COUNTING SNOWFLAKES IN A BLIZZARD: Where is Vince Lombardi when you really need him? Lombardi, dead now more than 50 years, remains famous not just for his granite-jawed and gap-toothed grimace, but for making the Green Bay Packers — the football equivalent of wet toilet paper before he arrived — a dynasty with which we still reckon. In other words, he put the cheese in the cheese heads.
Lombardi will live on into infinity for having upended the mewling acquiescence of sportswriter Grantland Rice, who famously encouraged underachievers everywhere by writing, “It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game.” Lombardi, a take-no-prisoners modernist, famously countered with his now-immortal “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”
He didn’t just say it; he said it a lot. Lombardi, I am told, borrowed the phrase from onetime UCLA football coach Henry Russell “Red” Sanders, who reportedly delivered that line unto a physical education class he was then teaching at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo back in 1950.