Winning the quiz isn't everything, it's the only thing

Last week at Ray's I asked a Subject Round's worth of "Notable Quotes," which is to say I read 10 semi-famous to famous quotations and asked people to identify the speaker or writer thereof. This inadvertently launched one of those trivial debates that people who enjoy trivia love to kick around.

Quotes can be a tricky business as they are commonly misquoted, incorrectly attributed and so forth. I tried to pick 10 that were unlikely to be the least bit controversial, but no dice. One was "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." The attribution I was looking for was legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi.

As it turns out there are two separate controversies surrounding the quote. One is the position that it was first coined - most likely but not with certainty - by UCLA football coach Henry R. "Red" Sanders and not Lombardi. The other is that later in life, coaching the less successful Washington Redskins and suffering from terminal illness, Lombardi seems to have had some regret over being identified with a harmful, aggressive jock mentality and denied saying such a thing exactly.

There seems to be no doubt that Sanders was uttering the quote as early as the 1930s, and that Lombardi followed his lead either directly or via a now largely forgotten John Wayne movie in which a girl attributes the quote to Wayne's character. The film's screenwriter said he drew the quote directly from Sanders, who might in turn have derived it from other coaches years earlier. If you'd like to read an exceptionally detailed history of the life of a quote, check out this Football Studies [!] article in Adobe .pdf format.

The secondary argument is over whether or not Lombardi used the quote at all. This I'm more dismissive of; check out the Bartlett's entry:

"This remark has been widely attributed to football
coach Vince Lombardi. In Vince Lombardi on Football,
ed. George L. Flynn, vol. 1,chapter 1, p. 16 (1973),
Lombardi is quoted, “I have been quoted as saying,
‘Winning is the only thing.’ That’s a little out of context.
What I said is that ‘Winning is not everything—but making the
effort to win is.’”

Not everyone agrees. Time, September 14, 1970, p. 61,
attributed this remark to Lombardi and called it his
creed. Bob Rubin, Green Bay’s Packers, p. 84 (1973),
quotes this from Lombardi’s opening talk on the first
day of training camp in 1959."

Incidentally, Sanders died in 1958, which would explain the lack of input from him as Lombardi gained notariety through the 1960s. Saint Vincent was also quoted as saying "If winning isn't everything, why do they bother keeping score?", a quote which is far harder to misconstrue. Additionally I have a very hard time believing that Lombardi thought that "trying to win" would be motivational for an NFL team in 1959, and that he'd take the care to emphasize fair play, good sprortsmanship and the playing fields of Eton and such when facing Chuck Bednarik in the championship game.

Bottom line? I was looking for Lombardi as the answer, and 3 of 4 teams got it right. I didn't ask for who coined the thoughts or quotes originally, so I think I'm covered there; I actually took care in fact to point out that I was looking for more obvious answers than usual that round. Had anyone answered Red Sanders, which no one did, I would have awarded points. The question was over whether or not Lombardi ever said the quote, and I'm abundantly satisfied he did. It was the fourth round, not the sixth. I'm not likely to ask a question about the super-obscure Red Sanders in that round. Sometimes the obvious is obvious for a reason.

I'm always happy to discuss answers that people think might be off. Thus far I've posted about a few, owned up to be flat out wrong about a question once and noted that, unfortunately, I made a misattribution of a different sort in last week's Secret Theme round at Frank's. The answer to the question was correct, the connection to the theme not useful (two teams did manage to get the theme, which I thought more obvious than most, from the other 9 answers); more about that later this week ...