Vince Lombardi, High School Basketball Star

It’s ironic to think that the man most closely associated with American football, Vince Lombardi, didn’t play on a high school football team until well into his senior year. For three years and more he attended a school that had no football team. Here he is on the basketball team of Cathedral Preparatory Seminary, Brooklyn, in 1932. Growing up in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay section, young Vince thought about being a priest and so he enrolled at Cathedral in the fall of 1928. David Marannis, his biographer, writes that Lombardi played center on a “rather lackluster” team. In his senior year, Lombardi left Cathedral because he realized he didn’t have a call to the priesthood. He then transferred to St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn, which did have a football team. And the rest is history. (He’s seen here in the front row, first on the left.)