Vince Lombardi Isn't Who You Think He Is

"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing!"

So goes the best-known exhortation of Vince Lombardi, the National Football League's defining champion and ur-coach. Of course, Lombardi didn't originate the phrase; it came from an 11-year-old girl, Sherry Jackson, playing the daughter of a down-on-his-luck football coach in the 1953 film Trouble Along The Way. Moreover, the saying was not a rousing call to action from a leader of men, but rather a child's naive repetition of her father's explanation for why he cares so much about a meaningless game.

Trouble Along The Way's coach wasn't based on Lombardi, who was still six years away from taking the head coaching position in Green Bay. John Wayne accepted the lead role, a surprise to many who never thought they would see him play a hero who "didn't ride a horse and didn't shoot a gun," as screenwriter Melville Shaverson put it. The fit, it turns out, was perfect: Coach Lombardi survives in our cultural memory much like John Wayne.

The memorable aphorisms, along with the indelible image of Lombardi shouting on the sidelines, have, as it relates to American culture, made him an authoritarian symbol. Even today, Lombardi is seen as the ultimate leader—the Abraham of every coach-proffered motivational speech and business-section book offering lessons on winning the game of life—able to mold boys into men capable of winning. But as with "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," these lines are less a representation of the real Lombardi than a myth football men crafted in order to buttress their sport's image.

Tim Cohane was the publicity director at Fordham University when Lombardi played college football there, and it was Cohane who helped Lombardi find an assistant coaching position at West Point. When Lombardi suited up on Fordham's offensive line, he was part of what Cohane celebrated as the "seven wonders of the world, seven immovable granite blocks." Decades later, as David Maraniss wrote in the Lombardi biography When Pride Still Mattered, Cohane began to build the grander Lombardi mythology with a photo essay in Look titled Vince Lombardi… Under this Green Bay Gridiron Genius, the Packers Pay the Price. Its opening paragraph finishes thusly: "Brilliant and tough-minded, a driving perfectionist, natural leader and born teacher, Vince Lombardi seems certain to become one of the greatest coaches of all time, if, indeed, he is not that already." Similar language recited in somber tones by men with deep voices peppers the vaults of NFL Films, home to the league's sacred visual texts.

But the most formative Lombardi mythmaking occurred in locker rooms and on the field. Arnold Mandell, a California psychologist, consulted with the San Diego Chargers in 1971 and wrote of his experience in The Nightmare Season. Mandell writes of Bob Schnelker, then Chargers offensive coordinator, a man who idolized Lombardi the authoritarian. "As he saw it," Mandell wrote, "everyone else, present or past, was flawed." Schnelker's coaching strategy was a combination of expletives and insults, and he was often accused of racism by San Diego's black players.

Schnelker was a tight end for the Giants in the late 1950s under Lombardi, then the team's offensive coordinator, and remembered him as the screaming disciplinarian many recognize. When Dan Fouts, a rookie under Schnelker in 1971, asked for the privilege to call plays on the field, Schnelker was incensed by what he viewed as a lack of discipline. Mandell quotes Schnelker, "When I coached for Vince… You think Vince would put up with this shit? I mean, can you imagine a rookie quarterback even thinking of rebelling against Vince?"

When men like Lombardi and Wayne are invoked, it is often with this implication. Lombardi would not have stood for the degradations in today's society. Where others relented to societal pressure and changing norms, the mythic coach would have stood fast, defending and embodying the values now under siege.

Dave Meggyesy, in his autobiography Out of Their League, writes of the typical manipulation players face from coaches. "Coaches develop a talent," Meggyesy wrote, "for emasculating a player over and over again without quite killing him. The one thing that is always evident in training camp is the coaches' absolute authority." In Meggyesy's experience, "Most coaches -- Vince Lombardi was the classic example -- give their players a tantalizing hint of what it might be like to be a man, but always keep it out of reach."

Meggyesy, who never played for Lombardi, was an outspoken opponent of football culture and one of the game's loudest political figures. After seven seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, Meggyesy retired from the game in 1969, at just 29 years old. "Face it," Meggyesy told Look in 1971, "football is an archaic ethos. it's a game for yahoos, like the old Roman sports. Throwing the bomb. Blitzing. Now what in hell does that mean? If this society changes like I hope it will, football will be a dead issue."

As far out as Meggyesy may sound, he wasn't alone. George Sauer was a two-time All-Pro when he quit the game at 27 in 1970. He was the son of a college coach turned NFL general manager, a born-and-bred football man. "I've tried to make the sport more humane," Sauer told Look in the same article, "but within the present structure of football it's impossible to do it alone. Football can be a beautiful thing, an artistic thing. It can be humane, too. But the men running it won't let it be." Sauer concludes, "It's difficult when you have a Vince Lombardi-type of coach hollering at you all the time to hate the other guy."

Chip Oliver was an 11th round pick by the Oakland Raiders in 1968, and despite being the two-hundred-ninety-eighth player selected, Oliver started at linebacker a combined 16 times and played in all 28 games of the 1968 and 1969 seasons. He also ditched the league after the 1969 season. By the time Look caught up with him in 1971, Oliver was living on a commune called One World Family. When asked how much money he had, Oliver said, "Let's see," fished into his pocket, pulled out a quarter, and dropped it into a nearby jukebox. "Now," Oliver told reporter Paul Zimmermann, "I've got nothing." But Oliver had no complaints about his new life.

The Oilvers and Sauers and Meggyesys of the world, in the minds of Bob Schnelker and the others who would recreate old man Lombardi in their image, represent precisely the sort of shit Vince Himself never would have put up with. They were the longhairs and hippies threatening traditional values, the same protesters disrupting college campuses and opposing America's involvement in the Vietnam War, the same lazy layabouts killing the economy.

Never considered? That the myth of Saint Vince doesn't match the man.

Five months before Lombardi died of cancer in 1970, he addressed the issue of these rebellious figures at a meeting with his fellow NFL coaches. He did not condemn Meggysey and company. He did not lambast their poor decisions or their lack of moral clarity. "I'd like to believe they're isolated cases," Lombardi told the coaches, "but let's face the fact we live in different and changing times. Nothing surprises me too much anymore, but in a way I feel guilty I've let football become so much a part of me I can't evaluate a situation like that presented by Meggyesy and Oliver. I have to fall back on my traditional ideas of discipline."

So far, so good. Only what did Lombardi, Schnelker's screaming authoritarian, mean by discipline?

"I believe everybody wants discipline, especially young people," Lombardi continued. "But one has to be careful of the spirit in which it's given. They'll take it if it's done in the spirit of teaching … even of love, like the discipline one gets from a mother and father."

It might be surprising to see words like love, guilt, and spirit attached to Lombardi. It doesn't fit the image coaches and NFL writers have been crafting and pushing in the 44 years since his death, and it doesn't fit the larger mythology of the gridiron. But to men like Harland Svare, who coached alongside Lombardi before becoming coach of the San Diego Chargers, Lombardi's emotional connection with his players wasn't just a part of Lombardi's character, but one of the major reasons for his success as coach. Arnold Mandell quotes Svare in The Nightmare Season:

"The only one I ever saw that was tuned in that good was Vince. Some games, he would scream at the players for an hour. Other times it was just a kind of lecture. I could never tell why he did one or the other. I looked for some sign of how he knew. Finally, I asked him one day, and he looked at me as though he was surprised by my question. He said that he just felt like the football team was feeling. Every moment. He would just look at himself and know what he had to do."

The psychologist Mandell, 5'6" and slim, never played football and had never been exposed to the inner workings of the professional football life. But he had been exposed to the Lombardi myth, and he was shocked by what he heard: "I stopped eating and became lost in thought. In the language of my business he was talking about empathy. Who would have guessed that the swearing Marine general, Lombardi, would have had it?"

Vince Lombardi was still a football coach, still a disciplinarian, still a more-than-occasional yeller and screamer. The Lombardi myth, like every myth, contains elements of truth. But the man behind it was more complex. More human. Those who would turn Lombardi into John Wayne without the horse or gun, a walking caricature of male ego, do a disservice to a man who built his career off not just discipline, but love and empathy, too. The next time a football coach asks, "Do you think Lombardi would have stood for this shit?" we should remember the answer probably isn't what he thinks.