Old Yeller: Words of wis-dumb from a short-sleeved football coachin' feller
Happy Anni-hearse-ary™ to the most-quoted sideline philosopher in all of bloody sports: Hard-nosed, gap-toothed American football fireplug Vincenzo Lombardo, life coach of the Green Bay Meat Packerers. In addition to bringing two hallowed — possibly hollowed — Super Balls™ to the godforsaken tundra of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the long-winded, short-sleeve-shirted Tweeterer™ amassed enough 140-word adages, axioms, maxims, truisms, platitudes — and other words meaning roughly the same thing—to fill a smartly designed Pinterest® pinboard. Herewith, our top 10 Lombardo Leaps of Logic: 1) “Winning isn’t the only thing. There’s also losing, but that's the thing we hope to avoid.” 2) “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you both the door. The door will be locked, the key nowhere to be found and good luck finding a locksmith at this hour.” 3) “The spirit, the will to win and the will to excel are the things that endure, unlike stomach distress, which eventually passes.” 4) “Winning is not a sometime thing. It’s an all-time thing — a morning, noon and night-time-across-the-various-time-zones type thing.” 5) “Winners never quit, quitters never win and quilters never whine, because quilting is a multi-coloured — if tedious — joy to behold.” 6) “Leaders are made, they're not born. Anybody can be born. Hell, go down to the maternity ward and they're poppin' 'em out as we speak.“ 7) “The only place where ‘success’ comes before ‘work’ is in the dictionary. Unless your dictionary is Spanish-to-English, or the binding is shot and you have whole sections missing.” 8) “If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score, and why did I take Mr. Baseball Pete Rose’s money and put it on our guys?” 9) “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, nor a lack of knowledge, but it is a lack of something, I just can’t quite put a finger on it.” 10) “I love Brian Piccolo.” Indeed. Pictured here shouting life affirmations at anyone within earshot, Coach Lombardo took his final Run to Daylight on this day, September 3, 1970. RIP, Old Yeller.
