On Football

Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi:

The Lasting Impact of a Loving Relationship

Coach Tom Landry had just finished addressing our high school football team in a pre-game devotional. Trinity Christian Academy is a Christian school located in a Dallas suburb which always had a time before a game to talk about Jesus Christ. It was a time to remind these young men about the most important things in life. In a most unusual event, the 1998 game was delayed because the visiting team was lost in the Dallas traffic in the post-Thanksgiving Saturday.

Coach Landry had a long-term relationship with Trinity Christian. He served on the Board of the school in its early days. His youngest daughter, Lisa, graduated from there, and the football stadium is named for him. Coach also had a grandson playing in the game. As it turned out, that pre-game talk by Coach Landry would be one of, if not, the last he would ever give. Coach Landry (he will always be “Coach Landry”) would be diagnosed with leukemia four months later and succumb the following February, 2000.

Caught between the pre-game team devotion during which Coach Landry shared his Christian testimony to a room full of nervous high school football players and a delayed kickoff, our coaching staff had the unusual opportunity to visit with one of the greatest football coaches in history. I had brought my camera with the hope of capturing each coach with Coach Landry. One of the trainers took a group picture of us. As it turned out, it would be the last time I coached the offense at Trinity Christian. We lost the game with Coach Landry sitting in the stands watching his grandson play his last high school game.

During our time of nervous and excited chatter about the Dallas Cowboys and what he was doing in the 10 years since he had coached his last season, we explored some of the observations Coach could offer us. I asked about the biggest changes he had seen in the NFL. In addition to feeling sorry for the then current head coach of the Dallas Cowboys (Chan Gailey), he pointed to how the relationship between coaches over the years had changed.

In the current NFL, the competition and the money have created coaches who are independent business men with agents and multi-million dollar contracts, endorsement deals, and corporate handlers. The assistant coaches are in a world away from job or financial security. In the middle management world of those assistant coaches, far removed from cozying up to billionaire owners the way head coaches do, men are working to keep a job or to position themselves for the next step up the coaching career ladder. Making friends in this business might get you a job or even, if things sour, cost you a job. So, coaches are slow, if not downright hesitant to get close to anyone. It hasn’t always been that way.

Coach Landry took us back to his days in New York when he coached for the football Giants. The stories are well-known to the old timers and younger fans who love the history of the game. Coach was the defensive coordinator for the Giants and was credited with shutting down and even shutting out the famous offense of Paul Brown, the head coach of the Cleveland Browns. He told us how, after a season when the Giants defense did not give up a single point to the Browns, there was a league meeting in New York City. At one point during the day of the meeting, Coach Landry was walking the sidewalks of New York when he noticed walking toward him on the same sidewalk was Paul Brown. Paul also saw Coach headed his direction. Rather than have to pass each other on the sidewalk and exchange pleasantries, Paul immediately found a hole in the traffic and crossed to the other side of the street. Coach Landry chuckled as he told us that story. He went on to tell us that he and Paul Brown had a very good relationship but the pain of losing and the classic grudge-holding of Paul Brown was but an example of the enjoyable personalities of the earlier days.

To further illustrate how the relationship among coaches had changed, Coach Landry told us of his relationship with another coach on the Giants’ staff, Vince Lombardi. Coach Landry was responsible for the defense and Lombardi was responsible for the offense. For five years (1954-1958) these two brilliant coaches would practice against each other. Each week, they carried the personal responsibility for the success or the failure of their individual units. These were two men who would ride in a cab together each day to work, sometimes even joined by a young sports reporter, Howard Cosell. Their wives knew, understood, and loved each other. It was a shared life. But their competitive juices fully flowed each day and they didn’t take losing very well.

Coach Landry told us about the time when the Giants offense had not played well but the defense did producing a win for the Giants. The New York writers were critical of the offense and praised the defense. Lombardi didn’t talk to Landry the entire next week. Coach Landry gently chuckled again when he told that story.

We had been laughing at these two stories enjoying Coach opening up to a group of admirers. He paused and for a minute or so, no one said a word. We all stopped talking. Then Coach continued with a story no one had ever heard.

Coach Landry still wanted to talk about relationships among the coaches and what they meant to him. One relationship he continued to talk about was the one he had with Vince Lombardi. It was clear that Coach Landry loved Vince Lombardi and that love was mutual. (I had an interest in this relationship because no men had more contrastive personalities than these two and I was actually attempting to write a case study of them. My research was eventually funneled to a real writer, Donald Phillips, who was would release his own book on Lombardi’s leadership abilities; Run To Win: Lombardi On Leadership in 2001. It was released at the start of the 2001 football season, the same week of 9/11/01).

Coach Landry took us back to December 30, 1967. It was the day before the famed Ice Bowl Game in Green Bay. It would be a miserably cold game, played down to the wire and won by the Green Bay Packers for their record third consecutive world championship. The Packers would earn their second trip to the new NFL-AFL championship game, the newly named “Super Bowl”, and defeat the Oakland Raiders. That game would be the last game Lombardi coached for the Packers. Following that season, he retired to become the Packers’ general manager for a year before moving to Washington D. C. to become the head coach of Washington Redskins. He would only coach one season. He died the following September of cancer at 57.

But on the night before that historic Ice Bowl game, two couples were sitting together over dinner at the Oneida Country Club in Green Bay, Wisconsin. These couples had known each other for nearly two decades. They shared their earlier years as coaches together and they shared their families. On this night, they were sharing their lives again. Alicia Landry, Coach’s wife, always traveled with the team to away games. As she would later tell me when I asked her about this incredible story, she always sat in the front of the team plane with “my Tommy”. She was the team mom. She remembered the trip and spending time with Vince and his wife, Marie. The four of them, Vince and Marie Lombardi and Tom and Alicia Landry, sat alone, but for the few respectful patrons who didn’t bother them, enjoying a casual dinner out.

While Coach Landry was telling us that story, we stood in complete silence. We knew we were hearing the untold story of that great game and those two great men and their lives together. Somehow, we had believed the imagery of these two teams which had battled through the 60’s for NFL dominance and imagined that their leaders must hate each other. As a Cowboy fan growing up, I ALWAYS hated the teams who beat my ‘Boys. Anyone having anything to do with a team I hated, I also hated. Players, coaches, and fans were all the same to me: Evil! However, listening to Coach Landry that day gave me a new perspective on the game and those who coach it: The relationships you have are the things that matter when the game is over. It was 31 years after that dinner in Green Bay when he told us that story. Vince and Marie Lombardi had been dead for 28 and 16 years respectively, but to Coach Landry, his love for them remained.

In a little over a year, Coach Landry would also die. But before he left this world and his quiet and gentle voice was muted, he left a hand full of high school coaches remembering that it is the relationships we shared that matter the most.

In 2003, ESPN was planning a movie about the Ice Bowl game, the focus of which was on the relationship between these two great men. Included in the script, but never confirmed as an actual event, was a dinner between the Landry’s and Lombardi’s. Vince and Marie’s family usually joined them on dinners the night before home games, but on that night, one of the grand children was sick and they couldn’t go. Vince’s son wasn’t sure where they went that night. Eventually, ESPN dropped the plans for the movie. Now the story about that dinner and the relationship between these men is known.