Sunday, September 27, 2009

This Day in Football History (Lombardi Wins 1st Game for Packers)

September 27, 1959—With a hard-fought 9-6 victory against the archrival Chicago Bears, the Green Bay Packers signaled more than that they were shedding their losing ways and rededicating themselves to winning.

The win at home, on Lambeau Field, also demonstrated that they were responding to new head coach Vince Lombardi, who had begun to forge his leadership style—as heavy on teaching as on discipline and motivation—20 years before, in a small parochial high school in northern New Jersey.

Jack Pearson had a fascinating post a few weeks ago in 50 Plus News Magazine about the game—the seasons of hopelessness preceding it, what transpired during the victory, and how sportswriters viewed it. (None, needless to say, predicted the coming dynasty.) He tells the story much better than I ever could, so read the above link.

Lombardi came to the Packers by way of the New York Giants, where he and Tom Landry had served as assistant coaches--the greatest assistant staff I can think of in league history. 

Recently I began dipping into one of great sports books of all time, Instant Replay, Packer guard Jerry Kramer’s diary of the last championship season under the coach who had pushed, prodded, cursed, and cheered him into becoming a star. It, along with David Maraniss’ later biography of the coach, When Pride Still Mattered, shows that there was far more to Lombardi than just brutalizing players, that knowing how to make them understand assignments as well as how to inspire each one individually figured much more prominently in his unequaled success. 

Focus again on a couple of verbs in that last sentence: “understand” and “inspire.” They’re central to the mission of teaching, aren’t they? It turns out that Lombardi came by his unique method while a teacher-coach at my alma mater, St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood, N.J. 

Maraniss’ book makes clear that Lombardi’s middle linebacker at Green Bay, Hall of Famer Ray Nitschke, was something of a reclamation project, a man whose brute strength could easily have been misused as an adult in tough neighborhoods if he hadn’t found an outlet for his aggression. The same thing happened at St. Cecilia, where Lombardi earnestly believed that sports could provide focus and instill character—and where, he felt, he could steer players into more productive pursuits. 

I was reminded of Lombardi’s inaugural season at Green Bay—and of the part education played in it—through Phil Barber’s marvelous article “Lombardi Rules,” in the Fall 2009 issue of American Heritage Magazine. That march to glory started in the summer with plays he diagrammed on blackboards (yes, classic teaching instruments), which the players were then expected to copy out themselves. 

Simplicity was the key to the whole thing. A play could fall apart if someone didn’t understand what he was supposed to do—which happened a lot with the 1-11 1958 Packers, when impossibly complicated play calls at the line of scrimmage, often barked by a quarterback making his voice heard over a roaring crowd, represented a recipe for disaster. 

In contrast, Lombardi’s plays featured an easy-to-remember numbering system: “43 Double Pinch,” for instance, meant that the 4 back would plunge through the 3 hole. 

Lombardi had learned another lesson from St. Cecilia’s, where, for $1,700 a year, he taught physics, Latin and chemistry, besides coaching football, basketball and baseball: don’t move on until even the dimmest bulb in the group understands what you’ve just said. It worked wonders. 

Barber quotes Packer center Bill Curry on what Lombardi “did best”: “What a great teacher does is make you want to please him or her. I’ll never forget what he taught me. That was his greatest gift.” 

Oh, one last holdover from his days as a teacher: grades. One of the most amusing entries in Kramer’s diary occurred early in Packer training camp, when Lombardi lashed out at the players: 

“Usually, we get graded for our blocking, and Vince reads the grades out loud at a meeting. Today he said he was so embarrassed by our blocking grades that he couldn’t even read them out loud. Instead, he wrote them down on little slips of paper and folded up the slips, put our names on them and handed them out.” 

Vince’s kid brother Joe could have told Kramer all about how the coach felt about poor grades. At St. Cecilia’s, Vince had gotten positively emotional about Joe’s—so much so, in fact, that it became one of the enduring legends of the school. 

Maraniss narrates the story in his biography, and maybe there are a few people out there who think it’s too outlandish to have happened. But a friend of mine who attended Saints at the time was present, reeled off the names of several people who were principals in the ensuing sequence of events, and insisted it occurred as Maraniss narrated. 

Lombardi was making a presentation at Blue and Gold Day, an academic-athletic-extracurricular awards ceremony just before the close of the school year that was still a tradition when I graduated in the late 1970s. The coach acknowledged the names of achievers, then referred to his brother Joe, a student in the school at the time. To the astonishment of those assembled, he pulled out a paper and began to read aloud Joe’s marks. 

The mediocre ones came first. It didn’t get any better after that. With each declining grade, Lombardi’s voice grew more vehement and his face more red. When he read the last subpar mark, he flung the paper down and chased his brother out of the hall. 

My friend told me that it took several burly football friends of his to block Vince’s path and enable Joe to make a safe exit—otherwise, he might have ended up pummeled, black and blue, or maybe even worse, if the chase hadn't been halted. 

Chase—a word associated with speed and constant movement, much like the famed “Lombardi Sweep” that the Pack immortalized in the Sixties. I like the quote that Pearson found in the Sporting News in which quarterback Bart Starr related the coach’s first remarks to the team in 1959: 

“Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because in the process we will catch excellence.” A pause for dramatic effect, then this conclusion: “I am not remotely interested in being just good.” 

That first season didn’t reach excellence, but it came close—a 7-5 mark. The next year, the Pack made the playoffs before losing to the Philadelphia Eagles. From then on, the Lombardi-led Packers never lost another postseason game. 

If you’re a sports fan, you know the rest of Lombardi’s record. You surely also know about the admiration, love and fear with which he was regarded by his players. What you might not know is the price he exacted from himself. 

The friend who attended Saints in the 1940s during the Lombardi era noted that the ashtray in the coach's office was continually full, with the air reeking of cigarette smoke. Smoking seemed the only way Lombardi knew to relieve the incessant pressure he placed as much on himself as on his players.

Inevitably, it took its toll. Lombardi’s death of stomach cancer at only age 57 in 1970 robbed the game of its greatest coach, and 20th-century American culture of one of its most complicated, driven, fascinating individuals. I've written endlessly every day for nearly two years about individuals from history, but Lombardi would easily make the short list of people I would most liked to have met.

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