Official Vince Lombardi Playbook

Vince Lombardi was notorious for his inability to throw anything away. What that means to fans of one of football's greatest figures finally comes together in The Vince Lombardi Playbook—an unprecedented collection of intimate photos; colorful reflections from players who honed their skills under Lombardi; personal mementos; and an array of his handwritten speeches, personal letters, scouting reports, and photos of players. Above all, The Vince Lombardi Playbook highlights the plays that made the Packers great: the feared power sweep, the halfback option pass, the textbook traps, the risky third-and-short passes, and many others. Featured in diagrams in Lombardi's original hand, with accompanying terminology and notations, these archival gems form an all-access pass onto the field and into the mind of a legend. Americans yearn for a more simple era, when athletes made news for their sporting accomplishments, not their arrests or congressional testimony. Most sports fans are equally nostalgic for the on-field simplicity of those days. Paying homage to a legend, The Vince Lombardi Playbook will be treasured by fans as an irresistible piece of history.

Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry could not have had two more divergent personalities. Yet, while working for the New York Giants in the mid-1950s under head coach Jim Lee Howell, the pair formed what still stands as the greatest set of coordinators on one team. Given their personalities, one might have likened Howell’s job to that of Dwight Eisenhower’s as the general struggled to control the egos and politics of his allied subordinates during WWII. But for some reason, Lombardi and Landry worked almost seamlessly, leading the Giants to the top of the NFL. In the five seasons the two men coached together between 1956 and 1959, the Giants appeared in three championship games, winning the NFL title in ‘56. Both coaches would go on to NFL stardom, Lombardi with the Green Bay Packers and Landry with the Dallas Cowboys. But it was during their years as Giants coordinators that they developed the coaching philosophies they would employ later in their careers. For Lombardi, it was the reliance on the running game that started with Frank Gifford and would continue in the “Packers Sweep” days of Paul Hornung. For Landry, it was his own invention of the 4-3 defense that led to the “Flex” defense of his Super Bowl winners in Dallas. How they developed their ideas, and how they were allowed to implement them, was a testament not only to their genius, but Howell’s willingness to let them handle the strategic matters while he looked after the big picture. In Lombardi and Landry, veteran sportswriter Ernie Palladino takes an in-depth look at these two legends’ formative years in New York, offering up a vivid, revealing portrait of two brilliant coaches just coming into an understanding of their formidable powers.

Winning wasn't the only thing for the one of the greatest coaches of professional football, but wanting to win was. Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers ruled the game through the 1960s, and his skills of innovation, motivation, and teaching hold priceless lessons for leaders everywhere. Vince Lombardi was one of the greatest coaches of professional football, in the days when the pro game was just beginning to eclipse college ball and displace baseball as the nation's premiere sport. Lombardi's Green Bay Packers dominated the National Football League for much of the 1960s and won the first two Super Bowls, and he was so much admired for his toughness and innovative skills that Richard Nixon actually considered asking Lombardi to be his vice-presidential candidate in 1968. New Word City, publishers of digital originals, contributes 10 percent of its profits to literacy causes.

On the field, legends like Don Hutson, Ray Nitschke, and Brett Favre made the Green Bay Packers into a professional football powerhouse. But the history of the NFL’s only small-town franchise is as much a story of business creativity as gridiron supremacy. Behind every Packer who became a legend on the field, there was an Andrew Turnbull, Dominic Olejniczak, or Bob Harlan, leaders whose dedication and creativity in preserving the franchise were unwavering. Green Bay Packers: Trials, Triumphs, and Traditions tells the improbable story of professional football’s most iconic team, and along the way gives a unique window into the rise of modern professional sports. As the NFL has evolved into a financial juggernaut, the Green Bay Packers, with more than 112,158 stockholders, stand alone as the only professional sports franchise owned by fans, thus providing the only public record of how a sports team is run. Featuring more than 300 photographs, some never before seen, Green Bay Packers illustrates how the most creative team in sports is also one of the most successful, with names like Lambeau, Canadeo, Lombardi, Hornung, Holmgren, and White leading the way to a league-best thirteen NFL titles and twenty-one Hall of Fame inductees. This comprehensive, up-to-date history of the Packers includes the 2011 season.

The 466 men who have held the increasingly demanding and prestigious position of Head Coach in the National Football League and the two leagues that merged into it (the All America Football Conference of the 1940s and the American Football League of the 1960s) form an exclusive club. This book essentially answers three questions about every professional head coach since 1920: Who was he? What were his coaching approach and style, in terms of both leadership and gridiron tactics? How successful was he? Every entry begins with standard background information, followed by each coach's yearly regular season and postseason coaching record, and then his statistical tendencies toward scoring, defense and play calling. The entry then addresses the three questions noted above.

VINCE LOMBARDI’S LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES: • Envision a successful future ― then chart a course to get there. • Communicate your vision with passion and conviction. • Know the people you lead; find out what motivates each one. • Lead with character and integrity. • Inspire confidence through your competence and success. • Lead boldly, act decisively, don’t second-guess yourself. • Don’t just be a boss ― be a servant to your people.

By the time he died of cancer in 1970, after one season in Washington during which he transformed the Redskins into winners, Lombardi had become a mythic character who transcended sport, and his legend has only grown in the decades since. Many now turn to Lombardi in search of characteristics that they fear have been irretrievably lost, the oldfashioned virtues of discipline, obedience, loyalty, character, and teamwork. To others he symbolizes something less romantic: modern society's obsession with winning and superficial success. In When Pride Still Mattered, Maraniss renders Lombardi as flawed and driven yet ultimately misunderstood, a heroic figure who was more complex and authentic than the stereotypical images of him propounded by admirers and critics.