Coach Lombardi influenced Wolfpack’s Jimmy V

We’re in countdown mode for the kickoff of Super Bowl LIV on Sunday, Feb. 2. The winning team takes home the NFL’s Vince Lombardi Trophy, named after the legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi.

He guided the Packers to victory in the first Super Bowl in 1967, and came back the following year to win another championship.

Vincent Thomas Lombardi was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, N.Y. As a football coach, Lombardi influenced millions of men and women in the sports world and beyond.

Lombardi was a “rock star” in the eyes of an impressionable James Thomas Anthony Valvano, who was born in 1946 in Queens, N.Y. Valvano played basketball at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J.

He came to North Carolina State University in 1980 to coach the Wolfpack men’s basketball squad. Valvano led the team to the NCAA championship in 1983.

Ten years later, Valvano delivered one of the greatest televised speeches of all time at the “ESPY Awards” show in 1993, sponsored by the ESPN network. Visibly suffering from cancer, Valvano received the inaugural Arthur Ashe Courage Award, named for the late African-American tennis star Arthur Ashe.

Valvano gave a dagnabbit warning to ESPN: “I’m going to speak longer than anybody else has spoken tonight. Time is very precious to me. I don’t know how much I have left, and I have some things that I would like to say.”

Valvano was quick to inject his special brand of humor, sharing his first coaching experience at the helm of Rutgers’ freshman basketball team. He was 21.

Valvano had been studying the book “Commitment to Excellence: Lombardi Style” and planning his first pre-game pep talk. “I’m getting this picture of Lombardi before his first game, and he said, ‘Gentlemen, we will be successful this year, if you can focus on three things, and three things only. Your family, your religion and the Green Bay Packers.’”

Valvano said: “That’s beautiful. I’m going to do that. Your family, your religion and Rutgers Basketball. That’s it. I had it…and I’m going to be the greatest coach in the world, the next Lombardi. I’m practicing outside of the locker room…family, religion, Rutgers Basketball. I got it, I got it.”

“I go to knock the doors open just like Lombardi. Boom! They don’t open. I almost broke my arm. Finally, I said, ‘Gentlemen, we’ll be successful this year if you can focus on three things, and three things only. Your family, your religion and the Green Bay Packers.’ I did that.”

One of Valvano’s key messages that continues to resonate is: “There are three things we all should do every day of our lives.” One – laugh. Laugh every day. Two – think. Spend time in thought. Three – have your emotions moved to tears.

“If you laugh, you think and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special,” he said.

When sportscasters Dick Vitale and Bob Valvano, younger brother of Jim, get together nowadays, they laugh about their favorite part of the ESPY show speech. Bob recites it perfectly:

“That screen is flashing up there ‘30 seconds,’ like I care about that screen right now, huh? I got tumors all over my body. I’m worried about some guy in the back going, ‘30 seconds?’ Hey, va’ fa Napoli, buddy.”

That Italian phrase translates to “get lost, take a hike” or words to that effect.

Valvano and ESPN partnered to create the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research, which adopted the motto of “Don’t give up…don’t ever give up.”

His parting words were: “Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.”

Coach Valvano died April 28, 1993, about seven weeks after his famous TV speech. His gravestone in Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh bears the inscription: “Take time every day to laugh, to think, to cry.”