When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi

00:00:12
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:00:44
Speaker 2: And you’re listening to the late Vince Lombardi.

00:00:47
Speaker 3: Can we celebrate great American iconic figures? And there was no bigger one in the mid to late twentieth century than Vince Lombardi.

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Speaker 2: He affected everything.

00:00:55
Speaker 3: And we love talking to great writers, and we’re going to talk right now with David Maraniss, 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—

00:01:07
Speaker 2: Joining us, my pleasure. Let’s start in the—

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Speaker 3: Beginning. Vince Lombardi’s dad, what did he what did he do for a living?

00:01:15
Speaker 2: And describe the world?

00:01:17
Speaker 4: Oh, man. The young Vince Gary’s father, Harry, was a butcher. The family lived in Sheepshead 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. 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 on his knuckles. On one, he and his knuckles spelled W-O-R-K, ‘work.’ And on the other hand, the knuckles spelled P-L-A-Y, ‘play.’ And that, too, sort of reflected some part of his son’s mythology.

00:02:18
Speaker 3: Indeed, and here’s a quote from you: “The trinity of Lombardi’s early life was religion, family, and sports.” It would be true for his entire life, wouldn’t—

00:02:28
Speaker 2: It be, David?

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Speaker 4: 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 very important part of his coaching philosophy. But family was really everything. His mother’s family were the Izzos. She was one of thirteen Izzo kids, and that was, you know, all kinds of cousins and uncles and aunts. And that 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.

00:03:25
Speaker 3: 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—

00:03:33
Speaker 2: Was, well, it was pretty normal, wasn’t it?

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Speaker 4: Yeah. No, it was not out of the ordinary for an Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic family of that era. The Izzos were pretty well renowned in Sheepshead Bay because there were so many of them, and they had various professions in that place. But no, it was not shocking that there would be thirteen of them.

00:03:57
Speaker 3: 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.”

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Speaker 2: Talk about that.

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Speaker 4: Vince Lombardi 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, the fathers there, and the nuns. When he was at Green Bay, he went to Mass every morning at Saint Willebrord’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 every morning, but the Mass that he wanted to attend was held at something like 9:30 or 10:00, 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 Lombardi to get to work. That one didn’t work. He couldn’t tell God what to do, but he could tell everybody else.

00:05:08
Speaker 2: That’s right.

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Speaker 3: 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.

00:05:15
Speaker 4: That was about the only place in his life where that was true. Yep. But I think that people have various levels of commitment to faith and religion, and I think with Vince 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 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.

00:05:54
Speaker 3: 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 rewards an altar boy found in his favorite game, David: suffering, pain, redemption. It sounds like football and religion and intertwined.

00:06:23
Speaker 4: Yeah, they certainly were with Vince Lombardi. There’s one great irony or paradox to that, which is that Lombardi was kind of a wimp. 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 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 Lombardi did personally, and that he truly believed in the reward of that hard work, which is part of the Jesuit philosophy.

00:07:15
Speaker 3: And you’re listening to David Maraniss talk about the Jesuit influence on Vince Lombardi’s life. More from the author of When Pride Still Mattered. The story of Vince Lombardi continues here on Our American Story.

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Speaker 2: Folks, if you 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 free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we continue here with Our American Stories and with David Maraniss and his terrific book, When Pride Still Mattered, the story of Vince Lombardi.

00:08:19
Speaker 2: Let’s pick up where we last left off.

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Speaker 3: People would never believe it now, but New York City at one point in time, David, was a college football power.

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Speaker 2: Talk about the impact—absolutely. Talk about the—

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Speaker 3: Impact of those Jesuits and Fordham on young Vince.

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Speaker 4: 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 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 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.

00:09:32
Speaker 3: 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, paring away the extraneous, reducing and refining until all that was left was what was needed for that game against the team.” Exactly your point.

00:09:51
Speaker 4: 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 Blaik, who really had that same philosophy of making things simple by being a good teacher. It doesn’t mean 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—something he also learned from Red Blaik.

00:10:34
Speaker 2: 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.”

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Speaker 4: Absolutely. You know, it was a perfect storm. You know, are 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 and West Point in a way that made him unique.

00:11:06
Speaker 3: Now, his first job out of Fordham, his first coaching job, was in a little hamlet in northern New Jersey called Englewood. I grew up not far from there, and Saint Cecilia’s 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 as you studied him—that was true all the way through.

00:11:29
Speaker 2: Wasn’t it?

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Speaker 4: 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 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, and they were going to start winning because of the way that Lombardi—who was a lineman, by the way—could explain what it was like to be a quarterback.

00:12:21
Speaker 3: 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 you said, here’s Bart Starr talking about that.

00:12:44
Speaker 5: “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 begin to win.’ And his very first meeting, you could see how well prepared he was, and then how he approached what he was teaching at that session that day. You could you could sense an outstanding teacher and a builder that he was, and that’s exactly what we were. He just brought us right up quickly.”

00:13:17
Speaker 3: It’s extraordinary. Eight years he spent at Saint Cecilia doing just that. Eight years, David, that really mattered, didn’t it?

00:13:24
Speaker 4: 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 wilderness before he got his break. All made it so that he had this enormous overriding will to succeed when he finally did get his chance.

00:13:52
Speaker 2: West Point is the next gig.

00:13:53
Speaker 3: Talk about this man, Red Blaik, because we all need mentors in life, and sometimes we’re just lucky enough to stumble on one.

00:14:00
Speaker 4: Well, Blaik was a superior football coach. He had great organizational skills. He also was a terrific teacher, and his motto 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 for Vince Lombardi.

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Speaker 3: 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.

00:14:30
Speaker 4: 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. There are many valid reasons to do that, but you can’t look at it through rose-colored glasses. So, you know, during Lombardi’s 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 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 Blaik to his knees. They had an amazing recovery, but it was a very difficult couple of years.

00:15:26
Speaker 2: And there’s an honor code there.

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Speaker 3: So, in a place like West Point, it’s even just—it’s worse than big state university—a cheating scandal, right, I…

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Speaker 4: 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.

00:15:52
Speaker 3: 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.

00:16:08
Speaker 2: Who was that?

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Speaker 4: That was General Douglas MacArthur, who, by that time, was back 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 Blaik were very close, and so one of Assistant Coach Lombardi’s assignments was to go down to New York and get the film developed and stop off at MacArthur’s penthouse suite in the Waldorf Astoria 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 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.

00:17:04
Speaker 3: 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.

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Speaker 4: 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.

00:17:28
Speaker 3: And you’ve been listening to David Maraniss, his book, When Pride Still Mattered.

00:17:32
Speaker 2: It’s an older book.

00:17:33
Speaker 3: 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 Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered, the story of Vince Lombardi, continues here on Our American Story, and we continue with Our American Stories and with author David Maraniss, who wrote When Pride Still Mattered 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.

00:18:40
Speaker 4: You could say that that was the best combination of assistant coaches in NFL history, so much so that the head coach, Jim Lee Howell, they used to joke that his only assignment was to make sure the football—