The most poignant description of Lombardi’s misery in 1968, as he watched the team decompose under Phil Bengtson, is given by former Player Personnel Director, Pat Peppler,

“I’ll tell you a story you probably haven’t heard. The Packer locker room, it was like a conference room and then the coaches’ locker room was behind that. Well, late in that year with Vince as general manager, we were just about out of it, and we were gonna play the Vikings. We had about two or three games left. Vince told Phil he wanted to talk to the team and he went in and he talked to the team. I was in that office and I was on the phone doing some things in there when Vince came out of that meeting. I found out later what he said in there, but he was trying to stir ‘em up. He came in the room and he looked at me and he said, “Goddamnit, I don’t know why I have to whip ‘em all the time to get ‘em to do it.” He sort of looked at me a little bit and I said, “Coach, you trained ‘em with a whip. You can’t put it down.” He said, “Yeah.” He went over and he took his chair, faced it into the corner, like a kid sittin’ in the corner, and he broke down and cried like a baby. Then, he finally got straightened out, and he said, “There is so damn much I wanted to tell ‘em.” He felt like he had let ‘em down. He was just so upset. I mean, Vince was emotional anyway, but he was really upset.

Willie Davis, Hall of Fame defensive end from THE LOMBARDI LEGACY:

“I tell you right now, Green Bay would be totally, totally misled if they felt for a minute that Lombardi didn’t blaze the way, open the way for black players. Not only in Green Bay, but for the rest of the league, because as he took black players and built us into champions. I think the league started to look around and see these black players make a difference in Green Bay. You saw ‘em pop up more frequently in other places, and I think, to that extent, it was definitely driven by him.”

Vince Lombardi’s secretary, Lori Keck:

“Everybody’s heard of “Lombardi Time,” which is 15 minutes earlier than the appointed or scheduled time. My one main fault is being on time for work, anyway this one particular morning I rolled in, I was no more than five minutes late and it was probably only a couple minutes. There was a bus in the parking lot to take the team to the airport for an out of town game, it was parked at the front door and I thought, “Well, I’m not walking through that.” I parked by the back door and thought I was home free. Lombardi had seen my car (from the bus) and sent Tom Miller (business manager) in to the office to tell me if I couldn’t get to work on time they would find somebody who could. Of course, that was a warning and I improved after that.”

Comments from chapter 20 on Vicki Aldridge Nelson, a white woman who married Lionel Aldridge, a black defensive end on Lombardi’s teams:

Make no mistake, interracial marriage in 1965 was a very big issue for the National Football League, so much so, that pressure was applied on Lombardi to stop the marriage. According to Vicki Aldridge Nelson the message was delivered in person, “Yes, the commissioner (Pete Rozelle) came into town and tried to stop it. And Mr. Lombardi said (to Rozelle), “Absolutely not, this is my team. My team is who my team is and nobody can tell me what I can, and cannot do.” Lombardi defied the commissioner on a critical social issue at an extremely sensitive time in our country’s history.