Packers Football Quotes

Did you know Granddaddy was a famous quarterback with the Green Bay Packers?” she said breathlessly. “My friends at school told me he won these things called Super Bowls and championships…” She didn’t

In my final years in Green Bay, when I wasn't getting the ball, people would ask me why I never complained. 'Because these guys are my family,' I would say. 'I'm not selfish. It's not about me. It's about these guys, my family, and winning championships together.

I was so raw I didn't know about the Lambeau Leap-a Packer player celebrates catching a touchdown by leaping into the stands. It was started by Leroy Butler years before and has been copied by players all over the league. Don't be fooled, though. The only legitimate Lambeau Leap is celebrated by a Packer at Lambeau Field.

For us there are still the great gods Sex, Shekels, and Stomach (an unholy trinity constituting one god, self), and the other enslaving trio, Pleasure, Possessions, and Position, whose worship is described in 1 John 2:16 as “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in posses-sions.” Football, the Firm, Freemasonry, and the Family are also gods for some, and indeed the list of other gods is endless, for anything that anyone allows to run his life becomes his god, and the claimants for this prerogative are legion. In the matter of life’s basic loyalty, temptation is a many-headed monster.

Winning is the only thing' does not mean 'win at all costs, by any means, fair or foul.' Nor does it mean that losing is without dignity. Every team, even the Green Bay Packers at their best, loses sometimes. It means that losing is, in the end, one's own responsibility. One's own fault. It means there are no excuses. 'Winning is the only thing' is capable of sinister interpretations. But it is also capable of expressing the highest human cravings for perfection. Winning does not simply mean crushing one's foes but being the best one can possibly be--and conquering the fates and adversities that are stronger forces even than opposing teams. Winning is both excellence and vindication in the face of the gods. It is a form of thumbing one's nose, for a moment, at the cancers and diseases that, in the end, strike us all down, every one of us, even spirits as alive as Vince Lombardi's.

The greatest glory is being knocked to your knees and then rising again. Lombardi repeated this phrase often, until it rang in the head of every single Packer, like a ubiquitous radio jingle.

but other times he fumbled like a Lions player taking on the Packers on Monday Night Football.

Hall of Fame football coach John Madden, in a documentary about Vince Lombardi, told a story about how, as a young assistant coach, he attended a coaching clinic where Lombardi spoke about one play: the power sweep, a running play that he made famous with the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s. Lombardi held the audience spellbound as he described that one play for eight hours. Madden said, “I went in there cocky, thinking I knew everything there was to know about football, and he spent eight hours talking about this one play. . . . I realized then that I actually knew nothing about football.

Nowadays in the West people idolize and, in effect, worship secular objects such as the firm, the family, football, and pleasant feelings of various kinds. But moral decline still results, just as it did when pagans worshipped literal idols in Bible times.

When I look back from our technology work to the coaching of Vince Lombardi, I see in his approach to football the same pursuit of clarity and perfection that we sought in our effort to make products at Apple. With his single-minded emphasis on the Power Sweep, and with the success the Packers enjoyed as a result, Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches. Lombardi connected his words and his team’s actions in football by focusing on one simple play, while at Apple, with our single-minded emphasis on never making the browser slower, we connected our words and actions in software by focusing on one simple rule.