Vince Lombardi, the football head coach who won the first two Super Bowls and had the Super Bowl trophy named after him, is\u00a0best remembered for his achievements in Wisconsin. However, Lombardi, a devout Catholic, got his start in New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sacraments, seminary, and Sheepshead Bay\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stone markers erected on a triangle of grass near East 17th Street and Jerome Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, are easy to overlook. One marker installed in 1974 reads, \u201cIn memory of Vince Lombardi, 1913-1970.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
That neighborhood was where the legendary football coach grew up. This 1950s-era New York Giants offensive coordinator\u00a0directed the 1960s Green Bay Packers to five NFL championships and an unsurpassed three consecutive league titles, first learned the most important aspect of the triangle that he preached.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cGod, family, and the Green Bay Packers. He had those priorities in order,\u201d former Giant and 1967 Packers fullback Chuck Mercein said in a telephone interview. \u201cHis faith meant a lot to him.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
His birthplace at 2542 East 14th Street in Brooklyn stands in a neighborhood that attracted thousands of immigrants like Vincenzo Lombardi, Vince\u2019s grandfather from Naples, Italy, and the Izzo clan on Vince\u2019s maternal side from Vietri di Potenza east of Naples.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis has always been a welcoming place to immigrants. Just looking at a lot of the names associated with the parish, there\u2019s certainly a heavy Italian influence,\u201d said Father Robert Mucci, the pastor at Saint Mark\u2019s Catholic Church, in an interview at the church.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just south of his boyhood home was the previous home to Saint Mark\u2019s, whose tall steeple rose high as a neighborhood reminder of the top of Lombardi\u2019s life triumvirate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOur Catholic faith and practice of it was primary to family life. Prayer was part of our daily existence,\u201d said Sister Bernadette M. Izzo, O.P., a relative of Lombardi\u2019s, in a telephone interview. \u201cPraying as a family was what kept us unified and able to meet the challenges of life.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The church where Lombardi worshipped no longer stands, but its altar remains in use at the current Saint Mark\u2019s Church a few blocks away on East 19th Street.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lombardi stood beside it as an altar server. He likely received sacraments of initiation in front of that altar and made daily Mass his practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was very strict in his observance of being a daily communicant,\u201d said Bill Curry, a center with the 1965 and 1966 championship Packers, in a phone interview. \u201cHe was very serious about it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Seriousness about his faith led Lombardi to discern the priesthood at 15 years old, attending Cathedral Prep. His devotion to Christ never seemed to waver there, but what pulled the teenager outside the bounds of seminary life was football, which Cathedral Prep didn\u2019t offer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lombardi instead graduated from Brooklyn\u2019s Saint Francis Preparatory School, which at that time was six blocks from the shipyards along the East River he crossed to chase his football dream.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fordham, Saint Cecilia, and the search for \u201cMagis\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Latin word \u201cmagis\u201d means \u201cmore.\u201d Within the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, it reflects the search to become \u201cwhat is more conducive to the end for which we are created.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lombardi\u2019s young adulthood became an inward discovery of \u201cmagis\u201d and an outward, often-frustrating exploration to find where football coaching could fulfill that faith call.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From 1933 to 1937, Lombardi attended Fordham University\u2019s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He sat inside Keating Hall his senior year for Fordham\u2019s capstone philosophy classes, integrating his entire college coursework.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is what\u2019s called the Ratio Studiorum. The Jesuits created the world\u2019s first liberal arts curriculum, which is used to this day,\u201d said Robert Reilly, the retired assistant dean of the Feerick Center at Fordham Law, in an interview on campus.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf one is going to see God in all things, one has to look at a whole bunch of things to see Him, so one can start seeing the connections.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reilly said Lombardi dived into those connections\u2019 relationship to Christ\u2019s greatest commandments, \u201cto love the Lord your God with your whole heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Part one came through daily Mass at Fordham University Church.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reilly said that the second part of Christ\u2019s commandment, one that paralleled his discipline, moral integrity, and trust in objective truth, involved \u201csocial justice, or corporal works of mercy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHe saw that we\u2019re not separated from anybody,\u201d said Reilly. \u201cCollectively if a rock falls down and falls on him, we\u2019ve all got to work together to get this rock off the guy. There was a collective, \u2018I can\u2019t turn my back and say you got the responsibility, not me.’\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The third part of Lombardi\u2019s rock-hard triumvirate of faith, family, and football reflected that lesson, through shared responsibility on Fordham\u2019s offensive and defensive lines.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lombardi and six fellow linemen formed the rock-hard Seven Blocks of Granite, leading Fordham to win more than three-quarters of its games in Lombardi\u2019s three years on varsity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Struggle and Perseverance on the Path to Greatness\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lombardi graduated in 1937. The next 22 years became a struggle to make \u201cmagis\u201d reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 1939, the football coaching bug led him to teach at Saint Cecilia\u2019s High School in Englewood, New Jersey. He force-fed his students with how academic and athletic lessons reflected \u201cmagis,\u201d God\u2019s integration into all things, including football, for which he became the school\u2019s head coach in 1942. His players\u2019 routine involved pregame Mass, followed by demolishing opponents, 25 wins as part of a 32-game unbeaten streak with three consecutive sectional championships.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Lombardi knew \u201cmagis\u201d called, to go further than a high school in a Jersey suburb.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He returned as a Fordham assistant in 1947 and 1948, spent five years coaching offense under College Football Hall of Fame coach Earl \u201cRed\u201d Blaik at Army, then spent five more years with the Giants, where he paired with defensive coach Tom Landry, who later led the Dallas Cowboys to Super Bowl glory, to help the Giants to an NFL title in 1956.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lombardi knew he was head coaching material, but opportunities for \u201cmagis\u201d slid past him those 12 years, at least partially due to social injustices against Italian-Americans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was informed by a selection committee at a Southern college that he would never get a head job anywhere because he was Italian, and he never forgot that,\u201d said Curry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But he found God in his suffering within a visceral call to make his eventual opportunity something that would transcend wins and losses.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That \u201cmore\u201d came in 1959 in Green Bay, where he won the hearts of players and fans into believing a dual demand: The disciplined sublimation of the will to a greater calling, and the call of love and responsibility to one\u2019s fellow God-created human being, the same call to \u201cmagis\u201d that he learned in New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lombardi\u2019s final resting place is in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Middletown, New Jersey, not far from where he and his wife made their final residence, in Fair Haven. Fans and admirers regularly visit and decorate the grave with mini-footballs and team memorabilia.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vince Lombardi, the football head coach who won the first two Super Bowls and had the Super Bowl…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5555,98,6300,4840,23130,23131,23132,23133,11979,15308,6301,23134,2676,23135,8919,1066,9,2683,11,10,22,23136,23137],"class_list":["post-39739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-archdiocese-of-new-york","tag-brooklyn","tag-catholic","tag-catholic-church","tag-diocese-of-brooklyn","tag-englewood-new-jersey","tag-fair-haven","tag-fair-haven-new-jersey","tag-football","tag-fordham","tag-fordham-university","tag-fordham-university-rams","tag-green-bay-packers","tag-middletown-new-jersey","tag-national-football-league","tag-new-jersey","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-giants","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-nfl","tag-vince-lombardi","tag-vince-lombardi-trophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}