Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Cramoni. inspiring and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Kramon Institute.

I call this one, catching excellence.

Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing. This quotation adorns the walls of

locker rooms all across America. Spoken by the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi,

it has abiding appeal because Americans, like sensible people everywhere,

suspect without having to think much about it, that winning is preferable to losing.

This seems even more true in real life than in sports, and you can see why not just coaches, but generals and business executives

would make a note to themselves to remind the troops of this essential point at halftime.

Still, a small cloud of conscience always casts a slight shadow with a saying, as if there is

something there not altogether according to Hoyle, Some suggestion that success is the only measure of men.

It isn't, of course. The truth, as Coates Lombardi well understood, is more complex and interesting.

But there is no denying that Vince Lombardi was a winner.

The son of an Italian immigrant, Vincent Thomas Lombardi was born in Brooklyn on June 11th, 1913.

He played guard in the famed seven blocks of granite offensive line of Fordham University

in the 1930s.

As a high school coach in New Jersey, he won multiple football championships

and a regional competition in basketball,

even though he admitted to knowing little about that sport.

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