Vince Lombardi was more than one of the greatest American football coaches of all time. He loathed discrimination and demanded acceptance from players and everyone else he worked with. In Lombardi’s eyes, everyone was equally deserving of respect.
Lombardi was born in Brooklyn 1913 and began his coaching career in 1939, as an assistant and later head coach at St. Cecilia High School in New Jersey. He is best known as head coach of the Green Bay Packers, after taking the position in 1959 with the team – who were not winning at the time. Lombardi pushed them to work hard and persevere, and his tactics eventually paid off with their many victories.
During the 1960’s, Lombardi led the Green Bay Packers to three straight and five total NFL Championships in seven years. This was in addition to winning the first two Super Bowls at the end of the 1966 and 1967 NFL seasons.
He never had a losing season as a head coach in the NFL, compiling a regular season winning percentage of 73.8 per cent and 90 per cent in the postseason for an overall record of 105 wins, 35 losses, and six ties in the NFL.
Lombardi passed away suddenly in 1970 from cancer, and still today is recognized as one of the greatest coaches and leaders in the history of all American sports. In 1971, the NFL Super Bowl trophy was named in his honor, and his name was put into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
He words will always remain with us, as he worked hard to sustain the leadership and perfection demonstrated throughout his career.
1. Winning isn’t everything – It’s the only thing.
2. It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever — the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.
3. Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.
4. If you aren’t fired up with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.
5. It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.
6. There’s only one way to succeed in anything, and that is to give it everything. I do, and I demand that my players do.
7. You defeat defeatism with confidence.
8. Individual commitment to a group effort, that is what makes a team work.
9. Success is based upon a spiritual quality, a power to inspire others.
10. We run to win, not just to be in the race.
11. Confidence is contagious; so is lack of confidence.
12. The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.
13. Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
14. The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.
15. No leader, however great, can long continue unless he wins battles. The battle decides all.
16. We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.
17. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.
18. The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.
19. Before I can embrace freedom, I should be aware of what duties I have.
20. 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.
21. Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.
22. I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is the moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle, victorious.
23. 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 habit.
24. The objective is to win: fairly, squarely, decently, win by the rules, but still win.
25. Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity.
26. Don’t succumb to excuses. Go back to the job of making the corrections and forming the habits that will make your goal possible.
27. If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?
28. I’m not afraid to die – it’s just that I had so much left to do in this world.
29. The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.
30. Mental toughness is spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication. It is fearlessness, and it is love.
31. Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
32. The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.
33. Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.
34. When you’ve got the momentum in a football game, that is a time to keep going and get it into the end zone. We want to score for America’s families.
35. Teams do not go physically flat, they go mentally stale.
36. Football is like life – it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.
37. Leadership is not just one quality, but rather a blend of many qualities; and while no one individual possesses all of the needed talents that go into leadership, each man can develop a combination to make him a leader.
38. A team that thinks it’s going to lose is going to lose.
39. There is only one way to succeed in anything and that is to give it everything.
40. I’ve been accused of lacking compassion. But that just shows I’m not without compassion.
41. The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.
42. We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.
43. I derived my strength from daily mass and communion.
44. A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.
45. Leadership is based on a spiritual quality; the power to inspire, the power to inspire others to follow.
46. The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.
47. Once you have established the goals you want and the price you’re willing to pay, you can ignore the minor hurts, the opponent’s pressure and the temporary failures.
48. 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.
49. Unless a man believes in himself and makes a total commitment to his career and puts everything he has into it – his mind, his body, his heart – what’s life worth to him?
50. Fatigue makes cowards of us all.
51. There is no substitute for work.
52. 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.
53. People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.
54. The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.
55. Success is like anything worthwhile. It has a price. You have to pay the price to win and you have to pay the price to get to the point where success is possible. Most important, you must pay the price to stay there.
56. A disciplined person is one who follows the will of the one who gives the orders.
57. It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you’ve got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not yet a winner.
58. At many a moment on many a day, I am convinced that pro football must be a game for madmen, and I must be one of them.
59. The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur.
60. Winners never quit and quitters never win.
61. Morally, the life of the organization must be of exemplary nature. This is one phase where the organization must not have criticism.
62. To be successful, a man must exert an effective influence upon his brothers and upon his associates, and the degree in which he accomplishes this depends on the personality of the man. The incandescence of which he is capable. The flame of fire that burns inside of him. The magnetism which draws the heart of other men to him.
63. Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will.
64. Teamwork is what the Green Bay Packers were all about. They didn’t do it for individual glory. They did it because they loved one another.
65. Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent’s pressure, and the temporary failures.
66. There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game and that is first place. I have finished second twice in my time at Green Bay and I never want to finish second again.
67. They call it coaching but it is teaching. You do not just tell them…you show them the reasons.
68. Football is a great deal like life in that it teaches that work, sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness and respect for authority is the price that each and every one of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
69. Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.
70. If you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives.
71. Getting to the final is everything, and winning is icing on the cake.
72. Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will be judged by only one thing – the result.
73. Winning is not everything – but making the effort to win is.
74. In order to succeed, this group will need a singleness of purpose, they will need a dedication, and they will have to convince all of their prospects of the willingness to sacrifice.
75. Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
76. Running a football team is no different than running any other kind of organization…
77. We know how rough the road will be, how heavy here the load will be, we know about the barricades that wait along the track, but we have see our soul ahead upon a certain goal ahead and nothing left from hell to sky shall ever turn us back.