When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi (Paperback)

The modern urge to deconstruct is unnervingly present in the first few chapters of _WPSM_, as Maraniss traces Lombardi's unbending pursuit of victory to everything from his father's Elmer Gantryesque tattooed knuckles ("WORK and PLAY") to the philosophical musings of St. Ignatius. As someone who has personally experienced the contradictions of football -- of losing the self in the expression of eleven wills striving for perfection, thereby paradoxically achieving great personal satisfaction and, yes, self-expression -- I have always been perfectly happy taking Lombardi at face value. Why yes -- you DO have to pay the price to achieve success, as Lombardi's great mentor Earl "Red" Blaik liked to say. And indeed, fatigue DOES make cowards of us all, which drove Lombardi to push his players to the edge of physical exhaustion -- but in pursuit of physical excellence, not as an exercise in sadism.

Maraniss ...subtly inserting questions about Lombardi's character and intelligence, not once but throughout the book...

Having read Maraniss' other modern biography, _First in His Class_, it is apparent that Maraniss understands Bill Clinton in ways that he can never understand Lombardi. This is not just because Maraniss knows so little about football (the book is full of groaners for even the casual fan -- when Maraniss attempts to explain why Lombardi's ability to convey four vital pieces of information in the phrase "Red Right 49" is so significant, he gets three of them wrong). Clinton gets a free pass from Maraniss not once, but many times during _FIHC_, while Lombardi's shortcomings as husband and father are related ad nauseum. Maraniss' imability to connect personally with Lombardi is simply a question of generation -- Maraniss is cut from the same cloth as Bill Clinton, so of course he needs to deconstruct Lombardi to the point where the great man appears to be a complete fraud.

OF COURSE Lombardi was a fraud, I found myself yelling -- all football coaches are frauds, at least the good ones. The coach can only succeed in getting his players to regularly commit acts which are the physical and psychological equivalents of racing a car at full speed into a brick wall -- not once, but over and over again, month after month -- by building myths. The myth of indestructibility, the myth of moral superiority, the myth of Divine favor -- these are all frauds. Without a large dollop of Barnum in his makeup, the football coach is nothing more than a teacher who has taken a disastrous career detour -- as Lombardi's successor at Green Bay, Phil Bengston, discovered in 1968.

For all its shortcomings, the book moved me for the simple reason that the stories of all great men and women are moving -- we see the subject touched with grace, moving among normal human beings, then making his or her exit from the stage. This moves us to awe when the protagonist changes the world in some way that is important to us. Maraniss attempts to chronicle that awe among Lombardi's contemporaries, but he does so as a cultural anrthropologist would, observing and recording, but never really understanding.

If you want to learn some interesting details about Lombardi's life, by all means, read this book -- but if you want to understand Lombardi, read Lombardi.

My frustration with the book was in the structural assymetry. Maraniss elegantly pilots the reader through the early years of Lombardi and the unique convergence of events and personalities that made the Packers the greatest team of their era. Lombardi was one, but not the only factor, in this phenomenen and some of the cameo actors are thoughghtfully introduced. The book ends though with a funeral and makes no attempt to track the longer range impact that Lombardi and the Packers had on the development of the American Football or the culture of sport in general. The reader may be left with the frustration that the story is only half written.