When Pride Still Mattered: The Life of Vince Lombardi

My everything that we have each day. No powder each week. John will play all will all the money thing that really when you will do a show will do when things are you listening to the late Vincent Barney we celebrate Great American iconic figures and there was no bigger one in the mid to late 20th century, the Vince Lombardi affected everything and we love talking to great writers and were to talk right now with Dave Moran's who wrote the book on Vince somebody when pride still mattered. The associate editor of the Washington Post and David, thanks so much for joining us. Let's start at the beginning Vince Lombardi's dad what what did he do for looking and describe the world you provided.

The area was torture. 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 5 x 5 which described about how we look. He was short and squat in very strong and sort of inculcated into his sons that there is no such thing as pain. He was To kill before it's time I give futilely disputed with the modern-day athletes that but my favorite tattoos brought his knuckles on one. He and his knuckles spelled WOR K work and on the other hand, knuckles spelled play PLA well I am at 230 reflected some part of his sons mythology is a quote for you.

The Trinity is Vince Lombardi's early life was religion family in sports.

It will be true for his entire life would be Dave L absolutely in various orders, but he was very religious man Catholic family.

Italian Catholics at what point.

Vince himself thought he was going to be a priest in the only sort of carried that inside of for the rest of his life that he was traded exported by the Jesuits in the Jesuit philosophy was a very important part of his coaching philosophy, but family was literally everything his mother's family were the those that she was one of 13 is no kids and that Norton with all kinds of cousins and uncles and is absent in that family really is the environment that Vince Lombardi grew up. Something that he never was able to re-create with his own nuclear family is will talk about but was able to re-create with his team the Green Bay Packers 13 kids people listening, like shocked right David, but Irish Catholic Italian Catholic and just lots of families eight and 12 was well it was pretty normal and I was not out of the ordinary Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic family of that era were pretty well renowned in Sheepshead Bay because there were there were so many of them the day they had various professions in that place. But no, it was not.

It was not shocking that there would be 13 of the church is not some distant institution to be visited once a week. Part of the rhythm of daily life.

Talk about the party adult like a bath every morning when you lived. You know where he lived at Fordham as a student he was trained by the Jesuits that he was teacher and coach it takes to hear your high school in New Jersey where he is best friends were there for the fathers there than the when he was at Green Bay. He went to mass every morning. It's a little broad Green Bay, which is a lovely Catholic place in the Lavista related Italy last move his career with the Washington DC he courts wanted to go to mass every morning but the mass that he wanted to attend was held at something like 930 or 10 and he wanted to get to work before that. So you literally knocked on the door the priest and told to move his mass up so that would work.

I could tell God what to do, but he could tell it was a part of me that as I read your book humus wanted to submit to something higher than them, but the only place in life where that was true, but I think that people of various levels of commitment to faith and religion that I think with its Lombardi it was authentic and deep that 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 that he knew that he sometimes had anger management problems.that he was violent, but to study, except that you know what his words that he wanted to try to control that he regretted it in notes for the recent best serve for repentance and that quote this is Marty quote in your book. From the first contact on football fascinated me contact control violence again with the mission was to hit someone harder punishing these up elbows out challenger body mind and spirit exhaust yourself and seek redemption through fatigue, such with rewards and altar boy found in his favorite game, David suffering, pain redemption, it sounds like football and religion and intertwined, they certainly were with its Lombardi. One great irony or paradox to that which is that Lombardi was kind of a whip.

He had a very low pain threshold himself copy would be to get a strong spirit. But as I write it. 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 and others, which the kid eliminated themselves so that the notion of fatigue go and work giving your hardest and leaving at all in the field is something Lombardi did personally and that he truly believed in the reward of that hard work, which is part of philosophy listening to David Marine's talk about the Jesuit influence since the parties life more from the author of when pride still mattered.

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Simply go to Geico.com or contact your local agent today and we continue here with our American stories and with David Morales in his terrific book when pride still mattered story of Vince Lombardi's pickup when we last left off, the people would never believe it now, but New York City at one point in time David was a college football power talk about the impact of those Jesuits and Fordham on young Vince could trace everything about my body coaching pullout back to the judge anyone in my mind is the notion of freedom through discipline, which I think explains Lombardi better than anything else and 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 for the dental to his free will for Lombardi if you transferred it to his football team. It was that what they learned. They discipline themselves to that hard work to understand what they were doing it slow the game down for them and made them have a leg up on all their opponents about the freedom that his hard work gave to his players from the book all the detailed preparations resulted not in a mass of confusing statistics and plans but in the opposite pairing away the extraneous reducing and refining until all that was left was what was needed for that game against the team exactly your point there David, along with the other major philosophy that affected liberty was from West Point, where he was an assistant coach under a great coach read Blake who really had that same philosophy of making things simple by being a good teacher. It doesn't mean that that things are are dumbed down for four players but just that there's so much extraneous stuff the teachers put into something in their ability to make it understandable to every player.

It simplifies something until it has a more powerful effect of something. He also learned to read Blake.

Thank you. "In many ways the philosophy at West Point was similar to the way of life. Marty had learned earlier at Fordham under the Jesuits, absolutely. You know the perfect storm yard are leaders order made electric is a combination of the two, but I think that that the making of Vince Lombardi with the greatest security came from the Jesuits and in West Point in a way that that made him unique his first job out Fordham's first coaching job was a little hamlet in northern New Jersey called Englewood. I grew up not far from there in St. Cecelia's high school in the quote again from the book when he took the job. It seems 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 know when you did.

As you study them was true all the way through wasn't totally teacher, coach, everything that helped him with the Green Bay Packers was refined first and little faith.

He taught a lot of different classes, including chemistry and again he did what he tried to do is make it you would go on in the course work until every kid in the class understood that he had a bad ability to make complicated things seem understandable comprehensible so that the later when you first got to the Green Bay Packers by Bart Starr, the quarterback spent one hour of fitful barley and rushed to a telephone call his wife to say that you never experienced anything like this and they were to start winning because of the way that liberty was alignment. By the way could explain what it was like to be a quarterback you know this is extraordinary.

We played the clip from Bart Starr in one second. What's interesting is when the morning just jumping ahead of the story will return back to St. Thales when when Lombardi gets to Green Bay. The team is been one intently.

You want intensities now meeting the players he gives this pep talk and within an hour. As you said, here's Bart Starr talking about that dollars in our first meeting with dynamite and I called my wife Karen. I said I will be in the wind.

That's all I center honey were going to began to win in his very first meeting, you could see how well prepared he was and how he approached what he was teaching at that session that day.

You could seek a sense of an outstanding teacher and builder that he was. And that's exactly what we were. He just brought us run up quickly is extraordinary eight years he spent at St. Cecelia doing just that. Eight years David that really matter didn't want to be that he was ready when he finally got his chance. Secondly, another way, all of that time eight years at St. Cecelia and several other assistant coaching jobs 20 years. Basically, in the wilderness before he got his break made it so that he had this enormous overriding will to succeed. When he finally did get his kids. West Point is the next about this man. Read Blake because we all need mentors in life and sometimes just lucky enough to stumble on one Blake was a superior football coach.

He had great organizational skills. He will also was a terrific teacher. His motto was, you have to pay the price and the notion that you get out of life, what you put into it that it was part of the learning tree for Vince Lombardi and what's interesting is this is back in West Point is again hard to believe was a national powerhouse in football teams when Marty got there, they'd come through a couple of lazing where they were the number one team in the country. One of the other breadth of my book, however, is the fallacy of the innocent test where were always longing for something golden in the past and that tend to romanticize it. For that reason there are many valid reasons to do that, but you can't look look at it through rose colored glasses. So during Lombardi's time at West Point.

There was a cheating scandal among among the football players human nature doesn't really change the culture around it does but but the temptations of life are there, you know, in every generation, so it West Point it was, you know, a cheating scandal that almost brought read Blake to his knees. They had an amazing recovery but it was a very difficult couple years and is an honor code there.

So in a place like West Point.

It's even just it's worse than big State University cheating scandal right yes if it's sort of more discombobulated that that those young men would would be involved in that it wasn't the first time it was the last time know that one of the academies had a scandal like that and partly because of the pressures of the other codes and that the young men in the very tough circumstances and that nothing changes there. One scene in the book really stood out for me, David. It was a Lombardi taking Dean Fromm from the West Point I'm bringing it to New York City for Horton graduate who lived in the Waldorf-Astoria was that Greg McArthur by that time was that from controversy over. It is generally general but still revered West Point did within the superintendent West Point. He had read Blake were very close to one of of assistant coach Lombardi's assignment was to go to New York and get the film developed and stop off at MacArthur's penthouse suite in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and show them the game filled MacArthur was always following in great detail the starting lineups of the West Point of the Army football team. Their schedule there preseason drills.

He wanted to know everything about every player on that team and what if somebody got to spend time with them showing game filled during the season, real learning experience for minimum MacArthur by the leg. Both believed David in the value of competitive sports to shape and mold men's character talk about that so deftly I know MacArthur was very much into the notion that the mind and body went together and that sports were essential to the building character and even listening to David Moran as his book when pride still mattered. It's an older book but what we do here in the show as 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 Moran us when pride still mattered.

The story of Vince Lombardi continue here on our American story role. Can we continue with our American stories and with author David Moran us wrote when pride still mattered quite a while ago that we call them up because no one knows more about Vince Lombardi. Let's continue what we last left off.

Let's not talk about his next job because it may have been his most important, he was an assistant coach with Wellington marriage New York Giants. He was the offense of coach and a young Tom Landry of Dallas. Of course, would ultimately get Tommy I was a defensive coach nice nice start combination of both coaches in all history. So much so that the head coach Jim Liao interjected is only made assignment to make sure the football had an affair and that eternity over to Landry and Lombardi who were just opposites of personality and coaching styles.

Landry was cool, methodical, almost, taught in the way he loved his players to act in the way he coached in the body was much more emotional much more.

You know how high and low in terms of how you do with the players complete opposite to learn something new we get to adapt Lombardi.

These grown men, guys like Charlie Connolly served in war talk about how it Lombardi adapted from teaching young people teaching grown men while you're right.

You know your first training camp with the Giants beat the effective players really didn't take Tobit first Frank Gifford, the great halfback and Charlie Connolly, the old quarterback.

They thought he was sort of amateurish and you know trying to serve around rock college guy so it took a while to adjust to the prose style, but that's a very important point about Lombardi, which many people don't quite understand you have the reputation of sort of my way or the highway being inflexible. He wasn't like that at all really is very disciplined and tough but he was also a master psychologist to study his players and figure out how to get the best out of all of them in learning change and adapt.

And that's exactly what he started doing when he became an assistant coach at the Giants and all teachers in the end have to do that because culture changes change and you just can't TTT can't treat people as robots their people that's exactly right enough. Why would people ask me whether Lombardi could succeed today.

I say yes, he would he would he would learn how to get the best out of players today, just as he did in his era that he would adapt to that without changing his fundamental philosophy. The players would adapt to him because they realize that he had their interests at heart and that he would help them with the national football experience then because it's not today, baseball, boxing even horse racing got more coverage in newspapers. Pay was poor in your book you talk about how players barely got paid for preseason games and many teams.

No compensation plans for injured players, but Lombardi was lucky to come into the league. Just as all that was beginning to change David and it didn't hurt that he was in a big media market like New York know it didn't hurt that it is well with the synergy between the rise of professional football in the rise of Vince Lombardi. So everything that he learned New York.

By the time he got to Green Bay football. The NFL was finally coming out from being a second-class sport to be the dominant sport that it would later become an export use Lombardi the Liberty used him in that rise. So he ends up in a little hamlet in the Midwest called Green Bay. His poor wife. I need to let my eyes well up in Alaska that he was going to.

As far as his wife and family were concerned.

We haven't talked much about this thing called the marriage and the wife had drinking problems. Vince wasn't exactly a model husband in terms of how we talk to his wife treated his wife and he was never there. Talk about that relationship and what the wife did she really tried to keep Vince in New York difficult love story but a very difficult and human and problematic one.

Marie was from New Jersey. She loved East Coast she liked the clothing stores in Manhattan in the whole lifestyle there and for her to go to the little Green Bay was just the other culture shock.

There was a Broadway play was made out of my book.

The character that steals the show in the play is very Lombardi played by the great actress Judith light the scene of them driving left for the first time and rubbing Chicago and then running into a snowstorm. It is amazing to see beautiful light portrayed Maria Betsy where she sees nothing but white that had of her bed and what that sort of representative or somebody was much better, creating a sense of family out of his football team that he was out of the nuclear family, his wife had a paradoxical situation where she loved being Vince somebody's life and she grew to love football and really understood him in the game, but in the end quite well yet it was a very lonely experience because the fence was married to football as much is more than her and she did have a drinking problem and there were several moments in their lives and Green Bay were things got pretty dicey. She was in the hospital at four for an overdose of flow of drugs kills drugs in the course the relationship with Vince Junior was equally difficult to imagine being.

That name and that bird is David, the sons of great men. Maybe, maybe not really is a great senior book will embody the new coach gives his first impassioned speech to the Green Bay team that had just lost 10 of 11 games told her they were going to be the New York Yankees of football. He told them that he would relentlessly pursue victory in anyone who didn't like it is free to leave after the speech I'm courting from your book. There was silence.

The room empties Lombardi approaches veteran Max McGee that you think Lombardi asked. I'll tell you you got their attention. Coach McGee replied, and I wasn't sure Lombardi confided everybody could've just gotten up and walked out. For all I knew showed a tremendous vulnerability in Lombardi and honesty. I think that is what really came out of this book for me what a human being. He was absolutely no you could try to create a mythological creature. But it is for frailty inhumanity of somebody that goes. Despite all of that to achieve success that make somebody the more interesting character.

And he did have those vulnerabilities in those uncertainties and they drove him as much is confident that it was good all my love is seen at somebody on a chalkboard outlining the sweet that that's the psychotic psychophysics class. It's so intricate and yet he mastered these team master display and it became the became the atomic play of the great American ball team known as the Green Bay Packers sweep much of anything described in somebody because I superficially it seems simplistic yet all the other teams that have all of the safety play and in the Packers had the power sweep the Green Bay sweep and other teams knew it was coming. So why did it succeed.

It's because nobody taught it so well and so thoroughly allowed freedom in the discipline of that sweet so that every player involved in that sleep. Whether their blocker or the runner knew about 10 or 20 variables that they could use the sweep depending on how the defense is reacting.

They understood it so well that they were one step ahead of the defense of that play and that was the freedom to discipline of Lombardi's philosophy exemplified by one plate.

It seems simple but actually was rendered simple complexity and you're listening to David, author of when pride still mattered.

This seminal book in understanding the life of coach Vince Lombardi. More after these messages. This is our American story will all and we continue with our American stories and the father David Moran is surprised, and author of when pride still mattered. Let's pick up when we last left off on the life of Vince Lombardi. Marty had no room in his locker room or in the entire city. It turns out for racism. David talk about this. Did some of that have to do with how Italians were treated in much of the country was called names like Lopp and dado and getting it certainly affect Lombardi that that that's not to say that the only factor because I think there are other Italians who were discriminated against or anybody you connect one of two ways you can then find somebody else to discriminate in his room stuff. Or you can take it as a learning lesson about you know that were all in the same boat.

Lombardi took it that way in the best possible way.

When he got to Green Bay, you know, I think there were three blocks of the hotel or one with a shoeshine man at the north window. Tell the other two were Packers. He brought the first wave of great black athletes to Green Bay and one of the first things he did was go to all the taverns and Green Bay are most of them are so many overlook the black but he said if I hear that you discriminate against any my players are off limits for all that had a pretty profound effect and that was the first thing he did throughout his career. When they had preseason games and the self of the first instance there were in New Orleans and the black players had sleep somewhere else. He said we will never allow this again and he would put the whole team up together at a rebate instead of having to deal with this with the Jim Crow South. He was very strong.

Andre said all of his black players from the date they first met up to the day he died. Reviewing him for that in the military. We all know this about the military, long before there was integration talk the first real cultural institution in America that brought the races together was the military did not know it too late. It happened after World War II basically but but the military and sports more than any other parts of American life and become a true meritocracy of the playing field or in the field of battle.

They did a lot. Both of those institutions to break the racial barriers of this country. Let's talk about prayer.

You said it was quote the essence, Lombardi's religious practice and the constant of his daily routine quote his daily prayers. With effort to balance the tension between his will to succeed in his desire to be good at something that he saw that in himself. He might have the appearance of mapping the most self reflective human being so obsessed theme with with prevailing but in fact he did have that self-awareness said it was the central part of his fate of his life of prayer was to try to find the right balance even if he couldn't do it outside of the church. He understood the problem that is dealing with. It is owed frailty that was that was 20 that a lot of you didn't pray to, when he prayed to be a better person and in your chapter Trinity's son talked about his dad quote from the sunlight was a struggle for my dad. He knew he wasn't perfect and a lot of habits that were far from perfect. The strengths were his weaknesses and vice versa.

He fought it by taking that paradox to church it went back to the Jesuits, always in the struggle between the shadow self in the real self, your humanity and your divinity. He saw that struggle clear.

My dad in concrete terms.

Wow, what a wise son, David left what I started this biography was not perpetuating a mythological seated preacher as a father, but had a clear eyed vision of him and it wasn't. He didn't hate his father. He loved his father, but he knew his father's flaws.

He had suffered because of that himself and spent a lot of time thinking about it, so that by the time I purchased book. Vince Junior was very open to letting it author sort of see the reality of the complexity of the paradox of his old man father and son doesn't have this complicated relationship in the honesty of this. The brutal honesty, it was absolutely beautiful.

I every every father-son mother-daughter relationship has some complexity to it of 1° or another. This one was a little more complex because of the father's fame and his obsession and the son's inability to break through Otello until he knows it was too late, but that level of comprehension of of Vince Junior of what his father was dealing with is quite extraordinary going to win a world championship by beating his old team, the New York Giants, they didn't just beat the Giants daily to destroy them. When the score was 37 and nothing finally started playing his subs and Lombardi call that title game.

The biggest thrill of his life to be the coach of the New York Giants so that you know you your kiddos. He liked Ian Wellington barely put before them in the same era.

There a lot of connections very didn't get the job, and that by the time he was might've gotten Eddie did little leave again so beating that beating the New York Giants. I would say that first 37 the nothing game was private. The most important of his career along with the last will one with the ice bullet.

Was this great celebration at the Elks club in town and everyone was there.

After this victory, players to you wrote this about Lombardi and the many coached is despotic and unfeeling as he could sometimes seem on the practice field. The coach had taught them how to win.

He lifted their self-image and challenge them to accomplish things that they had thought beyond their reach. I want to play you a clip of Jerry Kramer talking about code and this is a guy talking possibly dated 20 to 30 years after this incident, I think it was the Jerry Kramer hi Jeff outside lifetime scrimmage and got my faith. He said Mr. concentration five med high school is premed. You reject the shoeshine locker room, then their chin in my hand album a look at the floor thinking came in the door, came across the room flat man that my hair son was a day you turn around, walk away and that started my motor with that comment he allowed me to think about great point on I work everything I found in my life. Many coaches who think their many liberties don't understand is you have to have that balance. Yes, you can be tough but you have to have the ability to know when winters show the love you to your players and that you really you know it's about them and their ability to work together in the body had that little body B to just see the tough part don't see the love they don't see the softness either the vulnerability and that that's a considerable loss for them. The final parting thoughts here. Once the Giants game wins in my mind the Super Bowl's were afterthoughts they were going to happen. He had achieved all you achieve what it was or something after it was all done that you thought I should put that in the book, I missed it. The great question. I missed a couple stories that I wished I'd gotten was about Lionel Aldrich good defensive and an African-American who was in love with and married a white woman in there was a lot of pressure to prevent that from happening.

Believe it or not.

In that era that you still have that level of racial bias and Lombardi stood up for Aldrich and Cedeno were human beings first and don't feel any pressure from me about that seems obvious now but I wish it had that story in my book because it was one more level of Lombardi.

I do have the book affected his brother Harold was gay of the body was terrific on that issue. It still is not something that professional athletes can deal with the particularly healthy way. Even today, but will barely made it clear in all of his teams that if you found anybody discriminating against someone because of their sexual orientation.

They were off the team and is a Catholic that had to be something you mean he was actually practicing perfect salsa leaves loving on the game player. I love the way you put that because there's so many different ways that people distort religion in Catholicism in that he was applying the fundamental love of of what faith should be listening to David Moran's when pride still mattered. It's an older book the ticket up.

If you haven't read it you will regret it. Go to Amazon for the usual suspects.

The story of an somebody told by no one better than David Moran is here on our American stories