When Pride Still Mattered Quotes

“I remember once he began a speech to us by asking ‘What is the meaning of love?’ ” recalled Bob Skoronski. “And this is what he said. He said, ‘Anybody can love something that is beautiful or smart or agile. You will never know love until you can love something that isn’t beautiful, isn’t bright, isn’t glamorous. It takes a special person to love something unattractive, someone unknown. That is the test of love. Everybody can love someone’s strengths and somebody’s good looks. But can you accept someone for his inabilities?’ And he drew a parallel that day to football. You might have a guy playing next to you who maybe isn’t perfect, but you’ve got to love him, and maybe that love would enable you to help him. And maybe you will do something more to overcome a difficult situation in football because of that love. He didn’t want us to be picking on each other, but thinking, What can I do to make it easier for my teammate?”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“As integral as religion was to his sense of self, it was not until he reached West Point and combined his spiritual discipline with Blaik’s military discipline that his coaching persona began to take its mature form. Everything he knew about organizing a team and preparing it to play its best, Lombardi said later, he learned at West Point. “It all came from Red Blaik.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“There never was a champion who, to himself, was a good loser. There is a vast difference between a good sport and a good loser.” In Blaik’s opinion the “purpose of the game is to win. To dilute the will to win is to destroy the purpose of the game.” In this, as in most matters, he was influenced by General MacArthur. He never forgot MacArthur’s words: “There is no substitute for victory.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Late on weekend nights, when Vince was at last free from athletics, he took Marie out to his favorite haunts with the Palaus and other friends. They often drove up Route 9W to Englewood Cliffs for a late meal at Leo’s and then some band music at the Rustic Cabin, where they fell into the habit of buying a beer and steak sandwich for a performer who came over to their table to chat after his closing set, a skinny young Italian crooner from Hoboken named Frank Sinatra.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Every day Lombardi heard Cox lecture on the meaning of character—“an integration of habits of conduct superimposed on temperament, the will exercised on disposition, thought, emotion and action.” It was man’s obligation, Cox said, to use his will “to elicit the right and good free actions and to refrain from wrong and evil actions.” While man was blessed with intellect and free will, he was ennobled only when he sublimated individual desires “to join others in pursuit of common good.” Cox lamented that the modern world was turning away from that notion, and “the vaunted liberty which was to make us free has eventuated in a more galling servitude to man’s lower nature.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Again on Rose Hill with all the familiar sounds, sights and smells, dank gymnasium office, trainer Jake’s old barber chair, the Keating Hall clock tower, Jesuits in cassocks clucking along, lunches of linguine and calamari on Arthur Avenue, leaves and mud on the practice field, thud and smack of leather upon leather as dusk enveloped the Bronx, maroon and gold, we do or die notes drifting over from band rehearsal—Lombardi was in his element, restored. Football as religion. The T a catechism from which he preached. And God was in the details.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“she had married Vince because he seemed solid, religious and faithful, unlike her father. She believed, as he did, in the sacredness and lifelong commitment of marriage. She told herself that she would have to adjust.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“A date was soon set for the wedding. He and Marie were married on Saturday, August 31, 1940, at the Church of Our Lady of Refuge on East 196th Street in the Bronx. The nuptial mass was performed by the Reverend Jeremiah F. Nemecek, a Fordham football fan who idolized the Seven Blocks of Granite”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“After leading his aging team to its third straight title, Lombardi was spent. For years he had suffered from digestive problems and heartburn, and over the past season those symptoms had worsened. Players became accustomed to seeing him with a bottle of antacid medicine in his hand. He had traumatic arthritis in his left hip, and it hobbled him more than ever during the 1967 season. Carroll Dale, the receiver, remembered once that season when “the team was fogged in somewhere waiting for a plane, and Lombardi talked about the weather and how much it hurt him. How tough it was to be out on the field with that pain in his hip.” He took indomethacin daily for the arthritis, which had an ulceric side effect on his stomach, creating a vicious cycle of pain. He tried various other treatments, delving into folklore remedies to wear a copper bracelet on his wrist. The pain did not go away.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“The vaunted liberty which was to make us free has eventuated in a more galling servitude to man’s lower nature—especially to sex on the one hand, and to autocratic political power on the other. It is only the truth which can make us free and the truth is that liberty unchecked by law, the Natural Law of God and human law in accordance with the law of God, leads to license and thence to servitude.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“While “complete victory can never be won,” Lombardi said, “it must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might. Each week there is a new encounter, each year there is a new challenge. But all of the display, all of the noise, all of the glamour, and all of the color and excitement, they exist only in the memory. But the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win, they endure, they last forever. These are the qualities, I think, that are larger and more important than any of the events that occasion them.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Men needed the test of competition to find their better selves, Lombardi insisted, whether it was in sports, politics or business.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Competitive sports keeps alive in all of us a spirit of vitality and enterprise. It teaches the strong to know when they are weak and the brave to face themselves when they are afraid. To be proud and unbending in defeat, yet humble and gentle in victory. To master ourselves before we attempt to master others. To learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep, and it gives a predominance of courage over timidity.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“In many ways the philosophy at West Point was similar to a way of life that Lombardi had learned earlier at Fordham from the Jesuits. There was a direct line from one to the next, from religion to the military to football, from the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius to the football regimen of Colonel Blaik. Both emphasized discipline, order, organization, planning, attention to detail, repetition, the ability to adjust to different situations and remain flexible in pursuit of a goal while sustaining an obsession with one big idea.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“At Saints, ethical values were largely passed on not by the priests and nuns but by Vince Lombardi, who found his pulpit everywhere, on the playing field, in the classroom and at schoolwide auditorium meetings. He was the one person to whom Sister Bap acceded. Dorothy Bachmann, salutatorian at Saints in 1944, thought “all the nuns loved him. They were not afraid of Vince, but they respected him for the way he presented his values to the students.” Saints football, with its discipline, subservience and teamwork, was considered the ideal demonstration of proper teenage behavior, and Lombardi the purveyor nonpareil of the football philosophy.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Year by year, as his reputation grew beyond Englewood, it became clearer to him that coaching was his life’s calling. Football coach was not what Harry and Matty had expected of their son, nor what his old classmates had predicted. In some ways it was a job below his own self-image. All of which worked in his favor. During his years in Englewood, Lombardi was driven by a contradiction, consumed by a sport and somewhat embarrassed that it was considered merely a game.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Lombardi himself was partly responsible for this. He alone among the men of the four great Fordham front walls emerged as a large enough figure later in life to carry the legend. But this was also the work of the storytellers. Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon and their brethren glorified the 1936 line above all others, and their fraternal heir, Tim Cohane, continued the tradition. There is something to be said for the way they presented the world, looking for the romantic aspects of human nature through the playing of games, preferring it to what would come later, the cynicism of modern journalism and its life-deadening focus on money, controversy and man’s inevitable fall from grace. The problem with the storytellers was not their exaltation of myth, but their pursuit of the ideal to the exclusion of reality, allowing for the perpetuation of the fallacy of the innocent past.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi