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In celebrating the first 100 years of the National Football League, there are men and women who stand above the rest for their contributions to making the game great. There are none who stand any taller than Vince Lombardi, who was overlooked for coaching opportunities in the NFL despite a successful run as the top offensive coach for the New York Giants in the 1950s. He worked as a high school coach and as a college assistant at Fordham and West Point before getting his NFL opportunity with the Giants, whose top defensive assistant at the time was Tom Landry. Those 2 legends, along with head coach Jim Lee Howell, turned the Giant franchise into winners as they reached a pair of title games and won the title in 1956. Howell readily acknowledged the talents of his two top assistants, jokingly saying that his main job was “to make sure the footballs had air in them.” Despite the success, Lombardi was passed over for head coaching jobs, both in college and the pros, and he feared that his Italian-American heritage was being used against him in his failure to land a head coaching position. Finally, in 1959, the Green Bay Packers hired him as their new head man. The team was coming off of a one-win season and was a laughingstock in the league. Lombardi immediately turned around the team’s fortunes. They finished 7-5 and Lombardi was named Coach of The Year. His success was only beginning, however. The Packers won the Western Division title in 1960 and lost a heartbreaker to the Philadelphia Eagles in the championship game. The Packers were stopped just short of the goal line on the game’s final play, costing them the win. In the locker room afterwards, the coach told his team “This will never happen again. You will never lose another championship game.” He was true to his word, as that loss was the only postseason defeat his Packer teams would suffer. They went on to win 5 titles in the next 7 years, including wins in the first 2 Super Bowls.

Lombardi and his Packers celebrate NFL title

Lombardi stepped down as Packers’ head coach after the second Super Bowl win and stayed on as the team’s general manager for a year, but still had a yearning to coach, so he left the organization to become head coach of the Washington Redskins in 1969. He turned the Washington franchise around in his only season coaching there as they finished 7-5-2 for their first winning season in 14 years. Lombardi’s final numbers as a head coach were astonishing – no losing seasons, the 5 championships and an overall 105-35-6 record, including a 9-1 mark in postseason games. Unfortunately Lombardi’s tenure in Washington would only last that single season. After falling ill, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away shortly after at the age of 57. On his deathbed, he told a visiting priest that he did not fear dying but regretted that he had not accomplished more in his life. The football world couldn’t have disagreed more with that sentiment. He was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame a year after his sudden death and the trophy awarded to the winner of the Super Bowl each year was named in his honor.

Vince Lombardi Trophy

Lombardi is a giant of the game for more reasons than just winning. He was a pioneer in improving race relations and treating black players as equals, and even embraced gay players. He always said he didn’t see his players as black or white, but only “Packer green”. One former black player, noting Lombardi’s disciplinary style, once jokingly said that the coach “treated us all equally….like dogs.” His reputation as a taskmaster wasn’t entirely true. He was a master at teaching the game, having been a teacher before getting into coaching. He instituted policies in Green Bay that insisted that the team only stay at hotels that treated his players equally, would make any establishment that was prejudiced against any of his players off-limits to his entire team and made crystal clear to his players that any of them who exhibited prejudice of any kind against another player would be thrown off the team. Some of Lombardi’s critics, as few as they are, have said that his accomplishments are tainted because his teams were loaded with future Hall of Famers. That argument doesn’t hold water when you consider that most of those players were already on the Packer roster before Lombardi arrived, and were underachieving on a losing team. Lombardi molded them into Hall of Famers. One other factor that made the coach an all-time great was his integrity. He was so admired for his upstanding character that in the 1960s Richard Nixon tried to recruit him to be his vice presidential running mate. Lombardi, being a staunch Kennedy Democrat, politely declined. His commitment to integrity is a lesson some modern day coaches could learn from.

Vince Lombardi’s quote about integrity

On this week’s NFL schedule of games, there is a contest to be played between the Los Angeles Chargers and Tennessee Titans. For our weekly Throwback Thursday feature, we settled on a game played between these two franchises when the Chargers were still in San Diego and the Titans were located in Houston as the Oilers. It was September 15, the opening day of the 1974 season and coach Tommy Prothro’s Chargers were visiting Houston’s Astrodome for a game against the Oilers, who were coached at the time by Sid Gillman. Gillman, of course, led the San Diego franchise to huge success in their American Football League years in the 1960s, and this was his first chance to take on the team that had let him go after the 1970 season. Gillman would hardly recognize the Charger team that came into the Astrodome to play that day. His star players from the AFL days like John Hadl, Paul Lowe, Keith Lincoln, Lance Alworth, Dave Kocourek, Ernie Ladd and Ron Mix were all either retired or dispersed across the league finishing out their careers with other teams.

Whether there was any sense of revenge or not, Gillman’s Oilers would take care of their coach on this day, as they ground out a 21-14 win over San Diego. The Oilers featured a balanced attack instead of Gillman’s usual vertical passing game. Their young quarterback, Lynn Dickey, was efficient, spreading the ball around among 6 different receivers. Ronnie Coleman was the bulwark of the running game, gaining 123 yards on 21 carries, although George Amundson stole his thunder by scoring 2 short rushing touchdowns and catching an 8 yard throw from Dickey to account for all of Houston’s scoring. Cid Edwards had 100 yards rushing for San Diego and Glen Bonner scored on a short TD run, while the other Charger touchdown came on a pass from the team’s young signal caller, Dan Fouts, to one of the few Charger players Gillman might recognize from his days as the team’s coach, receiver Gary Garrison. The Oilers, who had finished 1-13 the previous year, improved to 7-7 on the season under Gillman, but the future Hall of Famer stepped down to give his hand-picked choice as his replacement, Bum Phillips, a chance to take over in 1975. Prothro’s Chargers staggered to a 5-9 record and the franchise never worked their way out of mediocrity under his leadership. They finally fired him in 1978 and brought on Don Coryell, who would bring the team back to a level of respectability.

Oilers’ 1974 media guide prominently featured the bow-tie wearing Gillman

One of the most underrated things about pro football in the 1960s, which is the era I grew up with, is the quality of the television broadcasters who brought the games into our homes. Those memorable men are the subjects of this NFL 100 post. The National Football League broadcast their games regionally in the ’60s, and the team whose games were shown each week where I live were the Cleveland Browns. It was so great to hear the familiar voices of Ken Coleman and former Browns’ player Warren Lahr describing the action as my childhood idols, players like Frank Ryan, Jim Brown, Gary Collins, Leroy Kelly and Paul Warfield fought their way to victory each week. Coleman was also a long-time Boston Red Sox baseball announcer. Like many of the men we’ll feature here, he was equally good at being knowledgeable about multiple sports.  Jack Buck, whose son Joe is currently the lead play-by-play man for FOX, was another familiar early football broadcaster. He started doing American Football League games in the early 1960s on ABC, then became a regular on the CBS regional NFL games, first with the Chicago Bears and later for the Dallas Cowboys. He was part of the broadcast team for the famous “Ice Bowl” championship game between the Cowboys and Green Bay Packers. Like Coleman, Buck was also a long-time baseball announcer, doing St. Louis Cardinal games for decades. A couple of other familiar football voices belonged to Frank Glieber and Lindsey Nelson. Glieber split time during the decade among the Cowboys and Browns (after Coleman left) while Nelson, one of the all-time great voices of gridiron play-by-play men, worked games involving the Cowboys and later the Chicago Bears. Nelson was one of the most versatile sportscasters of his time, having done San Francisco Giants and New York Mets baseball, numerous college football bowl games, NBA and college basketball, golf and tennis. The New York market was a breeding ground for outstanding sportscasters of the era, and some of the best worked NFL games for CBS during the 1960s. Most notable was Chris Schenkel, who worked the New York Giant games for most of the decade. Two former players who were color analysts for Schenkel, Pat Summerall and Frank Gifford, eventually grew into major roles as play-by-play announcers, a transition that former players rarely are successful at. Summerall would go on to become the lead CBS announcer when the network went to national games, a role he would continue when the game rights moved to FOX. Gifford spent a single season as an analyst for Monday Night Football along with Howard Cosell before sliding into the play-by-play seat, where he would remain well into the 1980s.

Ken Coleman interviews coach Paul Brown

Other former players who found success in the booth as analysts were Red Grange, who called Bear games from the 1950s until CBS scrapped the regional teams in 1968, and Tom Brookshier, who analyzed games for his former team, the Philadelphia Eagles, throughout the decade before hooking up with Summerall as a permanent team in 1974. I mostly remember Jack Whitaker from later decades but he also was the Eagles’ CBS play-by-play man in the early ’60s. Don Criqui, another announcer who remained active well into the 1990s, got his start in the play-by-play seat with the expansion New Orleans Saints in 1967, and became a regular when the network scrapped the regional game pairings and assigned games by merit. Last but not least among the 1960s NFL on CBS broadcasters was Ray Scott. He was the Green Bay Packers’ regional broadcaster throughout the Vince Lombardi Green Bay dynasty years, so he became a well known voice across the country with the Packers being involved in so many postseason games. His philosophy of less is more was legendary – he didn’t talk for the sake of talking but just reported the action on the field with limited conversation and with his trademark smooth voice. “Starr….to Dowler…for the touchdown.” was a call one might hear during a Packer game. When CBS went to their merit system to assign broadcasters, Scott remained mostly doing Packer contests.

Ray Scott, flanked by Jack Buck and Frank Gifford, preview the “Ice Bowl”

The American Football League had it’s own brand of broadcasters in the ’60s, and the main play-by-play man was Curt Gowdy, who teamed with former player Paul Christman, and later with former Giant Al DeRogatis, who was controversial and in a way, was Howard Cosell before Cosell himself, an analyst you either loved or hated. Jim Simpson and Charley Jones were also familiar AFL play-by-play voices, and some of the analysts they teamed up with were Kyle Rote, another former New York player who made the move to the broadcast booth, George Ratterman, Elmer Angsman, Andy Robustelli and Lee Grosscup. All in all, they did a great job of bringing professionalism and excitement to fans of the new league, and were a big reason that the AFL was able to succeed.

Al DeRogatis (left) and Curt Gowdy