When Pride Still Mattered Chapter 17 - Daylight

If you haven’t read his work beyond “Run to Daylight” do yourself a favor and pick up “The Top of His Game” and get a sense for the rest of W.C. Heinz’s writing. It’s a collection of some of his best sportswriting and, along with this chapter of “When Pride Still Mattered” should give you a good feeling for why he was the perfect writer to work with Vince Lombardi.

I’ve done a bit of sportswriting myself, and I think of myself as pretty good at it, but I’m not at Heinz’s level. I’ll never do the kind of work he did, partly because I’m not as good of a writer, but also because the kind of writing he did is exceedingly rare today. Few people have the resources to pick stories from around the country and follow them with the level of devotion that he did. But his ability to pick his stories well set him apart as a writer, made him worth that level of investment from his various employers, and made him the perfect person to write about Vince Lombardi.

If you read “Run to Daylight” (and we probably will at some point for the book club), you’ll see that it’s not really about Vince Lombardi in the way that most books are about their subjects. The blocking and tackling details aren’t really there — when Lombardi was born, for instance, doesn’t appear in the text. There’s no in-depth look at who he was before he was with the Packers, really. There is just what he does in a given week to prepare for a given game.

But, as Maraniss observes in this chapter, that’s really all you need to know about Lombardi. The way he does things perfectly explains who he is as a person. He gives absolute devotion to his chosen field, and he expresses that devotion in the only way he knows how: he makes football bend to his will through the sheer force of his will. His commitment is absolute, and you will either mirror his level of commitment or he will push you away.

Even if it’s another non-traditional chapter, I’m grateful that Maraniss went in this direction. I have a whole shelf of books at my house about writing and the different processes that writers use in their craft, so a digression into the behind-the-scenes work that went into making one of the great football books ever is right up my alley.