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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

What would Nancy do?
The sleuth of my mother's youth reveals life's mysteries.
By Amy Benfer
[10/07/99]

Perky fellows in a gay-looking speedwagon: The Hardy Boys return
At last, a revival of unexpurgated Frank and Joe.
By Steve Burgess
[10/07/99]

She wins bread, he loafs
Raised to be helpless, partial to pipe dreams, this dad sings the praises of the working wife.
By Rob Ryder
[10/06/99]

Make the dough, do the laundry: Life as a breadwinner mom
Dad's at home, Mom's raking in the bucks -- everything's cool, right? Not exactly.
By Dianne Lake
[10/05/99]

Hurting young men put pen to rage
A writing teacher who works with juveniles sees familiar pain in the diary of Eric Harris.
By Jill Wolfson
[10/04/99]

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I never succeeded. Night after night, my failure unfolded with a sickening regularity. Dead-eyed, an inhuman mass of rippling muscle, with a machine-like mastery of his brutal technique, the tackle, at the snap of the football, would slam his fists into my rib cage. Lifting me up, he would tip me over backwards, pinning me to the turf like a bug as the running back went skittering by.

Squirming helplessly there, I could see my embarrassed teammates turning away. Then a growling, gap-toothed coach would straddle me, leering down in disgust. "Get up! Go again!" he would bellow. I would shake my head no. "Coward!" he would roar. Still, I would refuse. "You are what I loathe," he would growl. "A loser." And with that, I would wake up.

While most of the figures in the dream were obscure, the coach was not, for he was none other than Vincent T. Lombardi, then in the final year of his life, now the subject of an eye-opening new biography by David Maraniss, "When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi."

I wanted no part of him. Of all NFL coaches, Lombardi, I knew, was the one coach who could expose me for what I was. A loathsome creature of some indeterminate species. Certainly not a man. Something on the pathetic periphery of masculinity. Without heart. A defeatist. A loser.

It was exactly this kind of fear that always made playing football a mixed experience for me, that drained the joy from a game I should have loved unconditionally. Fear of not pleasing the coach. Of not measuring up. In this violent game, what frightened me was not getting hit but being subjected to the scornful eye of the man above me. It took me years to understand this fear -- and by the time I did, I had to wonder if I had subjected my own sons, whom I had vowed never to treat the way I had been treated, to the same thing.

As it happened, I was spared the experience of playing for Lombardi, but not of escaping his legacy of shame. For I was drafted by a team that shared my fear of Lombardi's scrutiny -- that in fact had twice been humiliated by the Lombardi juggernaut -- Tom Landry's Dallas Cowboys. In their first crushing defeat by Lombardi's Packers, in the 1966 NFL Championship Game, which the Cowboys lost when Packer safety Tom Brown intercepted a pass in the Packer end zone, snuffing a game-winning Cowboy drive as time expired, the Cowboys were deemed too inexperienced, too new to the pressures of championship football to succeed at that level. But after their second numbing defeat, in the legendary "Ice Bowl"Championship Game in 1967, the very character of the club came into question, not only by fans and by sportswriters, but by the Packer players themselves. As Maraniss reports, the Packers were nothing short of disdainful of their Cowboy opponents. "We had their number," said Packer receiver Max McGee. "Lombardi had the hex on Landry." Other players observed that Cowboy receiver Bob Hayes unwittingly gave away plays by putting his hands in his pockets for runs, pulling them out for passes. The consensus was that the Cowboys didn't have the goods.

Next page | Buying the Lombardi mystique: The ex-Packers arrive