Lombardi had acquired a new group of golfing partners in Washington. He played several courses, including Burning Tree and the Army-Navy Club, but most of his rounds were at Congressional Country Club in Potomac. One of his frequent partners there was Ralph Guglielmi, a former quarterback at Notre Dame (preceding Hornung), who played nine seasons in the NFL. They played for two-dollar nassaus, which Lombardi fought to win with the same determination he would put into a Super Bowl. During one round Guglielmi told Lombardi that a friend of his in the computer business in Dayton had asked whether he could persuade the coach to come out to Ohio in mid-June for a speech to salesmen. “Goddamn it, Ralph, that’s the time I’m having camp,” Lombardi said. “You oughta know better than asking me then.” Guglielmi said he had already told his friend that there was not much chance of it, but that he had to ask.
A few days later Lombardi called Guglielmi. “What about that thing out there, the banquet?” he began. “Would it help you out any if I did it?” That was the generous side of Lombardi; he had felt guilty about not helping a friend. “Tell them I want five thousand, and you come with me and you get fifteen hundred,” he went on. “You emcee the ceremonies. I don’t want any stranger introducing me.” Guglielmi readily consented.
Lombardi had felt tired and constipated for several days before the trip. In preparation for the season, he had tried running up the hill behind his Stanmore Drive home, and the simple exercise exhausted him. He went to Dayton nonetheless, catching a plane with Guglielmi late on the Sunday afternoon of June 21. They arrived in time to have dinner at an Italian restaurant, and by Guglielmi’s account Lombardi ordered a huge meal. The sales seminar, sponsored by the SCM-Allied-Egry company, was held the next afternoon. Guglielmi did his job, making the introductions, then sat dumbstruck as Lombardi took the podium and began by announcing that both he and Ralph would donate their honoraria to the local boys’ club. “I say to myself, You sonofabitch!” Guglielmi recalled. Then he sat spellbound with the rest of the audience as the coach gave them the full Lombardi, all seven blocks of his standard speech—football, competition, perfection, authority, discipline, leadership and character. He even had a new introduction explaining what he meant by the well-known phrase “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”:
You know being a part of a football team is no different than being a part of any other organization—being a part of any army, being a part of a political party. The objective is to win—the objective is to beat the other guy. Some may think this is a little bit hard and a little bit cruel. I don’t think so. I do think that is the reality of life. I do think that men are competitive, and the more competitive the business the more competitive the men. They know the rules when they get into the game, they know the objective when they get into the game—and the objective is to win: fairly, squarely, decently, win by the rules, but still win. In truth, gentlemen, I’ve never really known a successful man who deep in his heart did not appreciate the discipline it takes to win.
When the speech was over Lombardi received a standing ovation, then fielded questions, most of which, to his apparent relief, were about football. He said that Bart Starr was the greatest quarterback he had ever seen, but that Sonny Jurgensen was a better athlete. “Jurgensen is so important in my plans that if he were to leave, I’d follow him the next morning.” He dismissed Kansas City coach Hank Stram’s claim that the era of rollout quarterbacks was coming. Quarterbacks were too special to be endangered that way, he said. In fact, Lombardi insisted, there were no new trends in football that impressed him. “If there were, I’d put ’em in.” In taking the last question, Lombardi said that this would be his final nonfootball speech of the year. “There are 365 days in a year, and I get at least five hundred invitations to speak,” he said. “I don’t take many, but I think this will be all.”
At the hotel late that night, Lombardi placed a call to Guglielmi’s room. “C’mon down, Ralph,” he said. “I’m having some problems I have to talk to you about.” When Lombardi opened the door, Guglielmi could see that he was in pain. “He said, ‘I haven’t taken a crap in three days,’ ” Guglielmi later recalled. “I said, ‘Well, that’s not normal, Coach. But you’ve been kind of on the go a bit. You had a big meal last night. Maybe you’re just constipated.’ And he said, ‘Can you go out and get me a Fleet enema?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Coach, it’s eleven at night. But I’ll try.’ ” Guglielmi went down to the front desk, learned the location of a late-night pharmacy, called a cab and returned to Lombardi’s room with three Fleet enemas.
The next morning, at breakfast, Lombardi said that he did not feel like eating. Did the enemas work? No, he said. He had ended up taking all three of them, but no luck.
The flight to Washington was to leave shortly after noon. Lombardi and Guglielmi reached the terminal just as an airport bar was opening. “He says, ‘I want to stop in here,’ ” Guglielmi recalled. “So we stop. A waitress comes over. Lombardi says, ‘Give me a double vodka on the rocks, please. You want anything, Ralph?’ I get a glass of tomato juice. Now he gets one, two, three double vodkas. It’s too early to drink, I’m thinking. Lombardi isn’t an imbiber. He likes a scotch or two. I don’t know why he’s doing this, but you don’t question the Coach. When we get back to the airport, his driver is there to pick him up and take him home. The next thing I know, he’s in the hospital.”
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL.
Admission Date: June 24, 1970. Time: 2:30 P.M.
Name: Lombardi, Vincent T.
Room Number: 6316
Rate: &80
Occupation: Football Coach
He returned from Dayton on the twenty-third and was in the hospital by the next afternoon. In between, he had told Dr. Resta, the Redskins team physician, that he had been unable to defecate for several days, and Resta sent him to Georgetown after a barium enema revealed a lesion in his left colon. Marie was in the room with her husband when he received his first visitor, Father Edward Bunn, S.J., Georgetown’s chancellor. The two men had known each other for more than three decades, since Lombardi was an undergraduate at Fordham and Bunn was a professor there who taught him philosophy and psychology. “You know, Father, I’ve never been in a hospital before in my life,” Lombardi said, discounting the weeks he spent in the Fordham infirmary after a football injury. “I didn’t even bring any extra clothes with me.” Father Bunn said he would pray for him and began a daily vigil at his old student’s bedside.
Later that afternoon, Dr. Robert Coffey, a specialist in colon surgery, conducted a preliminary examination that found Lombardi in “no distress.” His prostate was slightly enlarged, according to the medical report, and he had tenderness and fullness in his lower left abdomen, a small internal hemorrhoid, but no rectal mass. But further tests the next morning brought grim news. The biopsy from a proctoscopy revealed anaplastic carcinoma in the rectal area of his colon—a fast-growing malignant cancer in which the cells barely resemble their normal appearance.
Marie had suspected it long before anyone else, and had confessed to a haunting fear that he had cancer in the letter she had written to Vincent the previous November. Now here was the reality. She tried to keep the news from some people. When she called Susan in Chicago Heights, it was only to say that he was in the hospital, but there was nothing much to worry about, it might be a hernia. She passed along the same message to Vince’s parents in Sheepshead Bay, afraid that the truth might kill Harry, the tough Old Five by Five who had plugged on past several heart attacks but might not survive bad news about his oldest son. Vincent had been on vacation with his family in Wisconsin that week and discovered that his father was in the hospital from a news report while watching television in their motel room. He immediately called his mother, who said she had been frantically looking for him. Why? he wondered. The report made it sound as if his father had the flu. “It’s worse than that,” Marie told him. “You better come on out.”
Exploratory abdominal surgery was performed
on Lombardi at eight-thirty on that Saturday morning, June 27. During a two-hour and fifteen-minute operation, a team of surgeons led by Dr. Coffey removed a two-foot section of the rectosigmoid colon, the part of the colon closest to the rectum, where they had discovered a polypoid tumor. Tests revealed that the tumor was malignant, just as the earlier biopsy had indicated. But at Marie’s request, when Dr. Coffey met the press later that day, he left the opposite impression. He said that preliminary findings indicated the tumor was nonmalignant. They would not know for certain until tests came back in four days, he said, but most similar tumors turned out to be benign. Decades later this sort of deception would be rare and controversial, but at the time it was common and accepted.
Edward Bennett Williams continued the public deception, telling reporters that Lombardi’s prognosis appeared “excellent” and that he would “resume normal activities” within four weeks. While Williams and Marie both knew that Lombardi’s condition was worse than the public diagnosis, they did have some reason to hope for the best. The doctors had told them that the cancer had not spread to the liver or lymph nodes. Losing part of his colon could not stop Lombardi, Williams told friends. “Vince has so much guts they could take out fifty feet and he’d still have more than the rest of us.”
Four days after the operation a hospital spokesman said there would be no update on Lombardi’s condition. The test results were in, but they would not be made public. “Members of Lombardi’s family have instructed us that they have given out all the information they want released on the case,” the spokesman said. This inevitably created an air of mystery around the ailing coach. The Honor America Day celebration on July 4 came and went with Lombardi still in the hospital. On July 6 he missed his annual golf outing with the sporting press, this one held at Congressional. Williams was there, pounded with questions about who would run the Redskins training camp when it opened in two weeks. Would there be an interim coach? Williams offered an even more optimistic timetable than his earlier back-in-four-weeks prediction, now insisting that Lombardi would return in time for the first day of camp, July 19.
On the day Williams made that optimistic statement, Lombardi’s temperature spiked to 102 because of an infection in his surgical incision, but it appeared to be only a minor setback. By July 10 he was ready for release. The wound was considered “healed and strong” and his temperature was back to normal. He was sent home with instructions to follow a low residue diet and to take Darvon and chloral hydrate for pain and sleep. “At that point,” said Vincent, “we thought the prospects seemed good.”
Back at home, Lombardi felt alternately restless and fatigued. He was supposed to be recuperating, but he seemed to be losing weight and strength every day. His brother Joe came down to stay that first weekend. For all of Joe’s life, Vince had been the quintessential older brother, dictating, demanding, expecting, challenging. Now he seemed helpless. “I remember tying his shoelaces for him,” Joe said later. “He would sit on the bed and I would go up and tie his shoes. Then we’d go for a walk around the property a little bit, and he’d talk.” They discussed everything: wives, children, regrets and the Washington Redskins. “I have a big job to do here,” Vince said, listing what it would take to lift the Redskins up to a championship-caliber team. But Joe thought Vince knew he would never get that chance. “It was never said, but I got that feeling.”
His outlook seemed to change depending on the day or the company he was with. When Wellington and Ann Mara came down from New York for a two-day visit, Lombardi was tired but optimistic. He had to excuse himself after dinner to rest, but he also told Mara with a determined voice that he intended to go to training camp. “I’m gonna beat this!” he said. He and Marie drove downtown for lunch at Duke’s with Ed Williams and Ben Bradlee, and if Lombardi was strong enough to get in a spat with Marie and tell her to shut up, part of their routine patter, he showed little other energy. “He was very quiet,” Bradlee recalled. “I remember him appearing to be uncomfortable, and not well.” The next visitor at Stanmore Drive was Jack Koeppler, who came out from Green Bay with his son Kevin. Koeppler’s first impression was that his old friend “looked smaller, his face had gotten smaller.” At one point Marie took Kevin to the trophy room in the basement to show him Vince’s mementos, and after they had left the room Lombardi told Koeppler that he was dying. “I said, ‘Ah, you’ve fought through a lot worse,’ and he said, ‘No, I know I’m dying.’ I asked, ‘How do you know?’ and he said there were three doctors working on him and he found the weakest of the three and asked him how soon it would be before he could resume coaching. And the guy says, ‘I don’t think you’ll be coaching again.’ Vince knew. He knew.”
As concerned as Lombardi was about his health, he was also troubled by the game he loved. For the second time in three years the preseason was being delayed by a confrontation between players and owners over salary and pension issues. The NFL and AFL Players Associations had merged that year under the leadership of a new executive director, Ed Garvey. When the players threatened to strike, management preempted them by locking them out, opening the camps only to rookies. The day before Redskins camp was to open, Lombardi summoned his coaching staff out to Stanmore Drive. It was clear that he would not make it to Carlisle then, if ever. “Well, boys, Bill’s going to run training camp,” he said, referring to Bill Austin. “He’s been with me the longest. He knows how to run it. Operate for him as you would for me.” He never uttered the word “cancer,” but as they were all leaving, he said obliquely, “You can all make your own opinion about this.”
The labor dispute infuriated him so much that he decided to travel to New York on July 21 for a meeting of NFL club owners. Marie was worried about his fragile health and tried to talk him out of it, as did Dr. Coffey, but Lombardi was insistent. Marie ended up accompanying him on the trip, and asked Joe to meet them at the airport and drive them to the midtown session. It all jumbled together for Lombardi now: long hair, rebellion, student protests, anarchy, unions, strikes—all of it to him reflected what Father Cox had been talking about back at Fordham a third of a century earlier, the abuse of freedom. The only answer was to be fair but firm, he told the owners. He did not believe in football strikes, but he hated the idea of opening up camps to veterans who might cross the picket line, an act that he insisted would destroy team unity. He was equally repulsed by the notion of giving in to the union. It was up to the owners, he said, to maintain “the structure and the discipline” of pro football. “Gentlemen, you must not give away your game to a bunch of twenty-two-year-old kids.” Redskins aide David Slattery entered the room as Lombardi was speaking those lines. “His voice was almost a whisper. He was fading out on them, and I think he finished before he intended to,” Slattery said. “He looked absolutely terrible, like death warmed over. He told me he had to get back to Washington immediately.”
The trip home was a disaster. On the ride to the airport Lombardi became dizzy and his heart started beating rapidly. Marie was afraid that he was having a heart attack. (It was later diagnosed as paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, an arrhythmia caused when the heartbeat begins at an abnormal place.) They were in a taxi, with no one to help them. Marie lugged their two bags through the terminal, her husband leaning on her as they walked. There was a long line at the ticket counter. She pleaded with the airlines clerk to let Vin on the plane ahead of everyone else so that he could relax, but she was rebuffed. The stewardesses seemed rude, unconcerned with her plight. Marie got to her seat and started crying. When they arrived at Washington National, Lombardi was struggling to carry his own bag when “a nice young man” asked if he could help. “Vin never would ask for help,” Marie said later. “But this time, he said, ‘Help me, please.’ I almost cried right there.”
When he got home, doctors treated his rapid heartbeat with digitalis. The next day he asked Leroy Washington, the chauffeur he shared with Ed Williams, to drive him to Georgetown—not to reenter the hospital, but to watch his veteran players, who
were working out on their own at Kehoe Field. These were his boys. Even if he didn’t like them as a union, he loved them as individuals and as a team. And there they were, paying silent tribute to the Old Man by going through his conditioning drills, even without him hovering over them and driving them to do more, push harder, get those feet moving. Pat Richter, the player representative, was leading the grass drills when he looked up and saw in the distance a frail figure struggling to get out of a black sedan. Who was that man, now leaning against the car? My God, Richter said to himself, that’s Coach Lombardi.
There was a game the next day, the Redskins rookies against the Colts rookies at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Lombardi could not stay away, and sat in the owner’s enclosure with Marie and Edward Bennett Williams. He visited the locker room after the game, shuffling slowly amid the players, offering quiet words of encouragement. Just standing there for a few minutes tired him out, so he found a training table and leaned against it. George Dickson approached him looking for a scouting report. “Coach, anything you want to tell me about the running backs?” Lombardi was a shadow of his old self, but his football mind was still keen. He stared at Dickson and said bluntly, “You haven’t got any running backs.”
• •
ON JULY 27, exactly one month from the day of his first operation, Lombardi was readmitted to Georgetown and immediately sent back into surgery. His preoperation symptoms pointed to trouble. He had not had a bowel movement in three days, and an X-ray showed a partial bowel obstruction. This time the exploratory surgery found that the cancer had spread massively to his liver, peritoneum and lymph nodes. Dr. Coffey was stunned, calling it one of the most voracious cancers he had ever seen. There was nothing they could do except sew him back up, bombard him with cobalt irradiation and chemotherapy, and pray. He was a terminal case. Ockie Krueger would never forget Marie’s wail of despair when Dr. Coffey delivered the fatal prognosis.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 72