Chapter 16 of When Pride Still Mattered is a bit odd, so I think we need to break from our usual format.

It’s a unique stylistic choice to devote so much of one book to one night, especially one that covers a man’s entire life. But the first sentence of the chapter explains why this is a good decision: “Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.” I think this chapter shows how much re-telling and myth-making was going on during Lombardi’s lifetime, even before he’d won the second of his many championships.

Maraniss has already covered at length how Lombardi’s career prompted exaggeration at almost every step. People regularly (intentionally?) got details wrong about his life. His law degree. The football prowess of his son. The force of his personality alone seemed to make people want to make him larger than life.

But on top of that, there’s something more: Vince Lombardi actually was a very good football coach. He got attention because he got results, and he got results everywhere he went. Fordham. St. Cecelia’s. Fordham again. Army. The Giants. The Packers. He was a winner everywhere he went, and so people made him from a man into a myth.

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. We see this happen all the time in modern media. An athlete who wins can’t just be great, he has to be among the all-time greats no matter what he’s accomplished. A coach can’t just benefit from the talent of his players, he has to be a molder of men. We’re as eager now as we always were to make myths out out men (and women), but Maraniss is right to point how the mythologizing of Lombardi seemed to happen in realtime.

In retrospect, it’s kind of quaint how Lombardi was praised for winning one title, but that might just show how much it meant tot he city of Green Bay. People went out of their way to praise him for his accomplishments, and even his rivals were happy to show up and pay homage.

The Green Bay Press-Gazette devoted an entire page to covering the event, and it seems to have played out almost exactly as Maraniss described it. Every major figure of Lombardi’s life seems to have been there, from people who knew him as a player at Fordham to the commissioner of the entire NFL. If that’s how he was received at the time, maybe it’s no wonder that he became a legend in his own time.