"If life is comprised of a million small battles waged endlessly in our imagination, in mine, every Sunday that Lombardi won, he won for me, defeating not just the Giants and the Colts and Rams, but deeper foes, the forbidding East, class expectations, fate and also L.A., and everything else that seemed transient or unsettling compared to our place in Middle America."
-- David Maraniss
When Pride Still Mattered is
the definitive biography of legendary football coach
Vince Lombardi by
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author
David Maraniss. The book was first published in September 1999
This is not your run-of-the-mill sports biography. Maraniss spent several years researching this book -- fresh off his acclaimed biography of President Bill Clinton, First In His Class.
As a native cheesehead, Maraniss obviously brought a love of the Green and Gold to this book, but his journalistic sensibilities make this a compelling biography. Lombardi's life is examined in detail - the good, the bad, the inherent contradiction of a devout Catholic making his living through the use of channeled anger and violence.
Lombardi was a man of mythic stature and this biography almost serves as a history of American football. This is not just a book for the sports fanatic, but for anyone who wants to understand America in the middle decades of the twentieth century.