Vince Lombardi

MIDDLETOWN, N.J. - Vince Lombardi's modest grave here looks pretty good considering that its occupant allegedly has been turning like a barbecue spit these last 41 years. Most recently, just two weeks before the Eagles meet Lombardi's old team, the Green Bay Packers, in Sunday's NFC first-round game at Lincoln Financial Field, the now-familiar image of the straight-laced coach doing subterranean revolutions was invoked by Ed Rendell. Pennsylvania's governor, incensed when the mere threat of snow postponed the Vikings-Eagles game, said the decision undoubtedly had Lombardi "spinning in his grave.

Vince Lombardi was trying to guess what the Vince Lombardi would do if he could see Southern High's football team. "Cry," he said. " 'Cause that's what I do sometimes. "It would be a shame for anybody to have to look at this. " The Vince Lombardi coached the Green Bay Packers to five NFL championships in the 1960s. This Vince Lombardi is a center and nose guard for Southern, which might have been better off skipping the 1990s. When the Rams host South Philly rival St. John Neumann in their season finale Thanksgiving morning at 10:30, they will be dragging an anvil-heavy 42- game losing streak, nine short of the city record set by Thomas Edison from 1984 to '91. Vincent Anthony Lombardi, a 6-foot, 260-pound senior and the team's only four-year member, has been around for 40 of the setbacks.

It is late afternoon, the sky is low and gray, and the wind blusters through the pine trees and oak trees and makes the leaves skitter past your eyes. There is no sound but the wind when you spot it: the headstone that says LOMBARDI, right on the aisle, first grave off the road in Mount Olivet Cemetery. You shiver a bit and wonder if this is ghoulish. Or sacrilegious somehow, this trip to stand at the grave of Vince Lombardi two days before his former team, the Green Bay Packers, plays in its first Super Bowl since Lombardi was the coach 29 years ago. At that moment there are sounds, some footsteps and the heavy breath of someone who is working.

In 1970-71, I was living in Belfast to research a book, for which the publisher is still awaiting delivery of the last 14 chapters. (OK, so I'm not a fast worker, but I'm thorough.) Anyway, a former co-worker sent me a winter's supply of vitamin C tablets with a cover note that concluded with this cryptic postscript: "Wasn't it a pity about Vince Lombardi?" A pity? What pity? The last I knew, Lombardi had fled the boredom of his executive office with the Green Bay Packers to coach the lowly Washington Redskins back to a position of respectability.

VINCE LOMBARDI ran brutal training camps. All those grass drills in the scorching heat. The players called them "up-downs" and Lombardi justified them by warning, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all!" He wanted his players sharp, physically, mentally, emotionally in a grinding fourth quarter, late in a bruising season. "Henry Jordan once said, 'Coach Lombardi treats us all alike . . . like dogs,' " Mike Lombardi recalled, "and that was wrong. Vince Lombardi was a master psychologist and he treated each player differently.

Alexander F. "Wojie" Wojciechowicz, 76, one of Fordham University's legendary "Seven Blocks of Granite" whose pro football career included an Eagles world championship, died yesterday at Community Medical Center in Toms River, N.J. He lived in Forked River, N.J. A superb athlete who played with and against some of football's all-time greats, Mr. Wojciechowicz was an all-American and was elected to the college and professional Halls of Fame....

Sometimes you judge a book not by its cover but by its first sentences. These, for instance: "I was to learn that all the real secrets are buried and that only ghosts speak the truth. So it was fitting: Even for me, all this began in a graveyard, among mysteries, memories and lies. " Wow! It's hard to believe The Red Fox by Anthony Hyde (Ballantine, $4.50) is a first novel. The narrator is journalist Robert Thorne, who is visiting the grave of his father, dead since 1956 - a suicide.

He would have trouble with free agency and diminished player loyalty and, perhaps most of all, players celebrating every successful play of a football game. Contrary to what Nike and Jerry Stiller suggest in their ads, Vince Lombardi would not likely appreciate Deion Sanders, those from his era say. And Michael Irvin - or Ricky Watters - probably would have sent him over the edge as Packers miscreants Max McGee or Paul Hornung never could. With the Green Bay Packers back in the Super Bowl for the first time since "The Old Man" stepped down as coach after the 1967 championship season, you will read more about Lombardi this week than you have since picking up "Instant Replay" or "Run to Daylight" some 25 or 30 years ago. Those Packers have come to symbolize the best of pro football; its Camelot, to quote NFL Films chief Steve Sabol.

The Green Bay Packers rolled through the 1966 NFL season with customary ease. They won their second consecutive league championship, defeating Dallas, 34-27, on four touchdown passes by quarterback Bart Starr. They had staked out their place in pro football history. They had nine future Hall of Famers on the team, including head coach Vince Lombardi. In short, the '66 Packers were the classic blend of precision and power, the total football machine. So why were they in a sweat before Super Bowl I?

Sunday's Super Bowl will be broadcast into an unusually somber set of American living rooms. Remarkably enough, the Super Bowl and the Consumer Confidence Index were born in the same year, 1967. Since then, one has presented ever more excessive celebrations of consumption, while the other has soberly tracked the ebb and flow of America's confidence to consume. The most recent Consumer Confidence Survey recorded the lowest results in its 42-year history. How Super is that? One wonders how the nation's plummeting spirits will mix with the predictably overwrought spectacle of Super Bowl XLIII.

MIDDLETOWN, N.J. - Vince Lombardi's modest grave here looks pretty good considering that its occupant allegedly has been turning like a barbecue spit these last 41 years. Most recently, just two weeks before the Eagles meet Lombardi's old team, the Green Bay Packers, in Sunday's NFC first-round game at Lincoln Financial Field, the now-familiar image of the straight-laced coach doing subterranean revolutions was invoked by Ed Rendell. Pennsylvania's governor, incensed when the mere threat of snow postponed the Vikings-Eagles game, said the decision undoubtedly had Lombardi "spinning in his grave.

NEW YORK - Vince Lombardi was not the first to say, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. " As a matter of fact, he might have swiped it from a 1960 John Wayne movie named "Trouble Along the Way. " Wayne plays a devious football coach named Steve Williams, with an 11-year old daughter and a bitter ex-wife. Donna Reed plays the social worker investigating the family dynamics and winds up falling in love with the coach. At a game, Reed asks, "Is winning so important?" And the tomboy daughter replies, "Like Steve says, 'Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.

VINCE LOMBARDI ran brutal training camps. All those grass drills in the scorching heat. The players called them "up-downs" and Lombardi justified them by warning, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all!" He wanted his players sharp, physically, mentally, emotionally in a grinding fourth quarter, late in a bruising season. "Henry Jordan once said, 'Coach Lombardi treats us all alike . . . like dogs,' " Mike Lombardi recalled, "and that was wrong. Vince Lombardi was a master psychologist and he treated each player differently.

Sunday's Super Bowl will be broadcast into an unusually somber set of American living rooms. Remarkably enough, the Super Bowl and the Consumer Confidence Index were born in the same year, 1967. Since then, one has presented ever more excessive celebrations of consumption, while the other has soberly tracked the ebb and flow of America's confidence to consume. The most recent Consumer Confidence Survey recorded the lowest results in its 42-year history. How Super is that? One wonders how the nation's plummeting spirits will mix with the predictably overwrought spectacle of Super Bowl XLIII.

It is late afternoon, the sky is low and gray, and the wind blusters through the pine trees and oak trees and makes the leaves skitter past your eyes. There is no sound but the wind when you spot it: the headstone that says LOMBARDI, right on the aisle, first grave off the road in Mount Olivet Cemetery. You shiver a bit and wonder if this is ghoulish. Or sacrilegious somehow, this trip to stand at the grave of Vince Lombardi two days before his former team, the Green Bay Packers, plays in its first Super Bowl since Lombardi was the coach 29 years ago. At that moment there are sounds, some footsteps and the heavy breath of someone who is working.

The younger brother of the late Vince Lombardi said he is perturbed by the TV commercial in which comedian Jerry Stiller plays his legendary sibling. For one, Joe Lombardi says Vince never would have stepped on the field to hand the likes of Deion Sanders an abandoned shoe. "That's not Vince," Joe, speaking from his sales office in Moonachie, N.J., told the New York Daily News. "I don't like it. I can't ever see him walking in from the sideline, saying, 'You dropped your shoe. Here.

He would have trouble with free agency and diminished player loyalty and, perhaps most of all, players celebrating every successful play of a football game. Contrary to what Nike and Jerry Stiller suggest in their ads, Vince Lombardi would not likely appreciate Deion Sanders, those from his era say. And Michael Irvin - or Ricky Watters - probably would have sent him over the edge as Packers miscreants Max McGee or Paul Hornung never could. With the Green Bay Packers back in the Super Bowl for the first time since "The Old Man" stepped down as coach after the 1967 championship season, you will read more about Lombardi this week than you have since picking up "Instant Replay" or "Run to Daylight" some 25 or 30 years ago. Those Packers have come to symbolize the best of pro football; its Camelot, to quote NFL Films chief Steve Sabol.

Vince Lombardi was trying to guess what the Vince Lombardi would do if he could see Southern High's football team. "Cry," he said. " 'Cause that's what I do sometimes. "It would be a shame for anybody to have to look at this. " The Vince Lombardi coached the Green Bay Packers to five NFL championships in the 1960s. This Vince Lombardi is a center and nose guard for Southern, which might have been better off skipping the 1990s. When the Rams host South Philly rival St. John Neumann in their season finale Thanksgiving morning at 10:30, they will be dragging an anvil-heavy 42- game losing streak, nine short of the city record set by Thomas Edison from 1984 to '91. Vincent Anthony Lombardi, a 6-foot, 260-pound senior and the team's only four-year member, has been around for 40 of the setbacks.

Alexander F. "Wojie" Wojciechowicz, 76, one of Fordham University's legendary "Seven Blocks of Granite" whose pro football career included an Eagles world championship, died yesterday at Community Medical Center in Toms River, N.J. He lived in Forked River, N.J. A superb athlete who played with and against some of football's all-time greats, Mr. Wojciechowicz was an all-American and was elected to the college and professional Halls of Fame....

The Green Bay Packers rolled through the 1966 NFL season with customary ease. They won their second consecutive league championship, defeating Dallas, 34-27, on four touchdown passes by quarterback Bart Starr. They had staked out their place in pro football history. They had nine future Hall of Famers on the team, including head coach Vince Lombardi. In short, the '66 Packers were the classic blend of precision and power, the total football machine. So why were they in a sweat before Super Bowl I?