Exploring the Impact of Vince Lombardi on American Football

Tonight's guest has an unbelievable collection and a collection of a man that really sums up the game of football.

So specially that we've even named the super bowl trophy after him.

Vince Lombardi, who once said, unless a man believes in himself and makes a total commitment to his career and puts everything he has into it, his mind, his body, his heart, what's life worth to him?

Our guest, Jack Giambroni brings this embodiment and spirit of Vince Lombardi to his collection, shares it with us and shares some great stories, too, about the great Lombardi, coming up in just a moment.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal deposit of football history.

And boy, do we have a great episode for you tonight.

We are going to talk about some Green Bay packers history, some NFL history, and I think we're going to get in a little bit of the college game, too, of some more modern times and just have a lot of fun with a major collector.

And this gentleman, you know, I could.

I think I can say that because he shared with me and some preliminary conversations and some videos which we'll show here through this video if you're watching on YouTube.

His name is Jack G. And he is a big packers fan and big Vince Lombardi fan.

Jack, welcome to the Pig Pen.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

It's gonna be a lot of fun for our listeners and guests tonight.

Yeah, you, you contacted me and you are quite an expert on Coach Lombardi, you know, probably one of the most famous coaches in NFL history.

And so we're very excited to hear you tell us a little about him.

Tell us a little bit about your collection.

And some of your life in football is very interesting as well.

So I guess maybe before we even get into that, maybe you just give us a little bit of background, you know, what gave you the bug to be into the game of football like you are?

Well, as we discussed yesterday in the pre show, I attended the University of Dayton.

I grew up in Rochester, New York, and I walked on the University of Dayton football team and 250 guys showed up.

And in terms of talent, I was number 251.

I was one of the worst college football players in America.

But, you know, they used me As a tackling dummy.

I continued to take it and go through it, but the game just was fascinating to me and I knew I couldn't play it, but I wanted to be involved.

So after graduation, 10 years went by.

Went back to school and got my advanced degrees and got into coaching.

And coach Lombardi has always been kind of my guiding light as I looked to coach, because I didn't know what I was doing, quite honestly.

I didn't know how to put together an organization.

I didn't know how to put a coaching staff, didn't know how to coach the players, offense or defenses.

So I read a book by Coach Lombardi, put it down and grabbed another one.

Chuck, no.

And kept on reading.

And none of them really resonated with me.

And I went back to Coach Lombardi, read the second book, and from there on out, he's kind of been my guiding light and inspiration in coaching.

Well, you couldn't have had a better role model because the gentleman always seemed to have.

You know, I don't remember him coaching at all.

He was a little bit before my time.

I think I was two or three years old when he passed.

But just the quotes in the, the clips of films of him talking to players and the results for basically two decades.

If you count back into his days with the New York Giants as a coordinator.

I mean, just a tremendous career unparalleled by.

By most in.

During every stop he made.

It was an important part of his career and his makeup.

There were some major watershed moments at high school level going back to his all moderate Fordham, going to West Point, army joining Tom Landry at the Giants, going to the packers and then also, you know, in Washington for that brief time.

So all along the way, he learned something, he adapted something, he changed his thought about things.

He had this core principles, but how to design a team.

But there was also these little nuances that kept his teams progressing, kept his teams building, kept his team succeeding.

So he's.

He's a really interesting man as you take a peek behind the curtain.

And you know, as we know, and you talked about that when you, when you take a look at the quotes and the comments and the lessons and continue to endure.

Vincent Thomas Lombardi is the greatest coach that ever lived.

And you know, he died at 57 and he's been gone 55 years and we're still talking about him as though, you know, he just played in the Super Bowl.

Yeah.

A lot of people in the modern times that, you know, aren't into the history, and that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to educate people and help preserve football history.

They think about, okay, that's the guy's name's on the trophy at the super bowl.

And many don't.

May not even know that.

But the story of why his name is on the super bowl is, like, tremendous.

But you bring up some intriguing aspects that we never really get to hear about.

And I guess, first of all, before we go on, you have a project where you go and you lecture professionally about Coach Lombardi.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that and if somebody out there is interested how they could, you know, contact you to do something for their group.

Darren, thank you.

I go around the Midwest.

I've also gone even a little farther to California.

And I speak about Coach Lombardi, and we talk about his principles.

If you're a corporation, we design presentations based on the message you would like to give to your employees.

But one of the.

One of the really neat things, as we've been doing this for a number of years, is we bring pieces of the collection with us and we storytell around the collection.

We would storytell around.

You know, right next to me right here is all of the eight world championship games Coach Lombardi was involved in.

I have the original tickets, full tickets, and original programs.

So we bring about anywhere from 50 to 100 pieces, and we speak about Coach Lombardi's principles.

We speak about the company and what they're willing and what they would like to hear.

Their.

Their sales force to learn.

And it's just great experience.

I just got back from the Pro Football hall of Fame luncheon and brought items from Red Grange and brought items.

A signed letter from Jim Thorpe.

I brought Burt Bell's game ball that he signed when he was the commissioner.

So it's just a great experience for me spreading the word of Coach Lombardi in his motivation and his principles on how it could help not only football coaches, but professional organizations and everyone who is interested can get them hold through you, Darren.

And I'll let you be the gatekeeper and they can contact me.

Yeah, folks, if you want to get a hold of Jack, go ahead.

You can email me@pigskindispatchmail.com and I will get you in contact with Jack and get something arranged.

I mean, what.

What better way to have, like, a corporate team building or have a group of coaches just to try to get their.

Their.

Their kids or, you know, their college students, you know, unified in the game than the best team builder probably in football history?

And Vince Lombardi, and you're doing it with iconic pieces that he was a part of or celebrate him or his teams.

Man, that's.

That's phenomenal.

That really brings some tangency to.

To it and something that you can look at and say, okay, yeah, this.

I. I know why he was so great.

You know, eight.

Eight championships he's a part of.

Just.

It's tremendous.

Yeah, we bring things that are.

Are one of maybe five of the only people.

People that have them besides us is the Pro Football hall of Fame or the Green Bay Packer hall of Fame.

We.

We do a lot.

We do a lot of.

That's good company to be in as a collector, right?

It is, it is.

As long as I can verify where I got it and someone's not missing something along the way.

Right, right.

But we.

For sales staffs, we.

We bring some great things for.

For people that are kicking off a new year, a corporate year.

So we talk about sales.

We also have been very busy with companies onboarding their employees to come back to the office, and one of the struggles is people not wanting to come back to the office.

So we do a show on the corporate headquarters, and it's fascinating, and it's so interesting to see the spirit after the presentation of people going, yeah, maybe this coming back to the office, you know, really isn't all that bad.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great thing.

I never even thought of that.

But, yeah, that's.

That's definitely an issue that's happened the last few years since the pandemic.

Yeah.

So I guess maybe let's get into.

A little bit of Coach Lombardi and you talked a little bit about, you know, his high school record and his playing days in college.

Maybe you could speak to those and just share some of his history.

Let's talk about his high school playing days.

Okay, sure.

You know, as.

As you and I are both the oldest in our family, and in.

In the Italian culture, if you're the oldest boy, there's only one job for you.

It's to become a priest.

And Mrs. Lombardi shipped him off to seminary school, and he spent three years at seminary school.

And just to go show you how where his mind was he left after his junior year.

And the reasons that were cited is he loved football and he loved girls and he figured the seminary probably wouldn't be a good place to pursue those both interests.

So he was a red blooded American boy, right?

Exactly right.

Exactly right.

And he played one year of high school football and Fordham offered him a scholarship to come and play for them after only one year.

And a lot of people don't know that, but a lot of people don't know this fact.

Most of the people he was playing against were a lot younger than him.

He was older, coming from three years of the high school experience.

So as he was playing against 16 and 17 and 18 year olds, he was older than them.

And obviously in a one on one match, he would win every one.

And when you go see him in person, he just looked like a true all American.

So playing only one year high school football and being older than the other boys he competed against was a real advantage for him.

Fordham noticed him.

You know, he was a local kid, he wanted to go and play fullback at Fordham, but he really didn't have the athletic skills to do that.

So they put him at offensive line.

He, you know, Vinny Lombardi was number 40 right guard on the famous seven blocks of granite.

And if you take a look along that line, we actually have the picture in the other room.

He probably was the least athletic of them all.

He played offensive right guard and he also played some defensive line.

Now his teams were tremendous because at that point, you know, east coast teams like nyu, Eastern power, Ford, Eastern Power, West Point, Eastern Power, you know, and that was kind of the, the hotbed of football in the east.

And that's how he got to Fordham in, in his playing days.

He left Fordham after graduation and dad bent his ear about being a lawyer.

So he tried it a couple years, but the first year out after he graduated in 37 from Fordham, he still had the bug.

And he played one year of semi pro football for the Wilmington Clippers, went to law school, left the Wilmington Clippers, still had the bug, and played one year of semi pro football for the Brooklyn Eagles, left the law situation and that's how he got back to St. Cecilia High School in Inglewood, New Jersey and began his coaching career.

And as a side note, Coach Lombardi is in the semi pro Football hall of Fame for the two years that he played.

Oh really?

Yeah.

Well, that's pretty, pretty good name to have on hanging on your wall or however they plaque or bust or whatever.

That's good.

That's a Good one to have in your, your museum, that's for sure.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Very interesting.

Now, you know, many people don't know this, and you alluded to it brilliantly that, you know, Fordham was a football powerhouse back in the days, you know, even a little bit before Coach Lombardi came came there because, you know, it was prestigious that he got selected there.

And when they're naming your, your offensive line, a nickname that we still remember, you know, almost 100 years later, you know, you know, that's something great.

You know, that's, that's right up there with the, the Seven Mules and the, the Four Horsemen, the seven blocks of granite.

And the other thing is, you know, that that team was so powerful, the Fordham Rams, that, that is how the today's Los Angeles Rams were named.

When the Cleveland franchise that started out as.

That's where the Rams started, that's where they got their name from, is.

And a lot of it might have been because of that two team that Lombardi was on, without a doubt.

And it, and you take a look at what's happened now.

Nyu, no football team, West Point, just a tremendous season last year.

But you know, in terms of talking about competing against the Ohio states and, and Alabama's and Michigan's, that talk really isn't relevant.

And then, you know, in Fordham, so it, those were the glory days of those smaller schools, smaller Catholic schools.

Right.

We got Notre Dame now in terms of the Catholic side of it to cheer for.

But yeah, it just was talk about romantic and romanticizing college football in its infancy.

And that's when the nation was in love with their, our boys.

Right, Our boys who went out there and did it for the good of the school and did it for their hometown.

And certainly when you alluded to the present day college football scene, it's dramatically different.

Yeah, that's definitely right.

And college was.

Football was king then the NFL was, you know, just a side note, you know, a sidecar attraction had nowhere near the attendance other than a few games here and there, you know, Red Grange game or something.

But yeah, nothing.

Championship games were pulling as we just went through our championship series and we, we saw much of that.

But I guess that's a good segue into, you know, how coach got into.

Broke into the National Football League and sort of started that momentum of helping it to grow very rapidly.

That's a very good point.

And let's start pre professional football.

He's on the staff with Red Blake at West Point.

He leaves Fordham, gets to, gets to West Point and his Style of coaching was good for high school kids, good for maybe some younger college kids.

But he gets to West Point, and a really interesting story.

It's the first day of camp, and Coach Blake is inspecting another unit.

And down the field, he hears this screaming and yelling and all this commotion.

And as he leaves the one unit and starts progressing to this volume of action, he notices his young assistant, Vincent Lombardi, and he's just carrying on.

So they take a break in the action, and Coach Blake pulls him aside, and he says, do you think all that screaming and yelling is going to get you what you want with these boys?

Silence, he says, these boys are yelled at from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed.

If you think that's going to get your message across, you're sadly mistaken.

You've got to find a new way of teaching these young men who are very intelligent and are yelled at all the time a different way.

And that really flipped the switch for Coach Lombardi, because he now had to use a little intellect, you know, a little cerebral side of coaching.

And arguably, the most influential person in his entire coaching career is Red Blake, because he set the tone.

And he was under Coach Blake's wing for five years, teaching him and refining and teaching and refining.

And by the time he got to the Giants, he still had another drastic lesson to learn that we'll share here in a second.

But he left West Point kind of understanding the cerebral side, that he couldn't just bully his way with kids because it just didn't work.

So Blake sent them off.

And actually, Wellington Marrow, the owner of the Giants, was Coach Lombardi's classmate at Fordham.

Oh, okay.

And Wellington Mara was looking for head coach.

He wanted Earl Blake, and Blake turned him down.

But Coach Blake says, I got a young assistant.

You know, I don't know, but it may work out.

I'm not really sure.

His name is Vinnie Lombardi.

He's from the area.

And Wellington says, yeah, I know him.

So he brings him up, and he is in New York.

And remind me to tell the story about the West Point honor code being broke.

That's a.

That's a really interesting story.

And again, as you begin to try to understand the man behind the championships, it's an important one.

So he gets to New York, and he's got Frank Gifford, he's got YA Tittle.

He's got these great players, and, you know, the Giants are competitive.

He gets up there and he starts doing this screaming and yelling stuff.

You know, they come get a paycheck.

And you and I know a lot of these guys are mercenaries almost.

That's what the public thinks about them.

He's screaming and yelling, and nothing's going right.

They're not listening to him.

In fact, they're laughing behind his back.

He realizes he's not doing the right thing.

He calls up Frank Gifford.

He says, frank, you know, can I come and talk to you?

So, in terms of a man not evolving with the times, that's not true with Coach Lombardi.

He understood his weaknesses.

He sought help.

He found the leaders of the team, and he and Frank Gifford sat down, and Frank said, hey, coach, you know, this yelling rah, rah, rah stuff.

We're professional football players.

It doesn't work here.

And we need a lot more sophisticated system than your wing T. And Coach Lombardi, again, for, you know, the second time in his career, was woken to, I got to change.

I've got to grow up.

I've got to mature.

I've got to understand that pro football is not like college football.

He changes, wins his first World Championship in 56 with the Giants.

So he's been battle hardened leading up to Green Bay.

Yeah, it's such a fascinating item, too, that that coaching staff of the Giants is legendary.

And, you know, his coordinator on the other side of the ball for the Giants would end up being a rivalry in the NFL.

As far as head coaches, that is tremendous.

And you know that.

How was the relationship of Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry while they were assistant coaches in New York?

A mutual respect.

They.

They wanted both to outdo each other.

Now, coach.

Coach.

Coach Landry is more reserved.

Coach Lombardi is more vocal.

Obviously, he.

He thought that the intricacies of Coach Landry's offense would be their doom.

It would later come out in.

In some papers that he thought that the offense that Coach Landry is designed just wasn't up to handling difficult situations.

And that's how he coached against him in those two championship games, you know, towards the end, in 67 and 68 or 66 and 67, you know, one.

One being the ice Bowl.

But kind of some notes came out about that.

But there was high mutual respect.

They both were competitive.

They both had a head coach, sleepy Jim Howell up in New York.

And really, Landry and Lombardi were the coaches, were the head coaches.

A tremendous staff.

Yeah, it definitely is.

Now, I guess before we go too much further, did you want to tell your West Point code of honor story?

Yeah, because as we talked about, two things that impacted Coach Lombardi's beliefs and understandings about how the world should work, how football should work, how people should work.

West Point was involved in a cheating scandal while Coach Lombardi was there.

And under.

Under the honor code that if you see somebody doing something incorrect according to West Point honor code, you're to tell.

You're to tell what you saw and what you heard.

Well, the cheating scandal wiped out the football team.

In fact, also removed Coach Blake's son from the football team.

They were all caught cheating.

Somebody told on him and wiped out the team.

And Coach Lombardi, for the rest of his life, could not figure out why an honor code involved somebody tattletailing on somebody else.

He just couldn't figure out if it was an honor code, why isn't everybody honorable and not say anything?

So he really struggled with that.

So here's the related story.

Many of our guests tonight know that Coach Lombardi and his son didn't have the greatest relationship in the world.

They're at the Giants, and a lot of those guys, it's.

It's preseason camp.

They go to practice.

They get home from practice, and they go paint the town red.

They're in New York City, and they're just doing all kinds of crazy stuff.

There was one time where they had gone out way past curfew.

In fact, practice was starting, and they are just coming over the hill to join practice.

They've been out all night.

Vince Jr. Is always part of.

Of his dad during these camps.

He's there, and he witnesses this.

He knows these guys have been out.

So Jim Crowley just throws a gasket and just goes crazy and wants to know why these guys are late, what's going on?

And he presses young Vince and he says, I know you know.

You tell me, or I'm throwing you off this field.

Now his dad is standing in the.

In the far side, being quiet.

And Vince Jr. Never told, never snitched.

And it's later written in many documents.

That was one of the proudest moments of Coach Lombardi's life with his son, because as he witnessed the honor code being broken down by tattletailing, his own son didn't tattle tale and paid the consequence.

Wow, that's.

That's remarkable.

I have never heard.

Heard that story before.

That's very fascinating, but it sort of tells you the makeup of the man of being a true friend, a true compadre to his players, to his.

The teams he played for.

And, you know, because you.

You sit there and you think about it, you know, what you said just a little bit ago with, you know, Landry and Lombardi sort of running the Giants and.

And Jimmy Lee Howell sort of just being a coach, just by name, only the head coach.

And, you know, it's just very interesting.

And now I have had other guests, you know, during our championship series, both Giants coaches and Packers.

I'm sorry, Giants historians and packers historians tell me that, you know, both Landry and Lombardi both wanted that Giants head coaching job, and they were sort of waiting for, you know, how to either be vacated or leave on his own and take that over.

So with Coach Lombardi's standpoint, you know, his whole life, his whole history, what you just explained to us, you know, is Eastern New York, it's New Jersey, it's that east coast, you know, of that area.

How in the world does Coach Lombardi become the head coach in Wisconsin?

Impatience.

There's a lot of talk before you began really understanding who he was about discrimination, discrimination against Italian Americans.

And here's another story.

He's very frustrated at New York, and he really believes there's a lot of things going on, one of which is because he's a.

An Italian American, he's not getting a job.

That's why he left Fordham.

He thought he'd be the head coach at Fordham.

He left there West Point.

He.

After.

After Colonel Blake didn't go to the Giants.

There was no way that that Coach Lombardi was going to get the West Point job.

So he goes to New York, and he's highly frustrated this week because he's not a head coach.

So he confines in one of the office folks about this, and he says, hey, listen, I.

Coach Lombardi speaks to this office front office person and says, hey, listen, I don't know what the hell is going on, but I want to be a head coach.

And there's a very nervous silence pause by the front office person, and he says, vinny, you'll never get a job in the NFL.

And Coach Lombardi said, why?

He goes, because, Vincent, your last name ends in a vowel.

And that just infuriated him.

Now, he's young, and this just adds fuel to the fire.

He got to Green bay, and he's 47 years of age.

He was just tremendously impatient.

Yeah, there were signs of maybe some bias because of his heritage and culture, but a lot of it was the fact that he was young, you know, went from high school to a lower level job with Fordham, really made a break in with the West Point and crouch blank that that had something, you know, really important, but still only five years.

Went to New York five years, had tremendous success.

And the success in New York parlayed his job into West Point, into the Packers.

But he was highly frustrated and the whole Packer interview job was, is fascinating too, but he really felt as though there is a sense of kind of anti Italian sentiment in the country a little bit to that.

But he was really impatient.

He wanted a job and he was looking for all kinds of things to pin it on.

And one of it was being Italian American.

Yeah, that, that surprises me because you would think, you know, at least from my experiences and maybe yours too, probably one of the higher populations of Italian American Americans is on the east coast where, you know, it came into, you know, Staten island and you know, every those areas through Statue of Liberty.

I know my, my mother in law, I told you, she, she's a native Italian that immigrated in and came that area and her family's up in the Schenectady, New York and Connecticut area.

You know, that you would think that would be a strong support base for him because he has a lot of folks that are in the same, you know, know nationality and same immigration thing that his family went through.

And to move to Wisconsin, where you traditionally think of that more as of a Norwegian or you know, Denmark natives coming in, you know, to that area, it just, that's just kind of surprising that he felt more comfortable in that environment than he did where other Italian Americans were.

You're, you're right, but I, but he tells us, funny story about Susan saying, hey, he comes in, hey, you know, we're going to go to Green Bay.

And Susan asked, where's Green Bay?

He goes, I don't know.

Look it up on the map.

No one knew where the hell Green Bay was.

But the interesting point about the comfort level on the east coast with Italians, what we have to remember is the population of Italian Americans at that time were blue collar workers.

They were, they didn't hold high offices, they weren't in, in the corporate boardrooms, they didn't own football team.

So though that there was kind of a rallying cry underneath within his social economic climate, above him were not a lot of Italian Americans.

Okay, that explains it then.

Yeah, very interesting.

Okay, so he takes, you know, his knowledge that he has from Fordham and West Point and with the Giants, and he takes it to Green Bay.

What kind of a team was the Green Bay packers when Coach Lombardi arrived?

A bad one.

And in fact, there was a lot of talking and Cliff will tell you this, Cliff and I talk about this.

It's not like today where you've got a lot of private owners and you know, you're not going to pull my team.

You know, Pete Roselle was getting a lot of heat about Green Bay just being bad.

They hadn't had a winning record like in 11 years.

Just got awful.

And when he got there, I think they were 110 and 1, if I'm not mistaken, in 58.

And a ton of things were going against them.

First of all, they were a bad football team.

They were a bad football team for a decade plus.

They were the most northern team that people would have to travel to this God awful place.

Their football stadium was archaic and very, very small, and they were bad.

And so there was a real conversation about pulling the team out of Green Bay.

And I will tell you this, all, all our Green Bay Packer friends who continue to bash Chicago and the Bears and stuff like that, you and I know this.

There are two teams in Chicago at this point.

There's the Cardinals and the Bears.

And that is a very short distance to Green Bay.

And because they didn't complain about it, they kind of starved off the, the LA Rams and they starved off the Vikings, they starved off Detroit from, from, you know, bringing burning pitchforks to Green Bay and taking the team out because the travel was so close.

They were a bad football team.

So, you know, the Cardinals pack up the train, go beat the dog out of Green Bay, come back home, give everybody a lunch.

The Bears do the same thing.

So really the friends in Chicago actually kind of help Green Bay limp along.

And then Coach Lombardi arrives.

Coach Lombardi arrives in 59.

He, he goes seven and five.

In his very first year, he's carried off the field when he beats the Bears in the very first game, you know, in new City Stadium 9 to 6.

And the Resurrection project begins.

He.

He also has inherited a team that would have 12 hall of Famers.

Coach Lombardi in a lot of his materials, and he was quoted as saying this, that leaders are made, not born.

God gifted.

Coach Lombardi with this tremendous gift of education, he was a born teacher.

He went to St. Cecilia High School.

So we're going to go back and forth.

Darren, you're not going to go back and forth here.

So let's go back to St. Sophia in Inglewood, New Jersey.

I love the flashbacks.

I have sometimes had no apparent time.

He taught chemistry, he taught physics in Latin, all for three, $800.

And he took the subject matter and broke it down in such a way that everyone could understand it and digest it.

God blessed him with this tremendous ability to teach.

And, and Sonny Jurgensen said this.

If I had Coach Lombardi make the game for me this easy years ago, I'd have won three Super Bowls.

So he gets to Green Bay and he's this master teacher, master teacher guised with the, the cloak of Darth Vader, just pushing them and pushing them and pushing them.

So you get this brilliant teaching mind, this idea that keep the system very simple, work towards perfection and don't make it over complicated.

Use the kiss principle, keep it simple.

And he goes down as the greatest coach that ever starting from day one.

You bring up this and what you said earlier about coach, what a character conflict with inside him, you know, you talked about earlier how he was had to retrain himself and he self through self analyzation and some help from Frank Gifford and some others that he was, you know, a yeller and a screamer and you know, trying to push his way like many coaches that era did to just bully his players into what he, they wanted them to do.

But he's also a great communicator and connecting with people as a teacher and making things, you know, simplified for them to understand but through his connections.

So it's very, you know, two different sides of the moon here with him and how he, you know, but I guess that self analyzation and advice from others really helped him hone in that skill he had as a teacher.

And I'll give you another story as we go and we talk about that economy of Coach Lombardi and how complex he was.

They go to camp in 59 and Bart Starr is not the starting quarterback and bark star is fourth on the depth chart, but he's working his way up and Starr is in the scrimmage and he is just God awful.

Star is horrible, horrible.

Just a bad day.

And Coach Lombardi is in his rear end two feet, just ripping him unmercifully.

And Starr, you know, calls home to Cherry and says Coach Lombardi is just ripping me unmercifully and I'm really shaken up about it.

So Cherry tells him, hey, you know, maybe you should have a meeting with coach Lombardi and talk about this.

And he gets a meeting with coach Lombardi.

And you can imagine this.

Just picture his presence.

He's behind this big desk.

Somebody walks in, and there he is, just waiting for someone to say something out of line.

So Star goes in his office, and he begins and he says, coach Lombardi, if you want me to lead these players and lead this team, you have to show me a little bit of respect if we're going to get to where we want to go.

Now, first of all, his.

His heart is in his throat, and he tells coach Lombardi that, you know, yelling and screaming.

He says, I take it all the time.

My dad was military.

You want to do it behind closed doors, I'll be here.

You let me know.

You can rip me all you want, but if you rip me in front of the players, you want me to lead for us to be successful, that's not going to work.

Coach Lombardi never, ever yelled at him ever again.

Wow, that is.

That's an awesome character trait right there.

You know, I'm sitting there envisioning the bravery that Barstar, you know, he's.

He's a no name at that time.

Like you said here, you know, he's a guy from the south.

He's from Alabama, you know, or played for Alabama.

And here you have this guy from New York.

And I'm sure, you know, Coach Lombardi with that New York accent was, you know, and barking at him was kind of intimidating.

And he's the head guy.

He's your boss.

And for him to, first of all, call for that conference with him and to say what he did and the conversation he had, that's.

That's tremendous bravery.

That's a great leader.

And, you know, he was bound for stardom.

Yeah.

And it talks to coach Lombardi, too.

You know, oh, my God.

Here's a kid that I might cut, has a bad game.

He can't take ripping.

But Starr begins to be very logical about and how he sees this going.

And, you know, years ago, I did a program with the relationship between Bart and coach Lombardi, and it was just this tremendous relationship and the ice bowl, and I'll tell you an ice ball story later, but the ice ball epitomizes their relationship in a matter of 16 seconds.

Well, you segued us into it.

Let's.

Here we go.

The icefall story.

So, you know, they're on the three, and Donnie Anderson falls.

It's very slippery.

Second down, he tries another play.

No good.

In fact, Anderson, by all accounts, from the packers and the line of the Dallas Cowboys, he's in but because the Ice bowl was so cold, the referees don't have their metal whistles.

It's all done by verbal command and by time.

The side official comes in, the Cowboys push Anderson back beyond the goal line, so he actually scores.

But when the official gets there, he's short.

And they place the ball short of the line.

So Star calls timeout.

Last time out.

They've got one play.

This is it.

And it goes to the sidelines.

Now, they had talked about this idea of 31 wedge earlier in the week.

They had saw Jethro Pugh playing very high.

And Kramer says, hey, listen, if we need a player, need a yard, let's wedge pew.

And Lombardi just exploded and goes, what?

And he rewinds the film and sees Jethro Tall playing high.

He goes, oh, okay, put it in.

Never thinking it would ever come down to this.

So Starr comes off the sidelines, and Starr knows the field conditions, but doesn't know what play to run exactly.

Coach Lombardi knows what play he wants to run, but is not sure about the field conditions.

So this is a 30 second conversation.

This is how in tune they were with one another.

So the official play that comes out long time ago, it's called brown, right, 31 wedge.

It goes to lead back, and that's it.

So Starr comes off the sidelines, says, hey, Coach Lombardi, the play is okay.

The backs can't get their footing.

He says, but I can.

I'm right under center.

I can get the ball, shuffle my feet, and just fall over the line.

And to give you another backstory, there is no quarterback sneak in the.

In the Green Bay Packer hand playbook.

This is truly drawn up in the dirt.

And the reason I know is I've got the playbooks in the other room.

There is no quarterback sneak in the Lombardi offensive playbook.

Wow.

This was all improv, improvised.

It's probably the most famous play in Green Bay packers history.

Exactly right.

So he star says, you know, I can shuffle over the line, I could get it in.

And Coach Lombardi says this.

Run it and let's get the hell out of here.

And it starts going back to the huddle.

He's just chuckling.

He goes, we are in one of the most critical plays of.

Of our entire lives.

And the man just tells us, run it and let's get the hell out of here.

So Star goes into the huddle, he calls Brown right, which is the formation.

31 wedge is where the play is going in the blocking pattern.

So it's very similar to what we use today in terms of the.

The sequencing and Chuck Racine thinks he's going to be a star because the play is to him.

He's in the game now.

He replaces Donny Anderson and star gets the ball shuffles the.

Ken Bowman and Lombardi make the block high, low on Jethro Pugh.

He gets knocked out of the way star shuffles.

He's in the end zone.

And that's that famous image of Marshawn doing this.

Because you and I both know in those days, that's aiding and abetting if you push somebody in.

Right.

It's not like the Philly Special or the Tush push anymore.

You can't do it back then.

So Marcine, being an Ivy League graduate, wanted to make sure the referees knew I am not pushing him in.

Here's my hands.

He goes in the end zone, they win the game.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's great insight in some back story to what really was happening there on the sideline.

And, you know, the whole thing of that.

That's tremendous.

I didn't realize they did not have a quarterback sneak in their playbook.

None.

Zero.

And you think about this.

You've got Paul Horning, you've got Jim Taylor.

If you can't run the ball with those two, you don't deserve a yard.

And really, that's what he said.

Sometimes if I got to get the quarterback to do my running for me, boy, we've wasted two.

Two hall of Fame tailbacks.

That is just silly.

And the interesting thing about the play is NFL Films has it when you slow it down frame by frame, Jerry Kramer time the snap perfectly.

I'll use that as a quote.

He jumps early, actually.

Hey, whatever.

Whatever it takes, though, you know.

Yeah.

And, and, and, and, and Kramer will tell you, you know, he was just a perfect jump.

He blamed it on Bowman snapping the ball too late.

That's.

That's what, that's what all the other linemen besides the center say.

You know, that's.

That's exactly right.

Right.

You know, I, I was a high school football official for 27 years, so I did.

And that's how I sort of got into podcasting.

I wrote a lot of football history assignments.

It was my assignment to.

For officiating media and early dot coms and everything.

But.

So I read a book and I forget the, the head official's name of that.

The Ice bowl game told.

Had a whole book on this.

And I forget the gentleman's name at the moment, but he said that like you said earlier, there was Only one whistle that.

That entire game, and I was the umpire, blew the whistle to signal the ready for play for the opening kickoff, and it stuck to his lip, and he pulled the metal whistle away from him and, you know, took part of his lip off.

And I learned, you know, that is why you never see a metal whistle on an official in basketball or football or hockey.

You know, they're all the plastic whistles.

And, you know, the technology was catching up at that time in the 60s for plastics to be molded and, you know, be less brittle.

But that was the main reason that went to football to win the plastic whistles is because of that game.

And, Darren, I had the pleasure of interviewing Fritz Graf, and Fritz was the back judge at the Ice bowl, and God bless him, he was in a nursing home in Canton, Ohio.

I got a chance to go up there and talk to him, and that's the reason that I knew that they ditched the whistles, because he told me that they were so cold, they froze to their lip.

And he's in the iconic photo of star laying on the ground.

He's number 34.

And in his.

His son is.

Is here in Dayton, Ohio, and he gave me permission to go and talk to him.

That's why I know about the whistle.

But he was.

He was an official at the Ice Bowl.

Wow.

Very, very cool.

Very interesting.

Yeah, great.

Okay.

So, you know, Coach Lombardi, you know, he's.

Has all the success.

You know, he's winning this.

These championship games, winning the first couple Super Bowls, when we're finally having the merger start to take place, and, you know, it's evolving and having this world Championship game, you know, and then all of a sudden, he's no longer the packers coach.

What can you tell us about that?

What were the reasons why he left for Washington?

He.

He told his son Vince Jr. To the drive to the stadium for the Ice bowl that you'll.

This is the last game I'm going to coach for the.

For the Green Bay Packers.

And he sense of burnout.

The.

The cancer may have taken some of his energy away.

Now, we all know.

No, we don't know about the cancer.

But, you know, you take a look at the window forward, and he's becoming more exhausted and he's becoming more tired, and so he wins the Ice Bowl.

He WINS Super Bowl 2 and has this long internal talk with himself, and he turns the team over to Phil Bankston in.

In January of 68.

60, 68.

And all of us have to remember, too, Coach Lombardi is the general manager and head coach, something impossible to do today.

So he turns it over to Phil and he becomes a general manager for a year.

And watch the packers just deteriorate.

They're not a Lombardi team anymore.

Now, the team got old.

The team went through injuries, replacing Coach Lombardi with Phil Bankston.

Almost polar opposites, very intelligent man, but it wasn't Coach Lombardi.

And Coach Lombardi had a special room set up for him in the stadium, and the workers had to insulate it, noise proof it, because he would be in there during games raising seven kinds of hell, yelling and screaming and throwing stuff.

At the end of the 68 season, he realized he made a mistake.

But there was no way he was going to go back and take the team back from a man he gave it to.

And didn't find that to be any option of going back and being the Green Bay Packer head coach.

But he wanted to coach and he had a neck knockdown, drag out with the board of trustees in Green Bay.

They had just extended his contract, so they had to break the contract.

There had to be some stipulations to it.

But they finally worked it out.

One of the reasons he went to Washington is because it was such an attractive package.

Coach Lombardi got 5% of the Washington Redskins as being the head coach.

And in today's dollars, that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the family.

So he got 5% of the Redskins.

He got a chance to go there and rebuild.

He is becoming this iconic, not only sport figure, but national figure.

Nixon wanted him to run as vice presidency.

Found out that he was the other party and a big Kennedy supporter.

So that kind of nixed that.

That'd be a problem.

Yeah, a little bit.

But he was.

He was struggling with the Vietnam War.

He doesn't know why young people aren't involved.

He was the hotbed of politics in the world in Washington, D.C. he was running.

His football team had gotten him to be 7 and 5.

And what was scary for the NFL is you're taking a look at how he was making it up, and it was just a mirror image of the Packers.

And it was just.

He had his quarterback in Sonny Jurgensen, which was by far a lot more athletic than Bart Starr.

He had Larry.

Larry Johnson.

He had Larry Brown.

He had Taylor as a wide receiver.

He had Sam Huff as a linebacker.

And you're beginning to go, oh, my.

He is really creating the second version of the packers in Washington.

Yeah.

Okay, now, you know, we.

We know of his.

His demise and the cancer finally caught up to him, very quickly into his portion of his career with Washington, took away, you know, a young man, 57 years old, I believe, like you said earlier.

So I guess let's take it to some happier times.

Let's take it and focus more on your.

You and your collection and your.

Your football.

Now you have a massive collection.

You know, we're been showing some videos of a tour that you.

You gave me a video tour, and I appreciate you letting me share that with the audience here.

And just some tremendous items that you have.

What is maybe one of your.

There's always the fun stuff is always.

Maybe not the most valuable, but the story of, you know, the chase of.

Of getting this.

What's one of your most favorite items?

Because of the story of how you obtained it.

We're gonna.

We're gonna be a little melancholy with this one.

The favorite piece in the whole collection was actually sent to me, and it was sent by a woman in Washington, D.C. she was involved in an automobile accident.

So she was recovering, and her friends had set her up on a blind date.

And the gentleman comes to call, picks her up, says, hey, listen, you know, I know you're down on your times, and we're going to go have dinner, we're going to go dance, we're going to have some fun.

But before we do that, I beg your indulgence, we have to stop one place before we go.

So as Diane tells the story in her personal letter to me, she has walked into this church, and there's these giant men everywhere.

They're all over the place.

And she's very religious, and she realizes it's a religious ceremony.

So she kneels down in the.

In the Catholic kneeler, and she begins to say a quick prayer, and her and her date say the prayer, and they get up to leave, and she turns behind her, she grabs a mask card and walks out.

She later goes home, and what she had gone through was the viewing of Vince Lombardi.

And she had grabbed the mask card, she had stuck it in her Bible for 25 years.

When she had heard of the collection nationally, she wrote me a note, and her last line was, I wanted to find a home for this.

And I think I have.

And she.

Well, that is remarkable and that she would think that much of your collection and your passion for saving and putting these pieces together, that she chose you.

That is.

That is pretty special.

So.

So what.

What's.

Maybe that's definitely unique, but what's.

What's something maybe that would be unique that, you know, this is a Showpiece.

Somebody visits you and you say, okay, you, here's that, that piece, you know, that's, it's.

This is it, you know, this is the centerpiece.

What would that be?

Well, I got a funny story.

We'll tell some funny story.

So I go to Green Bay and we talk about this before and for our guests and our listeners, I go to Green Bay every year and it's a mixture of American Pickers and Antique Roadshow.

And I go to these just crazy remote areas.

So I go visit my friends at the Green Bay Packer hall of Fame, you know, looking to give loan some things for, for them to display.

And the curator goes, hey, listen, I don't know this guy, but he's trying to sell us something.

But I told him that, hey, we don't buy anything.

But I got this crazy guy, me, who you'll be interested in talking with you.

So I'm thinking, okay, well, you know, give me his name and, and, you know, let me know where he is.

So I get his name and I'm thinking, he's just around the corner.

So he is in Iron Mountain, Michigan.

Yeah, exactly.

Sounds pretty far away from Green Bay.

100 miles from Green Bay, directly up north.

I'm going, okay.

So I call the guy and he says, hey, listen, we got this, we got this great sign from the stadium.

When they were redoing the stadium, you know, we got a hold of it, we got this sign and, and he goes, you know, yeah, we want, we want $5,000 for it.

Well, first of all, not going to come up.

I don't have $5,000.

But, you know, maybe we could work something out.

So two hours up now, I'm crossing state lines in Wisconsin.

Right now I'm in Michigan and arrived and he's got this beautiful card shop.

Hopefully it was a winter time.

No, it was during the spring, thank goodness.

Right, right.

So I walk in and it's a beautiful little town.

It's a ski resort town.

And here is this tremendous memorabilia card shop.

So we make the connection and he's got this, this sign and you're seeing in the video, because I pan pass it and goes, anyone caught on the field will be arrested and fined $300, which I chuckle about because it was a sign hanging up at the Ice bowl.

And I've got the piece of the ice bowl that someone ripped down the goal post, ignored that 300 in jail sign to go and get during the Ice Bowl.

They pillaged and looted everything.

I've got a banner, All American banner.

That we got too.

So I get there and he wants to sell me this sign.

And he's been hanging on to the sign for like 30 years.

He had gotten it from a friend who was working on the construction crew.

And the guy was in charge of taking all the signage down.

Instead of putting in the proper receptacle, these two dozen signs founded themselves in the back of a pickup truck.

So this guy begins to realize, I've got stolen merchandise.

I'm not gonna be able to sell it to anybody.

So he of course offloads it to his buddy, who's now been hiding this for another 10 years.

And now it comes out in the open.

I make a deal with them.

But he was bold enough to call the Green Bay packers museum, which might not have been a great idea, right?

Yeah.

And they didn't even entertain.

But when those, when these two knuckleheads realized I got stolen merchandise, I'm trying to sell it for a benefit.

No one is calling me back.

And thank goodness the police didn't come get me because I stole it.

So we made a deal.

It's a great sign from the Ice bowl.

And we're going to put it up and we're going to put it right next to the piece of the ice to the goal post from the Ice Bowl.

Wow, that is a great story.

I told you, there's always a good stories when you, especially the chase.

You had to go 100 miles for this thing out of your way.

You're already in Green Bay from Dayton.

I'm sure that's a good chunk of a ride there to get there to, to that.

Yeah.

It's eight hours of Green Bay.

They're going to send me another two hours north.

But I, I, I appreciated that very much.

It was, it was just, it was a fun, fun thing to do.

But now it's a background story that both these knuckle didn't realize.

Hey guys, you got stolen merchandise on your hands.

And then I'm gonna buy it.

So.

Makes me just as dumb.

Yeah.

You're your accomplice now, right?

Yes.

I hear a knock at your door, I'll understand.

That's exactly right.

But Jack, you have.

Before I let you go, you brought up something at the very beginning and you told me a little bit about last night in your coaching career professionally.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, I had taken.

It was a three year stint at the World League.

The World League of American Football.

And before I got there, they had three teams internationally and the NFL decided to expand this worldly concept, the NFL, and every team put in a million dollars.

They cultivated the draft.

You had to be drafted and you had to be NFL caliber players.

So they wanted to keep the talent pool there at a high level.

So the first year that I was there, we were now going to put together everything for one of the seven expansion teams coming to the United States.

And I was fortunate enough to work with Larry Little, hall of Famer Paul Warfield, hall of Famer Dennis Thurman, Wally Chambers, and I was the low man on the totem pole.

But Coach Little gave me an opportunity, and we were the Ohio Glory World League of American Football League team.

And I did everything from, you know, making copies to doing game plans.

And Dennis and I became good friends and I work with Dennis and I coach defensive backs.

And it was just great experience meeting all kinds of great people.

And then our first year, we were one and nine.

We won a game against a German team, our field goal kicker, and we played at Ohio Stadium.

We played at the Shoot, and, and we had the Beach Boys play after the game and the score was tied.

We had marched the ball down the field and with, with like three seconds left, we trotted out our kicker who we just picked up this past week, you know, and he kicks a 50 yarder and gun goes off.

We win.

We're hugging each other in the coach's booth.

Coach Little's going crazy.

They all go out to the concert afterwards.

But the season ended and then they moved the operation back to Europe.

And, you know, our three seasons ended up being one playing season and two in prep.

But it was just this great experience being a professional coach in the World League.

They treated like kings.

Yeah, well, that being anytime you can be involved in professional football at a level and something sponsored by the NFL, teams in the NFL.

You know, that's, that's a tremendous story.

Now, did you.

Was there any players that you got to work with on the Ohio glory that maybe our audience would recognize?

Yeah, in fact, two, and I believe it was Super Bowl 37.

I had Tom Ruin, who was the punter for the Broncos.

Okay.

And I coached George Koontz, the outside linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.

They met in the Super Bowl.

And one of my proudest moments is because I, I coached both of them and they would go on and find homes in the NFL and then play each other for the, the grandest surprises of the NFL.

And Kun's going to the Green Bay Packers, a team that you adore and, and collect, basically.

So wow.

Full circle there.

That.

Yeah, that is tremendous.

Exactly right.

Full circle is right.

But, you know, when you get a chance to listen to Coach Little and how he talks and how he conducts himself, and he, you know, you see the 72 dolphins ring, the only undefeated team, and you see traces and glimpse of Don Shula and what he does and Dennis Thurman with the Cowboys and Paul Warfield with.

With Paul Brown, and you hear Wally Chambers with.

With, you know, the Bears.

It just fascinating.

And that's a time where you really appreciate one mouth and two ears.

Yeah, I'll bet.

But, Jack, we're getting short on time here, but maybe if you have one story that would maybe sort of reflect who Coach Lombardi is and why you, you know, savor your center, your collection around him.

But what would that be?

Coach Lombardi was legally colorblind.

And in fact, he was not allowed to leave the house unless Mrs. Lombardi picked out his uniforms, picked out his dress.

So he could not match colors.

He could not match hues or patterns, anything.

In fact, you knew when he attempted to do this, there's pictures of him, and it's God awful.

And as an Italian American who fancies himself somewhat stylish, he was a shipwreck.

And Coach Lombardi was literally colorblind, but he was figuratively colorblind also.

He was one of the first coaches in the NFL to say, it doesn't make a difference what color your skin is.

And he was asked about this in a press interview, you know, your black players and your white players.

And Coach Lombardi snapped black and goes, we don't have black or white players.

We have players that are green and gold.

That's the only players that we have here.

So Coach Lombardi set the stage for integrating football teams.

And during a preseason game, they had traveled to New Orleans, I believe, or the south, maybe Tennessee.

And the team was not staying together.

The owner of the hotel says that the white players can stay, but the black players had to use the back entrance.

So Coach Lombardi heard the story of it and asked this the hotel owner to come forward and says, listen, that's fine, but tomorrow morning, you're not going to have a hotel.

So now you change your thinking about where my football players stay, and maybe we'll stay, and maybe you'll keep your hotel.

And the.

The hotel owner kind of changed his tune.

And Coach Lombardi was adamant.

He was willing to risk everything to make sure people understood, didn't have white players.

You're gonna.

You weren't going to treat black players disrespectfully, you're going to treat our Green Bay Packer players all the same.

And that came from a lot.

And in fact, a lot of people don't know, our guests don't know where a lot of this comes from in terms of equality.

But Coach Lombardi's brother was gay, and so he understood not only being discriminated against as an Italian American, but discriminated against as, as an African American discriminated against because you happen to have a different sexual orientation.

He withstood none of this.

And he made this very clear in all of his teams, Redskins, he had two gay players.

But like he always said that you're here to contribute.

I don't care what you do outside of the team, but when you're in the team, you focused on your job and your job only to make our team better.

Wow.

Well, you definitely see by that story and many of the other stories that you shared with us here tonight why he was such a team builder and why after, you know, 50 some years after his passing that we're still talking about him as being one of the greatest coaches in NFL history.

Jack, we really appreciate you coming on here, sharing your experiences, your collection and the stories and research that you've done on Coach Vince Lombardi with us.

And we really love to have you again sometime to talk more.

Darren, thank you.

All the all the fans and all the people, all the viewers, thank you.

Thank you for listening into us.

Keep listening and we'll do it again.

Darren, thank you, sir.

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