A BLOCK OF GRANITE.

When Pride Still Mattered
A Life of Vince Lombardi
David Maraniss
Simon & Schuster, $26,  541pp.

It's not as if you aren't warned. "When Pride Still Mattered"? David Maraniss is pitching the good old days: football when color photos were beside the point because the men themselves came in black-and-white, grainy, grim. In the first paragraph of his preface, Maraniss, embarrassed, grabs your lapels and tells you he has used his awful title "with a certain irony." Don't believe him.

Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers are a wonderful sports story. When Lombardi came to the Packers in 1959, the team had not had a winning season since 1947. Professional football, a prime beneficiary of the advances in television camera technology in the 1950s, was about to become the remarkable entertainment phenomenon we have today. The league's other small-town franchises (the Portsmouth Spartans, Frankfort Yellowjackets, and such) had disappeared by the mid-1930s, and Green Bay's days were numbered. Lombardi, from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, a guard on Fordham University's "Seven Blocks of Granite" line of the 1936 season, turned it all around. In his first year, the Packers, who had won only one game the year before, won seven and lost five. The next year they lost to Philadelphia in the league title game. "This will never happen again," Lombardi told them, "you will never lose another championship." They were the champions the next year and the year after, and in 1965, l966, and l967, winning the first two Super Bowls in those last two years. By then the league had changed its college player draft to prevent Lombardi from drafting underclassmen to stockpile future winners. If the NFL hadn't changed that rule, Lombardi said, "no one would ever catch us." All the while, the television cameras were bringing us ever more intimate images of the brilliant, brutal play.

After the second Super Bowl victory, Lombardi, burned out, quit coaching the Packers. He spent a year watching his team lose, raging behind plastic glass in a booth above the field, and then left to coach Edward Bennett Williams's feeble Washington Redskins. Again, Lombardi won in his first year. He died of cancer before the next season.

A wonderful sports story. But Maraniss, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, can't leave it at that. If you're a serious fellow, you can't author a mere sports story, not in the age of Bob Costas and Doris Kearns Goodwin. No, your story must have...meaning. It was the "ambiguity of [Lombardi's] meaning in American culture," Maraniss tells us, that drove the author as he researched the book. (The "meaning," you won't be surprised to hear, is old-time decent subordination to the team and the goal-no hot-dogging, please.) And the economics of publishing now requires a big book, a big trade book, 500 pages, photographs, nice jacket,...the works.

Truth is, most of us don't live 500-pages' worth. Lombardi didn't. Maraniss is dauntless, though, and one way or another he gets there. He leaves out nothing. The long pages of why-am-I-reading-this? are relieved only occasionally by flashes of pure lunacy. "Little Ricky was gone by then. The dachshund scrambled for daylight whenever the front door opened, even on the bleakest of northern Wisconsin days, and one morning he made a vain effort to flee across the street and was struck by a snowplow. Marie [Vince's wife] took him to the vet and had him put to sleep, then broke the news to [the Lombardi children] Susan and Vincent, a more difficult task than the time back in New Jersey when she had to tell them that she had gassed their pet duck." (Remember Oscar Wilde on Dickens? "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.")

Another way to bulk it up-find the roots of everything. After all, you wouldn't write a biography of Saint Augustine and not ferret out the psychological origins of his ecclesiology. Lombardi, also an important guy, deserves no less. So,...coach Lombardi made his players practice till it hurt. Hurt....Ah, yes, pain. "Images of pain shaped his ancestral homeland of southern Italy, both the Neapolitan region of his father's Lombardis and the remote mountain village of Vietri di Potenza, home to his mother's Izzo clan. The people of southern Italy shared a history of pain on the largest scale fathomable: centuries of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, epidemics, revolts, famines, invasions, counterreformations, a communal memory of the works of man collapsing, crumbling, shaking, corpses burning, bodies thrown into the sea. In southern Italy pain was a constant of the human condition, the defining theme of religion and art. Paintings of flagellation, crucifixion, stigmata, biblical tragedies, luminous and muscular, with intimations of breathtaking pain. Pain was its own reward, to be endured, gloried [gloried?], but not overcome...." And on and on, paragraphs more of this nonsense on how Vince came to pain. Well, as the opening sentence of the book ("Everything begins with the body of the father") portends, Maraniss eventually finds or concocts an origin for each element in the Lombardi package-work, play, discipline, invention, you name it. The topper, I suppose, is his tracing the signature Green Bay running play, the power sweep, to The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola.

Despite Maraniss's best efforts, a picture of an interesting man emerges from the book. Lombardi was as driven and effective a man as ever went to work. (His home and family life, on the other hand, is a tale of inattention and incomprehension, painful to read.) His astonishing intensity, by turns abusive and tender, his quick passages from rage to satisfied laughter, worked wonderfully in football, a sport where coordinated explosive physical aggression carries the day. He would have been a disaster in baseball. Or would he? Would Lombardi have found a way to win there, too? Here Maraniss has it exactly right. "The will to succeed was his dominant characteristic, stronger in the end than his insistence on having things his way. If he had to adjust, he would find the means; it was a talent that he exhibited for the rest of his coaching career, though it often went unrecognized, overshadowed by his public image as the implacable leader who demanded that the world adapt to him."

If someone who knows you are not to be disturbed on Fall Sunday afternoons lays Maraniss's book on you for Christmas, skip the first couple hundred pages, get to Green Bay with Lombardi in February, 1959, and read a bit. Hidden in all the horse feathers is a wonderful sports story.

Neil Coughlan, the author of Young John Dewey, is a lawyer living in Connecticut.