December 27, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, more than any other sports figure, Vince Lombardi transformed football into a metaphor of the American experience. Our guest David Maraniss (author of When Pride Still Mattered), captures all of Lombardi: the myth, the man, his game, and his God.
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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.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Can we celebrate great American iconic figures And there was
no bigger one in the mid to late twentieth century
than Vince Lombardi.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
He affected everything.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
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, thanks so
much for.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Joining us, my pleasure. Let's start in the.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Beginning Vince Lombardi's dad, What did he what did he
do for a living?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
And describe the world.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Oh man. The young Vince Gary's father, Harry, was a butcher.
The family lived in sheep Said Bay 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 3 (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.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
It be, David?
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Oh? 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
(02:50):
very important part of his coaching philosophy. But family was
really everything. His mother's family were the Izzo's. She was
one of thirteen I Iszo kids, and that was you know,
all kinds of cousins and uncles and aunts, and that
(03:10):
family 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 3 (03:25):
And by the way, thirteen kids, people are listening like shocked, right, David.
But Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic and just lots of families
eight and twelve.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Was well, it was pretty normal, wasn't.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, No, it was not out of the ordinary for
an Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic family of that era.
The Zos 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
(03:55):
shocking that there would be thirteen of them.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Now you wrote quote the church was not some distant
instant to be visited once a week, but part of
the rhythm of daily life.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Talk about that.
Speaker 4 (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
will Lebron'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
(04:47):
every morning, 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 that Lombard to
get to work. That one didn't work. He couldn't tell
God what to do, but he could tell everybody else.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (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 with Ince 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 knew
(05:37):
that he sometimes had anger management problems, not that he
was violent, but just that he accept you know, with
his words, and he wanted to try to control that.
He regretted it, and that's one of the reasons he
went to Mass to sort of re penance in that sense.
Speaker 3 (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
where 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 4 (06:23):
Yeah, they certainly were with Vince Lombardi. There's one great
irony or paradox to that, which is that Lombarney 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 right, 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 that 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 3 (07:15):
And you're listening to David Moranis talk about the Jesuit
influence on Vince Lombardi's life. More from the author of
When Pride Still Mattered. The story of Vince Lombardy continues
here on our American story.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Folks, if you.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Love the stories we tell about this great country, and
especially the stories of America's rich past. Know that all
of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
(07:52):
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we continue here with our American
stories and with David Moranis and his terrific book, When
(08:15):
Pride Still Mattered, the story of Vince Lombardi.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
People would never believe it now, but New York City
at one point in time, David was a college football power.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Talk about the impact, absolutely talk about the.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Impact of those Jesuits and Foredom on young Vince.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Well. I think that you can trace everything about Lombardi'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 3 (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.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
There, David, Yeah, And I think that along with the Jesuits,
the other major philosophy that affected Lombardi was 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
(10:13):
that things 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 4 (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 3 (11:06):
Now, his first job out of ford Him, his first
coaching job was in a little hamlet in northern New
Jersey called Englewood. 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
(11:26):
as you studied him, that was true all the way through.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Wasn't it.
Speaker 4 (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 coursework until
(11:50):
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 this
(12:13):
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 3 (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 in ten, 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 5 (12:44):
I'll 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 began to win. And
his very first meeting, you could see how well pair
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 3 (13:17):
It's extraordinary. Eight years he spent at Saint Cecilia doing
just that. Eight years, David, That really mattered, didn't it.
Speaker 4 (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 2 (13:52):
West Point is the next gig.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (14:00):
Well, Blake was a superior football coach. He had great
organizational skills. He also was a terrific teacher, and his
mottol 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 3 (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 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
So in a place like West Point, it's even just
it's worse than big state university a cheating scandal, right, I.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
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 3 (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 2 (16:08):
Who was that?
Speaker 4 (16:09):
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 Red Blake were very close,
and so one of assistant coach Lombardi's assignments was to
(16:31):
go down to New York and get the film developed
and stop off at MacArthur's penthouse suite in the Waldorf
a Story 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, their schedule, their
(16:53):
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 3 (17:04):
That had to be a real learning experience for him
at a minimum. Lombardi and MacArthur, by the way, both
believed David and the value of competitive sports to shape
and mold men's character.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Talk about that, oh definitely, yeah, No. MacArthur was very
much into the notion that you know, mind and body
went together, and that sports were essential to building character.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
And you've been listening to David Moranis his book, When
Pride Still Mattered.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
It's an older book.
Speaker 3 (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 Story, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and with author David Mornis,
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. Nice nice start.
Speaker 4 (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
his only mina simon was to make sure the football's
had enough 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 Lombardy
was much more emotional, much more you know, high and
(19:26):
low in terms of how he would deal with the players.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (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, and.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
All teachers in the end have to do that because
culture changes, people change, and you just can't.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
You can't treat people as robots. They're people.
Speaker 4 (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 3 (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 pay was poor. In your book, you
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
(21:35):
as all of that was beginning to change, David. And
it didn't hurt that he was in a big media
market like New York.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
No, it didn't. 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
(22:02):
sport to being the dominant sport that it would later become.
And the sport used Lombardi, and Lombardi used him in
that rise, indeed.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (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 White 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 some more than her, and she did have a
drinking problem, and there were several moments in their lives
in Green Bay where things got pretty dicey. She was
(24:10):
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 3 (24:27):
There's a book in that, David, The Sons of Great Men. Maybe, yeah,
I know, there really is.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
There's a great.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
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 veteran Max McGee. What
(24:56):
did you think, Lombardi asked, well, I'll tell you you
got there tension. 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 4 (25:16):
Oh absolutely, you know, you can try to create a
mythological creature as a saint, but 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, and
(25:40):
they drove him as much as as his confidence that
he was going to win.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Indeed, and I love there's a video I don't know
if you've ever seen. It's Lombardi in front of a
chalkboard and he's outlining the sweep.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
Oh yes, that's iconic.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
It's like a physics class. It's so intricate, and yet
he mastered these 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 4 (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 Lombardy 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 3 (27:07):
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 Italians
were treated in much of the country. He was called
(28:03):
names like Wop and Daego and Guinea.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
You know, it did certainly affect Lombardi. 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 2 (28:22):
Against yourself, yep.
Speaker 4 (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 was a tavern on every block, right, But he said,
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 there were New
Orleans and the black players had to sleep somewhere else.
He said, will 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. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
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 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
You said it was quote the essence of Lombardi's religious
practice in the constant of his daily routine.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
His daily prayers were an effort to balance the tension
between his will to succeed and his desire to be good.
Speaker 4 (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 problem that he was dealing with
in his own frailty on that and that was that
was what he spent a lot of you know, he
didn't pray to win. He prayed to be a better person.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (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 man.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
And what father and son doesn't have this complicated relationship
and the honesty of this, the brutal honesty.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
It was absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
Oh I agree. I mean, every father's son mother daughter
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 Junior of what
(32:52):
his father was dealing with is quite extraordinary.
Speaker 3 (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 of his life.
Speaker 4 (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 the beating the New York Giants, I would say
(33:36):
that first thirty seven to nothing game was probably the
most important of his career, along with the last, along
with the Ice Bowl.
Speaker 3 (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
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.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Let's take a listen to Jerry Kramer.
Speaker 6 (34:19):
I jumped outside one time in a scrimmage and he
got in my face and he said, mister. The concentration
period of college student's five minutes high school of.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Three minutes kindergarten is thirty seconds.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
You don't even have that, So where's that put? You
put me? Checking the shoe shine.
Speaker 6 (34:35):
I go up in the locker room sitting there, chanting
on my hand album and looking at the floor, thinking.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
I'm never going to play for this guy. He came
in the.
Speaker 6 (34:43):
Door and 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
garden football. He turned around and walked away, and that
started my motor. With that comment, he allowed me to
think about being a great football player. And from that
(35:10):
point on I worked my tail on it. I gave
him everything I had. I had made a found impact
on my life.
Speaker 4 (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 about them and
(35:44):
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 part of it.
Speaker 3 (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 Giant's 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 2 (36:13):
I missed it.
Speaker 4 (36:15):
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, you know, we still
(36:37):
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
(36:57):
brother Harold was gay and 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 3 (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 4 (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 3 (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 Moranas here on
our American 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.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Can we celebrate great American iconic figures And there was
no bigger one in the mid to late twentieth century
than Vince Lombardi.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
He affected everything.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
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, thanks so
much for.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Joining us, my pleasure. Let's start in the.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Beginning Vince Lombardi's dad, What did he what did he
do for a living?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
And describe the world.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Oh man. The young Vince Gary's father, Harry, was a butcher.
The family lived in sheep Said Bay 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 3 (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.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
It be, David?
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Oh? 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
(02:50):
very important part of his coaching philosophy. But family was
really everything. His mother's family were the Izzo's. She was
one of thirteen I Iszo kids, and that was you know,
all kinds of cousins and uncles and aunts, and that
(03:10):
family 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 3 (03:25):
And by the way, thirteen kids, people are listening like shocked, right, David.
But Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic and just lots of families
eight and twelve.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Was well, it was pretty normal, wasn't.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, No, it was not out of the ordinary for
an Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic family of that era.
The Zos 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
(03:55):
shocking that there would be thirteen of them.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Now you wrote quote the church was not some distant
instant to be visited once a week, but part of
the rhythm of daily life.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Talk about that.
Speaker 4 (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
will Lebron'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
(04:47):
every morning, 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 that Lombard to
get to work. That one didn't work. He couldn't tell
God what to do, but he could tell everybody else.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (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 with Ince 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 knew
(05:37):
that he sometimes had anger management problems, not that he
was violent, but just that he accept you know, with
his words, and he wanted to try to control that.
He regretted it, and that's one of the reasons he
went to Mass to sort of re penance in that sense.
Speaker 3 (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
where 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 4 (06:23):
Yeah, they certainly were with Vince Lombardi. There's one great
irony or paradox to that, which is that Lombarney 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 right, 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 that 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 3 (07:15):
And you're listening to David Moranis talk about the Jesuit
influence on Vince Lombardi's life. More from the author of
When Pride Still Mattered. The story of Vince Lombardy continues
here on our American story.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Folks, if you.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Love the stories we tell about this great country, and
especially the stories of America's rich past. Know that all
of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
(07:52):
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we continue here with our American
stories and with David Moranis and his terrific book, When
(08:15):
Pride Still Mattered, the story of Vince Lombardi.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
People would never believe it now, but New York City
at one point in time, David was a college football power.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Talk about the impact, absolutely talk about the.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Impact of those Jesuits and Foredom on young Vince.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Well. I think that you can trace everything about Lombardi'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 3 (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.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
There, David, Yeah, And I think that along with the Jesuits,
the other major philosophy that affected Lombardi was 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
(10:13):
that things 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 4 (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 3 (11:06):
Now, his first job out of ford Him, his first
coaching job was in a little hamlet in northern New
Jersey called Englewood. 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
(11:26):
as you studied him, that was true all the way through.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Wasn't it.
Speaker 4 (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 coursework until
(11:50):
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 this
(12:13):
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 3 (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 in ten, 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 5 (12:44):
I'll 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 began to win. And
his very first meeting, you could see how well pair
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 3 (13:17):
It's extraordinary. Eight years he spent at Saint Cecilia doing
just that. Eight years, David, That really mattered, didn't it.
Speaker 4 (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 2 (13:52):
West Point is the next gig.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (14:00):
Well, Blake was a superior football coach. He had great
organizational skills. He also was a terrific teacher, and his
mottol 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 3 (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 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
So in a place like West Point, it's even just
it's worse than big state university a cheating scandal, right, I.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
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 3 (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 2 (16:08):
Who was that?
Speaker 4 (16:09):
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 Red Blake were very close,
and so one of assistant coach Lombardi's assignments was to
(16:31):
go down to New York and get the film developed
and stop off at MacArthur's penthouse suite in the Waldorf
a Story 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, their schedule, their
(16:53):
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 3 (17:04):
That had to be a real learning experience for him
at a minimum. Lombardi and MacArthur, by the way, both
believed David and the value of competitive sports to shape
and mold men's character.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Talk about that, oh definitely, yeah, No. MacArthur was very
much into the notion that you know, mind and body
went together, and that sports were essential to building character.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
And you've been listening to David Moranis his book, When
Pride Still Mattered.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
It's an older book.
Speaker 3 (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 Story, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and with author David Mornis,
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. Nice nice start.
Speaker 4 (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
his only mina simon was to make sure the football's
had enough 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 Lombardy
was much more emotional, much more you know, high and
(19:26):
low in terms of how he would deal with the players.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (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, and.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
All teachers in the end have to do that because
culture changes, people change, and you just can't.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
You can't treat people as robots. They're people.
Speaker 4 (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 3 (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 pay was poor. In your book, you
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
(21:35):
as all of that was beginning to change, David. And
it didn't hurt that he was in a big media
market like New York.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
No, it didn't. 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
(22:02):
sport to being the dominant sport that it would later become.
And the sport used Lombardi, and Lombardi used him in
that rise, indeed.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (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 White 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 some more than her, and she did have a
drinking problem, and there were several moments in their lives
in Green Bay where things got pretty dicey. She was
(24:10):
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 3 (24:27):
There's a book in that, David, The Sons of Great Men. Maybe, yeah,
I know, there really is.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
There's a great.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
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 veteran Max McGee. What
(24:56):
did you think, Lombardi asked, well, I'll tell you you
got there tension. 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 4 (25:16):
Oh absolutely, you know, you can try to create a
mythological creature as a saint, but 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, and
(25:40):
they drove him as much as as his confidence that
he was going to win.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Indeed, and I love there's a video I don't know
if you've ever seen. It's Lombardi in front of a
chalkboard and he's outlining the sweep.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
Oh yes, that's iconic.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
It's like a physics class. It's so intricate, and yet
he mastered these 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 4 (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 Lombardy 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 3 (27:07):
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 Italians
were treated in much of the country. He was called
(28:03):
names like Wop and Daego and Guinea.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
You know, it did certainly affect Lombardi. 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 2 (28:22):
Against yourself, yep.
Speaker 4 (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 was a tavern on every block, right, But he said,
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 there were New
Orleans and the black players had to sleep somewhere else.
He said, will 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. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
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 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
You said it was quote the essence of Lombardi's religious
practice in the constant of his daily routine.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
His daily prayers were an effort to balance the tension
between his will to succeed and his desire to be good.
Speaker 4 (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 problem that he was dealing with
in his own frailty on that and that was that
was what he spent a lot of you know, he
didn't pray to win. He prayed to be a better person.
Speaker 3 (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 4 (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 man.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
And what father and son doesn't have this complicated relationship
and the honesty of this, the brutal honesty.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
It was absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
Oh I agree. I mean, every father's son mother daughter
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 Junior of what
(32:52):
his father was dealing with is quite extraordinary.
Speaker 3 (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 of his life.
Speaker 4 (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 the beating the New York Giants, I would say
(33:36):
that first thirty seven to nothing game was probably the
most important of his career, along with the last, along
with the Ice Bowl.
Speaker 3 (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
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.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Let's take a listen to Jerry Kramer.
Speaker 6 (34:19):
I jumped outside one time in a scrimmage and he
got in my face and he said, mister. The concentration
period of college student's five minutes high school of.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Three minutes kindergarten is thirty seconds.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
You don't even have that, So where's that put? You
put me? Checking the shoe shine.
Speaker 6 (34:35):
I go up in the locker room sitting there, chanting
on my hand album and looking at the floor, thinking.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
I'm never going to play for this guy. He came
in the.
Speaker 6 (34:43):
Door and 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
garden football. He turned around and walked away, and that
started my motor. With that comment, he allowed me to
think about being a great football player. And from that
(35:10):
point on I worked my tail on it. I gave
him everything I had. I had made a found impact
on my life.
Speaker 4 (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 about them and
(35:44):
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 part of it.
Speaker 3 (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 Giant's 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 2 (36:13):
I missed it.
Speaker 4 (36:15):
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, you know, we still
(36:37):
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
(36:57):
brother Harold was gay and 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 3 (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 4 (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 3 (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 Moranas here on
our American Stories h
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