How the Lombardi Award helps tackle cancer

The Rotary Club of Houston founded the award to honor college football’s best lineman and to raise money to fight the disease that took a legendary coach’s life

By Bryan Smith

The four young men stride confidently into the hospital. They are used to people getting out of their way and happy to displace anyone inclined to do otherwise. Each of them is at least 6 feet tall, and collectively they tip the scales at about 1,000 pounds. That’s half a ton of turf-tested brawn.

The four are football giants. Neither laser-armed quarterbacks nor fleet-footed runners, they work in the trenches and are among the best linemen in the 1994 college season that’s just wrapping up. But now, at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, these gridiron goliaths are about to learn that true grit can also come in small packages.

The four players — Florida State linebacker Derrick Brooks, Arizona defensive end Tedy Bruschi, Miami defensive tackle Warren Sapp, and Nebraska offensive tackle Zach Wiegert — have come to Houston to learn which of them will receive the coveted Lombardi Award. Presented each year to college football’s best lineman by the Rotary Club of Houston, the award is named after Vince Lombardi, the legendary NFL coach who died of colon cancer shortly before the beginning of the 1970 season. Lombardi was only 57, and in addition to honoring the coach’s memory, the award raises money to battle cancer.

In the cancer ward, the four go from patient to patient, signing miniature footballs and sharing quiet words of encouragement with each of the ill children. Seeing a child who had lost an arm to cancer, Sapp kneels down and coaxes a smile from the little boy. “That’s what this is all about,” says Sapp. “I see more courage and determination in these hospital rooms than on any football field I ever played on.”

On 1 December, in front of a sold-out audience of 1,100 people, Sapp receives the 25th annual Lombardi Award. Houston club member Rocky Yapp, general chairman of that year’s event, presents a check for $160,000 to the American Cancer Society, bringing the total amount of money raised by the club to fight cancer to about $2 million (the equivalent of more than $4 million in today’s dollars). “We wanted my father’s legacy to be preserved and, in time, enhanced,” says Vincent H. Lombardi, the coach’s son and the keynote speaker for the award’s 25th banquet. “The Rotary Lombardi Award is the perfect expression of that wish.”

Created in coach’s honor

Shortly after Vince Lombardi’s death in 1970, the Rotary Club of Houston approached his sister, Madeline Lombardi Werner, a Houston resident, about the idea of giving an award in Lombardi’s name. Werner broached the topic with her brother’s widow, Marie Lombardi, who loved the idea. She agreed to let the Houston club use her husband’s name with the stipulation that money raised in conjunction with the award be dedicated to cancer research.

Having secured that approval, the club went about the challenging task of creating the award and planning the dinner ceremony where members envisioned the award would be presented. Steve Werner, a member of the Rotary Club of Denver Southeast and the coach’s nephew, remembers what happened next.

As a boy, Werner had spent a lot of time with his Uncle Vince, who had allowed his nephew to hang with his team: the storied Green Bay Packers, the overwhelming winners, under Coach Lombardi, of the first two Super Bowls. “Sometimes I got to ride with them on the bus from the stadium to the airport,” Werner recalls. “My parents would follow the bus and pick me up at the airport and take me home.”

Following the coach’s death, Werner’s mother, Madeline, who played an integral part in the creation of the award, insisted that her son attend the planning meetings held by the Houston club. “She said, You need to learn about philanthropy and you need to learn about service. I didn’t really have a choice,” Werner says. “But I really enjoyed the meetings. I just listened and learned from these businessmen who were really some of the best-known businessmen in Houston at the time, who worked so hard to put the award on.”

They not only worked hard, they worked quickly. Club members created a blue ribbon committee to choose the finalists and the winner of the award — and they created the actual award, which was designed by club member Mark Storm: a 40-pound block of Texas pink granite mounted on a wood and aluminum base inscribed with the word “discipline.” (Lombardi was one of the “Seven Blocks of Granite” on Fordham University’s fearsome line in the 1930s.) The Lombardi Award would honor the nation’s outstanding college football lineman, whether on offense or defense, who, as the award’s website states, “displays exceptional performance and ability and embodies the character and discipline that Vince Lombardi championed throughout his life.”

Four months after Lombardi’s death on 3 September 1970, the first Lombardi Award dinner was held at the Astroworld Hotel in Houston. Jim Stillwagon was the first player to receive the award, though the 21-year-old defensive guard from Ohio State may have felt overshadowed by the event’s featured speakers, Vice President Spiro Agnew and the sportscaster Howard Cosell.

In the years that followed, other celebrities and sports figures — from Bob Hope to Roger Staubach and from Bart Starr to Ronald Reagan — appeared as speakers at the Lombardi Award annual dinner. And to date, the Rotary Club of Houston, which continues to present the award, has donated more than $5 million to the American Cancer Society and other organizations that support cancer research and patients.

“We often say it is the football event with a heart,” says Vicki Brentin, a member and past president of the club who chaired the 50th Lombardi Award last year. “The Lombardi Award puts both Houston and Rotary in the national spotlight, but more importantly, we are proud to be able to showcase our commitment to philanthropy and service having hosted this award from its creation.”

A comeback kid

When Laiatu Latu jogged onto the field for practice for the University of Washington six days before the start of the 2020 season, the sophomore was regarded as one of the team’s breakout stars. Two years earlier, the All-California player had been hotly pursued not only by the Huskies but by other Division I football powerhouses. At 6-foot-4, 270 pounds, he had the ideal size and athleticism that teams were looking for. He also had versatility, with the ability to play on both sides of the ball. Indeed, he played linebacker and tight end at Jesuit High School in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, while also starring on his school’s rugby team.

During the practice that fall day, however, Latu suffered a neck injury from a tackle. The injury was severe enough that he sat out his sophomore year, when he met with five medical specialists and underwent surgery. In the end, doctors told Latu that it would be better to give up football than risk an injury that could leave him paralyzed for life. In April 2021, Huskies coach Jimmy Lake told reporters that he had decided to retire the team’s star recruit. Latu’s football career at Washington — and most likely anywhere else — was over, Lake said.

Latu and his mother, who had supported his dreams, were heartbroken. In the days and weeks that followed, they tried to process the soul-crushing news. Finally, Latu’s mother asked the only question that really mattered: “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t want to give up football,” Latu replied. It just wasn’t in the young man to quit.

In the weeks and months that followed, Latu worked out incessantly. Unable to play football, he returned to the other sport he loved: rugby. He even earned a tryout with a professional club in Seattle. Flattering, but no. He wasn’t ready to turn his back on football.

In September 2021, his mom, Kerry Latu, found a doctor, a spine specialist in California named Robert Watkins. Dr. Watkins believed Latu could return to football, and he backed up that belief with a medical opinion. Latu was cleared to play football, and in December, he was scooped up by UCLA, one of the teams that had pursued him out of high school.

In 2023, his senior year, Latu started all 12 regular-season games for the Bruins, leading the nation in tackles for loss and finishing fourth in the country in sacks. He’d be named Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year and selected unanimously to that season’s consensus All-America team.

And on 15 November, the Rotary Club of Houston announced that UCLA’s Laiatu Latu was one of four finalists for that year’s Lombardi Award.

Front Line Kids

Bucky Ribbeck was a teenager when he learned firsthand the deeper meaning behind the Lombardi Award. A star athlete in football and baseball at Strake Jesuit high school in Houston, he hoped to follow his athletic gifts as far as they would take them. He loved baseball so much that the soreness in his right arm that he started experiencing in 2009 near the end of his junior year didn’t worry him much. At first.

“The pain was in my throwing arm, kind of up near the elbow,” Ribbeck recalls. “It was the very end of the season, and I just thought it was a throwing related injury.” In hopes their son could get some relief from the pain, his parents took him to have the arm examined. Things moved fast after that, he says. “I went from getting X-rays one day to getting an MRI that same week and then getting a biopsy set up for a few weeks from then, and then got a diagnosis back.”

Doctors diagnosed a bony tumor in the radius bone of his right forearm. The good news was that the cancer had not spread, but he would need to immediately begin chemotherapy at Texas Children’s Hospital followed by surgery at MD Anderson. “It was a time frame of May 20 to basically June 1,” Ribbeck says. “That 10-day period was a big turnaround time, from getting the diagnosis to starting treatment.”

While undergoing treatment, Ribbeck learned about a “neat opportunity” from Vicki Brentin, the Houston Rotarian, and one of his doctors, ZoAnn Dreyer. “They knew I played football and baseball in high school,” he recalls, “and they said, Hey, we’ve got this event with the Rotary called the Lombardi Award, and we have this group called the Front Line Kids who are part of it every year. We’d like you to be part of it.”

The Front Line Kids, Ribbeck was told, are a group of young cancer patients from Texas Children’s Hospital and MD Anderson Cancer Center who attend the award dinner each year. “They bring you in and you get the VIP treatment,” says Ribbeck. The experience is a real boost for the kids, but for the college athletes and the guests attending the dinner, the uplift is reciprocal. “A lot of times it leaves the athletes pretty inspired,” Ribbeck says. “They see what we go through day to day as a cancer survivor, and I think it gives them an extra little spark to carry with them.”

That spark stayed with Ribbeck, who is now known as Dr. Bucky. Not only has he returned to speak at the award ceremony as an unofficial ambassador, but he channeled his love of sports and his experience with medicine into a career as a pediatrician and sports medicine specialist at Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children’s Hospital and has volunteered with Rotary and other organizations dedicated to people affected by cancer.

Dreyer, one of the doctors who saw Ribbeck through his ordeal, has worked with hundreds of other children who were Front Line Kids, having volunteered with the Lombardi Award since 1988. Back then, she was a senior fellow at the children’s hospital, when out of the blue, Dreyer says, “my boss came up to me and said, ZoAnn, we’ve got these football players coming and I need you to take over. They would come to the clinic and meet and greet with the patients, take pictures with them. Then we would go over to the [cancer] floor. We’d go room to room and see the patients, which of course was a huge thrill for these kids.”

In those early years, when the Front Line Kids program was still in its infancy, Dreyer would drive some of the kids to the award banquet. “Their parents came with them to the first few dinners that we held, then it slowly morphed into just being the patients,” Dreyer recalls. “For a number of years — probably almost until COVID hit — they would wear tuxes that were rented for them, and the girls would wear gowns.

“A lot of the kids that we would take to the dinner would be kids that were really struggling with their disease — maybe not in the best shape, maybe having had some rough complications. They meet the players and get pictures and autographs and all that kind of stuff.” The names of those players are instantly recognizable to people who follow football: Orlando Pace, Julius Peppers, Cornelius Bennett, Aaron Taylor. Taylor, who played for the Green Bay Packers when they won the Super Bowl in 1997, later returned to speak at the award dinner and let the kids try on his Super Bowl ring.

“It’s an emotional event for these kids, and it empowers them and they feel stronger,” says Dreyer. “Really, the award is secondary to the experience that not only the players have, but that the kids have.”

“Meeting these kids inspires the athletes, and it inspires those of us who witness these huge players being touched by the kids,” says Lindsey Kroll, a co-chair of this year’s award committee and a member of the Rotary Club of Memorial-Spring Branch (Houston). “These up close and personal meetings bring real focus to the job at hand: creating a cure for cancer.”

The choice of Kroll and Rhonda Walls Kerby, of the Rotary Club of Katy, as co-chairs, marks the first time that the annual Lombardi Award duties have not been chaired by a member of the Rotary Club of Houston (which was also the prime mover in the creation of a hospital-adjacent hotel that caters to the families of cancer patients). That decision to encourage involvement from outside the Houston club was intentional, says Brentin. “Although the Rotary Club of Houston ‘owns’ the event, we wanted to expand and broaden participation across District 5890,” she says. “And both Lindsey and Rhonda have been involved as volunteers on the committee for several years, so they are not new to the Lombardi Award.”

“Everyone’s life has been affected by cancer in one way or another,” says Walls Kerby, “and every dollar that the Lombardi Award raises goes to eliminating this deadly and dreadful disease. Rotarians all over the world should take pride in the fact that their fellow members have utilized the principles of Vince Lombardi to raise money to eliminate cancer through this prestigious award — and every Rotarian can and should get involved in this noble endeavor.”

The winner is…

The four 2023 finalists — Notre Dame offensive tackle Joe Alt, Georgia tight end Brock Bowers, Utah defensive lineman Jonah Elliss, and UCLA lineman Laiatu Latu — waited nervously in the shimmering grand ballroom of the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Houston. The dinner celebrating the Lombardi Award had crescendoed to its climactic moment: naming the 50th college lineman to hoist the 40-pound block of granite. Among the expectant audience members were several past winners, including Warren Sapp.

The 2022 winner, Will Anderson Jr., the third overall pick in the 2023 NFL draft, made his way down the long dais, a 10-foot-tall “50” glimmering behind him. Anderson listed the numerous qualities that define the award, including the refusal to give up, to quit. “With that being said,” Anderson announced as he opened an envelope, “the 50th Lombardi Award winner is ...”

When he heard his name, Laiatu Latu, dressed in a black tux with gold vest and matching gold bow tie, rose and edged past the celebrities and sports stars sharing the dais on his way to the microphone. He held back tears as the packed audience, including the Front Line Kids, leaped to their feet in a standing ovation. He held his hand up to his mouth and shook his head as the applause roared for several seconds.

“This is all so crazy to me,” Latu said, looking out into the crowd. “Being told I wouldn’t be able to play football again ...” Latu thanked the UCLA program “for really believing in me” and praised God and his family for helping him persevere. In addition, he said, he wanted “to give [his] appreciation to everyone that’s in cancer research, along with Rotary and the Front Line Kids.” He called the experience of getting to know them “super life-changing.”

His remarks ended, Latu hoisted the heavy block of granite to another standing ovation. And on 25 April 2024, he fully realized his dream: Surrounded by his friends and family, Latu beamed as the Indianapolis Colts announced he would be their first-round draft pick, the 15th overall. In doing so, the Colts praised Latu’s talent, his work ethic, his discipline, and his refusal to quit in the face of those who told him he must, almost as if reading those qualities off the Lombardi Award.

A regular contributor to Rotary magazine, Bryan Smith wrote about Milwaukee Rotarian Chris Kolenda’s Fallen Hero Honor Ride for our March 2023 issue.

This story originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.