When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Vincent was called to the podium to read from Scripture to honor his father. Dave Robinson, the Packers linebacker, had lost his own father when he was young, and witnessing this seemed almost as traumatic. The tears started rolling down his cheeks. It was, he said, meaning it not as a sign of race consciousness but as honest feeling, the only time he ever cried at the funeral of a white man. Bob Skoronski, seated nearby, had the speeches of Lombardi resounding in his head, and realized that he would hear the coach’s voice for the rest of his life.

  Terence Cardinal Cooke delivered the eulogy, basing his homily on the Epistles of St. Paul. He knew that Lombardi was drawn to St. Paul because “it was not uncommon for St. Paul, faced with the mysteries of life and death and eternal life, to describe them in terms of an athletic contest with victory or defeat as the outcome and with a prize as the reward for the victors.” It was St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, who had given Coach Lombardi his favorite quote from Scripture, the one he kept repeating to his Packers during their final drive to football greatness in 1967, the saying that hung, framed and illuminated, on the wall of his den back home. “Brethren: Don’t you know that while all the runners in the stadium take part in the race, only one wins the prize. Run to win.”

  Epilogue

  WINNING IS NOT a sometime thing, it is an all the time thing, Vince Lombardi often said, and his wife believed it. Marie believed almost all of his maxims at least as much as he did. Believing in the Coach was a matter of survival for her, even now that he was long dead. That explains why she was following his advice here in the solitude of her oceanside condominium and practicing a speech until she got it right.

  “Oh, yecch!” she said to herself with smoky disdain. She turned the tape recorder off again. This was her third rehearsal. It had gone smoothly until the end, when she momentarily lost her train of thought. If she wanted to do it right when it counted, at the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton, she had to perfect it here first. This one was important to her: the introduction of Jimmy Taylor, the roughneck fullback, first of their boys, the Green Bay Packers of the 1960s, to be immortalized in bronze alongside her husband. She searched for descriptive words and memories, revising and reciting over and over again. She even used that refrain in the speech, quoting her husband: You do what you do best, again and again and again.

  She turned the tape recorder on for another take:

  Thank you. This is my third trip to what is known as football’s greatest weekend. I’m thrilled and I’m honored to be here. About six weeks ago, I wasn’t certain that I was going to be here, because I was in the hospital having a nerve block on my face. And it’s a terrible thing because it numbs one whole side of your face. And your mouth doesn’t work too well. What’s worse for a woman than your mouth doesn’t work? If I seem nervous or I seem to slur my words a little bit, please bear with me. Now, this thing shattered me pretty badly, and I wasn’t sure I could be here, as much as I really wanted to do this for Jimmy. So I called my son in Seattle and said, “Vincent, you better call Jimmy and tell him I can’t go to Canton, because I can’t speak.” And he said, “All right, Mother, if that’s what you want.”

  An hour later I called him back and I said, “Don’t call Jimmy.” Because a big VOICE up there said to me, “You better be in Canton and you better do a good job.” So here I am, and I better do a good job because if I don’t he’ll probably trade me. And I suspect that I am pinch-hitting for that Italian with the big voice who can’t be here. So I’ll try to do a good job.

  This was the summer of 1976, six years after his death, and the Italian with the big voice was still telling Marie Lombardi what to do. It seemed that she lived in another world. Her penthouse suite occupied the top floor of a three-story condo on Ocean Boulevard in Manalapan, just south of Palm Beach. The decor was Florida provincial, white on white, with splotches of color provided by her needlepoints. Looking out the sliding glass door from her living room, she watched cruise ships ease past and storms amass at sea. From the picture window of her back bedroom, facing west, she followed luxury yachts and cabin cruisers up and down the Intercoastal Waterway. Within easy reach were the exclusive shops of Worth Avenue, and she made a habit of strolling there; in almost every shop the clerks knew her name. Although it had become more difficult for her recently, because of illness and depression, she still attended the local charity balls and found her picture in the shiny sheet, Palm Beach’s celebrity paper. People thought she wanted to go out and that she hungered for publicity; she certainly seemed to long for the reflected fame that had been hers back in the days when she entered restaurants at the side of the dominant figure in pro football.

  But her daily outings and frequent visits from friends and relatives seemed to be diversions from her single great preoccupation. Lombardi was dead and she was not sure that left her with much reason to live. She retreated into what her family called her dream world, ushered into this ethereal realm by alcohol, pills, endless cups of coffee, black with sugar, at least one lighted Salem, often two going at once. Cigarettes were her best friends, she said, the room enshrouded in smoke, her ashtray looking like a sea anemone with its jumble of red lipstick-smeared butts. She sat there and let memories wash over her. With few appointments to keep, she set her clocks and watches on Lombardi time, ten minutes fast. She still wore the bracelet with the little gold footballs on it, counting the gridiron Hail Marys of her life with Vin: two from Fordham, two from St. Cecilia, two from Army, six from Green Bay. When the lights dimmed, his words still shone on the side wall, the biblical passage from Corinthians. Run to Win.

  In her single-mindedness, Marie was like the Coach during football season, when life was a distraction from the game. Now, to her, it often seemed that anything but Vince Lombardi was a distraction. When a friend asked if she ever thought of remarrying, she said only if she could find a man who wouldn’t mind staying up until two in the morning listening to her talk about Lombardi.

  She continued rehearsing the speech.

  Everybody knows about all those marvelous records that Jimmy Taylor made in Green Bay. Especially those five magnificent years when he gained a thousand yards. But I suspect that tonight, this weekend, this honor, will be the thing he will take most pride in because, you see, he is the first person of the great Packer players of what is popularly known as the Lombardi era to be enshrined in this great hall. And there’s something about being enshrined . . . it’s like being crowned or canonized . . . that is truly awesome. And I go up to the Hall of Fame and I cry. It occurs to me that the era of the sixties was professional football’s finest hour. And I think the Packer players of the sixties dominated professional football at its finest hour.

  Marie still watched pro football, well past its finest hour. She even took Vincent and Susan to a game at RFK a week after the funeral. Then, for a time, she became furious at the game that had consumed Lombardi. But she came back, and now she never missed a Sunday, watching all day long, two sets going at once, rooting for old Packers wherever they played. When the games were over she retreated back into her dream world, looking at the scrapbooks and listening to his voice on tape. Things have changed, she would say. There’s no one like Vince saying those things today. And she would bring out the tape of Lombardi’s own induction into the Hall, with young Vincent saying that his mother, more than any other, was responsible for the success that his father had, and Well Mara saying that Vince Lombardi did not invent professional football, and he did not found the NFL, “but he embellished them both to a degree never surpassed and seldom if ever equalled.” And then the tape of Richard Nixon at the Knights of Columbus convention at the Waldorf-Astoria saying that he called Lombardi days before he died and said, “Coach, you’ve had millions of people rooting for your teams, but there have never been so many rooting for you as there are tonight.”

  Then she would listen to the voice of Howard Cosell, narrating Lombardi’s biography on the night of his funeral:

  Vincent Thomas Lombardi
…

  Born ⅓ Nineteen thirteen …

  Principal occupation ⅓… FOOTball coach.

  Her favorite tapes were of Lombardi himself talking to his players and to business conventions. She memorized his speeches about pride, country, freedom and discipline, quoting him verbatim, incessantly—to the hairdresser, Joanne, who made house calls at the condo to give her a perm, to the attendants in the basement garage who parked and delivered her silver Lincoln Continental, to her daughter, Susan, who lived nearby and would visit with her three children, to friends from Green Bay and New Jersey, who stopped by during their winters in Florida. When not quoting Lombardi, she lionized him. It was her mission, she said, to protect his image. She said that he was bigger than life, that she was the envy of everyone who knew him, that she would walk behind him in airports and people would stare at him, but he never saw it, he was so terribly shy. That he was the symbol of everything this country once stood for and was now losing. That he would never die. And one more thing, something she inserted into the final draft of her Hall of Fame speech for Jimmy Taylor. She said it right near the end: “… And we have a need in our country today for heroes. We don’t have any heroes.”

  When her son, Vincent, visited and heard her talk about the Old Man that way, it perplexed him. Yes, his father was an extraordinary coach, amazing in many ways, inspiring and heroic. But he was also all too human. Couldn’t she remember what it was really like?

  “Come on, Mother,” he would say. “I … was … there!”

  •

  Marie Lombardi died of lung cancer in 1982. She was sixty-seven.

  Bart Starr, Forrest Gregg, Ray Nitschke, Herb Adderley, Willie Davis, Jim Ringo, Paul Hornung and Willie Wood joined Lombardi and Taylor in the Hall of Fame.

  Great stars that knew their days in fame’s bright sun.

  I hear them tramping to oblivion.

  Not the Green Bay Packers, perhaps, and certainly not the Old Man himself. There are no roadside markers pointing to his childhood home in Sheepshead Bay, nor to his gravesite at Mount Olivet in New Jersey. He is buried next to Marie and Matty and Harry in a modest plot on the back edge of the cemetery, his gray tombstone softened by shrubs on a gentle slope a few steps from a gravel road. Men from the Knights of Columbus attend to the grave, clearing away ice in winter and weeds in summer, and there are often a few weather-worn tokens of worship left behind: seashells with shiny pennies in them, miniature statues of the saints, a green and gold plastic helmet, a felt Packers flag. The remnants of Lombardi’s world are fading, yet his legend only grows in memory: the rugged and noble face, commanding voice, flashing teeth, primordial passion, unmatched commitment. In the end it is perhaps Vincent—who had been there—who gave him the highest honor. After years of working through the contradictory feelings that he had for his father, the son found his calling. He became a motivational speaker, using for his inspirational material the life and words of Vince Lombardi.

  Notes

  1: TATTOOS

  1. The ornamentation: Ints. Madeline Werner, Harold Lombardi, Joe Lombardi, Vincent H. Lombardi, Susan Lombardi, Clara Parvin. Also Clara Parvin and Michelle Walden photograph collections.

  2. Next door to the Lombardis: Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920—Population. Brooklyn. Enumeration District 114.

  3. As teenagers from Vietri: Municipal records, Vietri di Potenza, Italy.

  4. The union of Antonio and Laura:Ints. Madeline Werner, Clara Parvin, Dorothy Pennell, Harold Lombardi, Joe Lombardi, Anthony Izzo, Eddie Izzo, Jill Couch, Wallace Izzo, Richard Izzo. Also Twelfth Census of the United States. Schedule No. 1—Population. City of New York. Enumeration District 565.

  5. Large Italian families: Brooklyn Eagle, Sept. 26, 1924.

  6. Grandpa Antonio Izzo: Brooklyn Eagleand ints. Richard Izzo, Eddie Izzo, Anthony Izzo.

  7. His mother’s favorite picture:Ints. Joe Lombardi, Clara Parvin; Parvin photograph collection.

  8. “From the first contact on”: W. C. Heinz notes.

  9. There was in Harry: Ints. Joe Lombardi, Harold Lombardi, Madeline Werner.

  10. When a painful lesson: Ints. Joe Lombardi, Harold Lombardi, Vincent H. Lombardi, Madeline Werner, Clara Parvin.

  11. Every weekday morning: Ints. Joe Lombardi, Madeline Werner, Harold Lombardi,Lucy O’Brien.

  12. Cathedral Prep: Cathedral Annual, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932. The Gargoyle 1929-30, 1930-31, 1931-32. Also ints. Rev. Joe Gartner and Rev. Larry Ballweg.

  13. None of this meant much: Ints. Harold Lombardi, Joe Lombardi, Dorothy Pennell. Lombardi’s football career at St. Francis drawn largely from detailed notes of W. C. Heinz interviews with Lombardi and Cohane papers; The SanFran January, February, March and May 1932.

  2: FORDHAM ROAD

  1. The trip by public: Int. Richard Izzo. Also New York City subway map, 1934.

  2. Descriptions of student life at Fordham 1933-37 from interviews with Lombardi classmates Andrew Palau, Frank Mautte, Victor Del Guercio, Ray Walsh, Wellington Mara, Richard Healy, Emmitt Eaton, James Ambury, John Barris, Rev. Francis Culkin, James McCann, John J. Corcoran, Charles Capraro, Peter Purchia, Thomas Rohan, John Sparnicht, Lawrence Sperandei, Daniel Brannigan, James Brearton, Alvin Lucchi, Phillip Castellano, Edwin Hoysradt Jr., Robert L. Kelly, Orville Leddy, David Pflug, Edwin Quinn, Edward Schmidlein, Charles Schweickart, John Madigan. Also The Fordham Ram and Maroon yearbook, 1934 and 1937.

  3. It took only one day: Heinz notes and Cohane papers. Also ints. Andrew Palau, Frank Mautte, Richard Healy.

  4. At Lambeau’s suggestion: Cohane papers; Cohane’s Bypaths (p. 661), Rice’s Tumult: “The Rock of Notre Dame” (pp. 159-66), “The Coach and the Horsemen” (pp. 57-66); The Fordham Ram. Ints. Dom Principe, Andrew Palau, Frank Mautte, Richard Healy, John Druze; Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, directed by Rex Ingram (1921).

  5. The next weekend: Accounts of VL sophomore season drawn from voluminous Fordham Research Library archives scrapbook with clippings of The Ram, New York newspapers, Fordham game programs. Also Maroon yearbook, Heinz notes, Cohane papers.

  6. Lombardi’s experience with women: Ints. Dorothy Pennell, Madeline Lombardi, Harold Lombardi, Joe Lombardi, Richard Izzo, Susan Lombardi, Vincent H. Lombardi, Jill Lombardi, Andrew Palau, Richard Healy, Frank Mautte. Also Susan Lombardi papers, Vincent H. Lombardi papers.

  7. The year 1935 in the Bronx: Fordham Research Library archives scrapbooks.

  8. The professionalization: The New York Times, Nov. 29, 1935.

  9. His junior year: Cohane papers, Heinz notes, Fordham scrapbook; ints. Andrew Palau, Frank Mautte, John Druze, Richard Healy.

  3: WE DO, OR DIE

  1. Reston appraised this: Fordham scrapbook.

  2. On the eve: Account of 1936 season and creation of Seven Blocks of Granite drawn from Heinz notes; Cohane papers (including original copy of Grantland Rice’s “Old Gibraltar”); Fordham scrapbook (including originals of Damon Runyon’s game coverage in New York American); Fordham game programs; 1937 Maroon yearbook; ints. Andrew Palau, Frank Mautte, John Druze, Richard Healy, Dom Principe, Fred Russell, Joe Lombardi, Wellington Mara, Ray Walsh, Victor Del Guercio, Rev. Francis Culkin.

  3. That the image was a wall: Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Noonday, 1973), p. 88.

  4. From his playing days: Cohane papers.

  5. His highest grades: O’Brien, in Vince, p. 37, was first to obtain Lombardi’s grades through request of Vincent H. Lombardi and discern that his academic prowess had been exaggerated, as was his later performance in law school.

  6. The values and ideas: The Ram, Jan. 18, 1929; Cox, Integral Education and Necessary Inbreeding, 1934; Cox, “The Catholic Church and Birth Control,” American Medicine,1935; Cox, “Radio Chapel Address,” The Living God, 1950. Cox, Liberty: Its Use and Abuse, 1937. Also ints. Wellington Mara, Victor Del Guercio, Frank Mautte, John Barris, Ray Walsh, Charles Capraro, Peter Purchia, Lawrence Sperandei, Ray Schroth, James McCann.

  7. The class of 1937: The Ninet
y-Second Annual Commencement Program, June 16, 1937; ints. Frank Mautte, Andrew Palau, Ray Walsh, Wellington Mara, Victor Del Guercio, Joe Lombardi.

  4: SAINTS

  1. This life inevitably: Ints. Richard Izzo, Harold Lombardi, Madeline Werner, Andrew Palau. Also Heinz notes and O’Brien for account of law school grades.

  2. One of Palau’s first: Int. Andrew Palau.

  3. When he took the job: Heinz notes. Ints. Andrew Palau, Father Tim Moore.

  4. The Saints lost: Accounts of Saints games from St. Celilia archive; scrapbooks of Joe McPartland and Andrew Palau, with clippings from Englewood Press and The Record, Heinz notes, Cohane papers. Also ints. Andrew Palau, Joe McPartland, Father Guy McPartland, John DeGasperis, Al Quilici, Don Crane, Joe Lombardi, Dorothy Bachmann.

  5. In his first experience: Ints. Andrew Palau, Mickey Corcoran, Father Tim Moore.

  6. Late that first season: The Record, March 1, 1939. A sidebar to the game story featured the headline: “Referee Paid, It’s a Swindle.” Also ints. Mickey Corcoran, Joe Lombardi, Father Tim Moore.

  7. A date was soon set: Andrew Palau, Harold Lombardi,Madeline Werner, Father Tim Moore. Vincent H. Lombardi papers; Susan Lombardi papers; letter from Father Nemecek to Marie Lombardi.

  8. Bored and stuck: Ints. Margaret Palau, Andrew Palau, Harold Lombardi, Madeline Werner.