When Pride Still Mattered: Life of Vince Lombardi

Maraniss, David

ISBN 10: 0671776290 ISBN 13: 9780671776299

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audioworks, 1999

Synopsis

When Pride Still Mattered is the quintessential story of the American family: how Vince Lombardi, the son of an immigrant Italian butcher, rose to the top, and how his character and will to prevail transformed him, his wife, his children, his players, his sport, and ultimately the entire country.

It is also a vibrant football story, abundant with accounts of Lombardi's thrilling life in that world, from his playing days with the Seven Blocks of Granite at Fordham in the 1930s to the glory of coaching the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s. It is also a study of national myths, tracing what Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Maraniss calls the fallacy of the innocent past, and an absorbing account of the mythmakers from Grantland Rice to Howard Cosell who shaped Lombardi's image.

By the time he died of cancer in 1970, after one season in Washington during which he transformed the Redskins into winners, Lombardi had become a mythic character who transcended sport, and his legend has only grown in the decades since. In When Pride Still Mattered, Maraniss renders Lombardi as flawed and driven yet ultimately misunderstood, a heroic figure who was more complex and authentic than the stereotypical images of him propounded by admirers and critics.

Using the same meticulous reporting and sweeping narrative style that he employed in First in His Class, his classic biography of Bill Clinton, Maraniss separates myth from reality and wondrously recaptures Vince Lombardi's life and times.

About this title

Review:

David HalberstamDavid Maraniss, one of America's most distinguished writers, has followed up his brilliant biography of Bill Clinton with a remarkable portrait of Vince Lombardi, a man as different from Clinton as it is possible to be. This is not just a book about sports or about a football coach. "When Pride Still Mattered" is an exceptionally well-written, thoughtful, and fair-minded portrait of one of the most important -- and compelling -- figures in modern American popular culture, and of the profound changes taking place in our society.

About the Author:

David Maraniss is the author of First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton and The Clinton Enigma. He is an associate editor at The Washington Post, where his articles on Bill Clinton won him the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1993. He grew up in Wisconsin and now lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Linda. They have two grown children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audioworks
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0671776290
• ISBN 13: 9780671776299
• Binding: Audio Cassette