Proud Father, Proud Sons

Football is not just a game but a way of life. It's a game of courage, stamina and coordinated efficiency, of sacrifice, dedication, self-denial and love.

Vincent Lombardi set out to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood, but along the way he discovered another religion: football. To it, he brought his special brand of apostolic dedication and evangelical fervor. "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing," was Lombardi's creed, and the scourge was his method. He elevated coaching to the level of mysticism, and his principal disciples--the Green Bay Packers--became the most spectacularly successful team in the history of professional football. Under his messianic lash, the Packers were the rulers of their brutal profession for nearly a decade; they won five National Football League championships (1961, '62, '65. '66, '67) and the first two Super Bowl games ('66, '67). They compiled an astounding won-lost-tied record of 99-31 -4.

Lombardi temporarily retired from coaching in 1968 to devote himself to the duties of general manager at Green Bay. But he paced the practice field like a caged grizzly bear, and when the Washington Redskins offered him a head coaching job (and 5% ownership), Lombardi leaped at the chance. Last year he transformed a dispirited collection of losers into a winning team (7-5-2). Said Vince: "What I missed most was --well, it wasn't the tension or the crowds or the game on Sunday. There's a great closeness on a football team--a rapport between the men and the coach. It's a binding together, a knitting together. For me, it's like fathers and sons. That's what I missed." Football's proudest father died of cancer last week at the age of 57, and the rugged sons who loved, hated, feared and--most of all--obeyed him will never forget how he took them to heights that they never knew they could reach.

Vince's football genius was not the intricate, intellectual sort exemplified by the Dallas Cowboys' Tom Landry or Los Angeles Rams' George Allen. His play books were slim: his orthodoxy stressed basics. "Football is two things, blocking and tackling," Lombardi liked to say. "You block and tackle better than the team you're playing, you win." In the Lombardi canon, malingering was a capital crime and injuries did not exist. "Lombardi time" ran ten minutes ahead of the rest of the world; whoever did not readily grasp this temporal anomaly learned at the cost of $10 per minute. Above all, Lombardi preached pride and mutual esteem, though he never permitted intimacy. Probably the most famous quote from Lombardi's Green Bay epoch came from Tackle Henry Jordan, who said: "He treats us all the same--like dogs." Jordan later added: "To this day, I don't know whether he liked me or not. He respected us as football players, but as far as liking us, he never let on."

Block of Granite. Lombardi gained his highly disciplined view of God, man and football as the Brooklyn-born son of an Italian immigrant butcher. He starred at fullback for St. Francis Prep and went on to become one of the most obdurate stones in Fordham's celebrated Seven Blocks of Granite. He spent five years under Earl Blaik at West Point and another five as offensive coach of the New York Giants. But the head-coaching assignment he yearned for persistently eluded him--until he was tapped by the floundering Packers (1-10-1) at the end of the 1958 season.

Lombardi demanded--and got--absolute authority: the power to hire and fire, to set salaries, even to design the Packers' uniforms. Methodically, relentlessly, he went about building a winner. He traded shrewdly for Jordan and Defensive End Willie Davis, took a third-string quarterback named Bart Starr off the bench and pumped confidence into him, collared the Packers' Golden Flop, Notre Dame All-America Paul Hornung, and told him, "You're going to be my halfback." At practice he was an unrelenting tyrant, screaming blasphemous exhortations through his gapped front teeth as the cold Wisconsin sun glinted off his thick glasses. His histrionics would have embarrassed Knute Rockne: he raved, he cried, he prayed in the locker room. It was pure schmalz, but it worked. Hornung won the N.F.L. scoring title three years running while Running Mate Jimmy Taylor piled up yardage, Starr developed into a consummate field general and Green Bay became the most devastating machine in the chronicle of pro football.

After that stunning era came to an end, and Lombardi was busy rebuilding the Redskins, he unabashedly admitted: "A lot of what I say sounds corny. But it is me. Hell, I'm an emotional man. I cry. I cried when we won the Super Bowl and I cried when I left Green Bay. I'm not ashamed of crying. Football's an emotional game. If you're going to be involved in it, you gotta take your emotions with you, mister."

Lombardi's fundamentalist brand of football has all but died with him. The headily revolving defense and complex multiple offense introduced by this year's Super Bowl winner, Kansas City's Hank Stram, are the new mode of the '70s. But the '60s will be remembered as the Lombardi decade, the era in which Vince's thundering green-and-gold-clad Packers savaged opponents from Yankee Stadium to the Los Angeles Coliseum and made pro football a national obsession. This incandescent game will unquestionably endure, but it will be much the dimmer for the eclipse of the brooding, bristling man who was its sun.

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