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'When Pride Still Mattered' by David Maraniss

Biography does Lombardi proud

Sunday, October 31, 1999

By Gene Collier, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	When Pride Still Mattered By David Maraniss Simon & Schuster $26.00

As a compelling vehicle for the mass media, Vince Lombardi had been done to death 25 years ago.

Lombardi the icon had been done seamlessly and endlessly by NFL Films, Lombardi the book (W.C. Heinz’s well-received “Run to Daylight!”), Lombardi the movie (“Legend in Granite” starring Ernest Borgnine), and probably Lombardi the breakfast cereal, not that I was paying attention. But it was all in place for posterity a long time ago.

Why Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss would turn his attention to the over-celebrated football coach 29 years after his death isn’t terribly clear anywhere in “When Pride Still Mattered,” but what is clear is that Maraniss went after this project as Lombardi himself would, with a religious passion for methodology and an insatiable curiosity for detail.

Only as such could we learn from these pages that Vince laughed so hard at Tom and Jerry cartoons that tears would spray from his ducts like windshield-washer fluid, could we learn the exact ingredients of his wife’s hot crab meat dip (cream cheese, crab meat, mayo, mustard and a touch of wine, from the oven), could we learn that altar boys who regularly served the daily communicant noticed that Lombardi’s tongue was serrated, “bitten into jagged edges, perhaps from years of anxiety.”

Over what? Well, the least of it would not have been that there might someday be a book like this.

To be certain, Lombardi was in the 1960s a figure as large as the culture itself. He was the dominant figure in a sport that was coming to dominate the new electronic age, and though he’d spent most of an otherwise unremarkable life in football, he hadn’t even been a head coach until 1959, when he was 46. Then, as the high priest of the Green Bay Packers, he brought that little town the world championship five times in the next nine years.

The winner of the Super Bowl is rightly presented the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

But Lombardi’s influence on the culture then and since was not necessarily positive. He was a despot. He elevated the notion of competition beyond its place. A sign in his locker room said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” A generation of over-the-top coaches and abused kids was the not-unrelated result.

The contemporary ethical value of “When Pride Still Mattered” is encased in Maraniss’ willingness to deal with this sociological Lombardi Factor, if you will.

“What is the value of competitive team sports?” Maraniss asks in a chapter about an honor-code scandal at Army when Lombardi was an assistant coach there. “Where is the line drawn between a single-minded desire to excel and a debilitating obsession to win? Are football teams essential to the well-being of institutions and communities? Do athletes deserve special consideration because of this? In a realm where the ultimate measurement is wins vs. means?”

To Maraniss’ considerable credit, his book is more than ready to answer these questions with detailed anecdotes that illustrate the way Lombardi’s obsession with victory, his gigantic will to “pay the price” of victory, damaged his relationship with scores of people, most especially the people living with him.

His wife Marie’s long struggle with alcohol laces the text, and the fitful discoveries of her own self-image actually threaten to overtake the focus of the book. Ten years into the marriage, Maraniss writes, “Marie was still uncertain about her place in Vince’s football life. She desperately sought more of his time and attention, and alternately loved and hated the game that possessed him, now embracing it as the most effective means of reaching Vince, now rejecting it roundly as the temptress that lured her husband away from her.”

Maraniss quotes Lombardi’s brother Harold as saying that a lot of Marie’s drinking came because “she idolized Vin and he was off with own little group.”

Similarly, Lombardi’s son and daughter chip in with histories of his neglect and verbal abuse, underscoring a condition that was essentially unavoidable given the coach’s focus and temperament. Their father, who let stand a popular myth that he had graduated from Fordham Law School (he dropped out) and who paid only passing attention to his children’s academics, once grounded his son for poor grades.

Vincent the younger was an occasional underachiever at Red Bank Catholic High School in New Jersey, Maraniss says, and “did not get along with some of the nuns, and wanted no part of their plans for him to be a student leader. A leader is what his father was. Vincent did not much like the type; to him it meant constant tension, unrelenting pressure. He was tense enough already, but less directed and ambitious, more like his mother, and he believed that his dad thought less of him for that.

“I think he thought I took after my mother in many respects. He thought she was weak. He thought I was weak,” the son said.

There was enough sheer force to Lombardi that Heinz once said, “if he hadn’t been a good guy, he could have been a terrible danger,” and yet the great coach emerges in this book as a figure who grasped a moral imperative, namely that the gifted must pay the price to be great, and who eventually came to an enlightened morality himself.

He tolerated no prejudice on the Packers. He told Green Bay bars and restaurants they would serve all Packers or no Packers. He quietly rooted for gay players in his training camp, hoping they would make the team. His brother Harold was gay, and Lombardi ignored Catholic teaching against homosexuality and considered gays another group deserving respect.

There is a great humanity to Maraniss’ book. Though it is thick with football technology and detailed football history, it is a masterful character study. Great sports books are virtually an oxymoron in this culture, but “When Pride Still Mattered” deserves a place next to Robert W. Creamer’s “Babe” on the top shelf of the genre.

The reason for it thus becomes self-evident. Lombardi had been done to death. Maraniss wrote Lombardi to life, bigger than ever.