COUNTDOWN TO 2000: A day-by-day recap of some of the most important sports moments of the 20th century. / SEPT. 3, 1970 : Cancer Claims Life of a Coaching Legend

Football lost one of its most famous coaches and charismatic personalities when Vincent Thomas Lombardi died, 29 years ago today.

He was 57 when he died of cancer at Washington’s Georgetown Hospital.

Lombardi was the coach and general manager of the Washington Redskins at the time but had achieved fame coaching championship teams at Green Bay, including the first two Super Bowl titles.

He was a coaching late-bloomer who at 33 was at St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood, N.J. He coached the football and basketball teams, taught Latin, physics, chemistry and algebra and attended Fordham law school at night.

Until he began coaching in the NFL, he had often said his lifetime ambition was to become the head coach at Fordham, where he had played in the 1930s. But when Fordham ended its football program, he turned to the NFL.

At 40, he was still an obscure assistant coach at Army. At 41, he began a five-year term as an assistant coach with the New York Giants and became the Packers’ head coach in 1959, at 46.

He turned a 1-10-1 team in 1958 into a 7-5 winner in 1959. In nine Packer seasons, his teams won five NFL championships.

He stepped back from coaching at Green Bay in 1968, then moved to the Redskins in 1969. Washington, after 13 consecutive losing seasons, was 7-5-2 in Lombardi’s 10th and final season as an NFL head coach.

He is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery at Middletown Township, N.J.

Also on this date: In 1906, Tex Rickard promoted his first big-time fight--Joe Gans vs. Battling Nelson for the lightweight championship at Goldfield, Nev. Gans won on a 42nd round foul and earned the then-princely sum of $17,500. Years later, with Jack Dempsey, Rickard promoted boxing’s first million-dollar fights.