A well-researched and strongly narrated biography of iconic Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. The New Yorker’s rise to national prominence was slow, but included a playing career at then-powerful Fordham (where he was one of the ‘blocks of granite’) and coaching stints with Red Blaik’s Army and the New York Giants (alongside fellow assistant Tom Landry), such that his bloodlines were notable. Author Maraniss also notes often that Lombardi was friendly with many of the leading sportswriters / myth makers of the era — without saying whether that was product of his success or something he sought out. A stout Jesuit, Lombardi believed in presenting information at a pace so that the slowest in the group could understand, and in a menu of few plays with many options, drilled incessantly until execution was innate. The most famous of these was the sweep. At Green Bay, his success catapulted him into the realm of business leadership. The standard seven themes of his addresses: 1) pay the price, 2) the value of competition, 3) commitment to personal excellence, 4) more authority, less freedom (in reference to the tumultuous 1960s), 5) effective leaders are disciplined and impart that trait, 6) leaders are made, and most of all 7) character is a habit superimposed on temperament, and will is character in action. Maraniss cannot resist a bit of postmodern-inspired exploration of the gap between reality and popular understandings (or ‘myth’), as if this discord is not inevitably the case and indeed the very purpose of biography. A fine work on an interesting fellow.