Devotion, dignity, excellence and forgiveness: Nine years of coaching in Green Bay delivered not only five NFL titles, but God’s calling to be greater
By Jay Sorgi | For On Mission
GREEN BAY, WI — On many sub-zero days in February 1959, Vince Lombardi sat inside his office in Green Bay, a 16-hour drive from his birthplace in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He had never lived more than two hours, 20 minutes away from home. A square mile in a particular part of New York City had a higher population than the entirety of Green Bay.
Everything on the Siberia-like outside felt foreign.
Lombardi had only three familiar things left inside him: his Catholic faith, his family, and football.
That trinity is all he would need to become what he learned at Fordham University in the 1930s as magis, to become the “more” that God called him to be.
He demanded the same from his Green Bay Packers for nine seasons as they won five NFL championships, including a record three consecutive titles in 1965-67.
“The three most important things in our lives should be God, family, and the Green Bay Packers, in that order, and with God or faith as the top priority,” said fullback, Milwaukee native, and fellow devout Catholic of Italian descent Chuck Mercein, whom Lombardi added to the roster late in that final 1967 season.
“He hoped that people would have faith in God and turn to God, depend and rely on him for guidance,” Mercein said.
Lombardi certainly did. His strength and solace came through submitting to God at the altar.
He not only attended daily Mass at St. Willebrord Parish in downtown Green Bay and at Resurrection Parish near Lambeau Field, but he also often assisted the priest as an altar server — just as he did as a child at St. Mark Parish in Sheepshead Bay.
Bill Curry, a center on Lombardi’s Packers who later became a head coach at four college programs, struggled to understand how Lombardi could balance daily devotion to a God of love with what felt like cruel coaching methods.
“I was making sport of how this guy goes to church every day, but he doesn’t act like somebody that goes to church,” said Curry, who deeply resented Lombardi’s demanding, often-harsh methods.
Talking with Bart Starr, to whom he snapped the football on fall Sundays, helped Curry see that Lombardi needed that faith to bring balance in a coaching life that often seemed intensely unbalanced.
“He was very strict in his observance of being a daily communicant,” Curry said. “Coach Lombardi sensed his human weaknesses, which we all have.”
That’s where Lombardi’s Jesuit ethos, the demand for magis beyond his weaknesses from himself and his players, came in.
“He was a bit of a perfectionist, although he once said that you could never really achieve perfection, but if you strive for it, you might get excellence,” Mercein said.
“He was teaching you values, hard work, persistence, determination, mental acuity, no mental mistakes, toughness. You had to go through hurts, go through little injuries. He didn’t tolerate people taking time off because of soreness.”
Yet Lombardi understood the fine line between demanding all of an athlete’s God-given talent and demanding more from a player than what God gave him.
“This is why you’re here. This is why I brought you here. It’s to help us win a championship,” Mercein said about the conversation he had with Lombardi when he went to Green Bay. “Don’t do anything more than you’re capable of doing, because what you’re capable of doing is enough.”
The start of the 1967 postseason brought one of the times Lombardi used Scripture to motivate his players, in a game against the Los Angeles Rams when his Packers were rare underdogs.
“Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win” (1 Cor 9:24).
“That phrase is on our Super Bowl ring,” Mercein said. He worked within his capabilities and scored a touchdown in that win over the Rams. Eight days later, he gained half of the yardage on the final, championship-clinching last-minute drive of the 1967 NFL Championship Game, the Ice Bowl.
Even in speeches to prominent business executives in which he extolled the values of discipline and authority, Lombardi often said that love was his team’s greatest bond. Even as he demanded more from his team, he focused much of his love on players as children of God, more than much of society did.
“His strongest suit is that he would not tolerate racism, ever,” Curry said. “One racist remark out of your mouth and your locker was cleaned out.”
Lombardi also led team boycotts and encouraged public boycotts of any establishment, whether in Green Bay or on the road, that would not treat his Black players equally as children of God.
“Lionel Aldridge, a defensive end who was Black, dated a white girl,” Mercein said. “He wanted to marry her. He went to Lombardi and said, ‘Coach, would this be okay with you?’ Coach said, ‘Of course it would be.’”
Lombardi’s coaching career in Green Bay sunsetted after the 1967 season. His life ended on September 3, 1970, at a hospital in Washington, D.C., with a packed St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York hosting his Mass of Christian burial four days later.
But scant days before his death, a dying Lombardi gave Curry perhaps the greatest reflection of Christ’s love, one the public isn’t as aware of.
“At Super Bowl III in 1969, I said ‘Lombardi is amazing, (but) he doesn’t care about his players,’” Curry said. “I was very, very angry and said a lot of things that I shouldn’t have said. I ran into Paul Hornung, and he said, ‘You made his mom cry.’ It gave me great pause, and I began to pray, wondering if I had not made a big mistake.”
His former Packers teammate Bob Long took Curry to the hospital to see Lombardi in his final days.
“We walked in the room, and his right arm was full of IVs,” Curry said. “I took his left hand and mumbled and stumbled some kind of an apology. ‘I said some things that I shouldn’t have said. You meant a lot to my life.’ He didn’t hesitate, and he fixed me with those eyes, and he said, ‘Bill, you’d mean a lot to my life if you’ll pray for me.’”
“What did that mean? He had forgiven the penitent sinner when I least deserved it, and that is the basis of the Christian faith, the very basis. And I’ve never forgotten it.”