Coach: A Season with Lombardi

By Tom Dowling

Book Overview

In 1969, after one year of retirement, Vince Lombardi could stand it no longer. He returned and became head coach of the moribund Washington Redskins. They were the Redskins who had Sonny Jurgensen--the paunch with a golden arm--and a lot of other good guys who seldom won. It was a typical Lombardi frontal assault on an impressive challenge. He was the man who had won more games, more championships, and more awe than any other man in football. The stories held that he was a brutal, ego-busting, driving disciplinarian--and in part he was. He was no paper lion; he was the real thing

Tom Dowling joined Lombardi at training camp and lived with him and his players throughout the long, painful, dramatic season. It is doubtful that anyone has ever so completely got under the hide o f professional athletes or written so fascinatingly about them. Lombardi emerges as everything everyone had been saying of him--and something much more.

Coach is a superb portrait, exciting read, and an inside view of the most popular spectator sport in the country.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393331547
• ISBN13: 9780393331547
• Release Date: September 1970
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Dowling Writes A Definitive Primer on a Legend

Tom Dowling's "Coach: :A Season With Lombardi" is an entirely enjoyable read for anyone who is a Vince Lombardi afficianado. He brings to life aspects of Mr. Lombardi's personality and beliefs that heretofore have received little or no emphasis. Throughout the book he continually separates the urban legends from actual truths letting the reader come away with the feeling that he knows Vince Lombardi not only as a coach but as a great humanitarian, one of the ground breakers in the civil rights movement of the 1960's.

Interesting

Here's another look at the legendary Vince Lombardi, in his final year of coaching after leaving Green Bay to take over the hapless Washington Redskins.Tom Dowling was a young beat writer who followed the 1969 Washington Redskins. Much of the book's focus is how Lombardi reacted to being thrust into this new situation with a less-than-steller talent pool and yet with huge, unrealistic expectations of success. His relationship with the press that season was testy, to say the least.One of the underlying themes is that there was a lot of optimism for future success for the Redskins, based on expectations of what Lombardi could mold them into, given time. Of course Lombardi never had the chance to finish the job. Within six months of the end of the 1969 season, Lombardi lay in a hospital bed dying of intestinal cancer.The book is well written and focuses on the people involved more than the individual game results, with engaging looks into the lives of some of the players on that team. Their views of Lombardi are interesting to compare with those expressed by most (all?) of the members of his Packer teams during the glory years in Green Bay.This is an enjoyable read, and it's too bad this book is not better known or more highly regarded. Lots of used copies are available, and it's definitely worth a few bucks to buy this book.