Lombardi’s Season: Million Memories Ago

Twenty years ago, Redskins fans were anticipating a new season with the fervor that’s come to be tradition in Washington. At last there was something to cheer about; the Redskins had not put a winning team on the field in 14 years. But in 1969 Vince Lombardi took over as coach. He’d change things.

How he went about turning a certified loser into a winner confirmed his uncanny resourcefulness and the merits of his straightforward football philosophy. “Gimme that ball, here’s how you do it. ... Ruuuun off the line. ... Got it, mister?”

That single Washington season, all Lombardi would live for, also set the tone for Redskins teams to the present day. Given the sampling of victory, the team’s president, the late Edward Bennett Williams, would no longer abide ordinary coaches and dismal autumns; he signed George Allen for ‘71, following Lombardi’s death.

Lombardi had been restless in one season as just a general manager at Green Bay, and in coming to Washington he was willing to stake his coaching reputation on what was perceived as an unpromising challenge, at best. Some Lombardiphiles feared that the Redskins were a task not even he would be up to. Lombardi knew better; as long as the Redskins had the quarterback they did, they shouldn’t have been the hopeless case they always were.

Lombardi realized that to win the heart and mind of a Hall of Fame passer was to be on the side of the gods. A charmer as well as a tyrant, Lombardi endeared himself to Sonny Jurgensen, telling him to be himself, not Bart Starr. He gave Jurgensen his due as one of the game’s best-ever passers, and thrust him into the role of team leader and made sure he stayed there.

“Take ‘em down to the goal post, Sonny,” he said when he wanted the squad to jog the length of the field at a summer orientation week at Georgetown University. Lombardi was making it clear on Day One that Jurgensen was his field representative.

He’d praise Jurgensen to the media at every opportunity. At one point during the season he called Jurgensen the best quarterback he’d seen, saying, “I do not want to take away anything from Starr or (Johnny) Unitas, but they have played with great teams. Sonny has not only had adverse conditions this season, but for several years.”

Lombardi genuinely liked the gifted players. Jurgensen was the purest of passers; Paul Hornung, Lombardi’s favorite at Green Bay, may not have been quite the natural, but there never has been a greater player of big games.

Lombardi was drawn to the glamorous as might be expected, having toiled in the trenches as one of Fordham’s “Seven Blocks of Granite.”

He was schooled in the blocks and tackles he demanded from his players, so one big question when he came to Washington was, how could he find peace with, or fix, a defense that had been giving up boxcar numbers for years? Defense had been a department not associated with the Redskins.

Lombardi had to look hard for a solution. From his own experience he suspected that Sam Huff was probably restless in retirement. Huff was the charismatic player Lombardi needed as his defensive quarterback. So he charmed Huff, made him a player-coach and eked a comeback season from the then-35-year-old middle linebacker.

“The most memorable thing about the season was the beginning -- training camp,” Huff said recently. “There’s nothing like a Lombardi training camp. It was absolutely awful.

“He told the team, ‘Football games are won in the last two minutes of the half and the last two minutes of the game, and they’re won on conditioning. And nobody is going to outcondition my team.’

“You thought, ‘Oh, God, here we go.’

“Sonny never had a belly, and he did all the calisthenics for once in his life. And so did I.”

Lombardi rarely made a personnel blunder, and when cutdown time neared he trusted the advice of an assistant coach and heeded his own feeling, keeping a little-known back with a hearing deficiency, Larry Brown. During his injury-shortened career (1969-76), Brown proved to be much like Hornung, a big-game man and, from inside the 20, one to be counted on to reach the goal line. He would carry Allen’s conservative offense on his back.

Often leading the way as a blocker was Charley Harraway, a Cleveland castoff and Lombardi find.

Mike Bass was another discovery of Lombardi’s. A couple of years before, the cornerback had been a 12th-round draft choice of the Packers but couldn’t break into their defensive backfield. But in 1969 Lombardi phoned him and Bass reported to Carlisle. When he got into an intrasquad game and piled up everybody, blockers and ball carrier, on an end sweep, the job was his -- until 1975.

(Lombardi’s first cut was the royally named Sir Prince Borton. Shortly before the rookie running back was dispatched, Lombardi barked at him to speed up in wind sprints. The message was received by all, especially when Borton became missing.)

Mixing Green Bay castoffs and some other free agents with holdovers and his few bright spots, Lombardi coaxed a 7-5-2 season out of what surely would have been disaster. (The only teams he lost to were those that simply had far more talent: the Colts, Rams, Cowboys and Browns.) Nothing was easy: It took a 17-14 victory over New Orleans in the next-to-last game to assure a winning season. The players gave the coach the game ball for that.

The season was mildly memorable as the last one for Jurgensen and Huff together as teammates. Their locker-room repartee, honed subsequently as broadcasters of Redskins games, was apparent in Tom Dowling’s first-rate chronicle of the autumn of ‘69, “Coach: A Season with Lombardi.” Dowling caught their act after the Cleveland loss, a game in which Huff suffered two concussions and Jurgensen made a desperation scamper of 33 yards as time ran out.

“Huff said to Jurgensen, ‘Sonny, if you’re going to run with the ball, go for a TD, and if it’s the last play of the game, for God sakes, call a timeout. We had some timeouts left.’

“ ‘The hell we did,’ Jurgensen countered. ‘We used up all our timeouts getting you off the field.’

“ ‘The hell you say,’ Huff beamed. ‘The first half was the only timeout we used on me. The second half I was on the sidelines when I got the old bell rung. That didn’t cost us nothing.’ ”

The Lombardi era was crushingly short. “In retrospect,” the coach said near the end of his last season, “we didn’t do as well as I thought we might have done.”

He vowed to find better players for the next season.

Of course there never was a next season for him. He died of cancer Sept. 3, 1970, and the Redskins were coached by an assistant, Bill Austin, the next year.

“The hardest thing for anyone to do is to change a mental attitude,” Huff said. “Lombardi could do it. He changed the mental attitude here to a winning one.”

He’d given the Redskins a sense of team brotherhood and the realization that devotion to work could overcome difficulty. To the city he gave the psychic uplift that’s now anticipated but was foreign then.

He’d demonstrated the possibilities in winning, and by the ‘70s a football tradition had been fully revived, something Washington hadn’t known for decades, not since Sammy Baugh was young.