Winning wasn’t everything for Lombardi, but the only thing

ONLY OLD floodlights can make that sudden clunking sound, like an old, rickety lever being pulled down to spark the countless bulbs to life.

A hunched Vince Lombardi hustles out to centre stage and we, the Broadway audience, become his team, taking a knee, hushed and intimidated, waiting for his words.

He starts loud and gets slightly louder. He points at some of us individually, his fingers wrapped around an old football, darkly coloured pigskin. The Green Bay Packers fan in the front row with the number 15 Bart Starr jersey is told that the legendary coach only wants winners.

But this particular Lombardi being portrayed by Dan Lauria (Fred Arnold’s dad in “The Wonder Years”) wasn’t legendary at this point, he was simply setting out the road map for a bunch of textbook losers. As they prepared to enter the 1960s, the Packers gambled on a little-known assistant coach with a part-time job at a bank who would go onto revolutionise the game and turn the small Wisconsin town around forever.

Lombardi is never far from the hearts and minds of football fans nor, of course, the officials charged with keeping the multi-billion dollar sport simmering. But now he is a HBO documentary, a Broadway play and a film that’s just entering the pipeline with Robert De Niro set to play the Brooklyn-born coach.

What’s more, the dual legacy he left will relocate to another type of stage just outside Dallas on Sunday when his Green Bay Packers go in as favourites to win the Vince Lombardi trophy at the 45th Super Bowl, the first and second editions of which he himself secured having already achieved greatness during the pre-merger days of the old NFL.

On West 50th St, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, “Lombardi” is regularly selling out at the famous Circle on the Square theatre. Written by Eric Simonson who based it on the book “When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi” by David Maraniss, the NFL-produced play centres around a tense week in 1965 when a sportswriter tries and fails to put together a magazine feature about the strategically elusive coach.

Given the week that’s in it, I went to see “Lombardi” on Saturday, a day after the 52nd anniversary of his appointment. Matching up to the stylistic expectations set so high by television’s “Mad Men”, the play uses flashback to chronicle his decision to wrench his wife away from New Jersey (and New York) to take over one of the league’s worst teams in a town his charismatic spouse refused to believe existed.

Based on a true story, young reporter Michael McCormick (a fictional character) must navigate his subject’s military-level obstinacy and, with the help of Marie Lombardi and some of the Packers players, try to gather together the chaotic fragments of a football genius.

At one point, Lombardi accidentally vocalises his insatiable desire for perfection (something he secretly acknowledges doesn’t exist) and tells the journalist that he’d rather be dead than be “down there in second place”. Then he spits out the dreaded words: “that was off the record”.

At the heart of a man who placed the Packers above God (with family a distant third) was a self-destructive focus and an all-inclusive love of each and every one of his players. Being an Italian-American who was too often overlooked for having “a vowel at the end of his name”, any hotel that refused blacks would never be frequented by his team.

Refreshingly, elements of his oft-told legend are debunked. McCormick explains to a laughing Lombardi about how he traced the origin of his oft-quoted mantra, “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” back to a John Wayne football film from 1955, “Trouble Along the Way”.

One great moment is when Lombardi rants about the poor writing of modern hacks, complaining about how Lambeau Field is so often referred to reverentially as the “frozen tundra”. “What’s wrong with that?” asks McCormick. “Tundras are always frozen!” roars the coach in response.

He also demands copy approval, ultimately forcing McCormick to quit his job before his editor refuses to print the finished product for being “too artsy”.

The play culminates in Green Bay’s 1965 NFL title victory which is depicted on screens high above us. It was the first of a historic three-in-a-row but all the time cancer was eating away at the increasingly obsessed coach.

After the cast walked off having accepted a well-deserved standing ovation, Lombardi’s representative on earth stopped at the edge of the stage, raised his fist and with a smile, mouthed the words: “Go Packers”.

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