Vince Lombardi

Lombardi was born June 11, 1913, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, the oldest of five children of Italian immigrant stock — his grandparents had come from Salerno and Basilicata. He finished eighth grade at fifteen and enrolled at a seminary considering the priesthood, then changed course for St. Francis Prep and a scholarship to Fordham, where in 1936 he played right guard on the line sportswriters nicknamed the Seven Blocks of Granite. He took a severe mouth injury against Pitt that season and played through it anyway. Out of college in 1937 with no path yet into professional football, he spent more than a decade coaching high school and college lines — Salesianum, St. Cecilia in New Jersey, then Fordham and West Point — before the NFL noticed him at 41.

Named head coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers on February 2, 1959, taking over a team that had gone 1 and 10 and 1 the year before, he demanded total control and got it. He had the team at 7 and 5 by year's end and Coach of the Year honors with it. Green Bay then won five NFL championships in seven seasons, three of them in a row from 1965 through 1967, along with the first two Super Bowls — the second title decided in the minus-13-degree Ice Bowl against Dallas, on a quarterback sneak with sixteen seconds left. He stepped down as head coach in 1968 and left for the Washington Redskins in 1969, giving them their first winning season in fourteen years and capping a career that never had a losing one.

At home the discipline he sold his players did not translate into warmth. Marie drank heavily after a miscarriage and, by her own account, had to defend herself against his temper; his children remember the yelling and, when he was not angry, a father who was simply absent, distracted by football even on his honeymoon, which he cut short to get back to it. He had ignored digestive symptoms since 1967 and refused a proctoscopic exam, and by the time doctors at Georgetown found the cause, in June 1970, it was an aggressive colon cancer already past treating. Nixon called him in the hospital; Lombardi told him he would never stop fighting. He died on September 3, 1970, ten weeks after the diagnosis, at 57.

Fifteen hundred people lined Fifth Avenue outside his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Pro football inducted him into its Hall of Fame the next year, and the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy for him before the 1970 season was even out. What has grown since is less the coaching record than the rest of it: histories now credit him as one of professional football's earliest integrators, refusing hotels that would not house his Black players, and biographer David Maraniss documented his private tolerance toward gay players and staff at a time almost no one in the sport said so out loud. That record is what later research added to the name.

Vince Lombardi's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Run to Daylight! book
  Co-written account of his offensive philosophy 1963
• Packers Sweep invention
  Signature Green Bay running play built around Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung 1959
• Second Effort film
  Motivational training film, once the best-selling of its kind 1968
• Five NFL championships other
  Three of them in a row, 1965 through 1967, unmatched since Curly Lambeau 1967
• Super Bowl I and II other
  The first two championships of the modern, merged NFL 1968

• 1936 aged ~23 Plays right guard on Fordham's Seven Blocks of Granite line
• August 31, 1940 aged 27 Marries Marie Planitz
• 1949 aged ~36 Joins Red Blaik's staff at West Point as offensive line coach
• 1954 aged ~41 Becomes offensive coordinator of the New York Giants
• February 2, 1959 aged 45 Named head coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers
• 1961 aged ~48 Wins the first of five NFL championships with Green Bay
• December 31, 1967 aged 54 Wins the Ice Bowl on a game-ending quarterback sneak at 13 below zero
• 1969 aged ~56 Takes over the Washington Redskins and posts their first winning season in 14 years
• September 3, 1970 aged 57 Dies of colon cancer in Washington, at 57

• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. supported for president
• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. supported in the 1968 primaries
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. considered him as a running mate
• Gaylord Nelson 1916–2005
  Senator and founder of Earth Day who helped make environmental protection a mass political movement. supported for senator