When Pride Still Mattered
Maraniss, David
Commonweal 1O December 17,1999 A BLOCK OF GRANITE When Pride Still nattered A Life of Vince Lombardi David Maraniss Simon & Schuster, $26, 541pp. Weil Couahlan It's not as if you aren't...
...His astonishing intensity, by turns abusive and tender, his quick passages from rage to satisfied laughter, worked wonderfully in football, a sport where coordinated explosive physical aggression carries the day...
...And on and on, paragraphs more of this nonsense on how Vince came to pain...
...Neil Coughlan, the author of Young John Dewey, is a lawyer living in Connecticut...
...are relieved only occasionally by flashes of pure lunacy...
...Hidden in all the horse feathers is a wonderful sports story...
...He died of cancer before the next season...
...In the first paragraph of his preface, Maraniss, embarrassed, grabs your lapels and tells you he has used his awful title "with a certain irony...
...The topper, I suppose, is his tracing the signature Green Bay running play, the power sweep, to The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola...
...Commonweal 2 I December 17,1999...
...All the while, the television cameras were bringing us ever more intimate images of the brilliant, brutal play...
...After all, you wouldn't write a biography of Saint Augustine and not ferret out the psychological origins of his ecclesiology...
...The will to succeed was his dominant characteristic, stronger in the end than his insistence on having things his way...
...No, your story must have...meaning...
...Hurt....Ah, yes, pain...
...When Lombardi came to the Packers in 1959, the team had not had a winning season since 1947...
...Lombardi didn't...
...When Pride Still Mattered...
...Professional football, a prime beneficiary of the advances in television camera technology in the 1950s, was about to become the remarkable entertainment phenomenon we have today...
...Don't believe him...
...Lombardi was as driven and effective a man as ever went to work...
...And the economics of publishing now requires a big book, a big trade book, 500 pages, photographs, nice jacket,...the works...
...it was a talent that he exhibited for the rest of his coaching career, though it often went unrecognized, overshadowed by his public image as the implacable leader who demanded that the world adapt to him...
...But Maraniss, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, can't leave it at that...
...If the NFL hadn't changed that rule, Lombardi said, "no one would ever catch us...
...If you're a serious fellow, you can't author a mere sports story, not in the age of Bob Costas and Doris Kearns Goodwin...
...One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing...
...Despite Maraniss's best efforts, a picture of an interesting man emerges from the book...
...Another way to bulk it up—find the roots of everything...
...He spent a year watching his team lose, raging behind plastic glass in a booth above the field, and then left to coach Edward Bennett Williams's feeble Washington Redskins...
...After the second Super Bowl victory, Lombardi, burned out, quit coaching the Packers...
...By then the league had changed its college player draft to prevent Lombardi from drafting underclassmen to stockpile future winners...
...The dachshund scrambled for daylight whenever the front door opened, even on the bleakest of northern Wisconsin days, and one morning he made a vain effort to flee across the street and was struck by a snowplow...
...Or would he...
...He leaves out nothing...
...Maraniss is dauntless, though, and one way or another he gets there...
...Here Maraniss has it exactly right...
...Little Ricky was gone by then...
...In his first year, the Packers, who had won only one game the year before, won seven and lost five...
...So,...coach Lombardi made his players practice till it hurt...
...Remember Oscar Wilde on Dickens...
...Lombardi, from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, a guard on Fordham University's "Seven Blocks of Granite" line of the 1936 season, turned it all around...
...His home and family life, on the other hand, is a tale of inattention and incomprehension, painful to read...
...If someone who knows you are not to be disturbed on Fall Sunday afternoons lays Maraniss's book on you for Christmas, skip the first couple hundred pages, get to Green Bay with Lombardi in February, 1959, and read a bit...
...Pain was its own reward, to be endured, gloried [gloried?], but not overcome...
...Images of pain shaped his ancestral homeland of southern Italy, both the Neapolitan region of his father's Lombardis and the remote mountain village of Vietri di Potenza, home to his mother's Izzo clan...
...Again, Lombardi won in his first year...
...The long pages of why-am-I-reading-this...
...Lombardi, also an important guy, deserves no less...
...They were the champions the next year and the year after, and in 1965,1966, and 1967, winning the first two Super Bowls in those last two years...
...The "meaning," you won't be surprised to hear, is old-time decent subordination to the team and the goal— no hot-dogging, please...
...It was the "ambiguity of [Lombardi's] meaning in American culture," Maraniss tells us, that drove the author as he researched the book...
...The people of southern Italy shared a history of pain on the largest scale fathomable: centuries of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, epidemics, revolts, famines, invasions, counterreformations, a communal memory of the works of man collapsing, crumbling, shaking, corpses burning, bodies thrown into the sea...
...He would have been a disaster in baseball...
...The league's other small-town franchises (the Portsmouth Spartans, Frankfort Yel-lowjackets, and such) had disappeared by the mid-1930s, and Green Bay's days were numbered...
...The next year they lost to Philadelphia in the league title game...
...David Maraniss is pitching the good old days: football when color photos were beside the point because the men themselves came in black-and-white, grainy, grim...
...If he had to adjust, he would find the means...
...Would Lombardi have found a way to win there, too...
...In southern Italy pain was a constant of the human condition, the defining theme of religion and art...
...Truth is, most of us don't live 500-pages' worth...
...Paintings of flagellation, crucifixion, stigmata, biblical tragedies, luminous and muscular, with intimations of breathtaking pain...
...Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers are a wonderful sports story...
...Marie [Vince's wife] took him to the vet and had him put to sleep, then broke the news to [the Lombardi children] Susan and Vincent, a more difficult task than the time back in New Jersey when she had to tell them that she had gassed their pet duck...
...A wonderful sports story...
...Weil Couahlan It's not as if you aren't warned...
...This will never happen again," Lombardi told them, "you will never lose another championship...
...Well, as the opening sentence of the book ("Everything begins with the body of the father") portends, Maraniss eventually finds or concocts an origin for each element in the Lombardi package—work, play, discipline, invention, you name it...
Vol. 126 • December 1999 • No. 22
