Scared Guys Finish First: What Made Vince Lombardi the NFL’s Toughest Coach

This article originally appeared in the January 1968 issue of Esquire under the headline “The Toughest Man in Pro Football.” It may contain sensibilities and attitudes about race and class that are potentially triggering. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade toAll Access.

One of the favorite things of Vince Lombardi, coach, general manager, and spiritual leader of the world-champion Green Bay Packers, is the grass drill. He lets an assistant coach lead the bending and stretching exercises, the calisthenics, but he himself must run the part of the drill that turns grown behemoths into groveling, gasping, sweat-soaked, foamy-mouthed animals without breath enough left to complain. It is a simple drill best conducted in the summer sun at brain-frying temperatures because sane men will not do it. The crazy men run in place, double time, as hard as they can, while Vince Lombardi shouts at them in his irritating, nasal, steel-wool-rubbing-over-grate voice. “C’mon, lift those legs, lift ’em. Higher, higher.” Suddenly he yells, “Front!”, and the players, who averaged $41,000 each for fourteen football games last season (there also were two post-season games), many of them no longer boys, but men in their thirties with families to care for and paunches to battle, flop on their bellies and as soon as they do, even while they are falling, Lombardi shouts, “Up!”, and they must leap to their feet, running, running, faster, higher. “Front!”, and they are down. “Back!”, and they roll over on their backs. “Up!” Run. “Front!” Down. “Up!” Over and over, always that raucous voice, nagging, urging, demanding ever more from rebelling lungs and legs. “Move those damn legs. This is the worst-looking thing I ever saw. You’re supposed to be moving those legs. Front! Up! C’mon, Caffey, move your legs. Keep them moving. C’mon, Willie Davis, you told me you were in shape. Front! Up! C’mon, Crenshaw, get up. It takes you an hour to get up. Faster. Move those legs. Dammit, what the hell’s the matter with you guys? You got a lot of dog in you. You’re dogs, I tell you. A bunch of dogs. Let’s move. Front! Up! For the love of Pete, Crenshaw, you’re fat. Ten bucks a day for every pound you don’t lose. Crenshaw! It’s going to cost you ten bucks a day. Lift those legs!”

The sound of their panting—seventy men reduced to sodden football suits filled with quivering muscles—rises over them in a moist, squishy roar. As the drill goes on the noises they make breathing almost drown out the sound of Lombardi’s voice. The breathing becomes louder and somewhat wetter, until it sounds like the ocean when the last wave rolls up into the sucking sand. Finally, when they are beyond the point of humanity or sanity, Lombardi lets up. “All right,” he shouts. “Around the goalpost and back. Now run!”

“That’s when you hate him,” says Henry Jordan, bald at thirty-two and looking older. A defensive tackle, he has been with the Packers since 1959. He knows what Lombardi does to his players when they report in the summer, so for three weeks in advance he works out, hard, pushing himself. It is never enough. “He drives you until you know you can’t go on. My legs just wouldn’t come up anymore. When he walked by me he hit them. He pushes you to the end of your endurance and then beyond it. If you have a reserve, he finds it.”

Sometimes he bulls past the reserve. Leon Crenshaw, a graduate of Tuskegee, is an amiable young man who didn’t mind being called Super Spook when he played minor league football with the Lowell Giants last season. But he was met with enmity by Lombardi because he showed up with three hundred fifteen pounds arranged paunchily over his six-foot-six frame. The coach said a pound a day or ten dollars. Crenshaw opted the pound. That was Wednesday morning.

Thursday noon he is lying, semiconscious, moaning, on a bench outside the St. Norbert College cafeteria where the team eats its meals during training. He has severe cramps and a doctor is rubbing ice over his ample middle while waiting for an ambulance. The other players, as they come out of the cafeteria, some of them sucking on toothpicks, avoid looking at him. It’s as though he were lying in a doorway in the Bowery or had fallen, a victim of plague, in a Bombay street. The diagnosis is heat prostration. But one of the players says he knows what it really is. “Starvation,” he says. It doesn’t matter which: Leon Crenshaw does not make the team. This is the Vince Lombardi process of natural selection. It’s how you build a professional football dynasty.

Partly how.

It isn’t enough to survive the tortures of the grass drills. One must enjoy them. So each time a fiendish new drill is announced, the players, college men every one, clap their hands in childish glee. They applaud. “Oh, yeah,” they shout. “All right. Allll ri-ight.” And they applaud.

Jordan laughs. “It’s like he says.” He digs at a sore muscle in his back and grimaces when he finds the right one. “If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.”

Another way to get fired is to come late to meetings or practice. And arriving on time isn’t enough. This would not show proper enthusiasm. So the Packers say there is Eastern Daylight Time and Central Standard Time and Greenwich Time and then there is Lombardi Time. “This is Lombardi Time,” says Don Chandler, the elderly kicking specialist who has been in the league eleven years. He points to his wristwatch. It is set fifteen minutes ahead. “If you come ten minutes early they’ve started without you.” Or the bus is gone. Or practice has started.

The players have bent to Lombardi’s will with a will and they have taken his spartan attitude as their own. Says Dave Robinson, a large linebacker who wears a mean scowl most of the time, which is all right because he’s that kind of football player: “If you come ten minutes early they make you feel like scum for holding them up.”

Now Donny Anderson, a Viking type from Texas Tech who got, it is said, $600,000 as a bonus when he signed a year ago, whispers to a veteran player on the sidelines of the practice field: “Slip me some water.” The veteran laughs. “There hasn’t been any water around here in eleven years.” Not true. There are perhaps six pints for the seventy huge players who will spend a violent two hours under a summer sun. But if Lombardi sees a player drinking water he shouts, “Whaddaya want to get, a bellyache?”

Sometimes, during a scrimmage, one of the defensive units is allowed to come up for air. The players sit and watch Lombardi driving, driving, driving and they talk about the kind of coach they would be. They agree tough is best. “I’d be a bitch,” says Robinson. He thinks for a moment. “But that Wood.” He shakes his head sadly. Willie Wood is a five-foot-ten defensive halfback who plays football as though he had been shot out of a gun. “Wood,” says Robinson, “he’d be a mother.” The other players laugh.

The team has learned, too, to feel about injuries the way Lombardi wants them to. “Every week there are the injuries,” Lombardi says. “It is foolish to think that, the way this game is played, you can escape them, but every week I feel that same annoyance.”

Annoyance? Anger. Rage even. Players are afraid to get hurt. When they do, they try not to react to the pain. They pound the grass with a fist and say, “Oh dammit, dammit.” They react to being hurt, not to the hurt. They rail at fate, not at pain.

It began the first day in 1959 that Vince Lombardi, the man from the East with the odd New York accent and hot eyes the color of smoldering chestnuts, walked into the trainer’s room after he had taken over the failing fortunes of the faltering Packers. There were, he remembers, fifteen or twenty players waiting for the diathermy or the whirlpool or to be worked on by the trainer. “What the hell is this?” Lombardi roared, his big yellow teeth with the wide spaces between them making him look like an angry jungle animal. “You’re going to have to live with pain,” he told them. “If you play for me you have to play with pain.” Lombardi glared at the players, who looked like kids caught with their hands in the jam. Now they don’t even like to talk about injuries. They sidle up to the trainer and, in whispers, ask for a muscle relaxer, a pain-killer. If Lombardi notices them taking a pill he rasps, “What’s the matter with you?”

“Not a thing, sir. Salt tablets.”

Lombardi never stops trying to prevent injuries after they happen. On this ill-tempered summer day on the steamy practice field in Green Bay, Wisconsin—across the road from Lambeau Field, where the Packers play their games—Lombardi has been on his players hard. “C’mon, you lard asses,” Coach yells. (The players, most of them, call him that—Coach. Not the coach, but Coach, as in “Coach doesn’t like anybody hanging around the ice bucket.”) “What are you guys doing? For Crissakes, you look like you’re playing mumblety-peg out there.” The players are in full football regalia (making them all look like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein) under a relentless sun and they are practicing pass patterns, which means it’s offense against defense and the blocking on the line is serious. You can tell it from the slap of forearm pads as the defensive line whacks away and the strangled sounds that men make when others charge into their necks, football helmets first.

There is a pileup and out of the bottom of the pile comes a cry that has been torn out of a man’s throat, a shriek of agony. It’s Jerry Moore, a rookie guard, who hasn’t learned he is not supposed to cry his pain. The pile untangles and Moore is left writhing on the ground, his hands grabbing at a knee which is swelling so fast that in another minute the doctor will have to cut his pants leg to get at it. “Get up!” Lombardi bawls, the thick cords on his heavy, sun-browned neck standing out with the effort. “Get up! Get up off the ground.” The sight has insulted him. He is outraged. “You’re not hurt. You’re not hurt.”

Minutes later Marv Fleming, an end who has been with the Packers four years, has somebody fall on his arm and separate his shoulder from the rest of him. He knows enough not to make any noise. But he lies there for a moment summoning the courage to take the pain he knows will wash over him when he stands up. Lombardi is otherwise occupied for the moment, but the players get on him. “Get up, Fleming,” one yells. “Oh, poor Fleming,” shouts another. “Stop killing the grass, Fleming. Get up.”

Ken Bowman, the center, three years with Green Bay, limps over to the trainer. “What you got for blisters?”

Lionel Aldridge, defensive end, four years a Packer, overhears. He snorts. “Nothing,” he says. “More blisters.”

That is the spirit of the Green Bay Packers. Lombardi instills it—relentlessly.

Jerry Kramer is thirty-one years old and is in his tenth season at Green Bay. Six-foot-three, two hundred forty-five pounds, rated one of the best offensive guards in the business, he is handsome in a football-player way, not pretty like Frank Gifford, but handsome, with light eyes that glint with the amusement he finds in the ridiculous world around him. Through the years he has been battered and scarred, probably more than most, and there is a line of angry hem-stitching up the back of his neck and head, the result of an old spinal injury. The players are kind about it; they call him Zipper Head. “In 1962 I was banged up around the chest,” Kramer remembers. “I was out for about two plays. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had two broken ribs. I played anyway. The next week, all I can remember is Merle Olsen of the Rams making cleat marks up and down me all afternoon. After that game we took X-rays and found out about the ribs. I went to Coach and told him I had been playing with two broken ribs and he said, ‘No shit? Well, they don’t hurt anymore, do they?’”

Elijah Pitts, who can run a hundred yards in 9.6 seconds and can take a football through the hole in a needle: “I had a shoulder separation. In college I wouldn’t have dreamed of putting my uniform on. Here I didn’t dare tell him I had it. I was afraid to tell him. I played two games with it.”

And Ray Nitschke. He is an odd-looking apple, a picture, a caricature of a fierce linebacker. His front teeth long since have been knocked out and he plays without his removable bridge so that when he smiles he looks gummy and evil. He is only thirty years old, but he is bald and when he pulls off his helmet his fringe of wispy red hair stands straight up, like fur on a frightened cat. He is a bulky man and you understand, viscerally, that he would like to hurt you. Off the field, though, transformation. His teeth back in his mouth, his hair combed, eyeglasses—he looks like a college professor. He even talks like a college professor. Many football players do. Even if they majored in basket-weaving (or, like the men on Syracuse’s great teams, Canadian geography) they’ve been exposed to four years of college, often five. It rubs off on them. Nitschke is in his tiny room, his bulk almost filling it, at St. Norbert’s Sensenbrenner Hall, the men’s dorm in this little college which is tucked picturesquely into a bend of the beautiful Fox River. St. Norbert is in West De Pere (pronounced, of course, de peer), six miles from the practice field and now, at five-fifteen after a day of muscle busting, Nitschke is sprawled on one of the two narrow beds in the room, waiting for dinner time and for the evening skull sessions in the basement. He tells about the time the tower fell on him.

There is a twenty-foot tower in the center of the three fields the Packers practice on. It’s for news photographers and, more important, Lombardi’s own cameraman. Football people film everything and Lombardi films everything plus one, including pass drills. He is said to have 16mm eyeballs. (When the assistant coach came back from his honeymoon he was asked how it was. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen the films yet.”) On this day a sudden gale came up and the tower tilted in the wind and then toppled. It pinned Nitschke. One of the bolts crunched through his football helmet and he wonders what would have happened had he not been wearing it. He was lying under the twisted steel when Lombardi ran up. “Who is it?” he asked. Nitschke. “Aw,” said Coach. “He’s all right.”

Alex Hawkins who was drafted by the Packers but cut before the season began, and who has played with the Baltimore Colts and the Atlanta Falcons, said: “No one went into the training room for the first couple of weeks Lombardi was there. If anybody went, he wasn’t a Packer long. I’ve seen some injuries that would put players on other clubs into the hospital, but these Packers wouldn’t even ask for an aspirin.”

In his book, Run to Daylight!, which was written in 1963 with W.C. Heinz, Lombardi says he got it all from his father, Harry, an immigrant Italian butcher who settled first in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Vince grew up in Sheepshead Bay, which must have been as tough as his father. “No one is ever hurt,” Vince Lombardi says Harry Lombardi always said. “Hurt is in your mind.”

Perhaps it was Lombardi’s father, too, who told him that playing with pain builds mental toughness. Or is it mental toughness that enables you to play with pain? Either way, mental toughness is one of Lombardi’s little dogmas. He has others:

Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

If you can accept losing, you can’t win.

You’ve got to be mentally tough.

Everything is “want” in this business. The man who wants to play is the man I want.

If you can walk, you can run.

Fatigue makes you a coward.

There’s no substitute for work in this business.

What the hell are you limping around for?