Vince Lombardi
Vincent Thomas Lombardi was born on June 11, 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, the first of Henry and Matilda Lombardi's five children. He was raised in the Catholic faith and studied the priesthood for two years before transferring to St. Francis Preparatory High School, where he was a star fullback on the football team.
Vince was accepted at New York City's Fordham University in 1933. After a year on the freshman team, the varsity football coach made 170-pound Vince a guard in Fordham's steadfast defensive line, which was tagged the "Seven Blocks of Granite." He was successful off the field as well, graduating magna cum laude with a business major in 1937.
For the next two years, Vince worked at a finance company, took night classes at Fordham's law school and played semi-pro football with Delaware's Wilmington Clippers. In 1939 he took a teaching and coaching job at St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, New Jersey. For $1,700 a year Vince taught Latin, algebra, physics and chemistry, and coached the football, basketball and baseball teams.
He married Marie Planitz in 1940, with whom he had a son, Vince Jr., and a
daughter, Susan.
Vince left St. Cecilia in 1947 to coach at his Alma Mater, Fordham. He spent one year coaching Fordham's freshman football team and the next as an assistant coach for the varsity team.
Earl "Colonel Red" Blaik, football coach for the United States Military Academy at West Point (and considered the best coach in the country at the time), hired Vince to manage their varsity defensive line in 1949. Vince regularly worked 17-hour days with Blaik, whose expertise helped refine Vince's leadership skills. Blaik taught Vince to stick with clear-cut plays (simple blocking and tackling), strive for perfect execution and conduct himself respectively on the field.
Vince left West Point in 1954 for an assistant coaching position with the New York Giants, under head coach and former classmate Jim Lee Howell. Vince was in charge of offensive strategy for the Giants, while future Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry led the defense. The previous season, the Giants suffered with a 3-9 record and scored the least number of points in the league. Within three years of Vince's arrival, however, the Giants were a championship team. His leadership channeled the talents of football great Frank Gifford, whom he switched from defense to offense. For each of the five years that Vince coached the Giants, Gifford was nominated as a halfback on the all-pro team and the Giants did not have a losing season.
By 1958, the 45-year-old coach was tired of being an assistant. He accepted a challenging five-year contract in Wisconsin as the general manager and head coach of perpetual losers the Green Bay Packers. At the time, the Packers had no clout in professional football (they won only one game the previous year), and Vince saw them as a chance to prove himself and his coaching [next page]