How a Lombardi Biography Gave Us a Conversation

My brother Phil called me on a Tuesday night last autumn, which was unusual in itself. We talk at holidays and we talk at funerals, and the rest of the year we let the phone ring. He was cleaning out Mom's garage before the estate sale and had found a cardboard box of our father's old things. Trophies, a whistle, a stack of game programs going back to 1961, and a single leather shoelace tied in a knot that I still have not undone.

Dad coached high school football for thirty years. Phil told me he had picked up David Maraniss's When Pride Still Mattered, the biography of Vince Lombardi, on a whim, so he would have some piece of Dad's world in his hands while he sorted Dad's things. The book arrived the same day the box did, and he had stayed up half the night reading it. He wanted me to know it was good, and then he went quiet, which I should have recognized as a man working up to something.

You would think thirty years of coaching tells you everything about a man. It tells you almost nothing. Practice ran until six, and by seven, when Dad sat down to dinner, he was just Dad, quiet, done with talk. What we never knew, Phil and I, was what any of it had ever meant to him, what a Friday night under those lights had felt like from where he stood, what he felt the first time a boy he had coached walked off the field in tears. It was a silence we had stopped noticing, the way you stop noticing a creaky step.

Phil read me the inscription in the front of the oldest program. To Pap, from the 1962 squad. Pap. Nobody who ever came to our house called him that, and I had to pull the phone away from my ear for a second. It was the first piece of our father's other life either of us had ever touched, and it had been sitting folded in a cardboard box for forty years, waiting for a Tuesday night.

We sat on the phone until past midnight, and for the first time in thirty years I heard my brother try to describe the sound of our father's voice.

My father died when I was thirty-two. Phil was twenty-eight. We were the generation that did not talk about the dead, so we had simply never talked about him. When that cardboard box of programs and my brother's copy of the book showed up on my doorstep, I had no idea either one would end the silence. I almost did not open the book for a week. Somewhere in me I knew it was going to cost me an evening, and I was right.

I read When Pride Still Mattered slowly, the way you read something you intend to argue about at the dinner table. Maraniss wrote the biography without the hagiography. Lombardi comes alive as a man with a temper, a stutter he spent his whole life compensating for, a father no one could ever quite please, and a ferocious belief that how you prepared mattered more than how you performed. It is a football book the way Moby Dick is a whale book. The subject is really what a man will give up to win, and what winning costs him.

Somewhere in the middle of it I put the book down and called Phil. Not about Lombardi. About Dad. I told him about the story Pap used to tell every Thanksgiving, about the rainy game where the kicker ran the wrong way and then cried in the locker room, and Dad never once raised his voice. He just took the boy's face in both hands and told him that was the bravest thing he had seen all year. Phil said he remembered every word of it.

Then he said something I will remember until I die. All those years we thought Dad was silent about the game because it did not matter to him, and it turned out to be the opposite. He was silent because it mattered too much, because he had poured that many evenings of himself into boys who were not his and did not know how to say what that had cost him. Maraniss's book had done for the two of us in a single week what thirty Thanksgivings of the same story had never done.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are reading this and thinking of a man in your life who does not talk, let me be plain with you. Buy the book, read it yourself first, then leave it where he will find it. Do not make a production of it. A gift that announces you want to talk is the loneliest gift in the world if the other person is not ready yet. Maraniss's When Pride Still Mattered comes to you ready for this. Underline it. Dog-ear pages. Write in the margins where a passage suddenly sounded like your own father.

The reason I would hand you this book before any other football history is that it is not really about football at all. It is about what pride costs and what pride buys, and it is about men my age and their fathers. It gives you a way to start a conversation that does not begin with those three terrible words, we need to talk. That is worth more than a whole season of Friday nights, and it is the closest thing to a gift for the quiet man in your life that I know how to give.