Vince Lombardi

Their life

The son of a Brooklyn butcher who spent fifteen years as an assistant before anyone would make him a head coach — passed over repeatedly, and privately convinced it was because he was Italian. He took over a Green Bay Packers team that had won one game the previous season and, in nine years, won five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls. His method was not invention but repetition: a handful of plays, the Packer sweep above all, run until they could not be stopped even when the opponent knew exactly what was coming. He was also, quietly and against the grain of his era, intolerant of racism in his locker room, telling his staff that any player who could not accept a Black teammate would be gone.

Known for

• Five NFL championships in Green Bay
• Winning Super Bowls I and II
• The Packer power sweep
• The 1967 Ice Bowl
• Demanding fundamentals and repetition
• Trophy that bears his name

The road they walked

Vincent Thomas Lombardi was born on June 11, 1913, in Brooklyn, the eldest son of Italian immigrant parents. His father, Harry, worked in the meat trade. Vince began on a path toward the priesthood at a preparatory seminary, then switched to St. Francis Prep, where football took over. He went to Fordham University on a football scholarship and played guard on the famed 'Seven Blocks of Granite' line of the mid-1930s. He was small for the position, and he made up for it with stubbornness. The Catholic discipline of those years never left him, and he attended Mass daily for much of his life.

After Fordham he drifted through odd jobs, some law classes, and semi-pro football, until 1939, when he took a job teaching and coaching at St. Cecilia High School in New Jersey. He taught Latin, chemistry, and physics there, and learned to coach by demanding precision from teenagers. Later came assistant jobs at Fordham, then at Army under Earl 'Red' Blaik, and then the New York Giants, where he ran the offense from 1954 to 1958 alongside defensive coordinator Tom Landry. Head-coaching offers did not come. He was in his mid-forties, and he suspected his Italian-American background was part of the reason.

In 1959 Green Bay hired him as head coach and general manager. The Packers had just finished 1-10-1. He demanded fundamentals, conditioning, and mental toughness, and he drilled a small set of plays, the power sweep above all, until execution became a kind of inevitability. The Packers reached the 1960 NFL title game, lost to the Eagles, and did not lose a championship game under him again. They won NFL titles in 1961, 1962, 1965, 1966, and 1967, the last in the frozen 'Ice Bowl' against Dallas, and took the first two Super Bowls. He was hard on his players and equally hard on himself. He also did not tolerate racial discrimination on his team, and he pushed back on segregated treatment of his Black players on the road and in town.

How their story ended

After leaving the Packers' sideline following the 1967 season, Lombardi returned to coaching in 1969 with the Washington Redskins and led them to their first winning record in years. In the summer of 1970 he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer, which had already spread, and he died on September 3, 1970, at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, at age 57. The NFL soon renamed its championship trophy the Vince Lombardi Trophy in his honor.

In their words

We attribute every quotation to the person we believe said it, and cite the source where we can place it. If you spot a misattribution or a factual error, please tell us — we will check it and correct the record.

From the Journal