When Pride Still Mattered Chapter 21 - Winning Isn't Everything
One of my favorite things about When Pride Stil Mattered is that David Maraniss isn’t afraid to take a chapter now and then to investigate something germane to Vince Lombardi’s life that doesn’t necessarily follow the narrative he’s laying out. This chapter is probably the perfect example of how that can work well, giving us a short meditation on what could be Vince Lombardi’s most famous quote: winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
That mentality has so much right about it — and so much wrong at the same time.
In football, winning really is the only thing. It’s why Tom Brady is widely (and wrongly, I’ve argued many times) described as the greatest football player ever. He won! Regardless of who helped him there or what he actually had to do with it, he’s got more Super Bowls on his resume than any other quarterback. To the victor, the spoils.
It’s also why true innovators who may not have had the same kind of on-field success can be overlooked. Just about everyone who knows anything about football history knows about Don Coryell’s impact on the sport, but he wasn’t elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame until 37 years after his career ended. Winning exactly zero championships at the pro level will land you in purgatory like that no matter how much you changed the game.
But the obsession with winning will eat you alive. I’ve remarked before that football really isn’t a game for decent people. It’s hard to be a person with rightly ordered priorities and be a good football coach. We’ve belabored that point regarding Lombardi here, so I won’t do it again, but I think it’s true of anybody. You will not be the best husband, father, or friend you can be as long as you are first and foremost kneeling at the altar of victory, because winning in the NFL takes everything you’ve got and more.
Worshiping that god really does become the black addiction of the soul, as the quote in the opening line of this chapter says.
It’s interesting, then, to hear these words come from Lombardi. I wonder if he unintentionally meant them more as a warning than an inspiration. “Consider the cost, young coach,” he could be saying here. Consider what it will cost you to try to win, for winning is the only thing.
As Colonel Blaik said and Lombardi echoed, you have to be willing to pay the price. The price for victory is an all-consuming drive, one few people can wield and survive. And the worst part is that even those who come up short have to pay the same price.