Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1913, he first considered the priesthood or the law before taking on an assistant high school coaching position in Englewood, New Jersey. It was clear Lombardi had something special; he even took the school basketball team to the state championship–without knowing much about basketball. “He didn’t know about basketball, but he knew about people,” said one of his students. “He was a master psychologist.” Over the years, Lombardi coached in some capacity at Fordham University (his alma mater and the place where he’d played football himself), the United States Military Academy at West Point and with the New York Giants. He was 45 years old when approached about taking on the Green Bay Packers, a team with a record of 1-10-1 in 1958. He agreed, asking for a five-year contract to get his vision in place. “I have never been on a losing team, gentlemen, and I do not intend to start now!” he said during his first team meeting. By the next year, the Packers had a 7-5 season. During his time as head coach, the Packers won six championships in their division, five NFL championships—and when the Super Bowl was first played in 1967, they won that as well. They even followed that up with another win in Super Bowl II. With such success, Lombardi decided to step back as coach and stay on solely as the franchise’s general manager. Soon, though, he was itching to get back in the game and in 1969 accepted a head coach and general manager position with the Washington Redskins (now the Commanders). In his first season with them, he seemed to be working his magic once more. However, before he could go further, Lombardi died in 1970 at the age of 57 due to colon cancer. To honor him, the sterling silver NFL Super Bowl trophy was officially named “The Vince Lombardi Trophy.” He was admitted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame posthumously in the class of 1971. It wasn’t just winning that Lombardi was good at. “I would say that nobody had more impact in creating diversity in the NFL than Coach Lombardi,” said former defensive lineman and team captain Willie Davis. When he got to Green Bay, there was only one Black player. In his quest to find the best players, he hired several Black players and treated them the same as everyone else. According to Davies, as the Packers kept winning, the other teams started to consider hiring more Black players too. Lombardi was serious about respecting everyone on his team as a person. “In the Packers’ training camp, if you said one racist sentence, you were cut immediately," recalled former offensive lineman BillCurry. “He didn’t care about the color of your skin. He cared a lot if you could play football, and he cared a lot if you were a good human being.” In 1968, under Lombardi, the Packers were the only team that integrated their hotel room assignments. His feelings were informed by his own experience as an Italian-American arriving in Green Bay, and his experiences with the team in the South–he was even denied service once because the hostess thought he was Black. Over time, he seemed to feel a bit differently about his single-minded pursuit of winning. “If you go out on a football field on Sunday, or any endeavor in life,” he once told journalist JerryIzenberg,” and you leave every fiber of what you have on that field when the game finally ends, you’ve won… and I never made that clear.” So when the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams battle at Super Bowl LVI on Sunday, Feb. 13 for the trophy that bears his name, keep Lombardi in mind—and check out the following 50 quotes from football legend Vince Lombardi.
50 Vince Lombardi quotes
- “Success demands singleness of purpose.”
- “Winning is a habit. Watch your thoughts, they become your beliefs. Watch your beliefs, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character.”
- “The objective is to win—fairly, squarely, decently. Win by the rules, but still, win.”
- “If you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives.”
- “Everyone has the will to win but very few have the will to prepare to win.”
- “I don’t have any black players, I don’t have any white players, I only have green players.”
- “At many moments in a day, I am convinced that pro football must be a game for madmen, and I must be one of them.”
- “If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.”
- “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”
- “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”
- “Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”
- “There’s only one way to succeed at anything and that is to give everything.”
- “The man on top of the mountain didn’t fall there.”
- “It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.”
- “The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.”
- “Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work.”
- “It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.”
- “The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work.”
- “If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?”
- “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”
- “Winning isn’t everything, but it’s the only thing. In our business there is no second place; you’re either first, or last.”
- “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”
- “Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off of the goal.”
- “The successful man is himself. To be successful you’ve got to be honest with yourself.”
- “Mental toughness is essential to success.”
- “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.”
- “Nobody is hurt. Hurt is in the mind.”
- “Winners never quit and quitters never win.”
- “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”
- “Once a man has made a commitment to a way of life, he puts the greatest strength in the world behind him. It’s something we call heart power. Once a man has made his commitment, nothing will stop him short of success.”
- “We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.”
- “Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will.”
- “Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.”
- “The good Lord gave you a body that can stand most anything. It’s your mind you have to convince.”
- “Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while… you don’t do things right once in a while… you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately so is losing.”
- “Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.”
- “We run to win, not just to be in the race.”
- “There is something good in men that really yearn for discipline.”
- “Winning means you’re willing to go longer, work harder, and give more than anyone else.”
- “People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.”
- “Don’t succumb to excuses. Go back to the job of making the corrections and forming the habits that will make your goal possible.”
- “If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.”
- “The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.”
- “When you’ve got the momentum in a football game, that is a time to keep going and get it into the end zone.”
- “You can’t always be first, but you have to believe that you should have been—that you were never beaten that time just ran out on you.”
- “Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not. But we will be judged by only one thing—the result.”
- “If you can accept losing, you can’t win. If you can walk, you can run.”
- “No leader, however great, can long continue unless he wins battles. The battle decides all.”
- “You’ve got to play with your heart—with every fiber of your body.”
- “God, family and the Green Bay Packers—in that order.” Next, With Tom Brady Announcing His Retirement, Find Out How Many Super Bowls the G.O.A.T. Has Won
