Lombardi was addicted to the competition, the constant testing against other men, the thud, thwack and sweat of the game.

	Fans in Washington knew who they wanted to coach the Redskins. (Vernon J. Biever)

Now he was back where he belonged, with a football team to turn around, and he went about it the same way he had in Green Bay. Repetition had always been his mantra, so there was no reason for him not to repeat what had worked for him before. Again he assembled a coaching staff of loyalists, looking not for innovative young football minds or future head coaches, but seasoned pros who understood his methods and could carry out his directives. From his early Green Bay days he brought back Lew Carpenter, one of his first halfbacks, and Bill Austin, his first line coach, recently fired as head coach of the Steelers. He wanted to hire two of his retired players, Forrest Gregg and Zeke Bratkowski, but the Packers would not allow it. For the defense he turned to Harland Svare, who had played for him when he was an assistant with the Giants. George Dickson was hired to coach the backfield with a glowing recommendation from Bob Blaik, the colonel’s son. Don Doll and Mike McCormack were retained from the Graham regime.

What kind of material did they have? Lombardi had been studying game films every night, and assigned each of his assistants to assess the players at each position. He took the quarterbacks himself, by far the easiest task. Sonny Jurgensen had been in the league for a dozen years, and Lombardi had always loved the way he passed. The films confirmed his impressions: Jurgensen was the best pure thrower he had ever seen, with a quick release and unerring accuracy. My God, he was heard muttering in the darkness of the film room one day. If we’d have had him in Green Bay ... His voice trailed off. Bart Starr had been his brain on the field, the most committed and disciplined of his ballplayers, but in terms of pure talent, he was not in the same category as Jurgensen.

Jurgensen’s reputation as a playboy did not bother Lombardi. If anything, it reminded him of his favorite son in Green Bay, Paul Hornung. The Golden Boy might break curfew, but he had uncommon talent and did not waste it, the best money player Lombardi had coached. People who did not know Lombardi often held the misimpression that he expected his players to be as conservative in their private lives as he appeared to be. That is what Jurgensen feared at first. When he heard that the Old Man was coming to Washington, he called Hornung and asked, "Jesus, Paul, what am I to expect?" Hornung chuckled and said, "Sonny, you’re gonna love the guy." Lombardi announced at his opening press conference that he was giving Jurgensen a "clean slate," and noted that despite his autocratic image he had never been obsessed with rules. "The city of Washington may have a lot of bars but I assure you Green Bay has 15 times more," he said. "We will have as few rules as we can get away with." After his first meeting with Lombardi, Christian Adolph Jurgensen came away saying he wished the season could start the next day.

Who would carry the ball? George Dickson studied films of the returning running backs and presented Lombardi with a pessimistic assessment, the last line of which read: "If we are going to win here, none of these guys will be here when we do." Lombardi was a realist. He knew that Dickson was probably right, but the report angered him nonetheless. "He came in after he read my assessment, threw that paper on my desk, and said, 'God damn it! But you’ve gotta coach ’em! Maybe you don’t think these men are any good, but you’ve gotta coach ’em!' " Dickson recalled. "I said, ‘I know I gotta coach ’em. But you only asked me what I thought of ’em!’ "

It was typical of Lombardi to expect the world to bend his way. He established the expectations, the routine, and people adjusted. The barber at the Mayflower knew when to expect him for his weekly haircut. The administrative staff quickly learned about Lombardi Time, and arrived at meetings 10 to 15 minutes early. His assistant coaches knew that they would be expected to work late on Monday nights and go to Duke Zeibert’s for dinner. He had been a daily early-morning communicant at St. Willebrord during his years in Green Bay, and wanted to establish the same pattern in Washington. One morning, a priest answered a knock at the door of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and there stood a man who introduced himself as Vince Lombardi. What time was the first daily Mass? Lombardi wanted to know. At 7:30 a.m., came the reply. "Why don’t you change it to 7, it would fit my schedule better," Lombardi said. The priest was a kind man; it amused him that a football coach would try to reschedule his Mass, but that was asking a bit much. Lombardi might be bigger than the president, but there was still a higher order.

Devoting endless hours to the film room, watching, rewinding, grading, was second nature to Lombardi, he had been doing it for 20 years, since he joined Red Blaik’s staff in 1949, but it could never replace the thrill he felt being around players. Even this off-season, during which he had far more than usual to do as he analyzed what it would take to make winners of the Redskins, seemed far too long for him. He visited relatives in New York, played golf at Congressional and Burning Tree, attended more social functions in Georgetown in a few months than he had in Green Bay in years, but still he was itching to get on with it. Marie saw the telltale sign; they had been in their new home in Potomac Falls only two months when he started cleaning the closets.

The football began on June 16, when Lombardi took his first look at candidates for the Redskins roster at a four-day minicamp of skull sessions and drills on Kehoe Field at Georgetown University. The first practice was scheduled for 2 p.m., and most of the players were there 20 minutes early, revealing an early appreciation of Lombardi Time. Tom Brown showed up, the former strong safety from the Packers having been acquired in a trade for a draft choice. He sensed the beginning of another era, convinced that players who stuck around Lombardi would "someday feel on top of the world." As passers and receivers went through basic drills, Lombardi was back in his element. Marie privately fretted about his health – he had suffered a severe bout of prostatitis shortly after his arrival in Washington and had complained of dizziness, which reminded her of his occasional collapses during his final year of coaching in Green Bay. But now he seemed refreshed and eager, no signs of physical exhaustion, no outward indications of worry, just pure football again. "I missed it more than I can say," he said. "It feels good to be back."

That night in the dressing room with his assistants, Lombardi expressed his private hopes and concerns about one of the running backs. Ray McDonald had been the team’s No. 1 draft choice in 1967 from the University of Idaho. On paper, he was an incredible talent, huge, fast and powerful, 6-4 and 248 pounds. Edward Bennett Williams had selected McDonald himself, the club president’s most conspicuous intrusion into the realm of player personnel, and had been disappointed by McDonald’s performance during his rookie year. Surely Lombardi could get the best out of him. It so happened that McDonald was gay. The players and coaches knew it; some felt uncomfortable about it and talked about him behind his back. Lombardi knew and did not care. His own brother Harold was gay. He had made it a point throughout his coaching career that he would not tolerate discrimination of any sort on his teams. "George," he said to Dickson. "I want you to get on McDonald and work on him and work on him – and if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood, you’ll be out of here before your ass hits the ground."

Confidence and fear, that was how Lombardi coached the game. He needed his quarterback to be confident, not afraid, and from the first day treated Jurgensen like a leader, something other coaches had been reluctant to do. They had considered Sonny talented but self-oriented. Lombardi saw more. "Take ’em down to the goal post, Sonny," he said at the start of practice on the third day. Jurgensen running ahead of the pack – an unheard of thought before, but there he went, holding the lead for several strides. Sonny was Lombardi’s man, and after only a few days, he realized what that meant. Jurgensen had been around great quarterbacks much of his career, including Norm Van Brocklin in Philadelphia and Otto Graham in Washington. Yet it was not until he hooked up with the undersize guard from Fordham that he understood the best way to play his position. Lombardi’s system, he said, was "completely different" from anything he had seen before. It placed the emphasis on reading the defense and giving the quarterback fewer plays but more options. As had happened to Bart Starr earlier, as soon as Jurgensen got into Lombardi’s system, the game seemed to slow down, what had been chaotic suddenly made sense, everything became clear and comprehensible.

When training camp opened at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., at high noon on July 9, Lombardi was surrounded by old friends and familiar faces. Sam Huff, who had played for him in New York and now came out of retirement for one last year, and his traditional army of priests, this time led by Father Guy McPartland, who had played fullback for him at St. Cecilia High in Englewood, N.J., and Father Tim Moore, the jovial Carmelite who had been the athletic director there. Ed Williams came up from Washington along with his pals Art Buchwald and Ben Bradlee, whose young son Dino was a ball boy. Lombardi took one look at the shaggy-haired adolescent and compulsively barked out, "Get a haircut!" as though he were talking to his own son or one of the ballplayers. Dino showed up the next day with a crew cut. It was the same for Sam Huff as it was for the ball boy, Lombardi ruled as the voice of authority. On the first night of camp, he gathered the squad together for his opening speech, similar to the one he had delivered for nine straight years in Green Bay, and though it was always effective, in this case it hardly mattered what he said. All he had to do was gesture with his big hand and let his Super Bowl ring glisten in the light and the message was clear. "He was like God himself to these players," George Dickson said. "This was the be-all and end-all of knowing how to win." He told the Redskins that night that he did not have many rules. "But, gentlemen, there is just one thing that I want you to understand. If you do anything to embarrass me or the organization, in any way, you will answer to me and me alone."

Lombardi talked himself hoarse, riding the seven-man blocking sled, daring his linemen to knock him off, hollering at his troops during grass drills. He was a perfect gentleman in social settings and loved a good joke, but in the film room and on the football field he could not stop cursing and yelling. His voice was so loud, and his language so purple, that a Dickinson official called David Slattery, Lombardi’s administrative assistant, and asked whether he could tell the coach to calm down. When Slattery broached the subject with him, Lombardi seemed contrite. "You know, David, I don’t understand it. I go to Mass, I never use bad language in my life, until I get to the football season." Then he laughed and said, "I’ll try to watch it."

Many of the Redskins were not accustomed to Lombardi’s style and had as hard a time with it as the college secretaries who had complained to the dean. Within a week, three rookie draft choices had bolted camp. Once, 14 years earlier when two rookies named Sam Huff and Don Chandler had packed up and headed for the airport at the Giants camp in Vermont, it was Lombardi who had talked them back. This time he let the rookies go, berating the "moral code," or lack of one, that would allow them to take signing bonuses and then go home. In some ways he seemed as gruff as ever, especially when he was lost in thought on the football field. Joe Lombardi, his little brother, who was then a regional salesman for Rawlings sporting goods, visited camp with two company executives and approached the coach at afternoon practice to see if he had time to meet them.

"Get the hell out of here and get those God damn people out of here!" Lombardi snapped.

"But c’mon, Vince, these are my bosses!" Joe pleaded.

"I don’t give a damn who they are," Lombardi said.

It was not that he did not love Joe or did not want to help him. In fact, Lombardi bought new uniforms from Joe that year, and sparked a minor controversy by clothing his team in a color that he insisted was the traditional burgundy but actually was a variation of rose. (Only his family knew Lombardi’s secret: He was colorblind.) Kicking people off his field was just a matter of habit, he had been doing it indiscriminately ever since he became a coach. Despite his bluster at Carlisle, in fact, some people who been around him for years thought Lombardi had mellowed that summer. "To me he was not as aggressive, and I figured, well, he’s just trying to feel his way around," recalled Tom Brown. "But maybe he didn’t have the energy, the enthusiasm, to do what he did in Green Bay. The other guys thought he was pushing them like crazy, but I’m thinking he doesn’t have the same intensity."

Brown’s perception was discerning. Lombardi had lowered his intensity a notch, and was struggling in private with his decision to come back to coach, something he would never admit in public. When Howard Cosell visited camp to do another piece on his favorite coach, Lombardi told him that he had no regrets. "I want to say that I’m very, very happy that I am back," he declared. But with a few confidants he talked about feeling older and tiring more easily, and questioned whether his desire to coach had overpowered the common sense that led him to retire. "I don’t know if I made the right decision," he told Father McPartland one night as the two men sat on the back porch of the house he had made his training camp headquarters. "I think I made the wrong decision." The priest at first thought he was talking about the prospects of a winning season, and tried to encourage him by recalling how he had turned the Packers around the first year in Green Bay.

But Lombardi was also still hurting from the harshest portraits of him during his final years in Green Bay, and the criticism of him as a bully who used brute force and intimidation to win continued even now. George Wilson, coach of the Miami Dolphins, was quoted that summer insisting that he was just as good as Lombardi, but more humane. "I’m tired of all this Lombardi business. Everyone makes him out to be such a great coach," Wilson harrumphed. "Given the same material, I’ll beat him every time. I can get a team up on the day of a game. I bawl guys out as much as Lombardi does, but I don’t holler at a fellow in front of his teammates. I don’t want to embarrass him. That’s just a big show, and I’m not going to do it." (Wilson finished 3-10-1 that year and was fired, ending a 12-year coaching career with 68 wins and 84 losses; in 10 years Lombardi won 96 and lost 34.)

	Breaking records: With an earpiece to help him hear signals, Larry Brown became the first Redskin to rush for more than 1,000 yards. (Richard Darcy - The Post)

As training camp progressed, Dickson and Lombardi found their runner, though it was not McDonald or any of the other veterans but an unheralded rookie from Kansas State named Larry Brown. From the scouting reports, there did not seem to be much promise in Brown; he was relatively slow and small, had few moves and little experience catching passes out of the backfield. But he was fearless, with uncommon leg strength and terrific explosion off the ball. Dickson considered him the toughest runner he had ever seen. Lombardi needed convincing. "You’re always looking for tough guys," he said to Dickson early on. "Give me talent, I’ll make them tough." He was also concerned about Brown’s mental errors; he had a tendency to miss the snap count and go too early or too late.

"Does that Brown hear?" Lombardi asked Dickson one night at a coach’s meeting.

"I don’t know, he always turns his head one way when I’m talking," Dickson said.

"God damn it, he must be deaf!" Lombardi said.

They fitted an earpiece in his helmet, and suddenly the errors stopped. Brown played impressively in the exhibition opener at RFK Stadium, pounding through the mud and rain on two short touchdown runs, and when Dickson walked out to the practice field a few days later he saw Lombardi standing with his arm draped around the rookie. "Son," Dickson said to him later during drills, realizing what the Lombardi drape meant, "you’ve got this ballclub made."