“Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”
Who would have thought legendary football coach Vince Lombardi would turn out to be one of the great villains of modern American history?
Too much?
Maybe, but Lombardi’s quote has been used to justify all sorts of bad behavior in the name of winning, and the fact is that he regretted what he later called “that damn quote.” He said that his second sentence should have been “Wanting to win is.”
Instead, it becomes a statement about ends and means, and whether a worthy goal can somehow justify unworthy tactics to achieve it.
Sadly, probably not.
A couple of years after Lombardi’s quote, less legendary coach George Allen got even more serious about it.
“Losing is like death.”
Strangely enough, Allen’s quote gained prominence after he led the historically hapless Washington Redskins to the Super Bowl, only to lose to the undefeated Miami Dolphins. When asked how he evaluated the season, Allen said the season was a failure because the only team not to fail was the won that won the Super Bowl.
Is winning everything?
Pete Rose certainly thought so when he barreled over catcher Ray Fosse to win the 1970 baseball all-star game, a game in which victory meant absolutely nothing.
And of course, with our national obsession with sports metaphors, eventually many of those sports terms and sports ideas moved into the rest of our society.
There’s always that famous quote by stock car legend Richard Petty:
“If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.”
Without that quote and the thinking behind it, it’s difficult to even imagine Donald Trump.
And it’s truly difficult to imagine that once we were a society that believed in fair play.
Grantland Rice?
Who’s he?
