Vince Lombardi was an
American icon, a symbol
of competitiveness, a legend
for asking his players to pay
the price of victory. By the
time he arrived in Washington,
he'd begun to wonder if there
were hidden costs.

By David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 5, 1999

Washington, at last. The patron saint of American competition and success had finally reached a town where winners were everything. After napping for two hours in Suite 675 at the Mayflower Hotel and attending a prayer breakfast on Capitol Hill, he arrived at his new job on Connecticut Avenue a few blocks north of the White House at 10 o'clock and immediately snapped into his routine. That was what Edward Bennett Williams had hired him for, what people were expecting of him, what he knew how to do better than any politician here, including Richard Nixon, who had been sworn in as president a few weeks earlier. It was February 1969 and Vince Lombardi was taking charge.

His title was executive vice president of the Washington Redskins, but his function was boss. Just as he had done in Green Bay 10 years earlier, he began by rearranging furniture and personnel. The big office that had belonged to Williams was now his. Pictures were coming off the walls and into a box marked EBW. "Why don't you go back to your law practice," Lombardi told Williams, half-jokingly, and the proud lawyer took it in good humor. He was still president, but had abandoned any pretense of running the club, something that was hard to imagine him doing for anyone but his beloved Lombardi. The very idea that he had landed 'the Coach" was said to make Williams quiver with boyish excitement.

	Vince Lombardi and his wife, Marie: "Now I am going to get tough and try to protect him." (Courtesy of the Lombardi family)

One the son of an Irish night watchman, the other of an Italian butcher, and now here they were, Williams and Lombardi, strolling down the sidewalk to lunch in the nation's capital, and it seemed as though they sucked up all the power in the city as they walked by. The noontime crowd turned and stared at Lombardi as he waited for the walk light at the corner of Connecticut and L. Inside Duke Zeibert's, the regular table up front awaited Mr. Williams and his guest. Red meat, martinis, sports pictures on the wall, ephemeral clatter of boating, dealing, lying, all suspended momentarily as patrons gawked and then pushed back their chairs and rose for a standing ovation. After lunch, the pair went to the Sheraton-Carlton, marching through the bright lights and television cables to the front of 200 cameramen and reporters in the Chandelier Room. Over at the White House, President Nixon had just finished a press conference, a mere warmup act for this announcement of the coming of Lombardi. "Gentlemen," the coach said, after Williams had introduced him by calling this the proudest day of his life, "it is not true that I can walk across the Potomac. Not even when it is frozen."

Perhaps not, but who was listening? Washington was agog over its new leader and the prospect of a football revival. The Redskins had not won a championship since 1942 and seemed in worse shape than even lowly Green Bay had been when Lombardi took control there a decade earlier. Four unsuccessful Redskins coaches had come and gone through 13 seasons without a winning record, from Joe Kuharich (26-32-2) to Mike Nixon (4-18-2) to Bill McPeak (21-46-3) to Otto Graham (17-22-3). If Graham, once a great quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, was not as ineffectual as Scooter McLean, Lombardi’s predecessor at Green Bay, he suffered from some of the same unfortunate perceptions. Nice guy, not a leader. Players called him Toot (Otto, inside out).

The fact that the home team was a loser did not seem to diminish the sports fascination of Washington’s power elite. Earl Warren and Richard Nixon, the departing chief justice and arriving president, might have had nothing else in common by that point in their careers, but both still read the sports section first. Football meant a lot to Washington even then, and Lombardi meant more; not just as a coach but as what Williams called the Philosopher King, someone who knew what he believed in and could get things done. David Broder of The Washington Post offered a similar assessment. "The Lombardi administration seems certain to revolutionize life in official Washington," he wrote. "For one thing, he is dedicated to winning. He defines happiness as the achievement of one’s objectives. This is radical doctrine in a government and a city where most jobs depend on seeing that no problem is ever really solved."It was "bad luck for Mr. Nixon," Broder continued, that "fate has made him only a bit player in this momentous drama, but the Lombardi era has begun."

The hype seemed almost justified. Only 10 years earlier, before he began his unlikely run to fame in remote Green Bay, Lombardi was a virtual unknown, already 45 and worried that he might get stuck as a lifer in the anonymous ranks of coaching assistants. Now, after leading the Packers to five NFL championships in nine seasons, he was on his way to becoming an American icon, a coach who transcended his sport. His name was synonymous with winning, but more than that with a philosophy of winning, an old-fashioned ideal that he had forged from the Jesuit precepts he learned as one of Fordham’s Seven Blocks of Granite during the mid-1930s and maxims he borrowed later from other coaches, especially his mentor at West Point, Col. Red Blaik. It was a sporting ideal that reflected certain notions of character, will, discipline, obedience and teamwork, the need to compete, to strive for excellence, to fulfill one’s human potential.

While his philosophy worked for his teams and for most of his players, and made him a powerful draw as a motivational speaker in the business world, it did not begin to reveal the complexity of the man. His public image – what made establishment Washington swoon – was of fearless determination, but he was in truth almost painfully shy. He had to screw up his courage every day to be a public figure; witty chatter and glad-handing did not come naturally to him. He did not fake or seduce or charm his way to fame. He was literal, not subtle. If you invited him to a 6:30 cocktail party, peer out the window at 6:25 and you would see him pulling up in his Pontiac, ignoring his wife’s pleas that they drive around the block a few times to avoid being the first guests ringing the doorbell. Nothing flashy about his looks: squat and sturdy build, gap-toothed smile, broad and fleshy nose, thick-lens glasses, short wavy dark hair salted with whitish gray, always fresh from the barber’s chair. In dress he was indistinguishable from a State Farm agent on Monroe Street in Green Bay: invariably neat, with his big Class of ’37 college ring and wristwatch and tie clasp and button-down short-sleeved white shirt.

He wore hats and galoshes and rain slickers made of translucent plastic, and played golf and gin rummy and cried and screamed and sweated and watched "McHale’s Navy" and laughed so hard that tears squirted from his eyes like windshield wiper spray. He fell asleep in a recliner chair in his den and snored away until supper.

No way around it, Lombardi was a square. And the interior of his life during his final years with the Packers had become more complicated than anyone could imagine. At the same time he was delivering speeches bemoaning what he viewed as the excesses of freedom, worried that American society was collapsing around him, his personal life was silently imploding. His health was deteriorating, his body punished by his need to prevail, what Bertolt Brecht called "the black addiction of the brain." In late January 1968, right after his moment of ultimate football triumph, his second Super Bowl victory, his unwed daughter, Susan, revealed that she was pregnant, provoking Lombardi to concoct a fake elopement for her and to pull strings to arrange a private Catholic wedding. His namesake son followed a straight and narrow path, playing football in college and then going on to law school, but all the while struggled to live up to the Old Man’s standards and to find ways to connect with a famous father with whom he had a love-hate relationship. His wife, Marie, enduring a decade of snowy winters in Green Bay and dearly missing the East Coast and metropolitan life, fell into more frequent and pronounced bouts of depression, occasionally ending up in the hospital to recuperate from mild overdoses of alcohol and painkilling drugs.

All this was the internal trauma of the flesh and blood Lombardi. But by the time he made his triumphant march into downtown Washington in February 1969, his fame had transformed him from a man into a symbol. The idea of Lombardi was being used and misused by opposing sides in the raging ideological debate of the times, with the establishment hoisting him up as a monument to law and order, patriotism and free enterprise, and his critics smashing him as a relic of old-line authoritarianism and a dangerous win-at-all costs pathology exemplified by a maxim most often attributed to him: Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

His philosophy on winning was in fact more authentic and interesting than either side would allow. The "winning isn’t everything" line was first uttered publicly not by Lombardi but by a young actress in "Trouble Along the Way," a 1953 football movie melodrama starring John Wayne. It later became part of the coach’s football psalm book, but to say that he believed it is true yet meaningless out of context. Every year Lombardi told his players that professional football was a cruel business. His job and theirs, he would say, depended on only one thing, winning, and the only way to win was to accept nothing less. To that extent his statement was an articulation of the obvious, the reality faced by any professional athlete or coach. But to say that winning was merely a practical consideration for Lombardi would be misleading. He considered it a matter of personal as well as national definition – "the American zeal," he once called it, "that is to be first in what we do and to win, to win, to win." He was indeed obsessed with winning, and that obsession led to the unfortunate imbalances in other aspects of his life.

	Vince Lombardi as one of Fordham's Seven Blocks of Granite in the mid-'30s. (Associated Press)

Still, there was a crucial distinction in his philosophy between paying the price to win and winning at any price. He did not believe in cheating to win, and he showed no interest in winning the wrong way, without heart, brains and sportsmanship. Although he never shied away from the violence of the game, he did not encourage dirty play. When one of his defensive backs in Green Bay tripped a receiver in frustration, Lombardi immediately yanked him from the game, even though the referees did not see the violation. Winning in and of itself was not enough for him. His players knew that he was more likely to drive them mercilessly after they had played sloppily but won than when they had played hard but lost.

His addiction was more to the competition, the constant testing of himself against other men, the thud, thwack and sweat of the game. It was his need for that fix, which he could get only among his players in the locker room and on the practice field during the week and on the sideline on Sunday, that finally allowed Edward Bennett Williams to lure him to Washington. The physical and mental exhaustion that had forced him to abandon coaching and serve as the Packers’ general manager in 1968 had been quickly overtaken by the abject misery he felt being one step removed from the action. He endured that final year in Green Bay with an odd sensation of afterlife, as though he had died and his ghost had returned to see how everyone was getting along without him.