In one’s seventy-fifth year, one comes to realize that much of one’s more vivid life experience is just history – if not myth – to most other (read: younger) people.

As I do every year, I reflected on this again on Sunday, when the Eagles were presented with the Lombardi trophy, professional football’s highest award. The trophy has borne that name ever since 1971, to honor a man who had died the previous year: Brooklyn’s own Vincent T. Lombardi, surely the greatest football coach of his time, and one of the greatest coaches of any sport in the twentieth century.

What do today’s Americans – even serious football fans – really know of him? Perhaps not much beyond his team’s record and his own few famous aphorisms, but that’s the way of the world. So there is a lot to be learned about this extraordinary American character and his times in Dave Maraniss’s richly rewarding 1999 biography When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.

He was born into a large Italian family in Sheepshead Bay in 1913, a few weeks after my mother was born elsewhere in Brooklyn: he was of that generation. As a high schooler, he studied for the priesthood, and though he ultimately decided against that vocation, he remained a daily communicant to the end of his life. This fact alone tells us volumes about the man, yet one wonders how many people today know it.

Serious fans may know that he was a member of Fordham’s legendary Seven Blocks of Granite in the mid-1930s. Fewer, I suspect, realize how deeply he absorbed the moral and philosophical teaching of the Jesuits there – and that, too, is to miss an essential element in his character.

Lombardi’s football education was completed as an assistant to the legendary Red Blaik, the dominant football coach of the 1940s, at West Point. But that, finally, was an ethos as much as it was a system, and those of us who love Lombardi are keenly aware of how he was shaped by it – how, in Lombardi’s psyche, Blaik essentially finished what the Jesuits had begun.

The big jobs always seemed to elude Lombardi, right up to the point in the late 1950s when he took the only head coaching position he’d ever been offered: that of the hapless Green Bay Packers, a small city team so woebegone that even its continued existence was in doubt. And at that moment the curtain went up on a sports legend that has no parallel.

Dave Maraniss’s signal achievement in this book is to rescue the man from the legend. It is not merely an outstanding sports biography: it’s one of the most perceptive, deeply researched and best written biographies of any mid-twentieth century American I’ve ever read. See if you don’t agree.  

© 2018 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings for financial advisors in his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. His most recent book is Around the Year with Nick Murray.