Vince Lombardi

• 1. Introduction

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  Vince Lombardi died at 7:12 in the morning on the 3rd of September 1970, in Washington, D.C., surrounded by his wife, his parents, both of his children, and six grandchildren. He was 57. At his funeral four days later at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, approximately 1,500 people lined Fifth Avenue. The avenue was closed to traffic between 39th and 50th Street. Tom Landry was there. Howard Cosell was there. Commissioner Pete Rozelle was there. The remaining members of the Seven Blocks of Granite, his old Fordham offensive line, were there. Cardinal Terence Cooke preached the homily.

  The football trophy bearing his name had already been announced. His coaching record stood at 105 wins, 35 losses, and 6 ties in the NFL, with a postseason winning rate of 90%. He had never once finished a season with more losses than wins. The questions worth asking about Lombardi are not really about those numbers. They are about where a boy from Sheepshead Bay got those numbers, what it cost the people around him, and what it says about him that his most trusted assistants in Washington included men he went out of his way to protect from a sport that would have discarded them.

• 2. Brooklyn to the Bronx

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  Vincent Thomas Lombardi was born on the 11th of June 1913, in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn, the oldest of five children. His father Harry and his mother Mattie had both come from Southern Italy, and the entire extended Lombardi and Izzo families had settled in Sheepshead Bay together. Harry and his brother Eddie ran a butcher shop in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan. Through the Great Depression, that shop did well enough to keep the family in a middle-class neighborhood, and Vince grew up helping his father cut meat, though he came to hate the work.

  Church attendance was not optional in the Lombardi household. Sunday Mass was followed by hours of dinner with family, clergy, and friends. Lombardi served as an altar boy at St. Mark Catholic Church, and when he was 12, amid what he later described as the color and pageantry of Easter Sunday vestments, the inspiration came to him that he should become a priest. His mother Mattie bragged to the neighbors about it.

  That plan gave way to football. At 15, Lombardi enrolled in Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in Brooklyn to train for the priesthood. Against school rules, he kept playing football off-campus throughout those years. By 1932 he had left Cathedral, enrolled at St. Francis Preparatory, and earned a spot on the virtual All-City football team as a fullback. The next year, a football scholarship took him north to Fordham University in the Bronx.

  At Fordham, Lombardi played for Coach Jim Crowley, one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. At 5'8" and around 180 pounds, Lombardi was undersized for a lineman. In his senior year of 1936 he was the right guard in the Seven Blocks of Granite, the Fordham offensive line that became the stuff of university legend. In a game against Pitt that season, he suffered a severe gash inside his mouth and had several teeth knocked out; he returned later to anchor a successful goal-line stand. The Rams finished 5-0-2 before losing to NYU 7-6 in their final game, which cost them a Rose Bowl berth. Lombardi carried that lesson about underestimating opponents for the rest of his life.

• 3. Learning to Lead

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  Fordham graduated Lombardi on the 16th of June 1937, into a nation still mired in the Great Depression. For the next two years he drifted: a failed attempt at semi-professional football with the Wilmington Clippers, a stint as a debt collector, a semester of Fordham Law School that he abandoned. In 1939, his former Fordham teammate Andy Palau offered him an assistant coaching job at St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, New Jersey. Lombardi took it, at an annual salary of under $1,000, teaching Latin, chemistry, and physics alongside his coaching duties.

  By 1942, Palau had left, and Lombardi was head coach. He stayed for eight years total, five of them as head coach. In 1943, St. Cecilia was recognized as the top high school football team in the nation, partly on the strength of a victory over Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit school considered one of the best teams in the eastern United States. Brooklyn Prep that season was led by a senior named Joe Paterno. Lombardi won six state private school championships and became president of the Bergen County Coaches' Association.

  In 1947, he moved back to Fordham to coach freshman teams. Then, following the 1948 season, he accepted an assistant coaching job at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point under head coach Earl "Colonel Red" Blaik. A biographer later wrote that it was at West Point, combining his own spiritual discipline with Blaik's military discipline, that Lombardi's coaching persona began to take its mature form. Blaik's emphasis on execution became a Lombardi trademark.

  The 1951 season at West Point was derailed when a cadet cheating scandal resulted in 43 of the 45 members of the varsity football team being discharged from the academy. When Blaik chose not to resign, Lombardi later said he came to regard that decision as a pivotal moment in his own career. The lesson was perseverance. The 1953 team, having lost additional players to academic misconduct, achieved a 7-1-1 record with Lombardi taking on a larger role than ever. Following those five seasons at Army, he joined the New York Giants.

• 4. New York and the Daylight Play

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  At 41 in 1954, Lombardi joined the Giants under new head coach Jim Lee Howell. The team had finished the previous season at 3-9. By Lombardi's third year in 1956, the Giants defeated the Chicago Bears 47-7 for the league title. Howell, who shared coordinators with Lombardi and Tom Landry, joked self-deprecatingly that his main function was to make sure the footballs had air in them.

  During his time as a Giants assistant, Lombardi worried that prejudice against his Italian heritage was blocking him from landing head coaching jobs, particularly at Southern colleges. Howell wrote numerous recommendations on his behalf. Lombardi applied for positions at Wake Forest, Notre Dame, and other universities. In some cases, he never received a reply.

  In New York, Lombardi introduced a blocking strategy he called running to daylight. In this system, offensive linemen blocked an area rather than a specific defender, and the running back ran toward whatever gap opened. He would later refine this approach into the Packers sweep, but its roots were in those Giants years, developed initially with running back Frank Gifford. The concept itself was borrowed from an old single wing formation, a fact Lombardi openly acknowledged.

• 5. Green Bay and the Championship Streak

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  On the 2nd of February 1959, Lombardi accepted the position of head coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers, a team that had gone 1-10-1 the previous season under head coach Ray McLean, the worst record in franchise history. The Packers had six future Hall of Famers on that 1958 roster. Lombardi told the franchise's executive committee: "I want it understood that I am in complete command here."

  In his first training camp, he demanded absolute dedication. The Packers improved immediately in 1959 to 7-5, winning as many games as they had in the prior three seasons combined. Lombardi was named Coach of the Year. Fans responded by purchasing every ticket for every Packers home game in 1960, a sellout streak that has continued ever since.

  In 1960, Green Bay won the NFL Western Conference for the first time since 1944. In the championship game against the Philadelphia Eagles, a late Packers drive was stopped a few yards from the goal line. After the press left the locker room, Lombardi told his team: "This will never happen again. You will never lose another championship." He coached the Packers to their next nine postseason wins in a row, a record streak that was not matched until Bill Belichick won ten straight from 2002 to 2006 with New England.

  The Packers swept the Giants for NFL titles in 1961-37-0 in Green Bay, and in 1962-16-7 at Yankee Stadium. After the 1962 title, President John F. Kennedy called Lombardi and asked whether he would return to Army to coach. Lombardi declined. Three consecutive championships followed in 1965, 1966, and 1967, a feat only once accomplished before, by Packers co-founder Curly Lambeau, who had coached Green Bay to three straight titles in 1929, 1930, and 1931. The 1966 and 1967 titles also carried the first two Super Bowl victories.

  Among the plays Lombardi designed in Green Bay was the Packers sweep, built around fullback Jim Taylor: both guards, Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston, pulled to the outside and blocked downfield while Taylor ran to daylight. On the 31st of December 1967, in the NFL Championship game known as the Ice Bowl, a heating coil Lombardi had installed beneath the field was not functioning. With 16 seconds remaining and the Packers down by three points, quarterback Bart Starr came to the sideline and told Lombardi he wanted to run a 31 wedge, keeping the ball himself. Lombardi, in the bitter cold, told Starr to run it and get them out of there. When Packer executive Pat Peppler asked Lombardi what play Starr would call, Lombardi replied: "Damned if I know." Starr scored. The Packers won.

• 6. The Discrimination He Refused

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  In 1960, a color barrier still existed on at least one NFL team. When Lombardi joined the Packers, they had one black player, Nate Borden. By 1967 they had 13 black players, including All-Pros Willie Davis, Willie Wood, Dave Robinson, Herb Adderley, and Bob Jeter. Lombardi explained his philosophy by saying he viewed his players as neither black nor white, but Packer green.

  Before the 1960 regular season, Lombardi established that the Packers would lodge only in places that accepted all his players, regardless of race. By 1967, the Packers were the only NFL team with a policy against assigning hotel rooms based on race. In Green Bay, he made clear to local establishments that if they did not accommodate black and white players equally, that business would be off-limits to the entire team. He also demanded, at the all-white Oneida Golf and Riding Country Club, that he be allowed to choose a Native American caddie even when white caddies were available.

  At the Washington Redskins in 1969, Lombardi pressed Hall of Fame wide receiver Bobby Mitchell into the team's front office, making Mitchell the first African American to work in an NFL front office. Mitchell would eventually rise to assistant general manager in 1981.

  Lombardi's stance on homophobia was equally direct. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Maraniss, if Lombardi caught a coach discriminating against a player thought to be gay, that coach would be fired. His brother Hal's lifelong partner, Richard Nicholls, said that Lombardi accepted people at face value for what they were and did not judge anybody. In Washington, both his assistant general manager and his PR director, described as Lombardi's right-hand man, were gay. Upon arriving with the Redskins, Lombardi brought tight end Jerry Smith into his office and told him his sexual orientation would never be an issue as long as Lombardi was coaching; Smith would be judged only on his performance. That single season was the first in Smith's career that he was voted First Team All-Pro.

  Lombardi's son Vince Jr. later said that his father would have hoped the locker room he created was one where differences of any kind would simply not be an issue.

• 7. Faith, Family, Fault

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  The three constants throughout Lombardi's life, by his own account, were his Roman Catholic faith, his family, and football. He attended Mass every day throughout his adult life. During his tenure at St. Cecilia, he shared an office with Father Tim Moore, and it was not unusual for Lombardi to pause mid-conversation and ask to go to Confession right there in the office. In Green Bay, he stopped at St. Willebrord Church each morning on his way to work, offering a prayer against unexpected death. He sat with his wife Marie at Sunday Mass at Resurrection Church in the Allouez neighborhood, always in the middle of the ninth pew.

  Marie Planitz had been introduced to Lombardi in 1934 by his Fordham roommate Jim Lawlor. Her stockbroker father was opposed to his daughter marrying the son of an Italian butcher from Brooklyn, a prejudice that echoed what Lombardi had faced throughout his life. They married on the 31st of August 1940. He cut their honeymoon short to get back to Englewood. Marie later said she had not been married more than one week before she told herself she had made the greatest mistake of her life.

  Marie's first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, which pushed her toward heavy drinking, a problem she carried throughout her life. Their son Vincent Henry Lombardi was born in 1942 and their daughter Susan in 1947. Lombardi's authoritarian nature and temper shaped every relationship in his household. He could be verbally abusive with Marie and was not gentle with his children either. When he had not lost his temper, he tended toward reticence and distance.

  During his tenure at St. Cecilia, Lombardi prayed specifically for calm and control, of his temper and of his wife's drinking. The man who demanded complete command of his football organizations could not command himself in the same way. Father Tim Moore was a witness to both sides of this throughout those years.

• 8. Legacy Beyond the Trophy

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  Lombardi had suffered from digestive tract problems as early as 1967 and had refused his doctor's request for a proctoscopic exam. On the 24th of June 1970, he was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital, where tests revealed anaplastic carcinoma in the rectal area of his colon, a fast-growing malignant cancer. On July 27 he was readmitted, and exploratory surgery confirmed the cancer was terminal. President Nixon called to say the entire country was behind him. Lombardi said he would never give up his fight. On his deathbed he told Father Tim Moore that he was not afraid to die, but regretted he could not have accomplished more.

  In 1970, the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy the Vince Lombardi Trophy. The Rotary Club of Houston created the Lombardi Award in 1970, given annually to the best college football offensive or defensive lineman or linebacker. He was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971. A 14-foot statue of him stands outside Lambeau Field as part of the stadium renovation completed in 2003. In Castel Giorgio, Italy, the football field where the first World Championship Final of American Football was played bears his name.

  In 1968, while still coaching the Packers, Lombardi appeared in a half-hour motivational film titled Second Effort, later called the best-selling training film of all time. A play titled Lombardi, starring Dan Lauria in the title role and Judith Light as Marie, opened on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre in October 2010. His grandson Joe Lombardi has served as an NFL assistant coach since 2006 and was the offensive coordinator for the Denver Broncos from 2023 to 2026, carrying the family's presence in the league into a third generation.