Movie Quote of the Day (‘The American President,’ Showing That Even Ultimate Power Has Limits)

President Andrew Shepherd [played by Michael Douglas] [muttering in disgust]: “Seven-trillion-dollar communications system at my disposal and I can't find out if the Packers won.” —The American President (1995), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Rob Reiner

Hmmm…Well, right now they’ve started this season 3-0. (And even in 1995, when this romantic comedy opened, they won their first division title since 1972.) So I’d say, “Don’t sweat it, Mr. President.”

(That’s Michael Douglas—presumably, using his remote, without success, to locate the Packers—with Annette Bening by his side in The American President.)

Quote of the Day (Jerry Kramer, on the Packers’ Indestructible Willie Davis)

“Once I was standing on the sidelines when [Green Bay Packers defensive end and teammate] Willie [Davis] came out of the game with a dislocated finger. I saw the bone sticking through the skin. The trainer grabbed the finger, yanked the bone back in place, then taped the finger to the adjoining fingers. Willie ran back to the game.”— Jerry Kramer (with Dick Schaap), Distant Replay (1985)

Remembering Pro Football Hall of Famer—and successful post-football businessman—Willie Davis (1934-2020). 

When I was growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my high school, St. Cecilia (Englewood, NJ) took special pride in the Packers, the team built by our football coach through much of the 1940s, Vince Lombardi. A July 1960 trade that Lombardi helped engineer for Davis became one of the building blocks of that pro sports dynasty. 

In his autobiography Closing the Gap: Lombardi, the Packers Dynasty, and the Pursuit of Excellence, Davis credited his coach not only with helping him feel more comfortable, as an African-American in largely white Green Bay, but also in having faith in him as a player but also as a student with the discipline to complete his MBA in 1968 by working through the offseason.

 

Motivation, self-discipline and faith—essential ingredients for success in whatever field that your career takes you to…

Video of the Day: Lombardi’s ‘Ice Bowl,’ on Its 50th Anniversary

I didn’t have the chance to see the TV documentary “Vince Lombardi: A Football Life” when it first aired—much to my regret, as I would have liked to see how it depicted the influence of my alma mater, St. Cecilia High School of Englewood, NJ, where he began his coaching career.

But, in researching the episode of his pro career that fascinates me the most—his leadership of the Green Bay Packers in its last NFL championship during his years there—I came across this vivid 10-minute YouTube segment from the documentary, on his “Ice Bowl” victory over the Dallas Cowboys, which occurred 50 years ago today. 

Interviews with son Vince Lombardi Jr., lineman Jerry Kramer and quarterback Bart Starr (the last two instrumental in the win) add personal behind-the-scene perspectives on this epic game. Game-day conditions (15 degrees below zero, (-35 degrees wind-chill factor) made a hash of the coach’s high-tech attempt to keep the turf easy to run upon, leading to something close to a fight for survival between the upstart, dynasty-in-the-making Cowboys and the aging but proud Packers.

On the coldest day to that point in NFL playoff history, the Pack launched its final drive with 4½ minutes to go. The winning play, on third down, with 16 seconds to go, represented “the culmination of everything Lombardi and his Packers had been preparing for for the last nine years,” according to Lombardi biographer David Maraniss.

I recommend Maraniss’ superb account of the coach’s life, WHEN PRIDE STILL MATTERED, for additional colorful details on this climax of Lombardi’s career. (For instance, Frank Gifford, broadcasting the game, told listeners: “I just took a bite out of my coffee.")

Theater Review: “Lombardi,” by Eric Simonson

I really would have kicked myself if I hadn’t seen Lombardi at Broadway's Circle in the Square before it closed this weekend. No, I couldn’t compare it to the classic dramas (particularly in its early history) that the theater once premiered (notably Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night).

But, as a graduate of St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood, N.J., where legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi got his start, I have been fascinated by his life story. Moreover, as an admirer of the source for Eric Simonson’s play, David Maraniss’ marvelous biography When Pride Still Mattered, I couldn’t help but wonder how the material of his life had been transformed.

By the time I was done sitting through the 90 minutes (without intermission) of this play, I could only liken myself to Packer opponents as they faced the team’s famed “power sweep” in their '60s glory days. I knew more or less what was coming, but the whole was so flawlessly executed that I was powerless to withstand it.

(Incidentally, to any other alumni from my high school who might read this: Yes, St. Cecilia’s is named several times in the course of the play. I managed to restrain myself each time it was mentioned.)

Simonson has chosen for the central situation of his play the 1965 season. The Pack have finished out of the running for the last two seasons, after having won two straight. For a ferociously driven coach who has been preaching the importance of winning since he first came to Green Bay in 1959, this situation is not only unacceptable but physically sickening.

Into the scene steps the (fictional) Look Magazine reporter Michael McCormick, appearing at the Lombardi home to write an in-depth profile of the coach. McCormack first tries to establish a relationship with a coach angry over being burned by another magazine writer the prior year, then has to fend off Lombardi’s heavy-handed attempt at news management.

McCormick is more than a stand-in for the audience in coming to understand the famous coach. He’s also a means for exploring one of the show’s themes: the problematic search for fathers. The reporter is following the same career path of his late father, but he had trouble seeing eye to eye with the latter while he was alive.

In a sense, McCormick reenacts the same struggle with Lombardi that he had with his parent: the need to win approval while still establishing his own identity and independence. While that struggle is eternally relevant, it was particularly so during the “generation gap” of the 1960s.
Lombardi himself has his own struggles as a parent. His total concentration on his team makes him a de facto father figure for the players he treats with tough love, but at home he is never there enough for his son and daughter.

It’s a difficult position to have to, in effect, be a dramatic device, but as McCormick, Keith Nobbs acquitted himself well in making his character three-dimensional. He also brought the house down with what might be the funniest moment in a play filled with laughs: his dead-on impersonation of how Lombardi might have turned out if, instead of continuing his stalled quest for an NFL coaching job, he had accepted a quieter, more family-friendly job as a bank officer (“You want a loan? You think you deserve a loan?”)

I can think of other events in the life of Lombardi more inherently dramatic than the pivotal week dramatized here (the Packers’ classic “Ice Bowl” playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys comes instantly to mind). But these might have missed two of the cornerstone figures of the Packers, their backfield of “Thunder and Lightning” (fullback Jim Taylor and halfback Paul Hornung), both gone late in the Lombardi regime.

Bill Dawes brought a welcome lightness of touch to Hornung, a player with a burning desire to score, on and off the field (in one scene, he chuckles that he has to leave, as he has a stewardess waiting for him).

But Chris Sullivan also delivered in an infinitely dicier role, as the hulking, monosyllabic Taylor. For much of the play, Simonson's script depicted the Hall of Fame running back as tough as a bull and as unthinking (he calls every male he meets “Roy” because he can’t remember their real names).

Yet three-quarters through, Sullivan made the most of his longest set of lines in the play, pouring out the back’s mixture of pride and anger in arguing unsuccessfully with Lombardi for a salary that would not only compensate him adequately for past accomplishments but also for the endless injuries and physical punishment he absorbed stoically for years.

Dan Lauria, most familiar to fans as Kevin Arnold’s father on the comedy The Wonder Years, brought out nearly every facet of this most complicated of human beings--in the words of McCormack, “the most imperfect perfect man I ever knew.” A former high-school football coach himself, he understood how to convey the combination of intelligence, charm and sheer bluster Lombardi needed to transform a team of losers into a squad with five NFL titles and two Super Bowl championships. The performance alternated, in reenacting the coach's legendary training-camp rants and exhortations, some of the most astonishing displays of lung power in this or any other Broadway season with displays of unconscious vulnerability. (Stress made Lombardi continually sick, triggering the colon cancer that struck him down at only age 57.)

Fully a match for Lauria was Judith Light, whose role as wife Marie Lombardi was a far cry from “Who’s the Boss?” Drawing herself up to her full height, filling the room with the most gin-soaked, smokiest voice this side of Elaine Stritch, she could have settled for the kind of tough, wisecracking woman in which Eve Arden specialized in the Forties. But she let you see the fragility that the ripostes can’t fully disguise—devotion to a man whose commitment to winning left his wife in the middle of nowhere, with precious little comfort except for the martinis that leave her increasingly unsteady. Light fully deserved her recent Tony Award nomination.

I’ve never made it out either to the Pro Football Hall of Fame or the Packers’ Lambeau Field, but I felt as if I were approaching the next best thing in the mini-shrine to the Lombardi-era Packers erected in the theater’s lobby. It was filled with all kinds of collectible items, including the jerseys worn by Taylor, Hornung, quarterback Bart Starr and linebacker Ray Nitschke, footballs signed by the Packers, and Super Bowl rings (including the image accompanying this post).
Lombardi was hardly groundbreaking theater, but in its rich exploration of the complicated coach that McCormick mourns as “the most imperfect perfect man I ever knew,” it was a solid and moving character study. Like the Maraniss biography, it kept in exquisite balance its view of a man consumed by a pursuit of perfection he knew he could never achieve.

This Day in Football History (Lombardi’s Packers Lose in 1st Try at Title)

December 26, 1960—The National Football League’s past met its future—and, for once, the past won. On their home turf at Franklin Field, the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Green Bay Packers, 17-13.

The Eagles, winning their third NFL championship, had reached the summit--and a couple of people associated with the team, perhaps sensing it, decided to leave while they were on top. Head coach Buck Shaw and quarterback Norm Van Brocklin, the league’s MVP, both announced afterward that they were retiring. And though he would stay another two seasons, Chuck Bednarik, the team’s versatile center-linebacker, would be the league’s last “two-way man.” By the 1962 season, age and injuries would send the Eagles hurtling down to last place.

The cellar was where the Packers had long resided, but everything was different now under head coach Vince Lombardi (in the image accompanying this post, of course). The team, posting only a 1-10-1 record under predecessor Ray “Scooter” McLean in 1958, had responded to the constant prodding of Lombardi—previously, an assistant coach for the New York Giants and, further back, head coach at my high school, St. Cecilia’s of Englewood, N.J.—with their first winning record in 12 seasons the next year (7-5). Then, in 1960, they won their first division title in 16 years.

In a December 26, 1960 preview of the championship game, Sports Illustrated writer Tex Maule, noting that the Packers were “a sound football team,” still accurately predicted that they would have trouble with “Van Brocklin’s keen, probing aerial game.” And so it came to be—but not, however, before The Pack gave Eagles fans some serious heart palpitations.

The Packers actually outgained their veteran opponents and bested them in time of possession. Two Eagle turnovers early in the going gave the Packers terrific opportunities, but all they could come away with were three points.

It turned out, then, that a 13-10 Packer lead late in the game turned out to be too precarious to maintain. A 58-yard Ted Dean kickoff return put the Eagles deep in Packer territory, giving “The Dutchman” Van Brocklin time to pick apart the Packer defense. Seven plays later, Dean made it into the end zone on a five-yard sweep.

One minute and twenty seconds remained on the clock as the Packers’ QB, Bart Starr—hailed by Maule as “the smartest (academically speaking) quarterback in the business”—tried to engineer his own drive. He almost pulled it off, too, marching the team down the field until the final dramatic play of the game.

The Packers were on the Eagles’ 22-yard line when Starr, noticing that everyone else was covered, threw a swing pass to rugged fullback Jim Taylor. You can see the action without benefit of highlight films through the words of the peerless Red Smith: “That wonderful running back ducked his head like a charging bull, bolted like an enraged beer truck into Philadelphia‘s congested secondary, twisted, staggered, bucked and wrestled one step at a time.”

Taylor managed to get to the nine-yard line and would have made it into the end zone but for Bednarik. The latter, 35 years old, pressed into service by Coach Shaw to play both sides of the line because of injuries, had already played 58 minutes of the game when he had his appointment with destiny.

A Bednarik hit earlier that year, on Frank Gifford, was so ferocious that the Giant running back was out of commission for 18 months. But his tackle now, against Taylor, was more significant.

"The tackle I made on (Jim) Taylor was the greatest play I ever made," Bednarik later remembered (in an interview posted on the Eagles' Web site). "When I saw him swing out of the backfield I took off. After catching the (Bart Starr) pass I tackled him to the ground and started watching the clock: four... three ... two ... One.”

At last, hearing the gun go off, Bednarik relented: "Taylor, you can get up now. This ****** game is over!"

A dejected Taylor lay on the ground for a full half-minute before rising from the turf. As David Maraniss relates the scene in his great biography of Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, his injured backfield teammate, Paul Hornung (whom I wrote about last week), came over to console him when Bednarik wrapped his arms around the two younger men, saying “they had a helluva football team and would be back in the championship the next year.”

Lombardi--and his team--felt the same way. In the somber lockerroom afterward, the coach abandoned the barking tones his players had gotten used to for the last two seasons and addressed them quietly and matter-of-factly. At the start of the game, he said, they might not have felt confident against a veteran team, but now they knew they could hold their own. “This will never happen again,” he assured them. “You will never lose another championship.”

And that’s how it turned out throughout the rest of Lombardi’s tenure as head coach of the team, which eventually won five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls. In 1971, the year after his death, Lombardi was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, followed by nine of his players from that 1960 youthful dynasty-in-the-making: Taylor, Starr, Hornung, Forrest Gregg, Ray Nitschke, Willie Davis, Jim Ringo, Willie Wood, and Henry Jordan.

Quote of the Day (Vince Lombardi on Paul Hornung, Prodigal Son and “Golden Boy”)

"You have to know what Hornung means to this team. I have heard and read that he is not a great runner or a great passer or a great field-goal kicker, but he led the league in scoring for three seasons. In the middle of the field he may be only slightly better than an average ballplayer, but inside the twenty-yard line he is one of the greatest I have ever seen. He smells that goal line."--Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi on his running back, Paul Hornung, quoted in George Sullivan, The Great Running Backs (1972)

A helluva lot of American guys in the 1960s undoubtedly secretly hoped that if they were ever reincarnated, they’d come back as Paul Hornung’s fingertips. It wasn’t only that he was a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback at Notre Dame; that, with Jim Taylor, he formed the “Thunder and Lightning” tandem that powered the Packers to one championship after another; or that Vince Lombardi called him the most versatile man ever to play the game.

(If you want an idea of his style, see this YouTube clip showing his TD run against the Cleveland Browns in the 1965 NFL championship game.)

No, not to put to fine a point of it, but Hornung may have scored more off than on the gridiron. After all, what’s a guy to do when, even in college, he returns to his dorm room to find a young lady, waiting expectantly for him? Even in the accompanying image, fresh after a victory, he looks as if he can't wait to meet someone who's caught his eye.

His reputation as a stud, however, might have been sealed for good when John M. Ross, in America Weekly, described him as a “205-pound Adonis” who “constantly runs the risk of becoming the first player in history to be carried triumphantly from the field on the soft shoulders of a shrieking female horde.”

This, I submit, is akin to the Daily Telegraph drama critic who hailed Nicole Kidman’s appearance in The Blue Room as “pure theatrical Viagra.” It’s the type of publicity you want printed and spread far and wide.

Lombardi, a Victorian at heart when it came to women, had a soft spot in his heart for the hellraiser he continually fined for rules infractions. It even survived the coach’s sense of betrayal when he discovered Hornung had lied to him about betting on Packer games.

When Hornung finally ‘fessed up, the coach agreed to go to bat for him at Commissioner Pete Rozelle's office, then, rather like a surrogate father, told him what it would involve, in language that his star, a fellow Catholic, could understand perfectly: “You stay at the foot of the cross. 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."

It’s impossible to believe, but the swift young back who “ran to daylight”--and into the arms of many a young lady--turns 75 today (and--far sadder--that teammates like Max McGee have already passed on). Happy birthday, Golden Boy!

Quote of the Day (Vince Lombardi, on His Disgust with “Being Hard”)

“It’s no damn fun being hard….You berate somebody and you feel disgusted with yourself for doing it, for being in a job where you have to.”—Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, quoted in Michael O’Brien, Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi (1987)

Who knows where the desire for perfection, the urge to push himself and others to their physical and psychological limits, came from?

One thing for sure: it came with a price for Vince Lombardi. The above quotation—one with not even close to the circulation of one misattributed to him, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”--is one indication of that price. The other was his death at age 57, on this date in 1970, by colon cancer. The disease, already in an aggressive stage when diagnosed two months before his death, was surely not helped by stress that ate away at him.

Like more than a few alumni of my alma mater, St. Cecilia of Englewood, N.J., I’m fascinated by this NFL legend who began his coaching career at my high school. Even if every single one of the stories about him is true (and I suspect that only 80% are), you still come away with a misleading portrait of the man. It’s like looking at the dark side of the moon and thinking you understand the whole thing.

Lombardi felt that part of his job involved motivating his players to achieve their best, and that this involved criticizing them until they could never forget they had messed up. Nearly all of the accounts I read, though, indicate that at some point, before the player was mentally broken, the coach would say or do something to build his confidence back up. He also knew who could bear up under his criticism and who would buckle.

At the same time, he was all too aware of what this managerial style did to himself. The element of self-disgust is impossible to miss in that quote.

Moreover, he felt guilt over the price paid by his family for his devotion to his work. He took his coaching job at the time of his death, with the Washington Redskins, partly because he was bored with being simply a front-office executive with the Packers, but also because he realized that his wife was becomingly increasingly lonely in Green Bay.

Later this month, a play will premiere on Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theater, called Lombardi, starring Dan Lauria (who played Kevin Arnold’s father on The Wonder Years). I hope the show runs long enough for me to see it.

What encourages me about this biodrama is that it is based on a superb biography of the coach that belongs on every sports fan’s bookshelf: When Pride Still Mattered, by David Maraniss. In each succeeding page, Maraniss narrates an incident that either troubles Lombardi’s defenders or stuns his critics. In other words, the coach emerges as fully human—the kind of person who constantly exhorted his players to surmount their flaws, but all too aware of the difficulties he had in overcoming his own.

It’s this latter Lombardi that interests me, not the cartoonish gridiron martinet whose legacy has been distorted by succeeding coaches with nothing like his tragic self-understanding (something you can sense in the image accompanying this post, where the coach looks far more vulnerable than victorious).

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.

This Day in Sports History (Instant Replay Used for First Time)

December 7, 1963—Today, as I watched in a coffee shop the New York Giants fumble away chances against the Philadelphia Eagles, it occurred to me that I owed the endless slow-motion repetition of their futility to the invention of instant replay, first used on this date 45 years ago in the fourth quarter of the Army-Navy game.

Present at the creation was the man better known to a generation of Mets fans as announcer Lindsey Nelson. Many fans probably remember him best as the smoothly professional partner of Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner in the broadcast booth. Me, I recall him for another reason: his, er, colorful attire. Granted, the 1960s and 1970s saw an astonishing amount of clothing curiosities. Still, it was a good thing that I was never on the Nelsons’ holiday list, as I might have found it hard to distinguish the Christmas tree in the living room from Lindsey in one of his green jackets.

For the Army-Navy game, Nelson and fellow announcer Terry Brennan had been told about the innovation in a cab ride before the contest. But CBS director Tony Verna warned the two that the device couldn’t be mentioned on air until it was ready.

Verna’s reticence about plugging the technology might also have had to do with questions of taste. Not only had the Army-Navy game itself been postponed a couple of weeks because of the JFK assassination, but so had pregame promotion of this significant change in TV technology.

It took Verna five or six tries during the game to get the technology to work. Once it did, he indicated to Nelson that it should be mentioned any second now.

Perhaps because of the newness of the technology, Nelson was at extreme pains to inform viewers that what they were watching was not live. "Well, I started in quickly to tell the folks what they were about to see was not live, and another touchdown, but in fact a replay of what they had just seen," Lindsey wrote in his autobiography, Hello, Everybody, I’m Lindsey Nelson. "I repeated my information and realized that in my urgency and excitement my voice was rising. I was practically screaming."

It’s probably just as well that the sportscaster did so—in the vintage black-and-white recording of the play, the touchdown run by Army quarter Rollie Stichweh was indistinguishable from live video.

A few years later, the process became more readily available when the Ampex Corp. took a camera it had mounted on a Studebaker for taping practices and began applying it—first to help isolate the Navy’s problems with aircraft-carrier jets, then to ABC using it on Wide World of Sports.

I’m convinced that at least part of the reason why football began to replace baseball as the national pastime in the 1960s was its increasingly adventurous use of technology such as instant replay, camera angles and graphics—increasingly employed by Chet Forte, the Columbia basketball player who became director of Monday Night Football. Forte’s rise—and eventual manic fall from grace because of a gambling addiction—were depicted in a roman a clef called TV by Brian Brown, who was sports editor of The Columbia Daily Spectator while I was an undergrad.

A few years after the Army-Navy game, the term “instant replay” had come into common-enough use that it was instantly recognizable when used by guard Jerry Kramer when he wrote his bestselling diary of his 1967 season with the Green Bay Packers, the team built and prodded into two-time Super Bowl champions by the most successful football coach in the history of my high school, St. Cecilia of Englewood, N.J., Vince Lombardi.

“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.