Bill Denver For NY Daily News
Vince Lombardi, the Super Bowl trophy’s namesake, gravesite is located in Middletown, N.J., less than an hour from MetLife Stadium where the Super Bowl will be played.
There are crisp footsteps in the snow at Mount Olivet cemetery in Middletown, N.J., many of them leading from one direction or another toward the plain headstone above the grave of Vince Lombardi, born a hundred years ago.
The pilgrims to this football temple are often high school coaches, Green Bay Packer supporters, or just plain old football fans. But this winter, it’s a little different. The Super Bowl itself is coming to Lombardi, or as close as it has come since he died too young in 1970 at age 57 of intestinal cancer.
So Ed Cardoza, superintendent of the cemetery, has an idea. More than an idea, really. A quest.
“Bring the trophy here,” Cardoza said, about the championship Vince Lombardi Trophy. “It’s so close now. As far as I know, it’s never been here to his grave. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth last June, there was supposed to be a big memorial that sort of fizzled out. This would be perfect.”
Cardoza has appealed to the NFL about his vision, and received no reply. He will next attempt something more direct. He will travel to New York on Wednesday, just as the trophy arrives by FedEx to Super Bowl Boulevard in Manhattan, as Justin Tuck and the Marching Cobras band form a greeting party for the hardware.
Cardoza will plead his case there.
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“We’re expecting some fans down here anyway,” Cardoza said. “I mean, what are they going to do all week?”
The cemetery is braced for an invasion, in any case, while Cardoza debates whether to seek some extra security from a local cop on Super Bowl Sunday. He can’t be sure yet about the power of Lombardi’s allure, or the number of people who will arrive. When these fans come, they can be wild.
“I’ve heard of them doing shots, cooking food on a grill over the grave,” Cardoza said. “You just never know.”
Cardoza wants NFL Films to shoot a moving tribute, with a trophy ceremony as the showcase. It makes sense. An official league visit to the gravesite would seem a wonderful symbolic gesture, the least the NFL can do after banking Lombardi’s image all these decades.
It is impossible to ignore Lombardi’s influence at this event. The play by Eric Simonson, “Lombardi,” may have ended its run on Broadway, but there are many other reminders of the man. The New Jersey Turnpike rest stop bearing his name stands just four miles from MetLife Stadium in Ridgefield. Outside Camp Alvernia on Long Island, a small metal sign marks where Lombardi practiced his own football in high school.
He played at Fordham, coached the Giants as an assistant. Lombardi belongs as much to New York as he does to Green Bay.
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He won five NFL titles, two Super Bowls. When he took the job with Green Bay in 1959, the Packers were coming off a 1-10-1 record and at risk of falling apart as a franchise.
Bill Denver For NY Daily News
Ed Cardoza, superintendent of the cemetery, has a quest to bring the trophy to Lombardi’s gravesite.
Lombardi led them to a winning record and for that was handed his only Coach of the Year award.
But he was more than Coach of the Year. Lombardi arrived on the scene when football was coming into its own, when it was morphing from two disparate leagues into something greater than its two parts, the NFL and AFL. He brought it altogether, in his rumpled, dignified way.
And then, of course, there were his quotes — negative in structure, yet strongly positive in message.
Like:
“Winning is not a sometime thing, it is an all-the-time thing. You don’t do things right once in a while. You do them right all the time.”
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“It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”
“Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
“Winning is not everything, but making the effort to win is.”
“If you don’t think you’re a winner, you don’t belong here.”
Lombardi used a lot of nots and don’ts, to prove his point that players can and must. It was a tricky syntax, but one he employed brilliantly. Would it work with today’s players? Probably not, but then Lombardi was a smart man, a brilliant motivational speaker, who would have adjusted to his audience.
On that gravestone in Middletown, there are none of his words, only his name and those of his closest relatives buried below. Some fans would like that to change. They’d like the man’s words on the stone to inspire. To put such a debate into Lombardi’s favorite syntax: That’s not their choice. They’ll have their own someday.
Meanwhile, the cemetery anticipates a busy week. David Spratford, a 78-year-old crossing guard just outside the cemetery, was helping a visitor on Monday find Lombardi’s grave, in Section 30 of the cemetery. His own relatives are buried there, too.
“When I visit them, I like to wave hi to him,” Spratford said.
Seems only right the trophy gets the same chance.
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