By Glenn Garvin
MiamiHerald.com
When Vince Lombardi came home one evening in 1959 to tell his little daughter that they were leaving New York because he’d gotten a new job coaching a football team in Green Bay, Wis., she was skeptical. “Where’s Wisconsin?’ she demanded.
Lombardi pointed out the state on an atlas, but the girl was still suspicious: “Where’s Green Bay?” Lombardi, after searching for several minutes, admitted it wasn’t on the map. “When I am done,” he promised her, “it will be on that map.”
The story of the football dynasty Lombardi built on Wisconsin tundra so bleak it was known as the NFL’s Siberia is told in one of a pair of television documentaries airing Saturday night. Taken together, they’re a reminder that — for better and sometimes for much, much worse — big stories sometimes come from small, obscure places.
The more heartening of the two is Lombardi, HBO’s biography of the coach who is at once the most revered and the least understood in NFL history. A troglodyte bully who made his players do calisthenics until they collapsed in vomit, a cerebral football tactician who could lecture for eight hours straight on the structure of a single play, Lombardi somehow managed to make his players fear him and love him at the same time.
And most of all, he made them win: a never-matched five NFL titles in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls. Lombardi’s name became so synonymous with football excellence that the NFL named the Super Bowl trophy after him. When he finally left Green Bay for a job in Washington, D.C., he had to warn a press conference full of exuberant local reporters: “I can’t walk across the Potomac, even when it’s frozen.”
As HBO’s documentary points out, Lombardi was anything but an instant success. A college player of modest talent who overachieved through fanatic self-discipline, he was part of a legendary offensive line at then-football power Fordham that was known as the Seven Blocks of Granite.
When he went into coaching, Lombardi found nobody would give him control of a team above the high school level. As an assistant coach, he helped shape Army into a collegiate juggernaut, then did the same in the NFL with the New York Giants. But he was continually passed over for head coaching jobs.
Lombardi was convinced it was anti-Italian bias. Whether that was true or not, he was a relatively senior 46 years old when an offer finally came: to coach the Packers, a team so miserable for so long that its coach was being hangged in effigy on downtown streets and the NFL was seriously considering revoking the franchise.
Lombardi instantly imposed a brutal work ethic of endless conditioning drills and interminable practices conducted to a soundtrack of continual screaming. He literally terrorized the team into winning.
“I think it was self-preservation,” remembers one player. “Make him happy, maybe he’d be nicer on us tomorrow.”
Lombardi also sensed how far a few word of praise would go in winning the loyalty of a browbeaten team. Future Hall of Fame guard Jerry Kramer tells how he was hanging his head in the locker room after enduring yet another day of tirades from Lombardi. Lombardi slipped up from behind, patted him on the head and murmur red: “Son, one of these days you’re going to be the best guard in football.” After that, Kramer says, he would have killed for Lombardi.
Lombardi’s histrionics were, at least in part, a calculated act. (One Green Bay administrative employee recalls catching the coach practicing scowls and grimaces in a mirror.) But separating pretense from reality was not easy and perhaps not even possible.
Lombardi’s terrified family often fled to the basement to hide out from his evil moods, and his wife resorted to pills and alcohol in such excess that she was hospitalized at least once for an overdose. Even Lombardi himself came to regret his most famous pronouncement of football fascism — that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
His raging fanaticism took a heavy physical toll, and in the end, he, too, was terrorized, lying in a hospital bed with most of his intestines eaten away by cancer. One of his former players, Frank Gifford, still chokes back tears as he remembers Lombardi’s final whispered words to him: “Frank, it really hurts.”
Read more: Documentaries offer big news from little obscure places - TV & Radio - MiamiHerald.com
I will get this and watch it tonight 
