Lombardi’s Law
Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
This law always will be associated with football coach Vincent Lombardi who raised the lowly Green Bay Packers to glory winning the first two Super Bowls in 1968 and 1969, but he did not originate it. The line appears in a 1953 movie Trouble Along the Way in which John Wayne plays a football coach at a small Roman Catholic School, and it was articulated before that in real life by Red Sanders who coached football at UCLA at the time the movie was made.
Respectfully Quoted, published by the Library of Congress, reports that Sanders employed it as early as 1948 at Vanderbilt where he coached before moving to UCLA. The exhortation could well be much older. Coach Lombardi tried more than once to deny the quote, maintaining that what he really said was that winning isn’t everything but that wanting - or making the effort - to win is. In the charged atmosphere of the locker room, the thought may well have been compressed. At least it was the stronger, harsher form that Green Bay guard Jerry Kramer remembered in his best-selling Instant Replay (1968) which popularised the saying.
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