Friday BookReview: LOMBARDI

    

[first published October 3, 2014]

From a 1999 column by George Will:

America had seen something like Vince Lombardi’s Chiclets-teeth grin before. His face often radiated competitive fury, but when it crinkled with happiness, you saw the visage – and spirit – of Teddy Roosevelt, apostle of the strenuous life, who could have said, as Lombardi did, that fatigue makes cowards of us all…

[In his decade in Green Bay], stalking the sideline in his camel’s-hair coat and fedora, he would become emblematic of the counter-counterculture…

David Maraniss says in his new biography, When Pride Still Mattered, that Lombardi is the "patron saint of American competition and success"… Maraniss was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin when it was a roiled sea of radicalism and Lombardi, 130 miles north, was vivifying martial virtues. He imbibed those values as assistant to coach "Red" Blaik at West Point in the early 1950s. In those days Lombardi took game film down to Manhattan, to the Waldorf Towers, to delight a former superintendent of the academy, Douglas MacArthur…

Lombardi’s grandparents came in the wave of immigrants drawn to America by ads seeking workers to build the Brooklyn Bridge. Lombardi grew up in Brooklyn, became muscular carrying slabs of meat [for his butcher father], then traveled to the northern Bronx to play football at Fordham. There the coach was Jim Crowley, one of the "Four Horsemen" of Notre Dame’s 1924 backfield. Crowley’s high school coach in Green Bay, Curly Lambeau, founded the Packers…

Fordham’s Jesuits taught Lombardi to understand virtue in terms of freely chosen subordination to a collective enterprise…

In chaotic 1968, both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, Maraniss says, considered Lombardi as a running mate. (Lombardi was a Kennedy Democrat, having met Jack during the 1960 Wisconsin primary)…

Football, writes Maraniss, blends elegance and violence into contact ballet, but at bottom football is hitting, and hitting causes pain to most players on most plays. Hence football fit what Maraniss calls Lombardi’s premodern heritage from southern Italy’s "history of pain": earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, revolts, famines, invasions, "a communal memory of the works of man collapsing."

Lombardi’s Packers were such a work. Having won Super Bowls I and II, the Packers next won Super Bowl XXXI.

                         

UPDATE: Here is a video giving the background to the famous "Ice Bowl" championship game. The Packers hosted the Dallas Cowboys on the last day of the year 1967. The temperature at kickoff was 15 below, with a wicked wind.

And a video with family members and biographer Maraniss discussing Lombardi's deep Catholic faith.