He added: “Johnny Unitas, John Hadl, Willie Lanier. They all won a statue of me.”

Wright sees football as merely a game and not a way of life. Although he describes his seasons in the league as “the time of his life,” he is not sentimental about his years in the game. In 2011, he auctioned off his ring from Super Bowl I for $73,000.

Wright, especially in his book, has little reverence for the game’s icons, including his coach at Alabama, Bear Bryant.

“Bryant’s an impressive person until you know him,” Wright wrote. On a visit to the coach’s house, he noticed, “The whole place was covered with nothing but pictures of him.”

He went on: “I was surprised there weren’t just plain wall mirrors instead. It would have saved a lot of trouble.”

While there are many targets for Wright’s ire in his book, Lombardi is not one of them.

“He was a strict disciplinarian,” Wright wrote, “yet he was able to bend enough because he had an end: he wanted to win football games. It didn’t make any difference to him what you looked like, where you came from or what you did in the off-season, just as long as when you walked on that field with a Packer uniform on, you were the best.”