Regarding the dictatorial coach, seeking vainly to sweep back the ocean of social change, everyone connected with sport has his own anthology of hilarious incidents, but the better coaches easily adjust to new situations. Not long ago the Associated Press circulated a feature page quoting ten major college coaches as to how they accommodated their one-time prejudices to the newer type of high school athlete. Hayes, Schembechler, Broyles, McKay and Parseghian confessed that they were bending with the times. Darrel Royal made an interesting comment:
In the 1950s my team had two-hour workouts morning and afternoon with no breaks for water. Now we stop at least every twenty minutes and let them have all the water or saline solution they want. In my opinion we coaches are just as strict as we once were. We have been taught or have learned better training methods.
But there are others who have made no concessions; like guardians at the gate they fight to prevent any social change from gaining entrance to the stadium. The consequences can be ridiculous. For example, coaches have fought a long battle against hair. Close-cropped themselves and inheritors of a Marine Corps tradition, they have sought to impose their standards on athletes who would prefer to follow the styles of their own generation. The coaches have heaped ridicule upon such men and have tried to enforce arbitrary rules, which the courts have struck down.
I was on one campus when the famous edict of J. Edgar Hoover appeared: ‘I cannot respect any man who wears long hair or a beard.’ A football player who had stubbornly resisted attempts to make him cut his hair responded, ‘Well, I guess that takes care of Jesus Christ and Ulysses S. Grant.’ Several coaches of professional teams have gained national attention by insisting that their players be shorn, but in reading their justifications, I have always wondered how they interpreted the Bible account of the athlete Samson. While his hair remained long, like that of a proper warrior, he was more powerful than an NFL linebacker; when he allowed it to be cut, the way the coaches advocate, he lost his strength.
In recent years two college coaches have received much attention, one in football and one in basketball. Frank Kush, a graduate of the Pennsylvania coal fields and Michigan State, has been presiding over the football team at Arizona State, building a local powerhouse which has the distinction of sending an unusual quota of graduates to the professionals. As one such player has said, ‘If you can play for Frank Kush, you can play for anybody.’
Hailed as ‘the new Vince Lombardi,’ Kush specializes in in bone-crunching offense, savage defense and the strictest training regimen in the nation. Late in August each year he takes his charges to a private camp he owns at the edge of the desert and there puts them through incredibly rigorous drills, featured by obligatory charges up Mount Kush, a nearby rock pile four hundred and fifty feet high and guaranteed to knock the wind out of even a super-athlete. For even a minor infraction during training, Kush barks out, ‘One mountain for you,’ and after practice the guilty one—’he came off the line too slow’—chugs up that steep and dusty incline.
Kush has produced an unbroken series of winners against better than average southwestern opposition, but not the real big time, has taken his teams to one bowl after another (1974 was a mediocre season, 7–5 and no bowl game, but in 1975 he was again 12–0 and ranked second in the nation) and has been invited to coach at various other colleges and in professional leagues. He lacks the charm of Vince Lombardi, and the ability to adjust to new situations, but he has compiled an impressive reputation as the toughest coach in the country. Three major magazine articles have featured his unique system, with numerous case histories of the remorseless manner in which he drives his players.
Mike Tomco, a three-year veteran from Anchorage, Alaska, tried to get his coach in focus for David Wolf of True magazine:
‘College football is an ugly business,’ said Tomco. ‘Kush just does what he thinks is necessary to win. I can take what he hands out—and it’s helped me—but a lot of kids can’t handle it. They go through the gate. We all hate him now, but later, most guys see he’s really made them play their best. You know, I’ve seen him do some awful things—stamp on hands, humiliate and emasculate guys till they quit football and left school, call ’em “wops” and “dagos,” and drive kids till they passed out. Still, aside from my father, there’s nobody I respect more. See, Kush is honest and fair. You can count on him in the clutch. He knows life is hard, so he’s teaching us to get up when we’re knocked down. He’s a different guy after the season. Like Jekyll and Hyde. Last winter I was broke but I wanted to take out my girl friend. I called Kush to see if he knew somebody who’d loan me a car. He gave me his car and ten bucks for dinner.’
Kush is not hesitant in discussing his philosophy of sport. Graduate of a tough system himself, he makes no apologies for his hard-nosed approach:
My job is to win football games. I’ve got to put people in the stadium, make money for the university, keep the alumni happy and give the school a winning reputation. If I don’t win, I’m gone.
Football is pain and agony, and our kids are prepared to pay the price. Our kids get mentally prepared for violence. In a pro camp it may depend on how much pain you can take.
The case of Jim Harding, who is reputed by even his enemies to understand the science of basketball better than anyone else, is illustrative. An Iowa boy who claims he won letters which records at the University of Iowa fail to confirm, he graduated with a degree in physical education and into a series of the routine small-time jobs that such would-be coaches land at the start of their careers. West Liberty High School in Iowa, Marquette High in Milwaukee and then college jobs, Loyola of New Orleans, Gannon College in Erie, Pennsylvania, and finally a big-time assignment, LaSalle in Philadelphia.
Through the years he made himself into a fierce disciplinarian, a tyrant and a man who used his coaching position as a base for psychological warfare. He abused his LaSalle players so flagrantly that he ran afoul of the sportswriters on the Philadelphia papers, and Frank Dolson of the Inquirer wrote a series of stories which made Harding’s position untenable.
He then shifted to the professional Minnesota Pipers, a tough, knowledgeable bunch of playground graduates, including Connie Hawkins, one of the great players of his day, spending his days in exile from the NBA. Jim Harding, vainly endeavoring to enforce his silly rules on these old-timers, drove them to distraction and himself to a heart attack. One of the most haunting things I have heard in sports is Hawkins’ confession that when Harding returned from his heart attack, partially recovered, his players purposely allowed the score to narrow in the final moments of each game, hoping that the excitement would knock him off for good.
‘No Rose Bowl, no Sugar Bowl, no Cotton Bowl, no …’
It became impossible for Harding to continue with the Pipers, but after a respite he landed on his feet once more, this time with the University of Detroit, another Catholic school which was giving up football and seeking to go big time in basketball. They could have done it, too, for they had one of the best college ballplayers in the country, Spencer Haywood, and a solid supporting cast of good ball-handlers.
Then the blows began to fall. Haywood quit school to enter the professional ranks in Denver, from where he would jump to the Seattle Supersonics, before moving to the New York Knicks. Then the Detroit players began to rebel against the drills Harding insisted upon, and several promising candidates quit. Harding was accused of threatening others with the loss of their scholarships, an illegal act under NCAA rules. The team lost cohesion, was riven by factionalism, and drifted to a 7–18 record, pitiful for a man who had often proclaimed: ‘I know more than 99.9 percent of the basketball coaches in the country.’ After another year he was through, a man from the sixteenth century trying to operate in the twentieth.
I am surprised that more big-time coaches don’t go the way of Jim Harding. The pressures on them to win are cruel, and the penalty for failure inescapable. I know of no other occupation where the evaluation of a man’s work is so incessant
; they say, with some justice, that a writer is no better than his last book, but he doesn’t produce a book every week, eleven weeks a year for instantaneous review. He can lick his wounds and recoup his energies, but the coach is on the firing line constantly.
He is trapped in an impossible bind. To keep his job he must win, but if he wins, it means that Coaches Y and Z at the bottom of the ladder must be losers, and sooner or later they will be fired.
Is it fair to penalize a man when the system itself is rigged against him? For some years I toyed with the idea that what we must do is educate our alumni to a realization that it was morally indecent to blame a coach for what it was mathematically impossible to avoid. (When my little college Swarthmore went 9–0 one miraculous year, I organized a group of alums to write letters of protest to our president, warning him that we had not intended to get our degrees from a football factory. He replied that he appreciated our letters, because after losing seasons he received so many complaints the other way, but he thought even the most rigorous school could absorb a winning season now and then.)
After long consideration of this problem, I have devised ‘An Irreverent Plan for Protecting Coaches.’ Its merit is that it ensures that every coach will have a winning season every year. Each alumnus can boast in his club, ‘This year we tied for the championship,’ and he can do so year after year. The plan is this. All colleges and universities are grouped together in conferences with twelve members. This is essential to the plan, and no deviation will be permitted. Since football teams play a schedule of eleven games, each member of the conference will play each other, and there will be an understanding that this year Team A wins its game against Team B, but that next year Team B will win.
At the conclusion of the tenth Saturday of each season, the conference standings will be as shown in the first column.
AN IRREVERENT PLAN FOR PROTECTING COACHES
On the last day of the season the Avengers play the Barracudas and win. The Challengers defeat the Destroyers. The Executioners wipe out the Firestorms, and so on down the line, with every 5–5 team clobbering every 6–4, and with the Killers annihilating the Limpets as usual, 55–3. The final standing is shown at the right, with eleven teams having winning seasons and all of them tied for the championship.
Obviously, the key to this system is the Limpets, who are required to lose every game every year in order for their fellow conference members to triumph. How are the Limpets to be persuaded to undergo this perpetual humiliation?
Simple. The university whose proud colors the Limpets wear will be granted, by the conference, enough money every year to build a new music auditorium or a theater or a cyclotron or a dormitory for women, plus a large grant for the purchase of books for the library. This money will come from donations which admiring alumni will contribute to the other eleven teams, each of which will have had not only a winning season but a share of the conference championship.
In addition, the coaches of the Limpets will have lifetime tenure at salaries equal to those paid by winning teams, and during the winter banquet season the Limpet coaches will speak on the moral values to be gained from football, and when they proclaim, ‘At our university we stress character, not winning,’ everyone will know they’re telling the truth. To coach the Limpets will not be all bad, not by any means.
But what of the players? How can we persuade high school athletes to join the Limpets when their record over the past nine years has been 0–99? Very simple. Limpet recruiters will tell their prospects what all recruiters say, ‘We’re interested primarily in your education, not your football ability.’ But they will be able to prove it. ‘Of the one hundred boys who played for us, ninety-nine graduated. Hoskins didn’t. He got a girl in trouble and fled to Mexico. Our alumni found a job for every boy who wanted to go into business. Our placement bureau found a slot for every boy who planned to enter medical school. We have the best library in the Missouri Valley and the newest science buildings, thanks to the grants we get each year.’ And if the student is perverse enough to ask what it would be like to spend four years playing football with the Limpets and going 0–44, the recruiter will say solemnly, ‘As Grantland Rice himself pointed out,
For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name
He marks—not that you won or lost—
But how you played the game.
You join us on the Limpets, and every week you’ll recognize the truth of those noble lines.’ I believe with the proper recruiters we could make playing for the Limpets actually attractive.
The conference, too, will profit. When cynics complain that athletes at Barracuda are not graduating, the officials there and at the other conference schools could point proudly to the Limpet record of graduating ninety-nine out of a hundred athletes and let that stand as surrogate for the whole, the way the Pacific Eight Conference now does with the Stanford record.
There is one tactical problem I haven’t solved. If bowls contribute major funds to university programs—over $35,000,000 in television money over the last ten years, plus a like amount in gate receipts—our conference might find it obligatory to produce only one champion each year, so that it could move on to some bowl, sharing its income with the other eleven members. This could be solved relatively simply. Let the Barracudas, in the example given, win their last game against the Avengers; this would give the Barracudas a 7–4 record and the title. Of course, the Avengers would then become losers at 5–6, which might be disastrous, except that when we force the Avengers to lose this year, we would also promise them that next year in the final game they would win, have a record of 7–4, and pick up some bowl money, which should be enough, I believe, to save their coach’s job.
The more I think about this reasonable plan, the more I like it. At least it’s as sensible as the various plans being followed today. And not the least of its virtues is that after ten or fifteen years of concentrating academic excellence at the Limpets’ university, we would have in each area of the United States one institution of real merit. Its growing departments, its enhanced library and its constantly improving faculty would be a positive boon to the nation.
The plan has three serious weaknesses, all financial. 1) If the outcome of a game can be known in advance, what will happen to the multitude of football pools and gambling lines across the country? That’s something to worry about. 2) Would ABC or CBS show any interest in televising a midseason game from such a conference when the standings of the best team could be no better than 4–3? 3) And would any self-respecting bowl committee select a team, even if it did win the championship, if it had only a 7–4 record? Millions upon millions of dollars are at stake here and I shall have to work further on my plan.
I must make two final observations about athletes and their coaches, each of a seemingly irrelevant nature but each instructive. Of the sixty athletes I have known, fifty-nine have been Republicans, only Stan Musial having been a Democrat, although some of the Southwestern Conference men may be so nominally. Joe Paterno, I believe, was the son of a Democratic father, but he quickly changed when a coaching career became feasible.
The athlete and his coach move in a world of conservative values and are surrounded by conservative types. Very few Democrats among the alumni have private jets, or good jobs to dispense, or the spare cash to endow athletic scholarships or build press boxes so that the university ‘can go really big time.’ Also, coaches know that conservative, hard-nose procedures pay off. For every hotshot newcomer who throws passes all over the place, there are ten tough old buzzards like Woody Hayes and Bear Bryant who work on the system of ‘four yards, a cloud of dust and a bucket of blood.’ They’re the ones who remain in coaching till their mid-sixties.
If I were a coach I’d recruit all my boys from underprivileged Democratic families and convert them to Republican linemen and back-court strategists. I wouldn’t have a single Democrat among my assistant coaches and I’d quickly identify the businessmen in my area who had
private jets. I would not be a coach like Jim Harding or Frank Kush. Ara Parseghian and Joe Paterno are more my type.
The reasons why athletes and their coaches tend to be conservative Republicans have been well explained by Rick Sortun, who played varsity football at the University of Washington and later in the NFL:
You are subtly channeled into an educational rut. Your advisors suggest fairly simple courses, like PE [physical education] or business. The practices leave you too tired to study more than what you need to get by. You’re definitely too tired to think on your own. You’re told to be suspicious of hippies and radicals. You end up avoiding the kind of associations—the serious bull sessions, the intellectual give-and-take with people of various philosophies—that are really as much ‘college education’ as what you learn in the classroom.
Increasingly, you accept the philosophy of the locker room. Physical strength and the ability to withstand pain are the most positive virtues. Women are things. Bookish people and little people are suspect. Finally, with the scholarships, the alienation, and the practice hours, you come to view it all as a job.
In recent years the athletic profession has had three heroes, Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon and General Patton, and it has had bad luck with two of them. It is understandable that coaches should have revered the first two: they talked football language, were no-nonsense men, and showed little sympathy for the radical life styles that were sweeping the campuses and threatening established routines. I have a score of quotes from sports figures regarding these heroes; a couple have crept into this manuscript, but the kindest and most typical, I think, appeared in the 1973 Nebraska guide, a lavish full-color 200-page job that sold for $2.00 and was worth it: