Winning wasn’t the only thing for Lombardi

Vince Lombardi has come back into the mainstream with HBO's documentary Lombardi chronicling the larger than life character.

Dave Feschuk of the Toronto Star writes of how the former Green Bay Packers and coaching legend was more than a few motivational quotes.

Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach, has been credited with a long list of memorable quotations.

“Show me a good loser,” he once said, “and I’ll show you a loser.”

“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.”

And this: “Winning isn’t everything . . . it’s the only thing.”

For years there were those who’d claim Lombardi never actually said that last one; that his defining mantra was stolen from someone else or cribbed from a John Wayne film. So if Lombardi, the new documentary currently screening on HBO Canada, serves one purpose, it clears up this non-controversy. The 90-minute feature includes previously obscure footage of Lombardi uttering his famous catchphrase, which he once had printed on a locker room wall. And it tells viewers something else: Lombardi would live to regret being associated with those well-travelled words.

We’re in the midst of a Lombardi renaissance. Forty years after the death of the sideline patriarch, Robert De Niro has reportedly been slated to play Lombardi in an ESPN-produced film that’s in the pipeline. And there’s also an excellent Lombardi production currently running on Broadway. (This typist, never confused with a theatre critic, took it in recently and came away impressed, especially with the title-role work of Dan Lauria, best known as the dad from the TV show The Wonder Years.)

Yet despite the ubiquity of his storyline, and the existence of David Maraniss’s acclaimed 1999 biography When Pride Still Mattered, Lombardi remains one of the misunderstood icons of modern sports. For the coach, if winning wasn’t the only thing, it was the usual thing: Before he died in 1970 of cancer, he won five championships in nine seasons as coach of the Green Bay Packers.

But as the documentary points out, the success came with a price. His wife, Marie, is cast as the loneliest of football widows, and you get the idea the coach would have been more supportive of her struggle with alcoholism if she’d been, say, one of his starting linemen. And as for his two children, Susan and Vincent Jr., their HBO screen time is as raw and honest as these things usually get; they grew up viewing their father as distant and, to use Susan’s term, “bipolar.”

But it’s complicated, and Vince Lombardi, the altar boy who liked to describe himself and his football-crazed kind as “madmen,” was a contradictory character. He was the control-freak coach who, in the most crucial moment of a defining victory — the 1967 Ice Bowl between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys — deferred to the judgment of his quarterback, Bart Starr, who suggested the one-yard-line QB sneak that produced the winning touchdown.

And while Lombardi was deeply loved by many of his players who deify him to this day, shallow imitations of his methods have left us with a lamentable effects. You know the screaming, condescending hothead stampeding the sidelines of your 8-year-old’s soccer game? He’s there because Lombardi didn’t just make it acceptable to pursue victory at the expense of being a jerk, he made it the gold standard.

Some have even cited Lombardi’s transcendent popularity as the root of bigger disgraces. He once made the cover of Time magazine, and in his prime he somehow stood outside his sport, the way his 14-foot bronze likeness now guards a gate of the Packers’ stadium. Maraniss’s book tells of a Lombardi-influenced sign that hung in the headquarters of Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign for U.S. president: Winning in Politics Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing.

Nixon and his cronies got caught stealing to win, of course, and therein lies just one misinterpretation of the coach’s legacy. Lombardi didn’t encourage cheating or dirty play. He attended church, his daughter tells us, 365 days a year. He preached team values over individual glory. And as much as his famed 24/7 work ethic helped give rise to the over-coaching so prevalent in today’s games, he valued simplicity over complexity. (While Dallas’s Tom Landry, one of Lombardi’s coaching rivals, derisively referred to Lombardi as “Mr. High-Low” for his emotional swings, Lombardi, Maraniss told a post-show symposium on Broadway last week, similarly looked down on Landry’s intricate systems as doomed to fail under pressure).

Above all, Lombardi did not, the best evidence suggests, believe winning was the only thing. He would frequently lambaste his championship squads after victories, blowouts and otherwise. He didn’t always do the same after rare losses. Perfection was what he was after; excellence was what he’d settle for; winning was the only thing worth striving for, but hardly the only acceptable end.

“(Lombardi) told me once, ‘I wish to hell I’d never said (‘Winning isn’t everything . . . it’s the only thing’),’” Jerry Izenberg, a sportswriter from Lombardi’s native New Jersey, tells the camera near the end of the documentary. “I said, ‘Don’t you believe it?’ He said, ‘What I believe is, if you go out on a football field, or any endeavour in life, and you leave every fibre of what you have on the field, then you’ve won.’”

To rephrase the catchphrase in tune with what Lombardi might have intended: The only thing is giving everything.