When Pride Still Mattered Chapter 22 - It's the Only Thing
We’ve spent quite a bit of time in these recaps lamenting the fact that Vince Lombardi, to put it mildly, was not much of a family man. This chapter resolves that issue, in a way, by admitting that Lombardi was a paradox. A great coach who preached the goodness of humanity and the value of properly ordering your life, but had a completely disordered personal life nonetheless.
David Maraniss encapsulates this nicely with a quote late in the chapter in which Lombardi himself admits to being a terrible father.
But setting aside that ongoing issue, or laying it to bed entirely, we also get a nice meditation in this chapter on what made Lombardi a great coach. Yes, he may have been a poor father, but he still was a great coach, and there are lessons in that greatness.
I think Lombardi’s success as a coach boils down to one very broad point: he knew how to drive people. Crucially, he knew that you couldn’t drive everyone the same way. Jerry Kramer had to be motivated in a different way than Paul Hornung and so on. That sounds like such a simple thing, but I think virtually anybody who’s had more than one job will quickly understand how few people actually know how to do that. Lombardi certainly did.
Lombardi was also single-minded in his approach to his duties. Writer Warren Wind put it this way: “He really means to do the job, and there isn’t a moment when he isn’t working at it.” Lombardi truly embodied that quote, and gave everything he had to his goal of winning. It is, after all, the only thing.
He also understood that nobody was ever going to do anything for him, specifically. He was a great motivator, true, but he accomplished a lot by getting his players to unite against him. That sounds counterintuitive, but it worked, and I’ve seen it work elsewhere. Lombardi knew that if all the players hated him (if only a little), they could work together to exact revenge by making themselves immune to criticism through their excellence. Which, obviously, only served to further Lombardi’s goal of winning all the time.
None of this is great insight on my part. Like many revered figures, Lombardi is often portrayed as something of a mystery, but I don’t think that’s really true. Maraniss has cut through the legend pretty neatly, and Lombardi is pretty well understood as a simple, dependable figure who did things in a very precise way. How he was able to achieve what he did was, no doubt, impressive. But the tools he used are no great mystery. He simply used them better than just about anybody else.
Interesting Notes
I think what Tom Brown says of professional football players is true of almost everyone to some extent. “We want to take the easy way out.” So few of us really have the drive, either internal from ourselves or external from someone else, to become all that we are capable of becoming.
Would you want to be Lombardi as his friend Jack Koeppler described him? Not the best at anything, but above average at everything.
Maraniss writes that Lombardi “encouraged his players to provide generous tips to clubhouse men at every stadium, believing that they would then get more towels, after-shave talc, better treatment all around, further instilling in them a sense of professional confidence.” In our interview with Dave Robinson earlier this year, he said it was actually equipment man Dad Braishier that was behind that, collecting money to leave to locker room attendants in opposing stadiums. Whoever’s idea it was, Robinson said it worked.
How crucial must it have been to have talented, handsome, charismatic Paul Hornung taking the worst that Lombardi could dish out? If Hornung, basically a living legend, could not escape Lombardi’s wrath but took it in stride, what example must that have set for everyone else?
On page 388 of my edition, there is quite an incredible typo: Curly Lambeau is referred to as “Curley.”
Lombardi’s health issues get some play in this chapter, including the intestinal problems that would later blossom into the cancer that ended his life. The implication here is that Lombardi’s life may have been saved had he gotten a prostate exam (get ‘em if you need ‘em!), but I don’t know if that’s true. It’s just my sense that Lombardi may have been destined to die young anyway, burning out rather than fading away.