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The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Starts Saturday strong. It's Big News Saturday on Fox, and here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes it special.
Then it's America's number one game. What a hit! The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest game.
Now the sideline touchdown! It's Big Noon Saturday, Noon Eastern on Fox. This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And all month long, we're celebrating the Italian Americans who helped shape our nation from Columbus to Capra. And up next, one of the great Italian American stories in the history of American sports.
Vincent Lombardi grew up in an Italian Catholic family in Brooklyn. His father Harry was a butcher, a short, strong man named Old Five by Five, and who had two words tattooed across his knuckles: "Work" on one hand and "Play" on the other. Those two words weren't a bad description of the life his son would go on to lead. And we love talking to great writers, and we're going to talk right now with David Moranis, 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 joining us. Oh, my pleasure. Let's start in the beginning. Vince Lombardi's dad. What did he?
What did he do for a living? And describe the world. Oh man, that young Vince grew up in. Father Harry was a butcher. The family lived in Sheephead 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 the modern day athlete in that sense.
But my favorite tattoos were on his knuckles. On one hand, his knuckles spelled W O R K, work, and on the other hand, the knuckles spelled play, P L A Y, and that too sort of reflected some part of his son's mythology. Indeed, and and here's a quote from you: "The trinity of Vince Lombardi's early life was religion, family, and sports." It would be true for his entire life, wouldn't it, be David? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, in various orders, but he was—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 was really everything. His mother's family were the Isos, and she was one of thirteen Iso kids, and that with you know all kinds of cousins and uncles and aunts, and 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 but was able to recreate with his team, the Green Bay Packers. And by the way, thirteen kids—people are listening, like shocked, right, David? But Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic, and just lots of families—eight, ten, twelve—was well, it was pretty normal, wasn't it? Yeah, no, it was not out of the ordinary for an Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic family of that era.
The Izo's were pretty well renowned in Sheepshead Bay because there were there were so many of them, and they they had various professions in that place. But no, it was not it was not shocking that there would be thirteen of them.
Now you wrote, "quote The church was not some distant institution to be visited once a week, but part of the rhythm of daily life." Talk about that, Vince Lombardi, as an adult. Went to mass every morning. When he lived, you know, wherever 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 he his best friends were the were the fathers there and the nuns. When he was at Green Bay, he went to mass every morning at Saint Willibrand's in Green Bay, which was a pretty heavily Catholic place.
And finally, I love this story. Late, you know, 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 nine nine thirty or ten, 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 he could get to work. That one didn't work. He couldn't tell God what to do, but he could tell everybody else. That's right. In the end, there was a part of me that, as I read your book, he he almost wanted to submit to something higher than him.
That was about the only place in his life where that was true. Yes, 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 did need that. He also, it should be said, that he went to mass every day because he knew he was a flawed human being, and he knew that he sometimes had anger management problems. Not that he was violent, but just that he, except you know, with his words.
And he wanted to try to control that. He regretted it, and now it's one of the reasons he he went to mass to.
Sort of repentance in that sense.
Now let me hit you with another quote. This is a Lombardi quote in your book. From the first contact on football, fascinated me. Contact controlled violence. A game with 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. 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 write, 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 giving your hardest and leaving it all on the field, is something that Lombardi did personally, and that he truly believed in the reward of that hard work, which is part of the Jesuit philosophy. And you're listening to David Moranis 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 Stories. Lee Habib here, and I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts.
Any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily. Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming. This is Hoda Kotb from Joy One Hundred and One with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy.
A ten-foot skeleton, sure. A full-size fog machine, why not? Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy. It happens. Which brings me to the Chase Freedom Flex card, the savvy decision that will earn you more cash back on the everyday purchases, plus the extraordinary Halloween tricks and treats.
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So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration. With Chase Freedom Flex cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, NA, member FDIC, subject to credit approval.
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Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon kickoff live. With an epic pregame, the crowd, the atmosphere—this is what makes it special.
Then it's America's number one game. What a hit! The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest game.
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Results may vary. See website for details. Hi, I'm Steph, and I work at United Healthcare. When I think about United Healthcare's members, I think of my own family. My niece was diagnosed with an ultra-rare genetic disorder.
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Health insurance is complicated. I would say our job is to make everything easy for our UHC members. I work for United Healthcare. I'm committed to care. And we continue here with our American stories, and with David Moranis and his terrific book, "When Pride Still Mattered: The Story of Vince Lombardi." Let's pick up where we last left off.
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! Absolutely. Talk about the impact of those Jesuits and Fordham on young Vince.
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 it was free will. For Lombardi, if you transfer 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. It's so true. I mean, 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 on. Until all that was left was what was needed for that game against the team.
Exactly your point, 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 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 for the players, but just that there's so much extraneous stuff that teachers put into something, and there the ability to to make it understandable to every player. And to simplify something, until it has a more powerful effect, is something he also learned from Red Blake.
Indeed, in fact, you wrote, "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." Absolutely, you know, it was a perfect storm. You know, our leaders, born or made—I think there's a combination of the two. But I think that that the making of Vince Lombardi, with the ingredients he already had, came from the Jesuits and and West Point. In a way that that made him unique.
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 know him, and you did as you studied him, that was true all the way through, wasn't it?
Oh, totally. Yes, he was. He was a teacher coach. Everything that helped him with the Green Bay Packers was refined first at Little Saint Cecilia. He he taught a lot of different classes, including chemistry.
And again, he he 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 a 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 with Vince Lombardi and rushed to a telephone to call his wife to say that he'd 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. 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 when Lombardi gets to 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. I always remember. 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." In 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 builder. That he was, and that's exactly what we were. He just brought us right up quickly. It's extraordinary.
Eight years he spent at Saint Cecilia doing just that. Eight years, David. That really mattered, didn't it? In a couple of ways. One 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, and then. And then several other assistant coaching jobs—you know, twenty years basically in the 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, West Point is the next gig. Talk about this man, Red Blake, because we all need mentors in life, and sometimes we're just lucky enough to stumble on one.
Well, Blake 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 for Vince Lombardi. And and what's interesting is this is back when West Point, and this again hard to believe, was a national powerhouse in football championship teams. Yeah, they when 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 and 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, you know, during Lombardi's time at West Point, there was a cheating scandal among among the football players. You know, human nature doesn't really change; the the culture around it does. But, 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 Blake to his knees.
They had an amazing recovery, but it was a very difficult couple of years. And there's an honor code there, so in a place like West Point, it's even just it's worse than big state university a cheating scandal. Right. I mean, yes, it's it's sort of more discombobulating that that those young men would 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. You bet, 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. Who was that graduate?
That was General Douglas MacArthur, who by that time was back from his controversial. Period as a as a army general, but still revered West Point. He had once been the superintendent at West Point. He and Red Blake were very close, and so one of 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 film. MacArthur was always following in great detail the starting lineups of the Westport of the Army football team, their schedule, their preseason drills.
He wanted to know everything about every player on that team, and when so Lombardi got to. Spend time with him, showing him game film during the seasons. That had to be a real learning experience for him. At a minimum, Lombardi and MacArthur, by the way, both believed David in the value of competitive sports to shape and mold men's character. Talk about that.
Oh, definitely. Yeah, no. MacArthur was very much into the notion that that you know mind and body went together, and that sports were essential to to building character. And you've been listening to David Moranis, his book "When Pride Still Mattered." It's an older book, 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 Moranis, "When Pride Still Mattered." The story of Vince Lombardi continues here on Our American Stories.
This is Hoda Kotb from Joy One Hundred and One with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy. A ten-foot skeleton, sure. A full-size fog machine, why not? Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy.
It happens. Which brings me to the Chase Freedom Flex Card, the savvy decision that will earn you more cash back on the everyday purchases plus the X. Extraordinary Halloween tricks and treats with Freedom Flex, you earn even more treats on your Halloween and everyday needs. You get five percent cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, three percent on dining and drugstores, and one percent on all other purchases. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded.
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This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA, member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.
The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Start Saturday strong. It's Big News Saturday on Fox. And here we go. It all starts at ten Eastern with Big Noon kickoff, live with an epic pregame.
The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes it special. Then it's America's number one game. What a hit! The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest game.
Down the sideline, touchdown! It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox. Come on and get happy with Happy GLP at just ninety nine dollars a month. Happy GLP gives you one set price every month, no tiers, no tricks. Getting started with Happy GLP is fast, convenient, and happens virtually with a licensed provider.
Check it out for yourself at happyglp dot com. That's happyglp dot com. A happy price for a happier you. Compound medications are not FDA approved. Eligibility required and determined by a licensed provider.
Individual results. My very see website for details. My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for United Healthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters.
There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do. I'm Ben, and I work at United Healthcare. I am just one piece of a larger puzzle, but every piece matters. It's more than just work.
We want to make the healthcare system better for everyone. I care because I want to make a difference. That's what committed to care means to me. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rushing the Field. I'm Nicole Auerbach, and I'm Joshua Perry.
We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world: college football. From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football. Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch Rushing the Field on NBC Sports now. And we continue with our American stories, and with author David Moranis, who wrote When Pride Still Mattered, quite a while ago.
But we call them up because, well, no one knows more about Vince Lombardi. Let's continue where we last left off. Let's talk about his next job because it may have been his most important. He was an assistant coach with Wellington Mara's New York Giants. He was the offensive coach, and a young Tom Landry, Dallas, of course, would ultimately get Tom Landry.
He was the defensive coach. Nice, nice start. You could say that that was the best combination of of assistant coaches in NFL history.
So much so that the head coach Jim Lee Howell. They used to joke that his only main assignment was to make sure the footballs had enough air in them, and then he turned everything over to Landry and Lombardi, who were yin and yang, just opposites of personality and coaching styles. Landry was cool, methodical, almost almost an automaton in the way he wanted his players to to act. And the way he coached, and Lombardi was much more emotional, much more you know high, high and low in terms of how he would deal with the players, just complete opposites. Indeed.
And by the way, he had to learn something new. He had to adapt. Lombardi. These were grown men. Guys like Charlie Connolly had served in war.
Talk about how Lombardi adapted from teaching young people to teaching grown men.
Well, you're right. You know, his first training camp with the Giants, he he did the the offensive players really didn't take to him at first. Frank Gifford, the great halfback, and Charlie Connolly, the old quarterback, they thought he was sort of amateurish and you know trying to sort of a rah rah college guy.
So it took him a while to adjust to. The pro style, but that's a very important point about Lombardi, which many people don't quite understand. He has the reputation of sort of my way or the highway, being inflexible. He wasn't like that at all, really. He was very disciplined and tough, but he was also a master psychologist, who who would study his players and figure out how to get the best out of all of them, and learn and 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, people change, and you just can't you can't treat people as robots. They're people. That's exactly right, and that's why when people ask me whether Lombardi could succeed today, I say yes. He he would he would learn how to get the best out of players today, just as he did in his era.
And he would adapt to that without changing his fundamental philosophy. And the players would adapt to him because they realized that he had their interest at heart and that he would help them win. Indeed, let's talk about the professional 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 had no compensation plans for injured players. But Lombardi was lucky to come into the league. Just as all of that was beginning to change, David, and it didn't hurt that he was in a big media market like New York. No, it didn't, and it didn't hurt that that the game had him as well. And it sort of was a nice synergy between the rise of professional football and the rise of Vince Lombardi.
So everything that he learned in New York, by the time he got to Green Bay, football, the NFL was finally coming out from. Being a second-class sport to being the dominant sport that it would later become, and and the sport used Lombardi, and Lombardi used him in that rise. Indeed, and so he ends up in a little Hamlet in the Midwest. Called Green Bay, and his poor wife. I mean, New York City, and it might as well have been 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 he talked to his wife, treated his wife, and he was never there. Talk about that relationship and what the wife did because she really tried to keep Vince in New York. Yeah, well, you know, it's a it's a difficult, it's a love story, but a very difficult and human and problematic one. Marie was from New Jersey; she loved the East Coast.
She liked the clothing stores in in Manhattan and just the whole lifestyle there. And and for her to go to to Little Green Bay was just a Utter culture shock. There was a Broadway play that was made out of my book, and the character that steals the show in the play is Marie Lombardi, played by the great actress Judith Light. The scene of them driving west for the first time and rounding Chicago, and then running into a snowstorm. It was amazing to see Judith Light portray Marie in that scene where she sees nothing but white ahead of her, and and what that sort of represented to her.
Vince Lombardi was much better creating a sense of family out of his football team than he was out of his nuclear family. His wife had a paradoxical situation where she loved being Vince Lombardi's wife. And she grew to love football and and really understood him and the game by in the end quite well. And yet it was a very lonely experience because he, since was married to football as much as or more than her. And she did have a drinking problem.
And there were several moments in their lives in Green Bay where things got pretty dicey. She was in the hospital once for. For an overdose of of drugs, you know, of pills. I'm sorry, not drugs and. Of course, the relationship with Vince Jr.
was equally difficult. Imagine being carrying that name and that bird. There's a book in that, David. The Sons of Great Men. Maybe, maybe you'll.
Yeah, I know there really is. Yep. There's a great scene in your book where Lombardi, the new coach, gives his first impassioned speech to the Green Bay team that had just lost ten of eleven games. He told them they were going to be the New York Yankees of football. He told them that he would relentlessly pursue victory, and anyone who didn't like it was Free to leave after the speech, and I'm quoting from your book.
There was silence. The room empties. Lombardi approaches veteran Max McGee. What did you think, Lombardi asked?
Well, I'll tell you, you got their attention, Coach. McGee replied. You know, I wasn't sure. Lombardi confided. Everybody could have just gotten up and walked out for all I knew.
It showed a tremendous vulnerability in Lombardi and in honesty, and I think that is what really came out of this book for me. What a human being he was! Oh, absolutely. You know, you can try to create a mythological creature as a saint, but it's the it's the frailty and humanity of someone who then goes on, despite all of that, to achieve. Success that makes Lombardi the more interesting character, and he did have those vulnerabilities and those uncertainties, and they drove him as much as as his confidence that he was going to win.
Indeed, and I love. There's a video. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's Lombardi on a on a in front of a chalkboard, and he's outlining the sweep. Oh yes, that's that's iconic.
Yeah, it's like a physics class. It's so intricate, and yet he mastered his team. Mastered this play, and it became well, it became the iconic play of the great American football team known as the Green Bay Packers. I love the the story of the sweep as much as anything to describe Vince Lombardi because, superficially, it seems simplistic. You know, the other teams would have all of these fancy plays and.
And and the Packers had this power sweep, the Green Bay sweep, and other teams knew it was coming.
So why did it succeed? It's because Lombardi taught it so well and so thoroughly, and allowed freedom in the discipline of that sweep, so that every player involved in that sweep, whether they're a blocker or the runner, knew about. Ten or twenty variables that they could use on the sweep, depending on how the defense was reacting, and they understood it so well that they were one step ahead of the defense on that play, and that was the freedom through discipline of Lombardi's philosophy, exemplified by one. Play that seems simple, but actually was rendered simple in its complexity. And you're listening to David Moranis, author of When Pride Still Mattered, the seminal book in understanding the life of Coach Vince Lombardi.
More after these messages. This is Our American Stories. This is Hoda Kotb from Joy One Hundred and One with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy. A ten-foot skeleton, sure.
A full-size fog machine, why not? Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy. It happens. Which brings me to the Chase Freedom Flex Card, the savvy decision that will earn you more cash back on the everyday purchases plus the extraordinary Halloween. Tricks and treats with Freedom Flex, you earn even more treats on your Halloween and everyday needs.
You get five percent cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, three percent on dining and drugstores, and one percent on all other purchases. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. That's no tricks, all treats. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card.
Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, NA, member FDIC. Subject to credit approval.
Offer subject to change. Terms apply. Biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Start Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox.
And here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon kickoff live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere—this is what makes it special. Then it's America's number one game. What a hit!
The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest game.
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We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world: college football. From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football. Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch rushing the field on NBC Sports now. And we continue with our American stories, and with author David Moranas, Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of When Pride Still Mattered.
Let's pick up where we last left off on the life of Vince Lombardi. Lombardi had no room in his locker room, or in the entire city. It turns out for racism. David, talk about this. Did some of it have to do with how Italians were treated in much of the country?
He was called names like "wap" and "dago" and "guinea." You know, it did certainly affect Lombardi that. That that's not to say that that was the only factor, because I think there are other Italians who were discriminated against, or anybody. You can react one of two ways: you can then find somebody else to discriminate against yourself, yep. Or you can take it as a learning lesson about you know that we're 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 blacks in the whole town, and one was the shoe shine man at the Northland Hotel, and the other two were Packers. He brought the first wave of, of great black athletes to Green Bay, and one of the first things he did was go to all the taverns, in Green Bay, or most of them. There's so many, and overwhelming. There was a tavern on every block.
Right. But he said, if I hear that you're discriminating against any of my players, you're off limits for all of them. And that had a pretty profound effect, and that was the sort of thing he did throughout his career. When they had preseason games in the South, the first instance they were in New Orleans, and the black players had to sleep somewhere else. He said, "We'll never allow this again," and he would put the whole team up together at a army base instead of having to deal with the with the Jim Crow South.
He was very strong on race, and all of his black players from the day they first met him to the day he died revered him for that. Yeah, 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. David. Yeah, no, that's true.
I mean, too late. It happened after World War II, basically. But but the military and sports. More than any other parts of American life have become true meritocracies, at least on the playing field or on the the field of battle. They did a lot, both of those institutions, to to break the racial barriers of this country.
Let's talk about prayer. You said it was quote the essence of Lombardi's religious practice and the constant of his daily routine quote His daily prayers were an effort to balance the tension between his will to succeed, and his desire to be good. You know, it's quite something that he saw that in himself. He might have the appearance of not being the most self-reflective human being, so obsessed did he seem with, with prevailing, but in fact he did have that self-awareness, and it was, the central part of his faith, of his. Life of prayer was to try to find the right balance, even if he couldn't do it outside of the the church.
He understood the problem that he was dealing with in his own frailty on that, and that was that was what he spent a lot of. You know, he didn't pray to win; he prayed to be a better person. And in your chapter Trinity, his son talked about his dad, and I'm going to quote from the son: "Life was a struggle for my dad." He knew he wasn't perfect. He had a lot of habits that were far from perfect. His strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa.
He fought it by taking that paradox to church. It went back to the Jesuits always, and the struggle between the shadow self and the real self, your humanity and your divinity. He saw that struggle clear, my dad, in concrete terms. Wow, what a wise son, David. Isn't that something?
I know. I felt blessed when I started this biography, that Vince Lombardi's son was not perpetuating a mythological sainted creature 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, and he had suffered because of that himself, and spent a lot of time thinking about it.
So that by the time I approached this book, Vince Jr. was very open to letting an author sort of see the reality and the complexity and the paradox of of his old man. And what father and son doesn't have this complicated relationship and the honesty of this, the brutal honesty of it, was absolutely beautiful. Oh, I agree. I mean, every every father son, mother daughter relationship has some complexity to it, of one degree 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 until until you know it's almost too late. But that level of comprehension of of Vince Jr. of What his father was dealing with is quite extraordinary. Lombardi would go on to win a world championship by beating his old team, the New York Giants, and he didn't just beat the Giants, David.
He destroyed them. When the score was thirty-seven to nothing, he finally started playing his subs, and Lombardi called that title game the biggest thrill of his life.
Well, you know, he probably thought that he was going to be the coach of the New York Giants. That was, you know, he was a New York kid. That was. He liked he and Wellington Mara both went to Fordham in the same era. There are a lot of connections there.
He he didn't get the job, and then by the time he was might have gotten it, he didn't want to leave again.
So beating the beating the New York Giants, I would say that first 37 to nothing game was probably the. The most important of his career, along with the last, along with the ice bowl at the end. Yep, there was this great celebration at the Elks Club in town, and everyone was there after this victory. Players too. You wrote this about Lombardi and the men he coached: "Quote as 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.
He challenged them to accomplish things that they had thought were beyond their reach. I want to play you a clip. It's of Jerry Kramer talking about Coach. Oh, great! And and this is a guy talking, possibly David, twenty to thirty years after this incident.
Let's take a listen to Jerry Kramer. I jumped offsides one time in a scrimmage, and he got in my face and he said, "Mister, the concentration period of a college student is five minutes. High school is three minutes. Kindergarten is thirty seconds. You don't even have that.
So where's that put you? Put me checking my shoe shine." I go up the locker room, sitting there, chin in my hand, elbowily looking at the floor, thinking, "I'm never gonna play for this guy." He came in the door, came across the room, slapped me on the back of the neck, messed up my hair. He said, "Son, one of these days you're going to be the best guard in football." He turned around and walked away, and that started my motor. With that comment, he allowed me to think about being a great football player. And from that point on, I worked my tail off.
I gave him everything I had. It made a profound impact on my life. Then the key to Lombardi, which many coaches who think they're mini Lombardis don't understand, is that you have to have that balance. Yes, you can be tough. But you have to have the ability to know when to when to show the love to your to your players, and that you really you know it's it's about them and their ability to work together.
And Lombardi had that. There's some. Lombardi wannabes who just see the tough part of it and don't see the love part of it. Yeah, they don't see the softness either or the vulnerability, and that's that's a considerable loss for them. Final parting thoughts here.
Once that Giants game wins, in my mind, the Super Bowls were afterthoughts. They were going to happen. He had achieved all he'd achieved. What if it was there?
Something after it was all done that you you thought I should have put that in the book. I missed it. Boy, that's a great question. I missed a couple of stories that I wished I'd gotten. One was about Lionel Aldridge, the defensive end, an African American who was in love with and married a white woman, and there was a lot of pressure to prevent that from happening.
Believe it or not, in that era, you know, we still had that level of Of racial bias, and Lombardi stood up for Aldridge and said, "You know, we're human beings first, and don't feel any pressure from me about that." Seems obvious now, but I wish I'd had that story in my book because it was one more level of Lombardi. I do have in the book the fact that his brother Harold was gay, and Lombardi was terrific on on that issue, which still is not something that. Professional athletes can deal with in a particularly healthy way even today, but Lombardi made it clear on all of his teams that if he found anybody discriminating against someone because of their sexual orientation, they were off the team. And as a Catholic, that had to be something. I mean, he was actually practicing perfect Catholicism.
He was loving on the gay player. I love the way you put that because there's so many different ways that people distort. Religion and in Catholicism, and and he was applying the the fundamental love of of of what faith should be. And you've been listening to David Morano, author of When Pride Still Mattered. It's an older book, but pick it up if you haven't read it.
You won't regret it. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects. The story of Vince Lombardi told by no one better. Then David Morano is here on our American Stories. The biggest game of the season, right here, right now.
It's Dog Saturday Straw. It's big news Saturday on Fox, and here we go. It all starts at ten Eastern with Big Noon kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere—this is what makes it special. Then it's America's number one game.
What a hit! The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest game.
Down the sideline, touchdown! It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox. Come on and get happy with Happy GLP. Just ninety nine dollars a month. Happy GLP gives you one set prices every month.
No tears, no tricks. Getting started with Happy GLP is fast, convenient, and happens virtually with a licensed provider. Check it out for yourself at HappyGLP. dot com. Again, that's HappyGLP.
dot com. A happy price for a happier you. Compounded medications are not FDA approved. Eligibility required to determine by a licensed provider. Individuals.
Results may vary. See website for details. Hey, Molly Ringwald here. Remember when hair was big and everything was neon, and you spent all night making a mixtape instead of doing your homework?
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Pfizer outdo yesterday. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rushing the Field. I'm Nicole Auerbach, and I'm Joshua Perry. We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world: college football. From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football.
Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch Rushing the Field on NBC Sports now. Some people use ChatGPT to answer questions. Others use it to get real work done. With ChatGPT Work, you bring the goal, plus real inputs like briefs, notes, files, feedback, data, and project plans.
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