, there was an underlying feeling of being jilted. Fans who once saw Lombardi as the symbol of loyalty and discipline now whispered that he was as greedy as anyone else. It was impossible for him to leave without appearing hypocritical. He had railed against Jim Taylor and any player who dared play out his option, he had tried to stop Bill Austin from leaving for another assistant coaching position, he had blasted the players union for splitting player from coach and putting money before team, and now he was breaking a contract, abandoning a struggling team, drawn away by nothing nobler than the scent of more power and money.
“It is true that our hero has treated us rather shabbily at the end. Vince Lombardi has gone off, without asking us about it, and made himself a deal in a foreign land to the east. He has cast us aside, rather roughly at that,” wrote Glenn Miller, sports editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. “It is probably true that our former idol has been crafty, calculating, even a little deceitful with us.”
“He didn’t leave the city with a very good taste,” said Paul Mazzoleni, the service station operator who had greeted Lombardi as a paisano a decade earlier. Howie Blindauer, a leading Packers fan and member of Martha’s Coffee Club, was so angry at Lombardi that he slapped a lien on his Sunset Circle house and demanded immediate payment of an overdue $500 air-conditioning bill. When Lombardi finally paid it, after a shouting match in his office, Blindauer proudly refused to cash the check. “You couldn’t blame Lombardi for leaving, but people sure did,” said Lois Bourguignon. “Some people thought he was terrible. They directed some anger at me, a few of the women, because I was close to Marie. They complained that Vince left this washed-up team and handed it over to Phil.”
Lombardi realized that many members of the Packers board were angrier than they showed in public, and he warned some of his assistants that they might take the brunt of that frustration. He told Pat Peppler that he had suggested to the board that they split up the coaching and general manager’s duties again and make Peppler the general manager. “But I haven’t done you any favor,” Peppler recalled Lombardi saying to him. “They aren’t going to pay any attention to what I’ve said. They’re mad at me.” (Soon after Lombardi left, his prediction was proved right; both jobs went to Bengtson.)
During a drive to the airport Lombardi had a long “heart-to-heart” talk with Chuck Lane, his young publicist, warning him “who to look out for in Green Bay.” There was more contention between the board and him than anyone could see on the outside, Lombardi said. Even as directors enjoyed the prestige his winning ways brought to Green Bay, they resented him for stripping away their power, and now they would move quickly to regain it. “He told me that it was a very, very political organization and that Bourguignon and Canadeo would now be virtually isolated by other members of the executive committee, whose power would grow,” Lane recalled. “And he was right on the money.”
Even the Press-Gazette, traditionally loyal to the head man, offered a hint of criticism in its farewell editorial, noting that “there are those who felt that his
participation in civic affairs could have been broader.” Lee Remmel, who had covered the breadth of Lombardi’s Green Bay era for the paper, wrote that it was human nature for the average fan to feel some resentment, but argued that “a calmer appraisal suggests another approach. Admittedly, he has prospered greatly, both artistically and financially, since coming here. But, by the same token, Green Bay has been fortunate to have had a man of his unique talents for as long as it has.” There were more huzzahs in the press. “In saying goodbye, we may feel free at last to call the great man Vince,” the Milwaukee Journal offered humbly, while the Chicago Tribune promoted him on a larger stage, declaring: “If Lombardi can repeat the miracle of Green Bay, there is only one place left for him to go. You guessed it: the White House.”
Lombardi was obsessing again, but not in that direction. He was returning to football. For several weeks Al Treml, the team film coordinator, had been following up on his request to duplicate the composite films of spliced footage they had compiled over the years. Lombardi had used the composites for teaching his style of football: one composite went back to Hornung and Taylor running the trademark sweep, again and again, behind Kramer and Thurston; another showed traps and off-tackle runs, another short-yardage situations, another his favorite pass plays. Now Treml knew why Lombardi wanted them. He would take his greatest hits to Washington to show to his new team. Lombardi made another football request when he called in Bart Starr to explain his decision to leave. “He wanted all my game notes,” Starr said later. “All my team game plans for the teams we’d played over the years. I had my own detailed notes, in folders, filed by teams in a cabinet, and I gave them to him and he copied them all and sent them back. It was the nicest tribute he ever paid me.”
PERHAPS HE HAD BEEN LEAVING, slowly, for a year, but in the end it did not seem like a long goodbye. There was a farewell party at the office. The secretaries ordered cake and coffee. Not many send-off jokes, nor much talking at all. Ten years of brilliance gone in a flash. As Lombardi often told everyone in his speeches, all of the color, and all of the glamour, and all of the excitement, and all of the rings, and all of the rewards were now limited to memory. He had promised that the will to excel and the will to win would endure in Green Bay, but there was a sense that he was taking that will with him, leaving behind only an overwhelming sense of loss. Good luck in Washington, someone would say, then more silence. “I gotta get out of here,” he said to Ruth McKloskey at one point, his eyes brimming with tears. Bart Starr stopped by and handed him a handwritten note of thanks.
The shoutings, encouragements, inspirational messages, and vindictive assault on mistakes transcended the walls of our dressing rooms but in the privacy of those same rooms to have known the bigger man, kneeling in tearful prayer with his players, after both triumph and defeat, was a strengthening experience that only your squads can ever fully appreciate. From one of those kids who became a poised, confident, unrelenting man come his heartfelt thanks and best wishes for even greater heights for his Coach.
McKloskey gave Lombardi a perpetual calendar. He promised to keep it forever, and then he left.
A few days later Vernon Biever, the team photographer, drove up from his home in Port Washington to take pictures. McKloskey let him inside Lombardi’s office for the first and only time. The nameplate was still on the door: MR. LOMBARDI. Framed photographs and awards sat on the desk, others had been packed in boxes. Biever felt excited to be in the office even though there was little to shoot. As he aimed his camera around the room, he realized that he was documenting not just the desk of a winner but also an aura of irreplaceable loss. No one else could fill this room, Biever thought to himself, clicking away at the emptiness. There would never be another Lombardi.
27
Taking Charge in Washington
WASHINGTON, AT LAST. The patron saint of American competition and success had finally reached a town where winners were everything. After napping for two hours in a Mayflower Hotel suite and attending a prayer breakfast on Capitol Hill, he arrived at his new job on Connecticut Avenue a few blocks north of the White House at ten o’clock and immediately snapped into his routine. This was what Edward Bennett Williams had hired him for, what people were expecting of him, what he knew how to do better than any politician here, including Richard Nixon, who had been sworn in as president a few weeks earlier. Vince Lombardi was taking charge.
His title was executive vice president of the Washington Redskins, but his function was boss. Just as he had done in Green Bay ten years earlier, he began by rearranging furniture and personnel. The big office that had belonged to Williams was now his. Pictures were coming off the walls and into a box marked EBW. “Why don’t you go back to your law practice?” Lombardi told Williams, half jokingly, and the proud lawyer took it in good humor. He was still president, but had abandoned any pretense of running the club, something that was hard to imagine him doing for anyone but his beloved Lombardi. The very idea that he had landed “the Coach!” was said to make Williams quiver with boyish excitement.
One was the son of an Irish night watchman, the other of an Italian butcher, and now here they were, Williams and Lombardi, strolling down the sidewalk to lunch in the nation’s capital, and it seemed as though they sucked up all the power in the city as they walked by. The noontime crowd turned and stared at Lombardi as he waited for the walk light at the corner of Connecticut and L. Inside Duke Zeibert’s, the regular table up front awaited Williams and his guest. Red meat, martinis, sports pictures on the wall, ephemeral clatter of boasting, dealing, lying, all suspended momentarily as patrons gawked and then pushed back their chairs for a standing ovation, like the one Grant received from victory-starved Washingtonians in 1864. After lunch the pair went to the Sheraton-Carlton, marching through the bright lights and television cables to the front of two hundred cameramen and reporters in the Chandelier Room. Over at the White House, President Nixon had just finished a press conference, but that was a mere warmup act for this announcement of the coming of Lombardi. “Gentlemen,” the coach said, after Williams had introduced him by calling this the proudest day of his life, “it is not true that I can walk across the Potomac. Not even when it is frozen.”
Perhaps not, but who was listening? Washington was agog over its new leader and the prospect of a football revival. The Redskins had not won a championship since 1942 and seemed in worse shape than even lowly Green Bay had been when Lombardi took control there a decade earlier. Four unsuccessful Redskins coaches had come and gone through a dozen straight seasons without a winning record, from Joe Kuharich (26—32—2) to Mike Nixon (4—18—2) to Bill McPeak (21—46—3) to Otto Graham (17—22—3). If Graham, once a great quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, was not as ineffectual as Scooter McLean, Lombardi’s predecessor at Green Bay, he suffered from some of the same unfortunate perceptions. Nice guy, not a leader. Players called him Toot (Otto, inside out). During his final losing season, they once took bets before practice on how many times he would slap his clipboard, a nervous habit, and they chattered and cheered with every slap. He never knew what his men were cheering about, that they were making fun of him, and the deception took on a touch of pathos when he told the press afterwards that he was encouraged by the team spirit that day. Goodbye, Toot.
The fact that the home team was a loser did not seem to diminish the sports fascination of Washington’s power elite. Earl Warren and Richard Nixon, the departing chief justice and arriving president, might have had nothing else in common by that point in their careers, but both still read the sports section first. Football meant a lot to Washington even then, and Lombardi meant more; not just as a coach but as what Williams called the philosopher king, someone who knew what he believed in and could get things done. David Broder of the Post offered a similar assessment. “The Lombardi administration seems certain to revolutionize life in official Washington,” he wrote. “For one thing, he is dedicated to winning. He defines happiness as the achievement of one’s objectives. This
is radical doctrine in a government and a city where most jobs depend on seeing that no problem is ever really solved.” It was “bad luck for Mr. Nixon,” Broder said, that “fate has made him only a bit player in this momentous drama, but the Lombardi era has begun.”
THE MOVE to Washington was as much for Marie’s well-being as for Vince’s restoration. She had braved ten snowy winters in Green Bay, and though she had tried to put the best public face on it she dearly missed the East Coast and metropolitan life. During the previous year, after her husband retired to the front office, she had longed for the action of being a coach’s wife as much as he had yearned to return to the sideline. Her occasional overuse of alcohol and prescription drugs to numb her pain had become more frequent and alarming to her family. “I’ve got to get her out of here,” Vince had said one winter’s day in Green Bay when she had drunk too much at a game. Now he had kept his word, got her out of there, with the promise of a new life and new home. The outside world knew none of this internal trauma. In social settings Marie seemed optimistic and vibrant, and in her first public comments in Washington she sounded as certain of her role as her husband was. “I feel sorry for the women who have to find their niche in life, and can’t,” she said. “I never wanted to be anything but be married to Vin.”
The Lombardis stayed in Suite 675 at the Mayflower Hotel for most of February 1969. Vince walked to work from there, while Marie went out looking for a new house with Jackie Anderson, a longtime friend from Arlington who was the wife of Packer scout Lew Anderson, and Connie Boyle, a young real estate agent who worked for W. C. & A. N. Miller Company. On the afternoon of February 18, Marie and Jackie returned to the hotel in late afternoon after house-hunting and were surprised to find Lombardi already there. He had left the Redskins office early with what the newspapers the next day—reporting what the team publicist told them—called a heavy cold. “He said he didn’t feel good and needed a doctor,” said Anderson. She called her husband the scout, who quickly found Dr. Phil James at the Washington Clinic and asked him to make a house call at the Mayflower. From a few preliminary questions, Dr. James determined that this was far worse than a cold. Lombardi was feverish, urinating frequently, and had a sore lower back near the kidneys. Dr. James contacted a urologist at his clinic, Dr. Landon Bamfield, and asked him to come to the hotel.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 68