When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi
by David Maraniss
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Book Summary Information
Author: David MaranissEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2000-09-03
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi
Book Review: A Coach's Life
Summary: 4 Stars
I am a huge sports fan, old enough to remember the Packers glory days under Lombardi, and while I spend a lot of my free time reading, I usually try to avoid sports biographies. For the most part, they are puff pieces about men who often don't deserve accolades for anything other than physical prowess. I really picked up this because I was impressed with a more recent work by David Maraniss, especially They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967
What Maraniss has done here is write a serious biography about an important sports figure, and he presents him warts and all. He shows Lombardi to be not just an effective, charismatic coach, but also a much less than devoted parent and husband.
The actual football sections of the book could have been stronger, fuller, more detailed. Frankly, a lot of the book, particularly the chapters that recap seasons of the Packer dynasty are redundant and pretty lightweight - just rehashing the sports pages of the day.
I enjoyed reading it, as I am sure most football fans will. It is better than the author's book about the Rome 1960 Olympics, but it is far short of his masterful account of the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement in America.
Summary of When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi
When Pride Still Mattered is the quintessential story of the American family: how Vince Lombardi, the son of an immigrant Italian butcher, rose to the top, and how his character and will to prevail transformed him, his wife, his children, his players, his sport, and ultimately the entire country.
It is also a vibrant football story, abundant with accounts of Lombardi's thrilling life in that world, from his playing days with the Seven Blocks of Granite at Fordham in the 1930s to the glory of coaching the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s. It is also a study of national myths, tracing what Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Maraniss calls the fallacy of the innocent past, and an absorbing account of the mythmakers from Grantland Rice to Howard Cosell who shaped Lombardi's image.
By the time he died of cancer in 1970, after one season in Washington during which he transformed the Redskins into winners, Lombardi had become a mythic character who transcended sport, and his legend has only grown in the decades since. In When Pride Still Mattered, Maraniss renders Lombardi as flawed and driven yet ultimately misunderstood, a heroic figure who was more complex and authentic than the stereotypical images of him propounded by admirers and critics.
Using the same meticulous reporting and sweeping narrative style that he employed in First in His Class, his classic biography of Bill Clinton, Maraniss separates myth from reality and wondrously recaptures Vince Lombardi's life and times.
As coach of the Green Bay Packers from 1959 to 1967, Vince Lombardi turned perennial losers into a juggernaut, winning back-to-back NFL titles in 1961 and 1962, and Superbowls I and II in 1966 and 1967. Stern, severe, sentimental, and paternal, he stood revered, reviled, respected, and mocked--a touchstone for the '60s all in one person. Which adds up to the myth we've been left with. But who was the man? That's the question Pulitzer Prize-winner David Maraniss tackles. It begins with Lombardi's looming father, a man as colorful as his son would be conservative. Still, from his father Vince Lombardi learned a sense of presence and authority that could impress itself with just a look. If a moment can sum up and embrace a man's life--and capture the breadth of Maraniss's thoroughness--it is one that takes place off the field when the Packers organization decides to redecorate their offices in advance of the new head coach's arrival: "During an earlier visit," Maraniss reports, "he had examined the quarters--peeling walls, creaky floor, old leather chairs with holes in them, discarded newspapers and magazines piled on chairs and in the corners--and pronounced the setting unworthy of a National Football League club. 'This is a disgrace!' he had remarked." In one moment, one comment, Lombardi announced his intentions, made his vision and professionalism clear, and began to shake up a stale organization. It reveals far more about the man than wins and losses, and is the kind of moment Maraniss uses again and again in this superb resurrection of a figure who so symbolized a sporting era and sensibility. --Jeff Silverman
Lombardi, Vince Books
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