June 2, 2026 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Vince Lombardi transformed the Green Bay Packers into a dynasty and helped turn football into a symbol of discipline, leadership, and the American experience. But behind the championships, the famous speeches, and the legendary Green Bay sweep was a far more complicated man shaped by faith, family, ambition, and struggle.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss discusses his landmark biography, When Pride Still Mattered, and explores the full life of Vince Lombardi: his Brooklyn upbringing, Catholic faith, coaching philosophy, devotion to excellence, complicated family life, and the leadership style that changed the NFL forever.
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
Excellence must be pursued, It must be wooed with all
of one's might and every bit of effort that we have.
And each day there's a new encounter. Each week there's
a new challenge. All of the display and all of
the noise, and all of the glamour, and all of
the color, and all of the excitements, and all of
the rings and all of the money, these are the
(00:34):
things that really linger only in the memory. But the spirit,
the will to excel, the will to win, these are
the things that endure.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
And you're listening to the late Vince Lombardi. Can we
celebrate great American iconic figures? And there was no bigger
one in the mid to late twentieth century than Vince Lombardi.
He affected everything. And we love talking to great writers,
and we're going to talk right now with David Miranis,
who wrote the book on Vince Lombardi When Pride Still mattered.
David's the associate editor of the Washington Post, and David,
(01:06):
thanks so.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Much for joining us pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Let's start in the beginning Vince Lombardi's dad, What did
he what did he do for a living?
Speaker 4 (01:15):
And describe the world.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
Oh Man young ARTI's father, Harry, was a butcher. The
family lived in Sheep said day in Brooklyn. Harry would
commute over to the lower West Side of Manhattan, where
he had a butcher shop. One of his nicknames was
Old five by five, which described about how he looked.
(01:39):
He was short and squat and very strong and sort
of inculcated into his sons that there was no such
thing as pain. He was tattooed, you know, before his time.
I guess you know, he'd fit in with a modern
day athlete in that sense. But my favorite tattoos were
(02:01):
on his knuckles. On one he and his knuckles spelled
w O r K work And on the other hand,
the knuckles spelled play p l A Y. And that
too sort of reflected some part of his son's mythology.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Indeed, and here's a quote from you, the trinity of
Insulambardi's early life was religion, family, and sports. It would
be true for his entire life, wouldn't it be?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Damide? Oh?
Speaker 5 (02:28):
Absolutely yeah, in various orders. But he was a very
religious man, Catholic family Italian Catholics. At one point, Vince
himself thought he was going to be a priest and
he always sort of carried that inside him for the
rest of his life. And he was trained at Fordham
by the Jesuits, and the Jesuit philosophy was a very
(02:50):
important part of his coaching philosophy. But family was really everything.
His mother's family were the Izzo's and she was one
of thirteen Izo kids, and that was you know, all
kinds of cousins and uncles and aunts, and that family
(03:11):
really is the environment that Vince Lombardi grew up in,
something that he never was able to recreate with his
own nuclear family, as we'll talk about, but was able
to recreate with his team, the Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
And by the way, thirteen kids. People are listening like shocked, right, David.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
But Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic and just lots of families
eight and twelve.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Was well, it was pretty normal, wasn't it.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
Yeah, No, it was not out of the ordinary for
an Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic family of that era.
Thezos were pretty well renowned in sheep said Bay because
there were so many of them and they had various
professions in that place. But no, it was not shocking
(03:56):
that there would be thirteen of them.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Now you wrote quote the church was not some distant
institution to be visited once a week, but part of
the rhythm of daily life.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Talk about that.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Vince Lombardy as an adult went to Mass every morning
when he lived, you know where he lived at Fordham.
As a student, he was trained by the Jesuits. Then
he was a teacher and coach at Saint Cecilia High
School in New Jersey, where his best friends were there,
(04:26):
the fathers there and the nuns. When he was at
green Bay, he went to Mass every morning at Saint
Willibron's in Green Bay, which was a pretty heavily Catholic place.
And finally, I love this story. Late, you know late,
his last move in his career was to Washington, d C.
He of course wanted to go to Mass every morning,
(04:47):
but the Mass that he wanted to attend was held
at something like nine thirty or ten, and he wanted
to get to work before then. So he literally knocked
on the door of the priest and told him to
move his Mass up so.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
That Lombardy to get to work.
Speaker 5 (05:04):
That one didn't work. He couldn't tell God what to do,
but he could tell everybody else.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
In the end, there was a part of me that
as I read your book, he almost wanted to submit
to something higher than him.
Speaker 5 (05:15):
That was about the only place in his life where
that was true. Yes, but I think that people have
various levels of commitment to faith and religion, and I
think was in so Lombardi. It was authentic and deep,
and he didn't need that. He also, it should be
said that he went to Mass every day because he
knew he was a flawed human being, yep. And he
(05:36):
knew that he sometimes had anger management problems, not that
he was violent, but just that he accepted, you know,
with his words, and he wanted to try to control that,
and he regretted it, and that it's one of the
reasons he went to Mass to sort of re penance
in that sense.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Now let me hit you with another quote, and this
is a Lombardi quote in your book from the first
contact on football fascinated me. Contact controlled violence, a game
with a mission was to hit someone harder, punish him,
knees up, elbows out, challenge your body, mind and spirit,
exhaust yourself, and seek redemption through fatigue. Such were the
(06:14):
rewards an Altar boy found in his favorite game, David
suffering pain redemption. It sounds like football and religion and intertwined.
Speaker 5 (06:23):
Yeah, they certainly were with Vince Lombardi. There's one great
irony or paradox to that, which is that Lombardy was
kind of a whimp. He had a very low pain
threshold himself. I mean, he was a tough human being,
he had a strong spirit. But as I'm write, and
I believe this is true with many coaches and politicians
(06:46):
and leaders in general, they see their own weaknesses and
understand them and try to eliminate them in others which
they can't eliminate in themselves. So the whole notion of
fatigue though, and we're giving your hardest and leaving it
all on the field, is something the Lombardy did personally,
(07:08):
and that he truly believed in the reward of that
hard work, which is part of the Jesuit philosophy.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
And you're listening to David Moranis talk about the Jesuit
influence on Vince Slambardes's life. More from the author of
When Pride Still Mattered. The story of Vincelambarti continues here
on our American story LiH Habib here and I'd like
to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on
(07:35):
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our podcasts.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Any story you missed or want to hear.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Again can be found there daily Again, please subscribe to
the Our American Stories podcast anywhere you get your podcasts.
It helps us keep these great American stories coming. And
(08:10):
we continue here with our American Stories and with David
Moranis and his terrific book When Pride Still Mattered, the
story of Vince Lombardi.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
People would never believe it now, but New York City
at one point in time, David was a college football
power talk about.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
The impact, absolutely talk about.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
The impact of those Jesuits and Fordham on young Vince.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
Well. I think that you can trace everything about Lombardy's
coaching philosophy back to the Jesuits. The key one, in
my mind is the notion of freedom through discipline, which
I think explains Lombardi better than anything else and is
a Jesuit notion, which is that only through the hard
(08:57):
work and repetition and commitment that comprises discipline can you
eventually develop the freedom in your life, you know, for
the Jesuits to his free will. For Lombardi, if you
transferred it to his football teams, it was that once
(09:18):
they learned they disciplined themselves through that hard work to
understand what they were doing, it slowed the game down
for them and made them have a leg up on
all of their opponents. And that was the freedom that
his hard work gave to his players.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
It's so true. I'm going to read again from the book.
All the detailed preparations resulted not in a mass of
confusing statistics and plans, but in the opposite, pairing away
the extraneous, reducing and refining until all that was left
was what was needed for that game against the team.
Exactly your point there, David.
Speaker 5 (09:52):
Yeah. And I think that, along with the Jesuits, the
other major philosophy that affected Lombardi from West Point, where
he was an assistant coach under the great coach Red Blake,
who really had that same philosophy of making things simple
by being a good teacher. It doesn't mean that things
(10:13):
are dumbed down for the players, but just that there's
so much extraneous stuff that teachers put into something and
the ability to make it understandable to every player, and
to simplify something until it has a more powerful effect
to something. He also learned from Red Blake.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Indeed, in fact, you wrote quote, in many ways the
philosophy at West Point was similar to the way of
life that Lombardi had learned earlier at Fordham under the Jesuits.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
Absolutely, you know, it was a perfect storm. You know,
our leaders born or made. I think there's a combination
of the two. But I think that the making of
Vince Lombardi, with the ingredients he already had, came from
the Jesuits in West Point in a way that made
(11:05):
him unique.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Now, his first job out of Fordham, his first coaching job,
was in a little hamlet in northern New Jersey called Engwood.
I grew up not far from there, and Saint cecily
Is High School. I'm going to quote again from the book.
When he took the job at Saints, Lombardi said later
his frame of mind was that he wanted to be
a teacher more than a coach. And for some people
who really knew him and you did as you studied him,
(11:27):
that was true all the way through, wasn't it.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
Oh? Totally, yes, he was a teacher coach. Everything that
helped him with the Green Bay Packers was refined first
at Little Saint Cecilia. He taught a lot of different classes,
including chemistry, and again, what he tried to do was
make it. He wouldn't go on in the course work
(11:49):
until every kid in the class understood it. And he
had that ability to make complicated things seem understandable, comprehensible,
so that you know later when he first got to
the Green Bay Packers, Bart Starr, the quarterback, spent one
hour since Lombardi had rushed to a telephone to call
his wife to say that he never experienced anything like
(12:13):
this and they were going to start winning because of
the way that Lombardi, who was alignment by the way,
could explain what it was like to be a quarterback.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
You know, this is extraordinary. We're going to play the
clip from bart Starr in one second. But what's interesting
in when Lombardi and we're just jumping ahead of the story.
We'll return back to Saint Cecilia's. When Lombardi gets to
Green Bay, the team had been one in ten the
year before one intent, so he's now meeting the players.
He gives this PEP talk and within an hour, as
(12:41):
you said, here's bart Starr talking about that.
Speaker 6 (12:44):
I always remember our first meeting with him. It was
dynamite and I called my wife, Cherry, and I said, honey,
we're going to begin to win. That's all I said
to her, Honey, we're going to begin to win. And
his very first meeting, you could see how well hair
he was, and then how he approached what he was
teaching at that session that day. You could you could
(13:07):
sense an outstanding teacher and a builder that he was,
and that's exactly what we were. He just brought us
right up quickly.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
It's extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Eight years he spent at Saint Cecilia doing just that,
eight years, David.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
That really mattered, didn't it.
Speaker 5 (13:24):
In a couple of ways. What is the the that
he was ready when he finally got his chance. Secondly,
another way, all of that time eight years at Saint
Cecilia's and then and then several other assistant coaching jobs,
you know, twenty years basically in the in the wilderness
before he got his break all made it so that
(13:46):
he had this enormous overriding will to succeed when he
finally did get his chance.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
West Point is the next gig.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Talk about this man, Red Blake, because we all need
mentors in life, and sometimes we're just lucky enough to
stumble on one.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
Well, Blake was a superior football coach. He had great
organizational skills. He also was a terrific teacher, and his
motto was you have to pay the price and the
notion that you get out of life what you put
into it. And it was part of the learning tree
(14:21):
for Vince Lombardi.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And what's interesting is this is back when West Point,
and it's again hard to believe, was a national powerhouse
in football championship teams.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
Yeah, they when Lombardi got there, they'd come through a
couple of amazing seasons where they were the number one
team in the country. One of the other threads of
my book, however, is the fallacy of the innocent past,
where you know, we're always longing for something golden in
the past and tend to romanticize it for that reason.
(14:52):
There are many valid reasons to do that, but you
can't look at it through rose colored glasses. So you know,
during lombardi time at West Point, there was a cheating
scandal among the football players. You know, human nature doesn't
really change. The culture around it does, but the temptations
(15:12):
of life are there, you know, in every generation. And
so at West Point it was, you know, a cheating
scandal that almost brought Red Blake to his knees. They
had an amazing recovery, but it was a very difficult
couple of years.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
And there's an honor code there. So in a place
like West Point, it's even just it's worse than big
state university a cheating scandal, right.
Speaker 5 (15:35):
I mean, yes, it's sort of more discombobulating that those
young men would be involved in that. It wasn't the
first time and it wasn't the last time though, that
one of the academies had a scandal like that, and
partly because of the pressures of the honor codes.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
You met, and that they're young men in a very
tough circumstance and that nothing changes there. One scene in
the book really stood out for me, David. It was
of Lombardi taking game film from the West Point game
and bringing it to New York City for an important
graduate who lived in the Waldorf Astoria.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
Who was that That was General Douglas MacArthur, who by
that time was backed from his controversial period as a
general Army general, but still revered West Point. He had
once been the superintendent at West Point. He and Read
Blake were very close and so one of assistant coach
(16:28):
Lombardi's assignments was to go down to New York and
get the film developed and stop off at MacArthur's penthouse
suite in the Waldorf Astory Hotel and show him the
game films. MacArthur was always following in great detail, starting
lineups of the West Point of the Army football team,
(16:50):
their schedule, their preseason drills. He wanted to know everything
about every player on that team, and one of so
Lombardi got the spend time with him showing him game
film during the seasons.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
That had to be a real learning experience for him
at a minimum. Lombardy and MacArthur, by the way, both
believed David and the value of competitive sports to shape
and mold men's character.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Talk about that, oh definitely, yeah. No.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
MacArthur was very much into the notion that you know,
mind and body went together and that sports were essential
to building character.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
And you've been listening to David moranis his book When
Pride Still Mattered.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
It's an older book.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
But what we do here on this show is we
go back and we let you hear the stories that
are some of the best ever told, and bring them
to you again. David moranis When Pride Still Mattered. The
story of Inslambardi continues here on our American Stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American Stories and with author David Morenis,
who wrote When Pride Still Mannered quite a while ago.
But we called him up because well, no one knows
more about Vince Lombardi. Let's continue where we last left off.
Let's talk about his next job, because it may have
been his most important. He was an assistant coach with
(18:28):
Wellington Mara's New York Giants. He was the offensive coach
and a young Tom Landry. Dallas, of course, would ultimately
get Tom Landry he was the defensive coach.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Nice, nice start.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
You could say that that was the best combination of
assistant coaches in FL history, so much so that the
head coach, Jim Lee Howell, they used to joke that
is only made as simons to make sure the football's
had enough of air in them. And then he turned
everything over to Landry and Lombardy, who were yin and Yang.
(19:02):
Just opposites of personality and coaching styles. Landry was cool, methodical,
almost almost an automaton, and the way he wanted his
players to act and the way he coached, and Lombardi
was much more emotional, much more you know, high and
(19:26):
low in terms of how he would deal with the players.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Just complete opposites, indeed, and by the way, he had
to learn something new, he had to adapt Lombardi. These
were grown men, guys like Charlie Connolly had served in war.
Talk about how Lombardi adapted from teaching young people to
teaching grown men.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
Well, you're right. You know, his first training camp with
the Giants, he did the offensive. Players really didn't take
to him at first. Frank Gifford, the great halfback, and
Charlie Connor, the old quarterback. They thought he was sort
of amateurish and you know, trying to sort of a raw,
(20:06):
raw college guy. So it took him a while to
adjust to the pro style. But that's a very important
point about Lombardi which many people don't quite understand. He
has the reputation of sort of my way or the highway,
being inflexible. He wasn't like that at all. Really, He
was very disciplined and tough, but he was also a
(20:27):
master psychologist who who would study his players and figure
out how to get the best out of all of
them and learn and change and adapt. And that's exactly
what he started doing when he became an assistant coach
at the Giants.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
And all teachers in the end have to do that
because culture changes, people change, and you just can't. You
can't treat people as robots. They're people.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
That's exactly right, and that's why when people ask me
whether Lombardi could succeed today, I say yes. He would
learn how to get the best out of players today
just as he did in his era, and he would
adapt to that without changing his fundamental philosophy. And the
players would adapt to him because they realized that he
(21:10):
had their interest at heart and that he would help
them win.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Indeed, let's talk about the professional football experience then, because
it's not today. Baseball, boxing, even horse racing got more
coverage in newspapers.
Speaker 4 (21:23):
Pay was poor. In your book, you.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Talk about how players barely got paid for preseason games,
and many teams had no compensation plans for injured players.
But Lombardy was lucky to come into the league just
as all of that was beginning to change David. And
it didn't hurt that he was in a big media
market like New.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
York, No, it didn't.
Speaker 5 (21:42):
And it didn't hurt that the game had him as well.
And it sort of was a nice synergy between the
rise of professional football and the rise of Vince Lombardi.
So everything that he learned in New York, by the
time he got to Green Bay football, the NFL was
finally out from being a second class sport to being
(22:03):
the dominant sport that it would later become. And the
sport used Lombardi, and Lombardi used him in that rise, indeed.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
And so he ends up in a little hamlet in
the Midwest called green Bay and his poor wife, I
mean New York City, and it might as well have
been Alaska that he was going to as far as
his wife and family were concerned. We haven't talked much
about this thing called the marriage, and the wife had
drinking problems. Vince wasn't exactly a model husband in terms
(22:31):
of how he talked to his wife treated his wife,
and he was never there talk about that relationship and
what the wife did because she really tried to keep
Vince in New York.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
Yeah, well, you know, it's a difficult It's a love story,
but a very difficult and human and problematic one. Marie
was from New Jersey. She loved the East Coast. She
liked the clothing stores in Manhattan and just a whole
lifestyle there. And for her to go to the Little
Green Bay was just a utter culture shock. There was
(23:04):
a Broadway play that was made out of my book,
and the character that steals the show in the play
is Marie Lombardi, played by the great actress Judith Light.
The scene of them driving west for the first time
in rounding Chicago and then running into a snowstorm, it
was amazing to see Judith Light portray Marie in that
(23:26):
scene where she sees nothing but white ahead of her
and what that sort of represented to her. Vince Lombardi
was much better at creating a sense of family out
of his football team than he was out of his
nuclear family. His wife had a paradoxical situation where she
loved being Vince Lombardi's wife, and she grew to love
(23:48):
football and really understood him and the game in the
end quite well. And yet it was a very lonely
experience because he since was married to football as much
as more than her, and she did have a drinking problem,
and there were several moments in their lives in Green
(24:08):
Bay where things got pretty dicey. She was in the
hospital once for an overdose of drugs. Of pills, I'm sorry,
not drugs. And of course the relationship with Vince Junior
was equally difficult to imagine being carrying that name and
that bird.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
There's a book in that, David, The Sons of Great Men.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Maybe all yeah, I know there really is.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
There's a great scene in your book where Lombardi, the
new coach, gives his first impassion speech to the Green
Bay team that had just lost ten of eleven games.
He told them they were going to be the New
York Yankees of football. He told them that he would
relentlessly pursue victory, and anyone who didn't like it was
free to leave. After the speech, and I'm quoting from
your book, there was silence, the room empties. Lombardi approaches
(24:55):
veteran Max McGee. What did you think, Lombardi asked, well,
I'll tell you you got there attention. Coach McGee replied,
you know, I wasn't sure. Lombardi confided, everybody could have
just gotten up and walked out for all I knew.
It showed a tremendous vulnerability in Lombardy and in honesty.
And I think that is what really came out of
this book for me. What a human being he was.
Speaker 5 (25:16):
Oh absolutely, you know, you can try to create a
mythological creature as a saint, but it's it's the frailty
and humanity of someone who then goes on despite all
of that to achieve success that makes Lombardy the more
interesting character. And he did have those vulnerabilities and those uncertainties,
(25:39):
and they drove him as much as as his confidence
that he.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Was going to win indeed.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
And I love there's a video I don't know if
you've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
It's Lombardi in front of a chalkboard and he's outlining
the sweep.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
Oh yes, that's that's iconic.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
It's like a physics class. It's so intricate.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
And yet he mastered, his team mastered this play and
it became well, it became the iconic play of the
great American football team known as the Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 5 (26:07):
I love that the story of the sweep as much
as anything to describe Vince Lombardi, because on superficially it
seems simplistic. You know, the other teams would have all
of these fancy plays, and the Packers had this powers sweep,
the Green Bay Sweep, and other teams knew it was coming.
(26:27):
So why did it succeed. It's because Lombardi taught it
so well and so thoroughly and allowed freedom in the
discipline of that sweep, so that every player involved in
that sleep, whether they were a blocker or the runner,
knew about ten or twenty variables that they could use
on the sweep, depending on how the defense was reacting.
(26:51):
And they understood it so well that they were one
step ahead of the defense on that play. And that
was the freedom through discipline of Lombardi's philosophy, exemplified by
one play that seemed simple but actually was rendered simple
in its complexity.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
And you're listening to David moranis author of When Pride
Still Mattered, the seminal book in Understanding the life of
coach Vince Lombardi. More after these messages, this is our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(27:40):
with author David moranis Pool, a surprise winner and author
of When Pride Still Mattered. Let's pick up where we
last left off on the life of Vince Lombardi. Lombardi
had no room in his locker room or in the
entire city, it turns out, for racism. David talk about this.
Did some of it have to do with how how
Italians were treated in much of the country. He was
(28:02):
called names like Wop and Dago and Guinea.
Speaker 5 (28:06):
You know, it did certainly affect Lombardy. That That's not
to say that that was the only factor, because I
think there are other Italians who were discriminated against, or anybody.
You can react one of two ways. You can then
find somebody else to discriminate.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Against yourself, yep.
Speaker 5 (28:23):
Or you can take it as a learning lesson about
you know that we're all in the same boat. Lombardy
took it that way in the best possible way. When
he got to green Bay, you know, I think there
were three blacks in the whole town, and one was
the shoeshine man at the Northland Hotel, and the other
two were packers. He brought the first wave of great
(28:47):
Black athletes to green Bay, and one of the first
things he did was go to all the taverns in
Green Bay, or most of them, there's so many, and overwhelmed.
There as a tavern on every block, right. But he said,
if I hear that you're discriminating against any of my players,
you're off limits for all of them. And that had
a pretty profound effect. And that was the sort of
thing he did throughout his career. When they had preseason
(29:11):
games in the South. The first instance, they were in
New Orleans and the black players had to sleep somewhere else,
he said, we'll never allow this again, and he would
put the whole team up together at an army base
instead of having to deal with this with the Jim
Crow South. He was very strong on race, and all
(29:31):
of his black players from the day they first met
him to the day he died, revered him for that.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Yeah, in the military, we all know this about the military.
Long before there was integration talk, the first real cultural
institution in America that brought the races together was the military.
Speaker 5 (29:47):
David, Yeah, No, it's true. I mean too late. It
happened after World War Two basically, but the military and sports,
more than any other parts of American life, have become
true meritocracies, at least on the playing field or on
the field of battle. They did a lot, both of
(30:09):
those institutions to break the racial barriers of this country.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Let's talk about prayer. You said it was quote the
essence of Lombardi's religious practice in the constant of his
daily routine.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
His daily prayers were an effort to balance the tension
between his will to succeed and his desire to be good.
Speaker 5 (30:29):
You know, it's quite something that he saw that in
himself he might have the appearance of not being the
most self reflective human being, so obsessed did he seem
with prevailing, But in fact he did have that self awareness,
and it was the central part of his faith, of
his life of prayer was to try to find the
(30:52):
right balance, even if he couldn't do it outside of
the church. He understood the problem that he was dealing
with in his own frailty on that and that that
was what he spent a lot of You know, he
didn't pray to win. He prayed to be a better person.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
And in your chapter Trinity, his son talked about his dad,
and I'm going to quote from the son. Life was
a struggle for my dad. He knew he wasn't perfect.
He had a lot of habits that were far from perfect.
His strengths were his weaknesses and vice versa. He fought
it by taking that paradox to church. It went back
to the Jesuits always and the struggle between the shadow
(31:31):
self and the real self, your humanity and your divinity.
He saw that struggle clear my dad in concrete terms. Wow,
what a wise son, David.
Speaker 5 (31:42):
Isn't that something I know? I felt blessed when I
started this biography that Vince Lombardi's son was not perpetuating
a mythological sated creature as a father, but had a
clear eyed vision of him and it wasn't He didn't
hate his father. He loved his father, but he knew
(32:03):
his father's laws and he had suffered because of that
himself and spent a lot of time thinking about it,
so that by the time I approached this book, Vince
Junior was very open to letting an author sort of
see the reality and the complexity in the paradox of
his old.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Man and what father and son doesn't have this complicated
relationship and the honesty of this, the brutal honesty.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
It was absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 5 (32:26):
Oh, I agree. I mean, every father's son mother daught
a relationship has some complexity to it of one degree
or another. This one was a little more complex because
of the father's fame and his obsession and the son's
inability to break through and tell you know it was
almost too late. But that level of comprehension of Vince
(32:51):
Junior of what his father was dealing with is quite extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Lombardy would go on to win a World championship by
beating his old team, the New York Giants. And he
didn't just beat the Giants, Davy, he destroyed them. When
the score was thirty seven and nothing, he finally started
playing his subs and Lombardi called that title game the
biggest thrill.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Of his life.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
Well, you know, he probably thought that he was going
to be the coach of the New York Giants. That was,
you know, he was a New York kid, that was.
He liked he and Wellington Marrow with what to Fornham
in the same era. There are a lot of connections there.
He didn't get the job, and then by the time
he might have gotten it, he didn't want to leave again.
So beating the beating the New York Giants. I would
(33:36):
say that first thirty seven to nothing game was probably
the the most important of his career, along with the last,
along with the Ice Bowl.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
At the end, YEP, there was this great celebration at
the Elks Club in town and everyone was there after
this victory. Players too. You wrote this about Lombardi and
the men he coached. Quote as despotic and unfeeling as
he could sometimes seem on the practice field, the coach
had taught them how to win. He lifted their self image.
He challenged them to accomplish things that they had thought
(34:06):
were beyond their reach. I want to play you a clip.
It's of Jerry Kramer talking about coach. And this is
a guy talking, possibly David, twenty to thirty years after
this incident. Let's take a listen to Jerry Kramer.
Speaker 7 (34:19):
He jumped outside one time in a scrimmage and he
got in my face and he said.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Mister, the concentration period of a college student's five minutes
high school is three minutes.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
Kindergarten is thirty seconds. You don't even have that Somewhere's
that put you.
Speaker 7 (34:32):
Put me checking a shoe, shine, I go up in
the locker room, sitting there, chanting on my hand album
and looking at the floor, thinking I'm never going to
play for this guy. He came in the door. He
came across the room, slapped me on the back of
the neck and messed up my hair. He said, son,
one of these days you're going to be the best
guard in football. He turned around and walked away, And
(34:55):
that started my motor. With that comment, he allowed me
to think about being a great football player. And from
that point on, I worked my tail on. I gave
him everything I had. I had made a found impact
(35:18):
on my life.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
Then the key to Lombardy, which many coaches who think
there are many Lombardies don't understand, is that you have
to have that balance. Yes, you can be tough, but
you have to have the ability to know when to
when to show the love to your to your players
and that you really, you know, it's it's about them
(35:43):
and their ability to work together. And Lombardy had that.
There's some Lombardy wanna bees who just see the tough
part of it and don't see the love.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
Part of it.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, they don't see the softness either or the vulnerability.
And that's that's a considerable loss for them. The final
parting thoughts here once that Giants game wins. In my mind,
the Super Bowls were after thoughts. They were going to happen.
He had achieved all he'd achieved. What if it was
there something after it was all done that you thought
I should have put that in the book.
Speaker 5 (36:13):
I missed it, Boy, that's a great question. I missed
a couple of stories that I wished i'd gotten. One
was about Lionel Aldridge, the defensive end, an African American
who was in love with and married a white woman,
and there was a lot of pressure to prevent that
from happening, I believe it or not. In that era,
(36:36):
you know, we still had that level of racial bias,
and Lombardi stood up for Aldridge and said, you know,
we're human beings first, and don't feel any pressure for
me about that. It seems obvious now, but I wish
I'd had that story in my book because it was
one more level of Lombardy. I do have in the
book the fact that his brother Harold was gay, and
(36:59):
Lombardi was terrific on that issue, which still is not
something that professional athletes can deal with in a particularly
healthy way. Even today. But Lombardi made it clear on
all of his teams that if he found anybody discriminating
against someone because of their sexual orientation, they were off
the team.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
And as a Catholic, that had to be something. I mean,
he was actually practicing perfect Catholicism. He was loving on
the gay player.
Speaker 5 (37:26):
I love the way you put that because there's so
many different ways that people distort religion in Catholicism, and
he was applying the fundamental love of what faith should be.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
And you've been listening to David Morana's author of When
Pride Still Mattered. It's an older book, but pick it up.
If you haven't read it, you won't regret it. Go
to Amazon or the usual suspects. The story of Insulambarty,
told by no one better than David Morana, is here
on our Mayor Rican Stories h
Excellence must be pursued, It must be wooed with all
of one's might and every bit of effort that we have.
And each day there's a new encounter. Each week there's
a new challenge. All of the display and all of
the noise, and all of the glamour, and all of
the color, and all of the excitements, and all of
the rings and all of the money, these are the
(00:34):
things that really linger only in the memory. But the spirit,
the will to excel, the will to win, these are
the things that endure.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
And you're listening to the late Vince Lombardi. Can we
celebrate great American iconic figures? And there was no bigger
one in the mid to late twentieth century than Vince Lombardi.
He affected everything. And we love talking to great writers,
and we're going to talk right now with David Miranis,
who wrote the book on Vince Lombardi When Pride Still mattered.
David's the associate editor of the Washington Post, and David,
(01:06):
thanks so.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Much for joining us pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Let's start in the beginning Vince Lombardi's dad, What did
he what did he do for a living?
Speaker 4 (01:15):
And describe the world.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
Oh Man young ARTI's father, Harry, was a butcher. The
family lived in Sheep said day in Brooklyn. Harry would
commute over to the lower West Side of Manhattan, where
he had a butcher shop. One of his nicknames was
Old five by five, which described about how he looked.
(01:39):
He was short and squat and very strong and sort
of inculcated into his sons that there was no such
thing as pain. He was tattooed, you know, before his time.
I guess you know, he'd fit in with a modern
day athlete in that sense. But my favorite tattoos were
(02:01):
on his knuckles. On one he and his knuckles spelled
w O r K work And on the other hand,
the knuckles spelled play p l A Y. And that
too sort of reflected some part of his son's mythology.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Indeed, and here's a quote from you, the trinity of
Insulambardi's early life was religion, family, and sports. It would
be true for his entire life, wouldn't it be?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Damide? Oh?
Speaker 5 (02:28):
Absolutely yeah, in various orders. But he was a very
religious man, Catholic family Italian Catholics. At one point, Vince
himself thought he was going to be a priest and
he always sort of carried that inside him for the
rest of his life. And he was trained at Fordham
by the Jesuits, and the Jesuit philosophy was a very
(02:50):
important part of his coaching philosophy. But family was really everything.
His mother's family were the Izzo's and she was one
of thirteen Izo kids, and that was you know, all
kinds of cousins and uncles and aunts, and that family
(03:11):
really is the environment that Vince Lombardi grew up in,
something that he never was able to recreate with his
own nuclear family, as we'll talk about, but was able
to recreate with his team, the Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
And by the way, thirteen kids. People are listening like shocked, right, David.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
But Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic and just lots of families
eight and twelve.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Was well, it was pretty normal, wasn't it.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
Yeah, No, it was not out of the ordinary for
an Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic family of that era.
Thezos were pretty well renowned in sheep said Bay because
there were so many of them and they had various
professions in that place. But no, it was not shocking
(03:56):
that there would be thirteen of them.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Now you wrote quote the church was not some distant
institution to be visited once a week, but part of
the rhythm of daily life.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Talk about that.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Vince Lombardy as an adult went to Mass every morning
when he lived, you know where he lived at Fordham.
As a student, he was trained by the Jesuits. Then
he was a teacher and coach at Saint Cecilia High
School in New Jersey, where his best friends were there,
(04:26):
the fathers there and the nuns. When he was at
green Bay, he went to Mass every morning at Saint
Willibron's in Green Bay, which was a pretty heavily Catholic place.
And finally, I love this story. Late, you know late,
his last move in his career was to Washington, d C.
He of course wanted to go to Mass every morning,
(04:47):
but the Mass that he wanted to attend was held
at something like nine thirty or ten, and he wanted
to get to work before then. So he literally knocked
on the door of the priest and told him to
move his Mass up so.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
That Lombardy to get to work.
Speaker 5 (05:04):
That one didn't work. He couldn't tell God what to do,
but he could tell everybody else.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
In the end, there was a part of me that
as I read your book, he almost wanted to submit
to something higher than him.
Speaker 5 (05:15):
That was about the only place in his life where
that was true. Yes, but I think that people have
various levels of commitment to faith and religion, and I
think was in so Lombardi. It was authentic and deep,
and he didn't need that. He also, it should be
said that he went to Mass every day because he
knew he was a flawed human being, yep. And he
(05:36):
knew that he sometimes had anger management problems, not that
he was violent, but just that he accepted, you know,
with his words, and he wanted to try to control that,
and he regretted it, and that it's one of the
reasons he went to Mass to sort of re penance
in that sense.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Now let me hit you with another quote, and this
is a Lombardi quote in your book from the first
contact on football fascinated me. Contact controlled violence, a game
with a mission was to hit someone harder, punish him,
knees up, elbows out, challenge your body, mind and spirit,
exhaust yourself, and seek redemption through fatigue. Such were the
(06:14):
rewards an Altar boy found in his favorite game, David
suffering pain redemption. It sounds like football and religion and intertwined.
Speaker 5 (06:23):
Yeah, they certainly were with Vince Lombardi. There's one great
irony or paradox to that, which is that Lombardy was
kind of a whimp. He had a very low pain
threshold himself. I mean, he was a tough human being,
he had a strong spirit. But as I'm write, and
I believe this is true with many coaches and politicians
(06:46):
and leaders in general, they see their own weaknesses and
understand them and try to eliminate them in others which
they can't eliminate in themselves. So the whole notion of
fatigue though, and we're giving your hardest and leaving it
all on the field, is something the Lombardy did personally,
(07:08):
and that he truly believed in the reward of that
hard work, which is part of the Jesuit philosophy.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
And you're listening to David Moranis talk about the Jesuit
influence on Vince Slambardes's life. More from the author of
When Pride Still Mattered. The story of Vincelambarti continues here
on our American story LiH Habib here and I'd like
to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on
(07:35):
Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get
our podcasts.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Any story you missed or want to hear.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Again can be found there daily Again, please subscribe to
the Our American Stories podcast anywhere you get your podcasts.
It helps us keep these great American stories coming. And
(08:10):
we continue here with our American Stories and with David
Moranis and his terrific book When Pride Still Mattered, the
story of Vince Lombardi.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
People would never believe it now, but New York City
at one point in time, David was a college football
power talk about.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
The impact, absolutely talk about.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
The impact of those Jesuits and Fordham on young Vince.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
Well. I think that you can trace everything about Lombardy's
coaching philosophy back to the Jesuits. The key one, in
my mind is the notion of freedom through discipline, which
I think explains Lombardi better than anything else and is
a Jesuit notion, which is that only through the hard
(08:57):
work and repetition and commitment that comprises discipline can you
eventually develop the freedom in your life, you know, for
the Jesuits to his free will. For Lombardi, if you
transferred it to his football teams, it was that once
(09:18):
they learned they disciplined themselves through that hard work to
understand what they were doing, it slowed the game down
for them and made them have a leg up on
all of their opponents. And that was the freedom that
his hard work gave to his players.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
It's so true. I'm going to read again from the book.
All the detailed preparations resulted not in a mass of
confusing statistics and plans, but in the opposite, pairing away
the extraneous, reducing and refining until all that was left
was what was needed for that game against the team.
Exactly your point there, David.
Speaker 5 (09:52):
Yeah. And I think that, along with the Jesuits, the
other major philosophy that affected Lombardi from West Point, where
he was an assistant coach under the great coach Red Blake,
who really had that same philosophy of making things simple
by being a good teacher. It doesn't mean that things
(10:13):
are dumbed down for the players, but just that there's
so much extraneous stuff that teachers put into something and
the ability to make it understandable to every player, and
to simplify something until it has a more powerful effect
to something. He also learned from Red Blake.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Indeed, in fact, you wrote quote, in many ways the
philosophy at West Point was similar to the way of
life that Lombardi had learned earlier at Fordham under the Jesuits.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
Absolutely, you know, it was a perfect storm. You know,
our leaders born or made. I think there's a combination
of the two. But I think that the making of
Vince Lombardi, with the ingredients he already had, came from
the Jesuits in West Point in a way that made
(11:05):
him unique.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Now, his first job out of Fordham, his first coaching job,
was in a little hamlet in northern New Jersey called Engwood.
I grew up not far from there, and Saint cecily
Is High School. I'm going to quote again from the book.
When he took the job at Saints, Lombardi said later
his frame of mind was that he wanted to be
a teacher more than a coach. And for some people
who really knew him and you did as you studied him,
(11:27):
that was true all the way through, wasn't it.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
Oh? Totally, yes, he was a teacher coach. Everything that
helped him with the Green Bay Packers was refined first
at Little Saint Cecilia. He taught a lot of different classes,
including chemistry, and again, what he tried to do was
make it. He wouldn't go on in the course work
(11:49):
until every kid in the class understood it. And he
had that ability to make complicated things seem understandable, comprehensible,
so that you know later when he first got to
the Green Bay Packers, Bart Starr, the quarterback, spent one
hour since Lombardi had rushed to a telephone to call
his wife to say that he never experienced anything like
(12:13):
this and they were going to start winning because of
the way that Lombardi, who was alignment by the way,
could explain what it was like to be a quarterback.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
You know, this is extraordinary. We're going to play the
clip from bart Starr in one second. But what's interesting
in when Lombardi and we're just jumping ahead of the story.
We'll return back to Saint Cecilia's. When Lombardi gets to
Green Bay, the team had been one in ten the
year before one intent, so he's now meeting the players.
He gives this PEP talk and within an hour, as
(12:41):
you said, here's bart Starr talking about that.
Speaker 6 (12:44):
I always remember our first meeting with him. It was
dynamite and I called my wife, Cherry, and I said, honey,
we're going to begin to win. That's all I said
to her, Honey, we're going to begin to win. And
his very first meeting, you could see how well hair
he was, and then how he approached what he was
teaching at that session that day. You could you could
(13:07):
sense an outstanding teacher and a builder that he was,
and that's exactly what we were. He just brought us
right up quickly.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
It's extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Eight years he spent at Saint Cecilia doing just that,
eight years, David.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
That really mattered, didn't it.
Speaker 5 (13:24):
In a couple of ways. What is the the that
he was ready when he finally got his chance. Secondly,
another way, all of that time eight years at Saint
Cecilia's and then and then several other assistant coaching jobs,
you know, twenty years basically in the in the wilderness
before he got his break all made it so that
(13:46):
he had this enormous overriding will to succeed when he
finally did get his chance.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
West Point is the next gig.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Talk about this man, Red Blake, because we all need
mentors in life, and sometimes we're just lucky enough to
stumble on one.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
Well, Blake was a superior football coach. He had great
organizational skills. He also was a terrific teacher, and his
motto was you have to pay the price and the
notion that you get out of life what you put
into it. And it was part of the learning tree
(14:21):
for Vince Lombardi.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And what's interesting is this is back when West Point,
and it's again hard to believe, was a national powerhouse
in football championship teams.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
Yeah, they when Lombardi got there, they'd come through a
couple of amazing seasons where they were the number one
team in the country. One of the other threads of
my book, however, is the fallacy of the innocent past,
where you know, we're always longing for something golden in
the past and tend to romanticize it for that reason.
(14:52):
There are many valid reasons to do that, but you
can't look at it through rose colored glasses. So you know,
during lombardi time at West Point, there was a cheating
scandal among the football players. You know, human nature doesn't
really change. The culture around it does, but the temptations
(15:12):
of life are there, you know, in every generation. And
so at West Point it was, you know, a cheating
scandal that almost brought Red Blake to his knees. They
had an amazing recovery, but it was a very difficult
couple of years.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
And there's an honor code there. So in a place
like West Point, it's even just it's worse than big
state university a cheating scandal, right.
Speaker 5 (15:35):
I mean, yes, it's sort of more discombobulating that those
young men would be involved in that. It wasn't the
first time and it wasn't the last time though, that
one of the academies had a scandal like that, and
partly because of the pressures of the honor codes.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
You met, and that they're young men in a very
tough circumstance and that nothing changes there. One scene in
the book really stood out for me, David. It was
of Lombardi taking game film from the West Point game
and bringing it to New York City for an important
graduate who lived in the Waldorf Astoria.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
Who was that That was General Douglas MacArthur, who by
that time was backed from his controversial period as a
general Army general, but still revered West Point. He had
once been the superintendent at West Point. He and Read
Blake were very close and so one of assistant coach
(16:28):
Lombardi's assignments was to go down to New York and
get the film developed and stop off at MacArthur's penthouse
suite in the Waldorf Astory Hotel and show him the
game films. MacArthur was always following in great detail, starting
lineups of the West Point of the Army football team,
(16:50):
their schedule, their preseason drills. He wanted to know everything
about every player on that team, and one of so
Lombardi got the spend time with him showing him game
film during the seasons.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
That had to be a real learning experience for him
at a minimum. Lombardy and MacArthur, by the way, both
believed David and the value of competitive sports to shape
and mold men's character.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Talk about that, oh definitely, yeah. No.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
MacArthur was very much into the notion that you know,
mind and body went together and that sports were essential
to building character.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
And you've been listening to David moranis his book When
Pride Still Mattered.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
It's an older book.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
But what we do here on this show is we
go back and we let you hear the stories that
are some of the best ever told, and bring them
to you again. David moranis When Pride Still Mattered. The
story of Inslambardi continues here on our American Stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American Stories and with author David Morenis,
who wrote When Pride Still Mannered quite a while ago.
But we called him up because well, no one knows
more about Vince Lombardi. Let's continue where we last left off.
Let's talk about his next job, because it may have
been his most important. He was an assistant coach with
(18:28):
Wellington Mara's New York Giants. He was the offensive coach
and a young Tom Landry. Dallas, of course, would ultimately
get Tom Landry he was the defensive coach.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Nice, nice start.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
You could say that that was the best combination of
assistant coaches in FL history, so much so that the
head coach, Jim Lee Howell, they used to joke that
is only made as simons to make sure the football's
had enough of air in them. And then he turned
everything over to Landry and Lombardy, who were yin and Yang.
(19:02):
Just opposites of personality and coaching styles. Landry was cool, methodical,
almost almost an automaton, and the way he wanted his
players to act and the way he coached, and Lombardi
was much more emotional, much more you know, high and
(19:26):
low in terms of how he would deal with the players.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Just complete opposites, indeed, and by the way, he had
to learn something new, he had to adapt Lombardi. These
were grown men, guys like Charlie Connolly had served in war.
Talk about how Lombardi adapted from teaching young people to
teaching grown men.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
Well, you're right. You know, his first training camp with
the Giants, he did the offensive. Players really didn't take
to him at first. Frank Gifford, the great halfback, and
Charlie Connor, the old quarterback. They thought he was sort
of amateurish and you know, trying to sort of a raw,
(20:06):
raw college guy. So it took him a while to
adjust to the pro style. But that's a very important
point about Lombardi which many people don't quite understand. He
has the reputation of sort of my way or the highway,
being inflexible. He wasn't like that at all. Really, He
was very disciplined and tough, but he was also a
(20:27):
master psychologist who who would study his players and figure
out how to get the best out of all of
them and learn and change and adapt. And that's exactly
what he started doing when he became an assistant coach
at the Giants.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
And all teachers in the end have to do that
because culture changes, people change, and you just can't. You
can't treat people as robots. They're people.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
That's exactly right, and that's why when people ask me
whether Lombardi could succeed today, I say yes. He would
learn how to get the best out of players today
just as he did in his era, and he would
adapt to that without changing his fundamental philosophy. And the
players would adapt to him because they realized that he
(21:10):
had their interest at heart and that he would help
them win.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Indeed, let's talk about the professional football experience then, because
it's not today. Baseball, boxing, even horse racing got more
coverage in newspapers.
Speaker 4 (21:23):
Pay was poor. In your book, you.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Talk about how players barely got paid for preseason games,
and many teams had no compensation plans for injured players.
But Lombardy was lucky to come into the league just
as all of that was beginning to change David. And
it didn't hurt that he was in a big media
market like New.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
York, No, it didn't.
Speaker 5 (21:42):
And it didn't hurt that the game had him as well.
And it sort of was a nice synergy between the
rise of professional football and the rise of Vince Lombardi.
So everything that he learned in New York, by the
time he got to Green Bay football, the NFL was
finally out from being a second class sport to being
(22:03):
the dominant sport that it would later become. And the
sport used Lombardi, and Lombardi used him in that rise, indeed.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
And so he ends up in a little hamlet in
the Midwest called green Bay and his poor wife, I
mean New York City, and it might as well have
been Alaska that he was going to as far as
his wife and family were concerned. We haven't talked much
about this thing called the marriage, and the wife had
drinking problems. Vince wasn't exactly a model husband in terms
(22:31):
of how he talked to his wife treated his wife,
and he was never there talk about that relationship and
what the wife did because she really tried to keep
Vince in New York.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
Yeah, well, you know, it's a difficult It's a love story,
but a very difficult and human and problematic one. Marie
was from New Jersey. She loved the East Coast. She
liked the clothing stores in Manhattan and just a whole
lifestyle there. And for her to go to the Little
Green Bay was just a utter culture shock. There was
(23:04):
a Broadway play that was made out of my book,
and the character that steals the show in the play
is Marie Lombardi, played by the great actress Judith Light.
The scene of them driving west for the first time
in rounding Chicago and then running into a snowstorm, it
was amazing to see Judith Light portray Marie in that
(23:26):
scene where she sees nothing but white ahead of her
and what that sort of represented to her. Vince Lombardi
was much better at creating a sense of family out
of his football team than he was out of his
nuclear family. His wife had a paradoxical situation where she
loved being Vince Lombardi's wife, and she grew to love
(23:48):
football and really understood him and the game in the
end quite well. And yet it was a very lonely
experience because he since was married to football as much
as more than her, and she did have a drinking problem,
and there were several moments in their lives in Green
(24:08):
Bay where things got pretty dicey. She was in the
hospital once for an overdose of drugs. Of pills, I'm sorry,
not drugs. And of course the relationship with Vince Junior
was equally difficult to imagine being carrying that name and
that bird.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
There's a book in that, David, The Sons of Great Men.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Maybe all yeah, I know there really is.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
There's a great scene in your book where Lombardi, the
new coach, gives his first impassion speech to the Green
Bay team that had just lost ten of eleven games.
He told them they were going to be the New
York Yankees of football. He told them that he would
relentlessly pursue victory, and anyone who didn't like it was
free to leave. After the speech, and I'm quoting from
your book, there was silence, the room empties. Lombardi approaches
(24:55):
veteran Max McGee. What did you think, Lombardi asked, well,
I'll tell you you got there attention. Coach McGee replied,
you know, I wasn't sure. Lombardi confided, everybody could have
just gotten up and walked out for all I knew.
It showed a tremendous vulnerability in Lombardy and in honesty.
And I think that is what really came out of
this book for me. What a human being he was.
Speaker 5 (25:16):
Oh absolutely, you know, you can try to create a
mythological creature as a saint, but it's it's the frailty
and humanity of someone who then goes on despite all
of that to achieve success that makes Lombardy the more
interesting character. And he did have those vulnerabilities and those uncertainties,
(25:39):
and they drove him as much as as his confidence
that he.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Was going to win indeed.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
And I love there's a video I don't know if
you've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
It's Lombardi in front of a chalkboard and he's outlining
the sweep.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
Oh yes, that's that's iconic.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
It's like a physics class. It's so intricate.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
And yet he mastered, his team mastered this play and
it became well, it became the iconic play of the
great American football team known as the Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 5 (26:07):
I love that the story of the sweep as much
as anything to describe Vince Lombardi, because on superficially it
seems simplistic. You know, the other teams would have all
of these fancy plays, and the Packers had this powers sweep,
the Green Bay Sweep, and other teams knew it was coming.
(26:27):
So why did it succeed. It's because Lombardi taught it
so well and so thoroughly and allowed freedom in the
discipline of that sweep, so that every player involved in
that sleep, whether they were a blocker or the runner,
knew about ten or twenty variables that they could use
on the sweep, depending on how the defense was reacting.
(26:51):
And they understood it so well that they were one
step ahead of the defense on that play. And that
was the freedom through discipline of Lombardi's philosophy, exemplified by
one play that seemed simple but actually was rendered simple
in its complexity.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
And you're listening to David moranis author of When Pride
Still Mattered, the seminal book in Understanding the life of
coach Vince Lombardi. More after these messages, this is our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(27:40):
with author David moranis Pool, a surprise winner and author
of When Pride Still Mattered. Let's pick up where we
last left off on the life of Vince Lombardi. Lombardi
had no room in his locker room or in the
entire city, it turns out, for racism. David talk about this.
Did some of it have to do with how how
Italians were treated in much of the country. He was
(28:02):
called names like Wop and Dago and Guinea.
Speaker 5 (28:06):
You know, it did certainly affect Lombardy. That That's not
to say that that was the only factor, because I
think there are other Italians who were discriminated against, or anybody.
You can react one of two ways. You can then
find somebody else to discriminate.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Against yourself, yep.
Speaker 5 (28:23):
Or you can take it as a learning lesson about
you know that we're all in the same boat. Lombardy
took it that way in the best possible way. When
he got to green Bay, you know, I think there
were three blacks in the whole town, and one was
the shoeshine man at the Northland Hotel, and the other
two were packers. He brought the first wave of great
(28:47):
Black athletes to green Bay, and one of the first
things he did was go to all the taverns in
Green Bay, or most of them, there's so many, and overwhelmed.
There as a tavern on every block, right. But he said,
if I hear that you're discriminating against any of my players,
you're off limits for all of them. And that had
a pretty profound effect. And that was the sort of
thing he did throughout his career. When they had preseason
(29:11):
games in the South. The first instance, they were in
New Orleans and the black players had to sleep somewhere else,
he said, we'll never allow this again, and he would
put the whole team up together at an army base
instead of having to deal with this with the Jim
Crow South. He was very strong on race, and all
(29:31):
of his black players from the day they first met
him to the day he died, revered him for that.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Yeah, in the military, we all know this about the military.
Long before there was integration talk, the first real cultural
institution in America that brought the races together was the military.
Speaker 5 (29:47):
David, Yeah, No, it's true. I mean too late. It
happened after World War Two basically, but the military and sports,
more than any other parts of American life, have become
true meritocracies, at least on the playing field or on
the field of battle. They did a lot, both of
(30:09):
those institutions to break the racial barriers of this country.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Let's talk about prayer. You said it was quote the
essence of Lombardi's religious practice in the constant of his
daily routine.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
His daily prayers were an effort to balance the tension
between his will to succeed and his desire to be good.
Speaker 5 (30:29):
You know, it's quite something that he saw that in
himself he might have the appearance of not being the
most self reflective human being, so obsessed did he seem
with prevailing, But in fact he did have that self awareness,
and it was the central part of his faith, of
his life of prayer was to try to find the
(30:52):
right balance, even if he couldn't do it outside of
the church. He understood the problem that he was dealing
with in his own frailty on that and that that
was what he spent a lot of You know, he
didn't pray to win. He prayed to be a better person.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
And in your chapter Trinity, his son talked about his dad,
and I'm going to quote from the son. Life was
a struggle for my dad. He knew he wasn't perfect.
He had a lot of habits that were far from perfect.
His strengths were his weaknesses and vice versa. He fought
it by taking that paradox to church. It went back
to the Jesuits always and the struggle between the shadow
(31:31):
self and the real self, your humanity and your divinity.
He saw that struggle clear my dad in concrete terms. Wow,
what a wise son, David.
Speaker 5 (31:42):
Isn't that something I know? I felt blessed when I
started this biography that Vince Lombardi's son was not perpetuating
a mythological sated creature as a father, but had a
clear eyed vision of him and it wasn't He didn't
hate his father. He loved his father, but he knew
(32:03):
his father's laws and he had suffered because of that
himself and spent a lot of time thinking about it,
so that by the time I approached this book, Vince
Junior was very open to letting an author sort of
see the reality and the complexity in the paradox of
his old.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Man and what father and son doesn't have this complicated
relationship and the honesty of this, the brutal honesty.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
It was absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 5 (32:26):
Oh, I agree. I mean, every father's son mother daught
a relationship has some complexity to it of one degree
or another. This one was a little more complex because
of the father's fame and his obsession and the son's
inability to break through and tell you know it was
almost too late. But that level of comprehension of Vince
(32:51):
Junior of what his father was dealing with is quite extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Lombardy would go on to win a World championship by
beating his old team, the New York Giants. And he
didn't just beat the Giants, Davy, he destroyed them. When
the score was thirty seven and nothing, he finally started
playing his subs and Lombardi called that title game the
biggest thrill.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Of his life.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
Well, you know, he probably thought that he was going
to be the coach of the New York Giants. That was,
you know, he was a New York kid, that was.
He liked he and Wellington Marrow with what to Fornham
in the same era. There are a lot of connections there.
He didn't get the job, and then by the time
he might have gotten it, he didn't want to leave again.
So beating the beating the New York Giants. I would
(33:36):
say that first thirty seven to nothing game was probably
the the most important of his career, along with the last,
along with the Ice Bowl.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
At the end, YEP, there was this great celebration at
the Elks Club in town and everyone was there after
this victory. Players too. You wrote this about Lombardi and
the men he coached. Quote as despotic and unfeeling as
he could sometimes seem on the practice field, the coach
had taught them how to win. He lifted their self image.
He challenged them to accomplish things that they had thought
(34:06):
were beyond their reach. I want to play you a clip.
It's of Jerry Kramer talking about coach. And this is
a guy talking, possibly David, twenty to thirty years after
this incident. Let's take a listen to Jerry Kramer.
Speaker 7 (34:19):
He jumped outside one time in a scrimmage and he
got in my face and he said.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Mister, the concentration period of a college student's five minutes
high school is three minutes.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
Kindergarten is thirty seconds. You don't even have that Somewhere's
that put you.
Speaker 7 (34:32):
Put me checking a shoe, shine, I go up in
the locker room, sitting there, chanting on my hand album
and looking at the floor, thinking I'm never going to
play for this guy. He came in the door. He
came across the room, slapped me on the back of
the neck and messed up my hair. He said, son,
one of these days you're going to be the best
guard in football. He turned around and walked away, And
(34:55):
that started my motor. With that comment, he allowed me
to think about being a great football player. And from
that point on, I worked my tail on. I gave
him everything I had. I had made a found impact
(35:18):
on my life.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
Then the key to Lombardy, which many coaches who think
there are many Lombardies don't understand, is that you have
to have that balance. Yes, you can be tough, but
you have to have the ability to know when to
when to show the love to your to your players
and that you really, you know, it's it's about them
(35:43):
and their ability to work together. And Lombardy had that.
There's some Lombardy wanna bees who just see the tough
part of it and don't see the love.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
Part of it.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, they don't see the softness either or the vulnerability.
And that's that's a considerable loss for them. The final
parting thoughts here once that Giants game wins. In my mind,
the Super Bowls were after thoughts. They were going to happen.
He had achieved all he'd achieved. What if it was
there something after it was all done that you thought
I should have put that in the book.
Speaker 5 (36:13):
I missed it, Boy, that's a great question. I missed
a couple of stories that I wished i'd gotten. One
was about Lionel Aldridge, the defensive end, an African American
who was in love with and married a white woman,
and there was a lot of pressure to prevent that
from happening, I believe it or not. In that era,
(36:36):
you know, we still had that level of racial bias,
and Lombardi stood up for Aldridge and said, you know,
we're human beings first, and don't feel any pressure for
me about that. It seems obvious now, but I wish
I'd had that story in my book because it was
one more level of Lombardy. I do have in the
book the fact that his brother Harold was gay, and
(36:59):
Lombardi was terrific on that issue, which still is not
something that professional athletes can deal with in a particularly
healthy way. Even today. But Lombardi made it clear on
all of his teams that if he found anybody discriminating
against someone because of their sexual orientation, they were off
the team.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
And as a Catholic, that had to be something. I mean,
he was actually practicing perfect Catholicism. He was loving on
the gay player.
Speaker 5 (37:26):
I love the way you put that because there's so
many different ways that people distort religion in Catholicism, and
he was applying the fundamental love of what faith should be.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
And you've been listening to David Morana's author of When
Pride Still Mattered. It's an older book, but pick it up.
If you haven't read it, you won't regret it. Go
to Amazon or the usual suspects. The story of Insulambarty,
told by no one better than David Morana, is here
on our Mayor Rican Stories h
Host
Lee Habeeb
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