When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi

Amazon.com
As coach of the Green Bay Packers from 1959 to 1967, Vince Lombardi turned perennial losers into a juggernaut, winning back-to-back NFL titles in 1961 and 1962, and Superbowls I and II in 1966 and 1967. Stern, severe, sentimental, and paternal, he stood revered, reviled, respected, and mocked--a touchstone for the '60s all in one person. Which adds up to the myth we've been left with. But who was the man? That's the question Pulitzer Prize-winner David Maraniss tackles. It begins with Lombardi's looming father, a man as colorful as his son would be conservative. Still, from his father Vince Lombardi learned a sense of presence and authority that could impress itself with just a look. If a moment can sum up and embrace a man's life--and capture the breadth of Maraniss's thoroughness--it is one that takes place off the field when the Packers organization decides to redecorate their offices in advance of the new head coach's arrival: "During an earlier visit," Maraniss reports, "he had examined the quarters--peeling walls, creaky floor, old leather chairs with holes in them, discarded newspapers and magazines piled on chairs and in the corners--and pronounced the setting unworthy of a National Football League club. 'This is a disgrace!' he had remarked." In one moment, one comment, Lombardi announced his intentions, made his vision and professionalism clear, and began to shake up a stale organization. It reveals far more about the man than wins and losses, and is the kind of moment Maraniss uses again and again in this superb resurrection of a figure who so symbolized a sporting era and sensibility. --Jeff Silverman

From Publishers Weekly
In the history of American sports, no coach has been mythologized as much as the Green Bay Packers' Vince Lombardi (who has been immortalized with, among other tributes, a rest station on the New Jersey Turnpike). Yet this fine biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post is a blast of cool air among the usually overheated roster of sports biographies. From Lombardi's formative years as a player and coach at Fordham University through assistantships with West Point and the Giants and, finally, to his tenure as head coach of the Packers, Maraniss presents a portrait of a complicated human being who was a great teacher but a mediocre listener, an effective psychologist despite being rife with flaws. Though he often got hurt as a college athlete, Lombardi, as a coach, scorned players who couldn't withstand injury. His relationship with his wife and children was less than ideal. But Maraniss doesn't succumb to any reductive assessments of Lombardi as "tragic" or "heroic." As legend suggests, Lombardi was indeed a great motivator, but his success also derived from a cerebral approach to the game. The book's true punch comes from its myriad subplots: a hero from one small town (early 20th-century Brooklyn) revitalizing another in the Upper Midwest, or professional football and Lombardi coming into their own at roughly the same time. Maraniss spends far too much time on people and events whose influence on Lombardi isn't made apparent, and he relies too much on other sportswriters' descriptions of games. Yet like its subject, the book, for all its flaws, is intricate, ambitious and satisfying. First serial to Vanity Fair. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Clinton biographer Maraniss's rich, resonant, and grown-up biography of Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi is full of the kind of surprises good research can yield (e.g., his New York butcher father had work and play stenciled philosophically on his hands). The book transcends the sports world, much as its iconic subject eventually did. (LJ 8/99) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Allen St. John
When Pride Still Mattered stands in stark contrast to most other books by and about coaches. Maraniss shows not only that winning isn't everything, it's not even what it's cracked up to be.

From AudioFile
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Clinton expert David Maraniss has written a very American story about a very American character, and you don't have to be a football fan to enjoy it. In his depiction of Coach Vince Lombardi, Maraniss demonstrates that a hero with blemishes can be more interesting than a flawless legend. Lombardi, the son on an immigrant Italian butcher, made his teams win by sheer guts and determination, and that is the theme that resonates. It is a pleasure to go back to a time when love of the game was a bigger issue than big money. Maraniss is not the best reader, but you trust him, and political junkies will particularly enjoy his presentation. M.D.B. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Lombardi, whose Green Bay Packers dominated professional football in the early 1960s, was arguably the greatest NFL coach ever, despite a relatively short career ended by his death from cancer in 1970. Maraniss, who won a Pulitzer for his Washington Post articles on presidential candidate Bill Clinton, looks beyond Lombardi's surface image of single-minded determination and devotion to discipline to reveal a man whose essence was . . . single-minded determination and devotion to discipline. There was no pretense and very little subtext to Vince Lombardi. He was devoted to family, God, and football, and if he had a failing, it was to reverse the order occasionally. As Maraniss reveals, he was a mediocre father and a loving but distracted workaholic husband. If there is any revelation here, it comes in Maraniss' treatment of the relationship between Lombardi and his wife, Marie, who was unhappy with her secondary position in her husband's life and, in response, became a problem drinker. This is a carefully researched, often poignant, three-dimensional biography. In an era where image is usually synonymous with illusion, it is refreshing to realize that Lombardi, whose private and public selves were so similar, was a man of substance and depth. Wes Lukowsky

From Kirkus Reviews
Though his subjects could not seem more different, Pulitzer Prizewinning Washington Post reporter Maraniss finds in Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi as compelling and paradoxical a leader as Bill Clinton (First in His Class, 1995) . Like prior biographies, such as Michael OBriens Vince (1987), Maranisss covers Lombardis childhood as the son of a Brooklyn butcher, college playing career as one of Fordhams Seven Blocks of Granite, apprentice coaching at a small New Jersey high school called St. Cecilias, West Point, and the New York Giants, the five championships with the Packers in the 60s, and the last year with the Washington Redskins before dying from colon cancer in 1970. What else can be written about a coach who seemed to symbolize the best and worst of professional sports? As it turns out, quite a bit. Maranisss coach is less self-confident than the martinet of myth, more aware that his rage, while the source of his success, is also sinful and self-destructive. Lombardi could play the father figure more convincingly to his lockerroom band than he could with his wife, a secret drinker, and his children, whom he neglected. Frightened by the anarchy he saw in the late 1960s, he became a favorite of businessmen and conservative Republicans because of his belief that sports builds character. His private actions might have surprised his admirers, however. On the negative side, he was not afraid to ask John Kennedy (whom he warmly supported) to defer stars Paul Hornung and Ray Nitschke from active duty in the army. More positively, he practiced quiet toleration, both of blacks and gays. In addition, Maraniss sensitively analyzes the influence of the coachs zealous Catholicism on his work, and paints extraordinarily vivid tableaus. From the myth of this model of order, loyalty, and victory, Maraniss has fashioned a richly complicated counterlife of a sports icon committed to and consumed by the quest for perfection. (First serial to Vanity Fair) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
Tim Long The Miami Herald A masterly biography....A finely crafted, multifaceted portrait of a life driven by obsession.

Book Description
When Pride Still Mattered is the quintessential story of the American family: how Vince Lombardi, the son of an immigrant Italian butcher, rose to the top, and how his character and will to prevail transformed him, his wife, his children, his players, his sport, and ultimately the entire country. It is also a vibrant football story, abundant with accounts of Lombardi's thrilling life in that world, from his playing days with the Seven Blocks of Granite at Fordham in the 1930s to the glory of coaching the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s. It is also a study of national myths, tracing what Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Maraniss calls the fallacy of the innocent past, and an absorbing account of the mythmakers from Grantland Rice to Howard Cosell who shaped Lombardi's image. By the time he died of cancer in 1970, after one season in Washington during which he transformed the Redskins into winners, Lombardi had become a mythic character who transcended sport, and his legend has only grown in the decades since. In When Pride Still Mattered, Maraniss renders Lombardi as flawed and driven yet ultimately misunderstood, a heroic figure who was more complex and authentic than the stereotypical images of him propounded by admirers and critics. Using the same meticulous reporting and sweeping narrative style that he employed in First in His Class, his classic biography of Bill Clinton, Maraniss separates myth from reality and wondrously recaptures Vince Lombardi's life and times.

Download Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist illuminates the life and legend of the great pro football coach Vince Lombardi, in this textured and compelling biography of an American original. of photos.

About the Author
David Maraniss is the author of First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton and The Clinton Enigma. He is an associate editor at The Washington Post, where his articles on Bill Clinton won him the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1993. He grew up in Wisconsin and now lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Linda. They have two grown children.


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Clinton biographer Maraniss's rich, resonant, and grown-up biography of Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi is full of the kind of surprises good research can yield (e.g., his New York butcher father had work and play stenciled philosophically on his hands). The book transcends the sports world, much as its iconic subject eventually did. (LJ 8/99) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information. Read all 8 "From The Critics" >


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