Remembering the Greatest Coaches and Games of the NFL Glory Years by Wayne Stewart

Author:Wayne Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Adderley played in 15 postseason games, winning 14 of those contests. He played in seven title games and lost only once. He appeared in four of the first six Super Bowls, winning three times. The Adderley-combined-with-Lombardi-and-Landry concoction was just about indomitable.

One thing Lombardi could not abide by was prejudice, and he loathed racial slurs. Dave Robinson remembered, “There was no difference between the whites, the blacks, the yellows, the browns, the purples—everybody was the same. He was very strict about that. He said many times that the only colors we have here are green and gold, that’s it, and that’s how it was. That’s how he coached.”

Another Packer, center Bob Hyland, concurred, declaring, “One thing I really liked about the Packers was there was no color discrimination whatsoever. Blacks and whites, we all spent a lot of time together.”

Robinson noted that when “Lombardi went to the little town of Green Bay and saw a lot of racial disparity there, he handled it, and we had no problems. Anything like [racial intolerance], Vince put a stop to it.”

It’s been said Lombardi told his players if any one of them, no matter how valuable he might be on the field, ever muttered a single racial epithet or made any negative racial comment, he was gone. Hyland said, “I believe that. I never heard of any incident occurring there—it just didn’t happen.”

Now, throughout the years, there had to be at least one Packer who, for instance, grew up hating blacks, but Lombardi demanded that his men obey him and either change their ways or, at the very least, keep their vitriol hidden. “It’s amazing how you change when you put that green and gold on,” concluded Hyland.

Lombardi doted on his wife Marie, who occasionally joked about his strict football ways. At Super Bowl XV, Marie, by then a widow, performed the ceremonial coin toss. Asked what her husband would have thought about this, she replied, “He’d probably wonder what the hell a woman was doing on the football field.”[8]

The portrayal of Lombardi as a martinet with his players and a marionette with his wife is only partially correct. It’s true that he did defer to his wife frequently, but it’s difficult to picture him as a stammering, henpecked husband.

It’s certainly true that he was tough and demanding with his players. Using that booming voice of his, he even threatened such veteran stars as Fuzzy Thurston to play harder and better, or expect to be shipped out of town. He often upped the threat by saying he would trade a player to a losing team.

Nevertheless, he was far from being heartless, and his men respected him. One reason is because when it came to hard work, Lombardi was never guilty of having double standards. On Christmas Eve 1967, for example, he and his staff reported to work early in the morning, and during the entire season the group toiled for as many as 16 hours a day. Furthermore, after each season, the coaches didn’t get a vacation until as late as June.

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