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Lombardi worked days as an insurance investigator, studied nights at Fordham Law ("because my Dad wanted it"), played weekend football for a minor-league pro team that called itself the Brooklyn Eagles. In 1939, he took his first coaching job — as an assistant football coach at tiny (600 students) St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, NJ. His HALFBACK HORNUNG
$25,000 of frosting.
duties also included teaching physics, chemistry, algebra and Latin, and his salary was $1,700 a year. Three years later. Lombardi was head football, basketball and baseball coach; his 1945 basketball team won the New Jersey parochial school championship, and his football teams won 36 games in a row. On the strength of that record. Lombardi bounced back to Fordham in 1947—hoping some day to be named head football coach. But he stayed only two years. Fordham football was already on the skids; in 1954 the school gave up the game.
"A university without football," says Lombardi in disgust, "is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall." Lombardi's next stop—Army—was in no such peril. Head Coach Earl ("Red") Blaik was college football's reigning genius, and besides Lombardi. his staff included such whiz kids as Murray War-math and Paul Dietzel. For five years Lombardi ran the cadets' fast-striking offense—and by West Point standards, most of them were lean years. Army's great All-Americas, Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard, graduated in 1947, and 37 players were expelled when a cribbing scandal rocked the campus in 1951. "We had very few talented football players." recalls Blaik. "We had to dig into our B squad to field a team, and our job was to teach what we had the best we could. Lombardi was a driver. Not all the boys liked him. but he brought out the best in each of them."
Neither were the New York Giants exactly wild about Lombardi when he arrived in 1954 to put some offensive muscle on a team that scored only 179 points and lost nine games the season before. "Vinnie didn't understand our game when he came here," says Halfback Frank Gifford. "He wasn't too bright about it. At first, we players were showing him how it went. By the end of the year, though, he was showing us." In Lombardi's first season the Giants scored 293 points, won seven of twelve games; two years later, they won their only N.F.L. championship since 1938. Still Lombardi could not make the big time. Whenever a head coach job was up for grabs—at Southern California, at Washington, at Stanford, at the Air Force Academy—Lombardi's name was mentioned, but, says Vince, "nothing ever happened." Then Green Bay came along. "I knew it was time to make a move," says Lombardi, "if I was ever going to make one."