Lombardi's telling start

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By Dick Heller

The new coach stood up at the welcoming luncheon and scowled at the board of directors whose members had dictated team policy in recent disastrous seasons.

"I want it understood: I'm in complete command here," he rasped. "I've never been associated with a loser, and I don't expect to be now."

These were brave, perhaps even foolhardy words from a 45-year-old man who had never been a head coach in the NFL and who was inheriting a team that had finished 1-10-1 the previous season and 32-76-2 since the departure of club founder Curly Lambeau in 1950. But soon he and they would make pro football history together.

The team was the Green Bay Packers and the coach, of course, was Vince Lombardi. Fifty years after his ascension began in 1959, author John Eisenberg relates the dramatic story of how Lombardi began his memorable nine-year tenure on the Packers' sideline in "That First Season."

During that epochal year, the streaky Packers won their first three games, lost five straight and won their last four for a 7-5 record. The following season, they won the NFL's Western Division title. Then they collected five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowl crowns in the next seven seasons - with Lombardi ranting and raving at his troops like a madman.

"It's like we were a house, and he came in and built a new foundation," Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr told Eisenberg. "Fitness, discipline and preparation, we did not have any of those things prior to his arrival."

Not that the players immediately revered Lombardi. Said defensive tackle Henry Jordan famously: "Lombardi is very fair. He treats us all the same, like dogs."

Fuzzy Thurston, the other pulling guard in Lombardi's famous "Packer Sweep" running attack, put it this way: "We didn't like him as a person, but we loved him as a coach. ... We were glad we had him. He was going to make us special."

For veteran Redskins fans, this tale of Lombardi's wizardry might bring only pain. Lured to Washington by owner Edward Bennett Williams in 1969, he started almost exactly as he had in Green Bay, turning a perennial loser into a 7-5-2 outfit his first season. But then intestinal cancer struck down the seemingly invincible coach. He died, at 57, just before the start of what would have been his second season.

Starr again, on Lombardi's visit to the quarterback's new home near Green Bay: "[My wife] said, 'We owe all this to you, Coach.' He was tearing up, crying, then he just walked right out of the house. We always wondered if he knew then that he had cancer."

Lombardi's initial success in Green Bay should have been no great surprise because eight of the players eventually joined him in Canton. Yet the Packers were very much on the skids because of the five-game losing streak before beating the hapless Redskins 21-0 on Nov. 22 in Starr's first game as a starter. They completed their revival by whipping the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers in California in the final two games.

"The other teams better watch their [butts]," defensive back John Symank said in the visiting locker room at San Francisco's Kezar Stadium. "We're just starting to go."

Adds Eisenberg: "How right he was."

We also learn that the New York Giants, for whom Lombardi labored as an assistant coach through 1958, tried to rehire him as head man after the 1959 season when Jim Lee Howell talked of retiring. Lombardi spurned his old team because "I haven't fulfilled my obligation to the people in Green Bay."

The author, a former sports columnist for the (Baltimore) Sun, enlivens his account by frequently interspersing italicized comments on what Lombardi and others might have said at particular junctures. In most cases, the tactic works effectively, but some of these presumed quotes strike a false note, such as veteran Chicago Bears coach George Halas "saying" he would pummel Lombardi's Italian posterior before the Packers' first game.

And in a rather jarring error, Eisenberg misspells the name of Phil Bengtson, Lombardi's longtime assistant coach and eventual successor, throughout.

But these are minor negatives in what is a compelling read about perhaps the most compelling coach ever to stride an NFL sideline. This one is a keeper for anyone who remembers St. Vincent or wonders how he did so much so quickly.