A Gritty Look Back at Sports History, Lombardi Style
Lombardi
Circle in the Square
W. 50th St.
New York
What was it about that grizzled, burly, angry man prowling the sidelines of the Green Bay Packer football games in the 1960s? Coach Vince Lombardi, in his camelhair coat, signature fedora and papers rolled up in his thick hand was an iconic figure of American sports history, perhaps the greatest football coach who ever lived. What made him so legendary? And what was he like off the field? I was a teenager when he led the Packers to five NFL titles and two Super Bowls then and, like all other sports fans, only saw him at a distance through a television lens. Who was he?
We get a much better idea of Lombardi the coach and the man in the riveting new play Lombardi, by Eric Simonson, based on David Maraniss’ book When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, that just opened at the Circle in the Square Theater, in New York.
The at times inspirational and at times sad play shows Lombardi as an overly obsessive coach determined to win all the time. The story takes place over a weekend in the 1965 season, following the year the Packers finished in second place, a finish that absolutely crushed Lombardi. A reporter from Look magazine (a details-driven and sometimes frantic Keith Nobbs) arrives at the Lombardi house in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to write his story and meets the coach, his wife and several star players from the Packers.
As soon as he arrives he finds that Lombardi is not only a controlling figure on the field, but a man whose wife seems adrift in the wake of his success. The reporter then has to sort all of this out as the play unfolds.
Dan Lauria, as Lombardi, is the cornerstone of the play. The gifted performer (the dad on TV’s The Wonder Years) not only portrays the workaholic Lombardi perfectly, but he looks just like him with his thick glasses, toothy smile, thick hands, muscular torso and awkward, trudging walk.
He dominates the play from the moment he strides on to the stage and peers out at the audience. Through Lauria, we see Lombardi as a frustrated man who is given control of the worst team in football in 1959 and through hard work, an overbearing coaching style and reliance on fundamental football, turns it into a champion.
The play shows his weaknesses. As an example, while players hail the coach in public, they complain bitterly about his workplace overdrive and his insistence that they be perfect in an imperfect world. He even criticizes one player when he scores a touchdown. He never understands the changeover in the NFL in which the players’ union starts to gain momentum and snarls at running back Jim Taylor that he should not play for money, but for pride.
Perhaps Lombardi’s greatest skill, just hinted at in the play, was his ability to bring out the best in players in a fundamental offense that ran the ball well on sweeps and used quarterback Bart Starr effectively as a passer. The Packers always had a tenacious defense, too. Lombardi did not use complex or tricky plays; he won on well-executed simple plays. The Packers drove to the top with fundamental football from a fundamental coach.
But this is not a play about “x’s” and “o’s.” It is a play about Lombardi the man and it soars when it concentrates on his relationship to his wife Marie. Veteran actress Judith Light is magnificent as the smiling second banana to the star coach. You get the impression she really doesn’t like football and what it has done to her husband and to her. She walks around the stage like she has been beaten up—by football. She has turned into an alcoholic, too, and seems to have more drinks than the Packers have first downs.
Players Paul Hornung (Bill Dawes), Jim Taylor (Chris Sullivan) and Dave Robinson (Robert Christopher Riley) are good background pieces in the story and in one scene work with the reporter at a bar in defining Packer Pride and explaining why they win—why they need to win.
What is lost in this marvelous look at Lombardi on and off the field, though, is the remembrance of him as a titanic icon in American sports. Perhaps only Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, from the 1920s, captivated the public as much as Lombardi. We are just told his story and not the tale of how the fans and press loved him so much. It was not just all his victories and tough guy persona. It was something magical, connected to the changing times and the embrace of pro football by television. We don’t get much of that in the story.
While the long string of problems Marie Lombardi had with her husband are chronicled, the coach’s relationship with his grown son and daughter are only hinted at (poor relations). We need more of that, too.
We discover things we did not know about sports history. For example, the legendary quote about victory, “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” long attributed to Lombardi, was actually from an old John Wayne movie.
The play is co-produced by the National Football League and their people have turned the theater lobby into a Lombardi/NFL museum with huge photographs of the coach and his team decorating the walls. It looks splendid.
Lombardi is a spectacular, four touchdown play about a driven coach who managed to wring mercurial performances out of his players and pushed pro football to new heights in a country that, in the early sixties, was drifting into troubled times—the death of President Kennedy, Vietnam, student riots, the civil rights movement.
“Lombardi” is not just a football night out, either. Even people who only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials will enjoy it. The play is a study of a famous man and how he tries to balance marriage and family with his job, and he does not do it that well. It is a needed sports history play, too. We have plenty of sports books and movies, but few plays. This is a welcome addition.
Could Lombardi have enjoyed so much success today, though, when we all realize that winning is not the “only” thing? Could he beat the super teams of today, such as the Patriots, Colts, Saints and Steelers with their strong armed quarterbacks, 350-pound linemen and armies of assistant coaches and their computers? Would his yelling and screaming, and insistence on excellence, work on $5 million a year players with agents, lawyers and managers?
Oh, yes it would. He’s Vince Lombardi.
Lombardi is produced by the Circle in the Square Theater, Theodore Mann and Paul Lubin executive directors, in association with the National Football League.
STARS: Dan Lauria (Vince Lombardi), Judith Light (Marie Lombardi), Keith Nobbs (Michael McCormick),Robert Christopher Riley (Dave Robinson), Bill Dawes (Paul Hornung) and Chris Sullivan (Jim Taylor).