Sonny Jurgensen checked with opposing players about the new coach. So did Sam Huff. Rookie Larry Brown read a book on the incoming boss.
They knew one thing — being very early was being on time — Lombardi Time.
“It was a 10 o’clock meeting. I was there at 9:30,” said Jurgensen of the first encounter with Lombardi. “Twenty minutes to 10, the meeting starts. Everybody was there. Some kid [Ray McDonald] comes in about 10 of 10 and Lombardi said, ‘What’s your name, young man?’ He said, ‘You obviously don’t care enough about making this football team. You’re late.’ The kid was shaking. He didn’t make the team either. Lombardi got everybody’s attention with that.”
Thursday marks the 40th anniversary of Lombardi’s only training camp with the Washington Redskins. A Green Bay legend with so many titles the NFL later named the Super Bowl trophy after him, Lombardi came to Washington in what was a milestone year for the town. Ted Williams managed the Senators while Lefty Driesell took over Maryland basketball. Meanwhile, D.C. Stadium was renamed RFK Stadium while Redskins owner George Preston Marshall died.
Lots of changes, plenty of high expectations. Williams led the Senators to their only winning mark over 12 seasons before later moving to Texas. Driesell transformed the Terrapins into a national power.
The Redskins? Washington’s last winning season was 1955. A franchise that won titles in 1937 and ’42 was a now hapless crew whose previous season’s scores looked more like basketball outcomes.
No matter. Lombardi managed a 7-5-2 season, a turnaround that sparked the franchise to a generation of success.
And as quickly as he came, Lombardi was gone. Colon cancer. A pea-sized tumor. Players worked out by his Georgetown University Hospital window, the coach occasionally watching from a balcony. He spoke once to the team after a rookie scrimmage before dying Sept. 3, 1970.
“We thought we had turned the corner in making enormous improvement,” said Brown. “This was an enormous setback. No one saw it coming, but in retrospect I remember he was chewing a lot of Rolaids during the season. I just assumed some of the things I read and heard after he passed that he probably knew about [the cancer].”
Indeed, Lombardi came and went so quickly his sole season in Washington seems almost mythical. Someone whose time in the nation’s capital is washed over by successors George Allen and Joe Gibbs. But without Lombardi’s turnaround, perhaps the Redskins wouldn’t have become the dominant team in town.
When the Redskins became Washington’s sole pro team in 1972 — a year before the Bullets moved from Baltimore and two seasons before the Capitals were founded — a combination of success and no competitors suddenly made it the team to follow.
Would Allen have come if the franchise hadn’t shown life under Lombardi? Would fans have believed success was possible without the legendary coach first breaking the streak?
“That was the turnaround of the Washington Redskins,” said Huff, who spent the final season of his Hall of Fame career as a player/coach for Lombardi. “Baseball in Washington has never been the same.”
The key to Lombardi’s success, said former players, was discipline and leadership. The coach was a family man with a surprising sense of humor, but practices were a crisp 90 minutes, meetings ended by the 5 o’clock cocktail hour with the media and nobody was out of shape.
“Lombardi believed in conditioning,” Huff said. “We’re going to outhit them, outplay them and we’re going to win this football game.”
Huff jokes it was the only season Jurgensen didn’t sport a potbelly. Ironically, Jurgensen said Lombardi was the only coach that never asked about the passer’s weight.
“Lombardi said, ‘I knew you’d be in shape if you’d went through my practices,'” Jurgensen said.
Players still marvel at Lombardi’s leadership. The team just endured three lackluster seasons under Otto Graham, whose pro quarterback decisiveness never transferred into coaching. Former Washington Star reporter Steve Guback likened Graham to Steve Spurrier, whose 2002-03 tenure as Redskins boss was disastrous. Comparatively, Lombardi was always in charge.
“It was like God had arrived,” Huff said. “Lombardi and [Dallas coach Tom] Landry were the most religious people I’ve known that lived the life of the great above. They got across to the team. You didn’t get out of line with Landry and Lombardi. Today’s athlete is different, but that kind of leadership has an effect on the team.
“Lombardi never talked about losing. It never entered his mind. He was the greatest leader I ever met.”
Said Jurgensen: “Lombardi was so superior in his organization, communication, leadership — everything he did. No wonder Green Bay won.”
No wonder Washington did, too.
Rick Snider has covered local sports since 1978. Read more at TheRickSniderReport.com or e-mail [email protected].
