That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory

by John Eisenberg

Meanwhile, Ole’s subcommittee on management restructuring quietly proposed a plan, much of it suggested by Canadeo. The executive committee would shrink from thirteen people to seven. A real GM—a football expert, not a bean counter—would take over the on-field operation. The position of chairman of the board would be eliminated. The executive committee would no longer grill the coach on Mondays during the season.

He also met with Scooter before the team’s season-ending trip to California and told him that a new coach would be hired. As a thank-you for eight years of service, Scooter was offered the chance to finish the season and resign, as opposed to being fired. Good soldier that he was, McLean took the deal and left for California.

The Packers always concluded their schedule with road games against the 49ers and Rams; they played at home earlier in the fall, when the weather in Wisconsin was milder, and traveled to the warmer climate once winter arrived in December. The players always enjoyed the trip, treating it as a season-ending party with a little football attached. They had won just one of sixteen games in California since 1950.

for a week of practice before their season finale against the Rams. They checked into the Green Hotel in Pasadena, where they always stayed. Opened in the 1880s as an exclusive resort, it had fallen on hard times and now housed retirees as full-time residents. It would be condemned a few years later. The Packers trained at a nearby public park and went out at night. Scooter’s departure hadn’t been announced, but given the team’s dismal season and the fact that he had signed a one-year contract, rumors about his demise swirled.

A board member spoke to Curly Lambeau, who lived in California but still had many friends in Green Bay, and that led to a rumor that Lambeau would return as GM and hire a big-name college coach. Lambeau, with typical drama, denied it at first but then told Daley he might be interested.

At 3 A.M. on New Year’s Eve, Scooter was in Art Daley’s kitchen, cooking eggs for friends and toasting his time in Green Bay. No one had given Lambeau, Ronzani, and Blackbourn parties when they left, but Scooter was such a nice guy.

Most NFL teams cared little about scouting; some just consulted Street & Smith’s College Football guide before making picks. But Vainisi was consumed by the process, to the Packers’ benefit.

He traveled extensively, even carving out time on his honeymoon to check out prospects.

You had to dig around to find out about NFL assistants, who were unknown commodities, receiving little publicity or acclaim.

Blaik had won two national titles, fashioned a thirty-two-game winning streak, and always fielded strong teams. His approach was devastatingly simple. His players were well conditioned and mentally tough. The team’s playbook was slim but allowed for few mistakes. Army beat you not with offensive wizardry but with ferocious blocking and tackling.

Lombardi adopted Blaik’s straightforward philosophy. Football didn’t need to be complicated. The best players were fit, disciplined, and tough, willing to inflict and endure pain. They could win by mastering a small set of basic formations and plays, executing so crisply it didn’t matter if the other team knew what was coming.

Lombardi got off to a rough start with the Giants. Some veterans didn’t care for his sarcastic, critical style, and the offensive linemen practically revolted when he showed them his blocking system. They previously made blocks according to the defensive alignment, but now their assignments would be dictated by the offensive play-call. And instead of blocking a specific man, they were assigned a space and told to block any defender who entered it.

After the 1957 season, in which the Giants finished second in the Eastern Division, Lombardi was approached by the Philadelphia Eagles about becoming their head coach. They offered a short-term contract with the possibility of an extension if the team won. Lombardi had dreamed about the chance to run his own team, but Giants owner Wellington Mara talked him out of going. The Eagles had meddling owners who would interfere, Mara warned. Lombardi turned down the offer and received a raise from Mara.

Halas said, “I shouldn’t tell you this because you’re liable to kick the crap out of us, but he’ll be a good one.”

Ole phoned Mara and asked for permission to speak to Lombardi. Mara denied the request and suggested Ole consider Landry. But Ole persisted and, after several conversations, finally obtained Mara’s permission.

Disappointed to lose what Sports Illustrated called “the greatest football game ever played,” Lombardi started his off-season job at a bank a few days later. Coaching pro football wasn’t a full-time job for assistants, many of whom worked outside the game in the off-season to augment their meager salaries. Lombardi experienced a profound change as he went from the shattering noise of a championship football game to the quiet purr of a bank, but he needed the money to maintain his family’s standard of living, and he enjoyed the professional environment. Hired by the bank’s sales office, he checked out other jobs in the building and wondered if he might like such work if his coaching career fizzled. A dapper dresser and quick learner, he felt he fit right in.

Ole was under pressure to make a splashy hire. The members of an American Legion post that owned a substantial amount of Packer stock had demanded the resignations of the entire executive committee;

A big-name hire would calm the situation at least temporarily, and the opportunity presented itself when Curly Lambeau campaigned hard to return as GM and be put in charge of hiring the new coach. The idea stirred excitement and headlines, but Lambeau had made enemies during his bitter departure a decade earlier, and Ole resisted making the easy, crowd-pleasing play.

In early January, Evashevski, a square-jawed former star quarterback at the University of Michigan, emerged as the Packers’ top candidate. Iowa hadn’t won a Big Ten title in three decades when he took over in 1952, but he had remade the Hawkeyes into a power, winning Big Ten titles in 1956 and 1958. At age forty, he was just the kind of coach Ole wanted. Much of the committee supported going after him. Evashevski expressed interest when Ole contacted him shortly after the Hawkeyes pounded California in the Rose Bowl. Ole, Vainisi, and Canadeo interviewed him at the National Collegiate Athletic Association convention in mid-January and then quietly brought him to Green Bay for a second interview. But Evashevski abruptly took himself out of the running after that. He didn’t plan on coaching much longer (1960 would be his last year on a sideline) and the rebuilding of the Packers figured to take years.

The sad state of the Packers was a hot topic among reporters covering the event. Some wrote columns suggesting the franchise was in disarray.

His interviewers found it slightly unsettling that he had never been a college or pro head coach, and Lombardi insisted that he would only come to Green Bay as a dual coach/GM, with full control of the team. He had turned down the Eagles because Mara said the owners would interfere, and he knew that could also happen in Green Bay unless he had the authority to ignore the executive committee.

Canadeo and Dick Bourguignon met the plane at the Green Bay airport and drove Lombardi downtown to meet the rest of the committee. Incredibly, Lombardi’s name still hadn’t appeared in the Press-Gazette or the Milwaukee papers.

Meeting the rest of the committee, Lombardi repeated that he would only take the job at Green Bay as a head coach/GM with full authority over the team. During the past decade, when the committee had exerted suffocating control, it never would have ceded so much power. But now it was willing to let a football man take charge.

On January 28, the Packer board convened in the Northland Hotel’s Italian Room, a fitting setting. The response wasn’t entirely positive when Ole said the executive committee wanted to hire Lombardi. Some directors wondered why the choice wasn’t Evashevski, a bigger name. Some wanted Lambeau. One board member, John Torinus, spoke for many in the room when he asked, “Who in the hell is Vince Lombardi?” Down the hall, newspaper and radio reporters filled a pressroom with cigarette smoke and wisecracks. At 2:15 P.M., three board members walked in and said Ole would have an announcement in forty-five minutes. Some directors had been unable to attend the hastily arranged meeting and were being polled by phone. In the end, twenty-six of forty-five members gave Lombardi the thumbs-up. One said no. Eighteen didn’t vote.

To the fans, Lombardi seemed an odd choice. Since Lambeau’s departure, the Packers had been coached by taciturn, Midwestern football guys (Scooter was from New England but had been around so long he seemed like a local), so in background and manner alone, Lombardi represented a change. Plus, he seemed awfully old to be getting his first chance to run a team.

He emphasized that, unlike the Packer coaches before him, he wouldn’t tolerate interference. “I want it understood: I’m in complete command here,” he stated, pausing to let his words sink in. “I expect full cooperation from you. You will get full cooperation from me in return. I’ve never been associated with a loser and I don’t expect to be now. You have my confidence. I want yours. I’m not against anything that will help the Packers.”

When Lea, a Green Bay native, knocked on the door and entered, he found Lombardi and Marie relaxing in chairs. They smiled, introduced themselves, and peppered Lea with questions when they found out he had grown up in Green Bay. Where should we live? What are the good schools? Where are the best places to eat? They spoke for a half hour, and then Lea got his quotes and left. As he walked away he thought, Seems like a nice guy. Years later, Lea would recall that as one of the last pleasant conversations he had with Lombardi.

Lombardi and Marie decided to build a one-story brick house on Sunset Drive in Allouez, a Green Bay suburb.

He was instantly at ease in a city with so many Catholics.

A soft-spoken, analytical Minnesota native, Bengston had just been passed over by the 49ers, who had hired another assistant, Red Hickey, to replace fired coach Frankie Albert. Disappointed, Bengston had called the Packers about their head-coaching vacancy, and also called several other teams. When the Packers hired Lombardi, Bengston called him about a job. They related well. Both were forty-five, Catholic, and longtime assistants. Bengston liked the 4–3 defense that Lombardi wanted to use. Plus, despite his low-key personality, Bengston coached an attacking defense featuring unpredictable red-dog blitzes by linebackers, and Lombardi always wanted to play aggressively.

Cochran and Bengston came to town to start working and rented rooms at the downtown YMCA while they waited for their families to join them in Green Bay. Walking to work one day as a howling wind blew snow in their faces, Cochran, a native of Alabama, looked at Bengston and said, “Phil, what in the hell are we doing in this place?”

We are going to do things right until everyone is doing them right. We are going to run plays over and over and over until everyone is running them right. I mean everyone!

Lombardi wondered if Hornung, who had bombed at quarterback and fullback, might fare better as a halfback.

“How much do you weigh?” Lombardi barked. “Two twenty-five,” Knafelc croaked. “Well, you’re going to play tight end for me,” Lombardi said. Knafelc was stunned. He had always been a wide receiver, catching passes downfield. A tight end had to block. “Coach, I haven’t blocked anyone in five years in this league,” he sputtered. “You want to play for another team?” Lombardi snapped. Knafelc shook his head. No, he was a Packer. And now, it seemed, he was a Packer tight end.

We have to change their attitude before we change anything, Phil. This is terrible.

He asked team president Olejniczak for the financial backing, and Ole said yes. Closely following the Giants’ model, the Packers would start flying on better planes, staying in better hotels, eating better food. They would adhere to a dress code on road trips, wearing ties and shiny new green Packer blazers that Lombardi pledged to buy with his own money to show his commitment. Their home and road uniforms, which Lombardi found drab, would be updated. Back home, the team’s depressing offices would be redecorated more brightly.

If we’re going to become winners, Ole, we have to start looking, acting, and feeling like winners.

Lombardi would have to do a lot more to get the players thinking positively, especially after such a horrid season. He would start by enforcing curfews and conducting harder practices with far more conditioning work, holding the players to a higher standard of professionalism.

“I have always followed the words of General MacArthur,” he said, “who once told us at West Point, ‘Gentlemen, there is no substitute for victory.’ That will be applied here. We as coaches, an organization, and the team shall play every game to the hilt with every ounce of fiber we have in our bodies. Whatever personnel we have available, we realize football is a violent game and that’s the way we’ll play it.”

A month later, while at a league meeting in Philadelphia, Lombardi huddled with Cleveland’s Paul Brown, who liked Lombardi and, in a way, felt responsible for seeing that he succeeded, having recommended him repeatedly during the Packers’ search for a coach. Brown gave Lombardi a list of Cleveland players who could be obtained because they wouldn’t make Brown’s starting lineup. Lombardi saw names that interested him, negotiated with Brown, and announced the major deal he had sought as a way of shaking up the Packers. Howton was going to the Browns in exchange for Bill Quinlan, a starting defensive end, and Lew Carpenter, a veteran halfback.

Lombardi believed Howton was a bit too comfortable with losing, a serious problem given his stature in the locker room. He also didn’t block much and was leading a drive by players throughout the league to organize a union, annoying management everywhere, Lombardi included.

To say that Starr had struggled was an understatement. Scooter and Blackbourn had given him plenty of chances since his rookie year in 1956, but the Packers had a 3-15-1 record in games he started, and Starr had never played all four quarters of a victory. He didn’t have a strong arm, wasn’t a nimble runner, and seemed almost cursed with a habit of making mistakes at critical moments. Though he was popular in the locker room, some Packers believed he was just not meant to lead the team.

As his college career ended, pro scouts had little interest in him as a quarterback; he worked out as a defensive back at the Blue-Gray All-Star Game, and the Packers selected him in the seventeenth round of the 1956 draft almost as a favor to Johnny Dee, the basketball coach at Alabama, who knew Jack Vainisi, felt badly for Starr, and recommended him.

He prepared for his first training camp by throwing passes through a tire with Cherry as his receiver, but the Packers assigned him uniform number 42 when he reported, thinking his best chance of making the team was as a defensive back.

Although they traded Rote before the 1957 season, they drafted Paul Hornung and traded for Babe Parilli to fill the vacancy.

Packer fans argued about whether Starr or Parilli should start, but Vainisi doubted either was the permanent solution. Lombardi felt similarly after studying them on film.

McHan was amiable enough, Wolfner thought, but he sulked when criticized and complained about dropped passes. In a bizarre incident in 1956, he had ignored his coaches during a midseason game after asking not to play because of nerves, and then walked off the practice field the next day. Wolfner levied a three-thousand-dollar fine, the largest in NFL history, and briefly booted McHan off the team, but revoked both penalties when McHan apologized.

Golf’s popularity had soared in the United States during the 1950s (President Dwight Eisenhower loved the game so much he was jokingly called Duffer in Chief), and Lombardi, like many men, played it with a passion.

Many charities and clubs in Green Bay sponsored springtime golf events, and Packer players and coaches often participated.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we’re going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because, in the process, we will catch excellence.”