GaryMrMets
09-27-2003, 10:59 PM
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/sports/article.adp?id=20030917105509990002
For Vince Lombardi, Winning Was the Only Thing
By JOHN WIEBUSCH
AOL Exclusive
As NFL storm fronts go, he was a tornado, whirling out of New York into sleepy Green Bay in 1959, rattling doors and windows and underachieving football players. The town by the lake in Wisconsin had not had a winning season since 1947, and for men who played pro football it was the equivalent of Siberia.
For a few brief moments, some people thought that's what it might be for Vince Lombardi, too. Who could imagine the charismatic New York Giants' offensive coordinator in a place where the locals were called Cheeseheads?
Marie Lombardi, his wife, was among those who werent sure about the move, unlike her husband. He liked the idea that he was being given the chance to operate the entire town-owned franchise, and, well, it was still the 1950s, when only the man wore the pants in a marriage. Besides, he always could go back to New York, couldn't he? And, yeah, he was 45 years old and getting his first head-coaching job since St. Cecilia High in 1946 and how many more chances would there be?
Vince and Marie and their teenage kids -- Vince, Jr., who wasn't a junior but who was called Junior, and Susan -- arrived on the frozen tundra of Green Bay in January 1959.
The miracle working began relatively modestly. Lombardi found underutilized gems like Bart Starr and Paul Hornung and Ray Nitschke, and he screamed and yelled and needled and cajoled and the Packers gained some 7-5 self-respect in 1959.
The NFL invaded the promised land of American living rooms in the 1960s through television, and the sport was led by the gap-toothed, Patton-like coach in Green Bay and by a boy commissioner, Pete Rozelle, who was elected, at age 32, almost one year to the day after Lombardi had taken over the Packers. Representing Green Bay in a marathon session to choose a successor to the late Bert Bell, Lombardi was a key figure in Rozelle's twenty-third ballot election. Rozelle would bring the NFL record TV contracts, expansion, and a merger with the AFL.
To say "and the rest is history" is to spout a moldy cliché. But indeed it was.
The Packers won the NFL's Western Conference in 1960 but lost to the Eagles 17-13 in Philadelphia in the NFL Championship Game. A trembling Lombardi stood among his players in the Green Bay locker room afterwards and said, "We are men and we will never let this happen again. We will never be defeated in a championship game again."
Incredibly, Green Bay never lost another championship game under Lombardi. Green Bay was Titletown in 1961 and 1962 (Lombardi whipping his old Giants' teams twice) and again in 1965, 1966, and 1967 (for perfectionist freaks, the Packers were a lowly second in the Western Conference in both 1963 and 1964). And as if to add exclamation points to the story, after the '66 and '67 seasons, Lombardi's teams won the first two Super Bowls.
He stepped down as coach in 1968 but stayed on as president and general manager for one more year. But he was restless and he (and Marie) yearned to return to the East Coast. (In a might-have-been flashback, Lombardi had been offered the Giants' head coaching job in early 1961 but he turned it down because he felt it was not the right time to leave Green Bay). In early 1969, the Redskins came courting. This may sound familiar: Washington had not had a winning season since 1955. Lombardi took the job, and in his first season there the previously underachieving Redskins were 7-5-2.
But this road taken does not have a happy ending. Lombardi never finished the job in Washington. The man who once said "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" was diagnosed with a virulent strain of colon cancer in the spring of 1970. He had two surgeries and he lost more than a hundred pounds in four months. He died at 57 on September 3, 1970. In 10 seasons as an NFL head coach his teams had a 105-35-6 record. The trophy that is awarded for winning the Super Bowl bears his name.
Vince Lombardi would have been 90 in June. One imagines him as a grandfather and great-grandfather and no doubt there would be trace elements of him being irascible.
But his son begs to differ. "He could goo-goo and gaga with the best of them," says Vince Lombardi, Jr., who lives in Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle, and makes a living as a motivational speaker, something his father also did during the NFL season and off-season. "If he were still around now he would be down on the floor with his great-grandchildren having a jolly old time. He would be laughing and he would be crying."
Vince Lombardi crying?
"No question. He cried easily. Every emotion came easily to him. Every emotion was right there at the surface for him. He could get angry easily and he could yell easily. But he also could do the kinder, gentler things easily, too."
The son is 61 now and the father of four adult children in their 30s. Those children have produced six children. Daughter Susan lives in Jacksonville and is the mother of three adult children, who have had four children.
The stories of Vince Lombardi the coaching disciplinarian are legendary and the son is asked what his father was like at home
"No question he could be tough," he says. "And with me I'd have to say he could be pretty free with the back of his hand. But I also have to say that there was hardly ever a time that I didn't deserve it, and there was never a time when it wouldn't be forgotten five minutes later.
"And like he was with the team, he always was great in a crisis. It was the little things that would bother him. He was a total perfectionist. He could be very rational over the big things. I'd do something really wrong -- like get kicked out of school -- and I'd worry about it all day. Then he'd come home and we'd talk about it very calmly. He always seemed to know how to handle things."
In fact, Lombardi was a master psychologist. One Packer famously was quoted as saying, "He treated us all the same -- like dogs." But that had to be said for laughs because it simply was not true. Bart Starr and Boyd Dowler were quiet and sensitive with fragile egos. Lombardi never shouted at them. Paul Hornung and Max McGee were notorious carousers who always were testing limits. Lombardi shouted at them often. Willie Davis and Forrest Gregg needed intellectual motivation. Lombardi gave it to them. Fact is, he treated every player differently.
He was completely different with my sister than he was with me, the son says. He always seemed to know what I needed -- what we all needed. I went to college at St. Thomas in St. Paul. I played football there -- I loved the sport -- and after my second or third year I told my dad I wanted to become a coach. 'Oh?' he said. 'And whos going to pay for your schooling now? 'Why you,' I said. And he said, 'The hell I am. Youre going to law school after you graduate and, yes, Ill pay for that. He said, 'Youre too smart to be a coach.'
"So I followed his wishes and eventually finished law school -- and it was the right decision. Another rationale for his not wanting me to go into coaching was that it would have been very tough to follow in his footsteps -- to be Vince Lombardi, Jr., out there in the coaching world. Like Frank Sinatra, Jr., it would have been a tough act to follow.
"My dad had come very close to getting his law degree so it was a very big deal to him when I got mine. He was proud, so proud, of me, and when he was proud he didnt have to say a word. He used to introduce me -- 'This is my son, the lawyer.'"
Vince Lombardi made winners out of everyone and everything he touched.
His son, the lawyer chose motivation and not coaching as his platform in life, but hes really spreading the gospel of his father.
In an NFL bible, the words of Vince Lombardi, Sr., are practically pro football commandments:
"Fatigue makes cowards of us all."
"Mental toughness is essential to success."
"The word 'selflessness' as opposed to 'selfishness' is what I try to teach."
"Make that second effort."
"The harder you work the harder it is to surrender."
"Success demands singleness of purpose."
"Dancing is a contact sport. Football is a collision sport."
"I demand a commitment to excellence and to victory and that is what life is all about."
"If we would create something we must be something."
"Some of us will do our jobs well and some of us will not, but we all will be judged by only one thing -- the result."
"The will to excel and the will to win, they endure. They are more important than any events that occasion them."
"Winning isnt everything, its the only thing."
John Wiebusch was Editor in Chief of NFL publications for 32 years. The editor of NFL Insider, GameDay, PRO! magazines and the Super Bowl Game Program, he has edited and/or written more than 100 books. You can write John at WiebuschNFL.
09-24-03 12:56 EDT
http://cdn.news.aol.com/aolnews_photos/01/07/20030922182609990001
Vince Lombardi
Which coach is the NFL's all-time greatest?
Tom Landry
Vince Lombardi
Bill Parcells
Don Shula
Bill Walsh
Other (Discuss)
For Vince Lombardi, Winning Was the Only Thing
By JOHN WIEBUSCH
AOL Exclusive
As NFL storm fronts go, he was a tornado, whirling out of New York into sleepy Green Bay in 1959, rattling doors and windows and underachieving football players. The town by the lake in Wisconsin had not had a winning season since 1947, and for men who played pro football it was the equivalent of Siberia.
For a few brief moments, some people thought that's what it might be for Vince Lombardi, too. Who could imagine the charismatic New York Giants' offensive coordinator in a place where the locals were called Cheeseheads?
Marie Lombardi, his wife, was among those who werent sure about the move, unlike her husband. He liked the idea that he was being given the chance to operate the entire town-owned franchise, and, well, it was still the 1950s, when only the man wore the pants in a marriage. Besides, he always could go back to New York, couldn't he? And, yeah, he was 45 years old and getting his first head-coaching job since St. Cecilia High in 1946 and how many more chances would there be?
Vince and Marie and their teenage kids -- Vince, Jr., who wasn't a junior but who was called Junior, and Susan -- arrived on the frozen tundra of Green Bay in January 1959.
The miracle working began relatively modestly. Lombardi found underutilized gems like Bart Starr and Paul Hornung and Ray Nitschke, and he screamed and yelled and needled and cajoled and the Packers gained some 7-5 self-respect in 1959.
The NFL invaded the promised land of American living rooms in the 1960s through television, and the sport was led by the gap-toothed, Patton-like coach in Green Bay and by a boy commissioner, Pete Rozelle, who was elected, at age 32, almost one year to the day after Lombardi had taken over the Packers. Representing Green Bay in a marathon session to choose a successor to the late Bert Bell, Lombardi was a key figure in Rozelle's twenty-third ballot election. Rozelle would bring the NFL record TV contracts, expansion, and a merger with the AFL.
To say "and the rest is history" is to spout a moldy cliché. But indeed it was.
The Packers won the NFL's Western Conference in 1960 but lost to the Eagles 17-13 in Philadelphia in the NFL Championship Game. A trembling Lombardi stood among his players in the Green Bay locker room afterwards and said, "We are men and we will never let this happen again. We will never be defeated in a championship game again."
Incredibly, Green Bay never lost another championship game under Lombardi. Green Bay was Titletown in 1961 and 1962 (Lombardi whipping his old Giants' teams twice) and again in 1965, 1966, and 1967 (for perfectionist freaks, the Packers were a lowly second in the Western Conference in both 1963 and 1964). And as if to add exclamation points to the story, after the '66 and '67 seasons, Lombardi's teams won the first two Super Bowls.
He stepped down as coach in 1968 but stayed on as president and general manager for one more year. But he was restless and he (and Marie) yearned to return to the East Coast. (In a might-have-been flashback, Lombardi had been offered the Giants' head coaching job in early 1961 but he turned it down because he felt it was not the right time to leave Green Bay). In early 1969, the Redskins came courting. This may sound familiar: Washington had not had a winning season since 1955. Lombardi took the job, and in his first season there the previously underachieving Redskins were 7-5-2.
But this road taken does not have a happy ending. Lombardi never finished the job in Washington. The man who once said "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" was diagnosed with a virulent strain of colon cancer in the spring of 1970. He had two surgeries and he lost more than a hundred pounds in four months. He died at 57 on September 3, 1970. In 10 seasons as an NFL head coach his teams had a 105-35-6 record. The trophy that is awarded for winning the Super Bowl bears his name.
Vince Lombardi would have been 90 in June. One imagines him as a grandfather and great-grandfather and no doubt there would be trace elements of him being irascible.
But his son begs to differ. "He could goo-goo and gaga with the best of them," says Vince Lombardi, Jr., who lives in Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle, and makes a living as a motivational speaker, something his father also did during the NFL season and off-season. "If he were still around now he would be down on the floor with his great-grandchildren having a jolly old time. He would be laughing and he would be crying."
Vince Lombardi crying?
"No question. He cried easily. Every emotion came easily to him. Every emotion was right there at the surface for him. He could get angry easily and he could yell easily. But he also could do the kinder, gentler things easily, too."
The son is 61 now and the father of four adult children in their 30s. Those children have produced six children. Daughter Susan lives in Jacksonville and is the mother of three adult children, who have had four children.
The stories of Vince Lombardi the coaching disciplinarian are legendary and the son is asked what his father was like at home
"No question he could be tough," he says. "And with me I'd have to say he could be pretty free with the back of his hand. But I also have to say that there was hardly ever a time that I didn't deserve it, and there was never a time when it wouldn't be forgotten five minutes later.
"And like he was with the team, he always was great in a crisis. It was the little things that would bother him. He was a total perfectionist. He could be very rational over the big things. I'd do something really wrong -- like get kicked out of school -- and I'd worry about it all day. Then he'd come home and we'd talk about it very calmly. He always seemed to know how to handle things."
In fact, Lombardi was a master psychologist. One Packer famously was quoted as saying, "He treated us all the same -- like dogs." But that had to be said for laughs because it simply was not true. Bart Starr and Boyd Dowler were quiet and sensitive with fragile egos. Lombardi never shouted at them. Paul Hornung and Max McGee were notorious carousers who always were testing limits. Lombardi shouted at them often. Willie Davis and Forrest Gregg needed intellectual motivation. Lombardi gave it to them. Fact is, he treated every player differently.
He was completely different with my sister than he was with me, the son says. He always seemed to know what I needed -- what we all needed. I went to college at St. Thomas in St. Paul. I played football there -- I loved the sport -- and after my second or third year I told my dad I wanted to become a coach. 'Oh?' he said. 'And whos going to pay for your schooling now? 'Why you,' I said. And he said, 'The hell I am. Youre going to law school after you graduate and, yes, Ill pay for that. He said, 'Youre too smart to be a coach.'
"So I followed his wishes and eventually finished law school -- and it was the right decision. Another rationale for his not wanting me to go into coaching was that it would have been very tough to follow in his footsteps -- to be Vince Lombardi, Jr., out there in the coaching world. Like Frank Sinatra, Jr., it would have been a tough act to follow.
"My dad had come very close to getting his law degree so it was a very big deal to him when I got mine. He was proud, so proud, of me, and when he was proud he didnt have to say a word. He used to introduce me -- 'This is my son, the lawyer.'"
Vince Lombardi made winners out of everyone and everything he touched.
His son, the lawyer chose motivation and not coaching as his platform in life, but hes really spreading the gospel of his father.
In an NFL bible, the words of Vince Lombardi, Sr., are practically pro football commandments:
"Fatigue makes cowards of us all."
"Mental toughness is essential to success."
"The word 'selflessness' as opposed to 'selfishness' is what I try to teach."
"Make that second effort."
"The harder you work the harder it is to surrender."
"Success demands singleness of purpose."
"Dancing is a contact sport. Football is a collision sport."
"I demand a commitment to excellence and to victory and that is what life is all about."
"If we would create something we must be something."
"Some of us will do our jobs well and some of us will not, but we all will be judged by only one thing -- the result."
"The will to excel and the will to win, they endure. They are more important than any events that occasion them."
"Winning isnt everything, its the only thing."
John Wiebusch was Editor in Chief of NFL publications for 32 years. The editor of NFL Insider, GameDay, PRO! magazines and the Super Bowl Game Program, he has edited and/or written more than 100 books. You can write John at WiebuschNFL.
09-24-03 12:56 EDT
http://cdn.news.aol.com/aolnews_photos/01/07/20030922182609990001
Vince Lombardi
Which coach is the NFL's all-time greatest?
Tom Landry
Vince Lombardi
Bill Parcells
Don Shula
Bill Walsh
Other (Discuss)