“Lombardi for President…Halas for Dogcatcher!”

As a teenager in downstate Illinois in the 1960s, my friend and former colleague Ann grew up in an environment where football ruled the roost, and particularly the Chicago Bears, the beloved team of Gale Sayers, Dick Butkus, and their beloved longtime coach and owner, George Halas. But there was one significant dissenter from the established order: her father.

In flagrant defiance of homestate sentiment, Ann’s father came to admire another team and its coach—one that regularly beat the Bears during crunchtime—and he wasn’t shy about making his feelings known. At the height of the season, he hung up a sign that made his opinions crystal clear to anyone passing by:

LOMBARDI
For President,
HALAS
For Dogcatcher!

Vince Lombardi fever swept many other areas of the nation besides downstate Illinois in the 1960s. But, aside from Green Bay itself, there were probably few places more gripped by it than Englewood, N.J., where the Packers coach got his start coaching at my alma mater, St. Cecilia’s, and made his first professional mark as one of the two assistant coaches for the New York Giants. (The other was another future head coach Hall of Famer, Tom Landry.)

Today, like much of America, I’ll be watching my favorite football team, the New York Giants, contend for the NFC title. I’m thrilled that they disposed of the hated Dallas Cowboys last week, but I won’t be as happy if they manage to pull a second consecutive upset against the Packers.

Like many other area fans, I have too much respect for the legacy carved out by Lombardi in that most unlikely of NFL franchises—not only the last of the small-town franchises that once commonly filled the league, but also currently the only nonprofit, community-owned franchise in the U.S. 

(Thank God, there’s no chance that the team will be moved by an owner—unlike what the now-late and certainly unlamented former showgirl and nightclub floozy Georgia Frontiere did with the Los Angeles—excuse me, St. Louis—Rams.)

Although I’m loath to include links that might run out within only a week or so, the following two are so noteworthy that I decided to make an exception in these instances.

Ian O’Connor, sports columnist for The Bergen Record (and, like your correspondent, a Saints alum), provides an excellent overview of the New Jersey roots of Lombardi – not just with the Giants, but at St. Cecilia’s, where Lombardi not only served as coach but teacher.

If the definition of a good piece of journalism is that it enables you to learn something you never knew before or think of somebody or something in a new way, then this particular O’Connor column has it in spades, demonstrating that as a teacher, Lombardi not only made sure his players measured up to the standards he set for non-athletes, but exceeded them. (Something that cannot be said for other teacher-coaches since then.)

The same week that people have been remembering this New Jersey history, state politicians were trying to erase a very tangible reminder of Lombardi and others who contributed to its history. 

A USA Today article reports on efforts by State Senator Raymond Lesniak (D-Elizabeth) to rename rest stops christened after major state figures with those of corporate sponsors—not just Lombardi, but also Walt Whitman, Woodrow Wilson, Clara Barton and Thomas Edison, among others.

“It’s just taking money from advertisers and putting their name up,” Lesniak says. “It’s a lot easier than raising tolls.”

Let’s deconstruct this for a second, shall we? “Just taking money” doesn’t seem like much of a problem for Lesniak because it’s what politicians do —including Lesniak pal Jim McGreevy, who during his disastrous tenure in office went along with “pay for play” when he wasn’t trying to install someone in the state’s top security post whose only qualifications were serving as the governor’s boy toy. As for “raising tolls,” Governor Corzine is going to take care of that –in 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022, when they’ll increase 50%.

But back to Vince…

A couple of years ago, I was surprised to learn that a man I had met periodically from time to time on my job was a former professional football player. His subsequent career, in academe and real estate, disguised what I would have otherwise surmised from his burly build. He told me that he had played for the Packers.

“Did you play for Vince Lombardi?” I asked eagerly.

No, he told me, he had joined the team a couple of seasons after their glory days. But he had received a memento of the coach’s tenure there when the team’s longtime trainer retired. It was a sign spray-painted with one of Lombardi’s favorite sayings, one that, I later learned, came from Gen. George S. Patton: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

It turns out that there are still things to be learned about the coach, nearly 40 years after his death and even after the publication of a fine biography by David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered.

What impressed me particularly about this biography was not just that Maraniss’ exquisite balancing of the coach’s strengths and weaknesses, but also his understanding of Lombardi’s Catholic ethos. Exercise was a discipline in his physical life just as prayer was in his spiritual one.

Even Lombardi’s manner of speaking seems to come now from a particular time. When star player Paul Hornung admitted his involvement with gamblers, Lombardi promised to go to bat for him, but with an element of tough love mixed in.

“You stay at the foot of the cross," Lombardi said. "I don't want to see you go to the racetrack. ... I don't want to hear about you doing anything. Keep your nose clean, and I'll do my best to get you back. But, mister, stay at the foot of the cross."

Strip away the short, clipped sentences and you could be hearing the voice of a spiritual adviser, the head of an order. It reminds me a bit of my alma mater. I know almost nobody my age now who uses this religious shorthand anymore.

Just as dynamic priests, brothers and nuns had founded orders that transmitted the message of Catholicism to future generations in communities abiding by accepted rules, so St. Cecilia was permeated by the spirit of an order. The “founder” of this “order” was Lombardi.

Like Saints Bernard, Francis, Dominic, Ignatius Loyola, Elizabeth Seton, and Clare, Lombardi attracted followers through self-discipline and devotion to ideals, a figure who continued to inspire awe in his followers and could never be forgotten.

St. Vince’s followers were the coaches and athletes who walked in his footsteps and sought to follow his tradition a generation after he had left the school. They held their great communal celebration on Sunday, but not in the stained-glass confines of the church but on the sunlit fields of Winton White Stadium a half mile away.

This 5,000-seat cathedral of sports had been filled to capacity every Sunday that Lombardi had coached at the school. 

Over two decades later, when I was growing up, it was still packed with students, faculty and parents waving pennants, consulting their programs and munching hot dogs before game time. For the Thanksgiving game against our cross-town public school rival, Dwight Morrow, many lined the fences outside the sold-out stadium.

From the high seats in the stadium you could feel the snap in the autumn air and behold leaves turning color to the east, but after the opening kickoff you only paid attention to the field. But even now, a quarter century later, I can still hear the cascade of sound louder than the 1812 Overture that just a lone instrument – a drum, even a kazoo, for God’s sake —set off.

You would watch the head coach lean on the wide receiver’s shoulder and send him onto the field with the play, pace on the sidelines in anticipation, then pump his fist in the air or, if the play failed, chew out a player who fouled up. 

As the team pushed the ball relentlessly up the field and especially within the 10-yard line, we leaped to our feet and let loose a rumbling chant that reverberated across the stands like swelling brass: “Go, go, go, go, go, go…”

The crowd held its breath for a few agonizing seconds, peering through the turf flung up by twenty-two pairs of cleats to determine whether the play was a run or a forward pass. 

All at once our blood was up as our running back scissored through our opponent’s line, kicking his feet away from a linebacker’s attempted tackle, then dashing to the goal line trailed by a hopelessly diving defensive back.

Our fighting faith restored, we exploded in squeals and whistles and taunts at our rival that carried across the field and drowned out the plucky but tiny band of rival fans in our rivals’ rickety wooden stands.

And the cheerleaders, linking arms, wriggling from right to left and kicking up their heels, the epitome of sex appeal to every guy in the stadium, celebrated the touchdown with a chant incongruously sanguinary for a team with the gentle nickname, “Saints”:

Here we go ‘Celia, knock ‘em dead,
Great Big Saints gonna step on your head
Blood on the saddle, blood on the ground,
Great big puddles of blood all around.”

The fans celebrated even before the scoreboard ticked off the final seconds. Nananana, nananana, hey hey hey, goodbye, they taunted the other team. 

Then we piled into our cars and formed a madcap procession from the stadium back to the schoolyard a half mile away, honking horns and screaming lungs out in a wall of sound that made the entire city vibrate.

It would be impossible to write about the high school without coming to grips with football – and, more particularly, with the man who forever enshrined it in the school’s imagination and heart, Vince Lombardi. 

The future football legend was not the only famous person to have come from Saints; CBS News reporter Charles Osgood, for instance, attended the school in the late 1940s.

But as the child of Italian immigrants, Lombardi represented an ideal toward which the entire school community could aspire. He was proof that no matter how low you may have started in life, you would eventually be rewarded through hard work.

While at the school Lombardi taught chemistry, physics and biology in addition to coaching the football and basketball teams, and he was generally acclaimed by both male and female students as a gifted teacher. 

In fact, he honed two of his principal functions as a coach—instructing and motivating—in hundreds of classroom sessions in the eight years he spent at Saints.

After all these years—including more than a generation since the high school, like countless other parochial schools before and since, closed —my feelings about this game that consumed so much of our emotions back then are mixed. 

As I return home on a quiet late Sunday afternoon with the high school parking lot now vacant and still and the sun lowering somberly in the sky, I sometimes think of how less crowded with sight and sound such days seem now than they had been more than a quarter century ago.

The gridiron was a field of binding energy, a place that called forth all the latent talents and self-sacrifice of everyone, from parents staffing the concession stands to the runty kid patrolling the defensive backfield who wouldn’t have stood a chance of stepping on the field at a larger school.

It drew many of us closer, whether we were attending practices, games or the boisterous post-game parties. 

It gave us a tradition—the province of the old—and a game that enabled all of us to live or re-live the brightest moments of youth.

At the same time, the adulation given the athletes was excessive and bound to alienate virtually everybody else who just could never fit.

But one thing is for certain: neither I, nor anyone else who stepped into St. Cecilia when his disciples spread the gospel of St. Vince, could ever forget Saints football.