There’s a moment I love in a certain kind of movie. The protagonist thinks they’ve done something significant, and maybe they have, but then they meet someone who realigns their worldview. In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda tells Luke (the consummate Rebel hero! the guy who destroyed the Death Star! the only person anybody knows with a lightsaber!) that “you must unlearn what you have learned.” 

Of course, Luke doesn’t. At least, not really. He goes and gets whipped by Darth Vader and sees how right Yoda was. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t all he could be, at least not yet. He needed more help.

That moment came to mind in this chapter, especially the note about how Colonel Red Blaik would reign in Lombardi by simply twirling his class ring and saying “Vince, don’t do it that way at West Point.” 

This chapter drives home the idea that however accomplished Lombardi may have been as a high school coach and whatever he’d done as an assistant at Fordham, he was still very much an up-and-comer. He knew his stuff, sure, and he was innovative and intelligent. But Army was at or near the peak of the sport at the time, and Lombardi needed some time at the foot of the master before he was ready for a really big job.

You can almost hear Colonel Blaik saying “The Force is with you, young Lombardi. But you are not a Jedi yet.” 

So we see another possible fork in the Lombardi path. Maybe Tim Cohane could have helped him land a head coach gig somewhere after his frustrating time as a Fordham assistant, and maybe he would have taken it. But would his growth have been stunted? Would he have, to borrow a slogan from the Army, been all he could be? I think it’s hard to argue that he’d have achieved his full potential as a coach. Blaik and company provided some vital seasoning, forcing Lombardi to defend what he’d learned and practiced to this point in his career, as well as equipping him with new skills and disciplines that he’d only briefly experienced before.

We should also note how Lombardi’s post at Army was the first really all-encompassing job of his football career. It was there that he learned that football was a “full-time twelve-month vocation.” Compared to his work at West point, he’d really just dabbled in the profession before, and the effect on his family shows up in Chapter 6. It’s heartbreaking to read how his family seemed to beg for more of his attention, but he was so driven to be a great coach that he almost couldn’t help himself. Unfortunately, there’s worse to come, and as these chapters go on, we’ll see that the Lombardi priorities of “faith, family, and then football” might have been more marketing-speak than not.

Interesting notes

• Here are two ships passing in the night: Vince Lombardi took over at West Point for Sid Gillman, who’d go on to have a Hall of Fame coaching career of his own in college football, the AFL, and the NFL.

• I’m always amazed, even though it should be totally obvious, how things that seem totally ordinary now were once considered revolutionary. Colonel Blaik loved watching film and Maraniss presents it as a bit of an oddity at the time. “Let’s try to learn what our opponents are doing before we play them.” How novel! Or just playing certain guys on offense and other guys on defense! Amazing stuff.

• Related, I think you can find the truly great coaches of the era by looking at how long their ideas still feel modern. Lombardi cited Blaik’s ability to synthesize data and film and only focus on what was necessary to beat a given opponent as his greatest strength, and that’s still basically what coaches do today.

• Speaking of looking at things through a modern lens, how do you read Blaik’s description of this injury as anything other than a (probably severe) concussion: “[Gilbert] Reich, our only safety, went out the first five minutes of play and did not clear mentally until late Saturday night.” 

Packers connections

• “Can you imagine living in this godforsaken place?” said Vince Lombardi on a recruiting trip to Green Bay? Indeed, coach!