When Pride Still Mattered
Maraniss, David
The Art of Winning and Winning and Winning.. . When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi David Maraniss Simon & Schuster / 544pages /$26 REVIEWED BY Geoffrey Norman W Ari inning...
...His family plainly took second place to football—and winning...
...Lombardi was a force of nature...
...But Maraniss goes on to explain that Lombardi wasn't the first to use the phrase and that he may have actually picked it up from a justifiably forgotten film called Trouble Along the Way, in which John Wayne plays a football coach...
...That was the essence of his method, which he called "Run to Daylight...
...E arly in his career, Lombardi was an assistant coach at West Point under Colonel Red Blaik, a ferociously disciplined and exceedingly methodical planner...
...Unlike baseball, the "national pastime," there was nothing pastoral and leisurely about professional football...
...You had the offense and the defense, blitzes and long bombs...
...And millions of fans who never shed a drop of sweat on a practice field believed, too...
...But he soon learned that pros did not respond to tactics that worked with cadets...
...How did he do it...
...He was a pretty good football player who missed a lot of games due to injuries, but then as a coach chased players out of the training room, accusing them of malingering...
...Lombardi was an assistant on the Giants team that played the first sudden-death overtime game for the NFL championship, losing to Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts in 1958...
...Their success is based, in large part, on sheer force of personality...
...He could bend men to his will and leave them grateful to him...
...This was the game that established professional football and put it at the center of the American Zeitgeist...
...This was the famous "Ice Bowl," which Green Bay won on the last play under Arctic conditions...
...So Lombardi said it, but it wasn't original with him and, anyway, according to Maraniss, Lombardi's "philosophy of winning was more complex and contradictory" than that stark formulation suggests...
...The mythical Lombardi rode his players mercilessly and they loved him for it...
...It is a mystery how he did it...
...The players were specialists...
...Lombardi made the cover of Time...
...In three, they were champions...
...The game was on the ascent and the team had won just one game the season before he arrived...
...Maraniss does a fine job with the details of the life and times, but he never quite answers that question because, in the end, it can't be answered...
...The way the pros played it, the game was both cerebral and violent...
...Lombardi won the players over with his knowledge of the game, by coming up with plays that worked...
...went back on his word...
...They loved him because, at the end of long, brutal marches, they won...
...According to David Maraniss in his Lombardi biography When Pride Still Mattered, the quote can probably be attributed to the coach, who posted the words on the Packers' locker room wall...
...But it makes a great story...
...The Packers had talent to spare but teamwork and discipline gave them their personality and that came straight from the coach...
...He simplified football, brought it down to the fundamentals, gave great players freedom to execute within an orderly system...
...When they ran a sweep, with the guards pulling and the back following them around end, looking for the hole, it was a picture of how the game should be played...
...Every yard that play gained had been earned in the hard work of practice, with Lombardi yelling at his players, telling them to run it again and get it right...
...The American Spectator October 19 9 9 71...
...It was organized in corporate style...
...That line is routinely attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers...
...When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi David Maraniss Simon & Schuster / 544pages /$26 REVIEWED BY Geoffrey Norman W Ari inning isn't the most important thing," the famous football saying goes, "it's the only thing...
...and both ignored and tyrannized his children...
...neglected his alcoholic, pill-popping, depressive wife...
...Maraniss's Lombardi is a flawed man...
...And the scriptwriter probably lifted the line from a cynical, wisecracking UCLA coach named "Red" Sanders...
...Frank Gifford dismissed him, at first, as a college chump...
...The language was tough and militaristic...
...Simple, brutal, and elegant...
...Crushing him...
...You could find all sorts of metaphors for contemporary America in the game...
...Great football coaches, like great generals, are originals...
...The lessons Lombardi learned about training and preparation, and the sense of football as a stoic, soldierly commitment, were things he took from the Point when he joined the New York Giants as an assistant...
...Lombardi became head coach of the lamentable Packers at just the right time...
...He preached loyally and other traditional virtues but broke contracts and GEOFFREY NORMAN is the editor-at-large of Forbes FYI...
...The Wayne character doesn't actually speak the provocative words, his 11 year-old daughter does, claiming to quote her dad...
...But it is instructive to remember—since football coaches are commonly compared to generals—that Stonewall Jackson's troops loved him in spite ofhis propensity to shoot deserters...
...He took the same players and made them winners in one season...
...After a couple of off years—the suspension for gambling of star running back and kicker Paul Hornung didn't help —the Packers came back and won three straight championships including the first two Super Bowls and the memorable NFL championship in 1967...
...It brought out the love of competition, the physicality, the lust to win not simply by performing well but by beating the other guy...
...When he said, "Follow me and we'll win," his players believed...
...For years football aficionados have debated whether Lombardi really said it, and if so, whether he actually meant it...
...Intimidating him...
...As a play unfolded, they could read and react to what the defense gave them...
...To subscribe to The American Spectator call 1-800-524-3469...
Vol. 32 • October 1999 • No. 10
