Vince Lombardi almost did not play high school football.

When he graduated from eighth grade in a public school in Brooklyn, he decided to attend a Catholic seminary and study to be a priest.

"The choice he made, Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, a diocesan preparatory seminary, reflected not only what he wanted to study but also whom he hoped to become," wrote David Maraniss in "When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi."

"He thought he was on his way to being Father Lombardi," Maraniss wrote. "Pursuing the priesthood was not an unusual calling for a studious Catholic boy then, not for an altar boy so earnest that he appeared at church an hour before mass, but it was out of the ordinary within his family."

At Cathedral, Lombardi played basketball and baseball. But the school did not have a football team.

In 1932, after he finished his fourth year in this seminary — which ran a six-year program — he transferred to another Catholic School, St. Francis Preparatory School in Brooklyn. It did have a football team, and he played for it — even though it did not have a football field on campus.

"Back in Brooklyn, they put on their pads and cleats on at school, then clambered into an old bus and jostled through the borough to what passed for a field on the edge of Todd's Shipyard along the East River waterfront," wrote Maraniss. "The skyscrapers of Manhattan soared in the middle distance."

"But if the conditions were difficult, the........

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