49ers’ Jack Reynolds Would Rather Be Playing and Hitting : Does This Guy Look Like a Coach?

For Jack (Hacksaw) Reynolds, who will be 38 in November, this will be the year of a career change--maybe.

The champion San Francisco 49ers are trying to make a linebacker coach out of the old linebacker, and he’s going along with them for the present. But 1985 may be Reynolds’ last year in football.

“Coaches work twice as many hours as players,” Norb Hecker, a 49er assistant, said the other day at the team’s training camp in Rocklin, Calif. “And Hacksaw told me he’d have to think about that. It never surprises me when a retiring player finds something better to do with his time.”

Hecker was voicing some of Reynolds’ thoughts because, after 15 years in a National Football League player’s uniform, Reynolds has chosen not to be interviewed in a coach’s cap this summer.

He begged off after agreeing to appear at a single press conference on the first day of training camp last week.

“Football is still in my blood,” Reynolds said at the press conference, indicating that he will continue to fight for his old place on the playing roster. “I came here with an open mind. I came to help these guys (San Francisco’s young linebackers) get better. But I’m not saying I’ll never play again.”

Still, the 49ers seem to be saying it for him, threatening a career that began in 1970 when, in the first round, the Rams drafted Reynolds from Tennessee.

He was, and is, a Pete Rose-type competitor and if this is indeed the end of the line for Reynolds, it adds up to another illustration of the difference between baseball and football.

Rose is 44. He’s still playing baseball several times a week, as well as managing the Cincinnati Reds.

In the NFL, by contrast, no active players are doubling as head coaches. Normally it takes years of apprenticeship as an assistant or college coach to get to the top in pro football. And more than that, as Hecker said, it takes a lot of time. A football coach’s workday runs from 12 to 16 hours.

There’s no way Rose could put in such a shift and also catch Ty Cobb.

“Rose and Hacksaw both have desire to burn,” Hecker said. “They’d both kill to win. However, their situation is only the same in (that) one respect.”

Make that two respects. Both are products of Western Hills High School in Cincinnati, where, honoring their most prominent living native, the city’s fathers recently named a street Pete Rose Drive.

At that time, asked if anything had ever been named for him, Reynolds said: “Yeah, probably the men’s room.”

A resident of San Salvador Island in the Bahamas--”the first land Columbus saw in the new world,” Reynolds likes to say--he is the son of a Marblehead, Mass., socialite and a chemical engineer, an MIT graduate.

He became Hacksaw Reynolds at Tennessee, where a 1969 defeat prompted him to cut a 1953 Chevrolet in half with 13 blades and a hacksaw.

Whether he will ever coach as successfully as Rose has managed this year remains to be seen. But as a player he was similarly successful, playing a large role for the 49ers in the two Super Bowl championships they won in his four years as a San Francisco linebacker.

Earlier, Reynolds had played on the Rams’ only Super Bowl team, in 1980, which means that he has made more championship game trips in this decade than most folks.

It was also in 1980 that he made the Pro Bowl for the last time as a Ram, whereupon the club cut him for reasons that will be familiar to Eric Dickerson. On instructions from ownership, the Rams declined to pay Reynolds what he thought he was worth.

Bill Walsh, the San Francisco coach, didn’t mind paying Reynolds, though. And thinking back to those days, when Walsh was putting together his first Super Bowl champion, he said: “Reynolds was the veteran who steadied our young defense.”

But this year the NFL roster limit has been cut from 49 to 45, and to the talent-heavy 49ers, the change means that Reynolds’ job probably has been eliminated.

Walsh, however, has always believed that the old linebacker has a future as a coach. “This is an opportunity for Jack to see if he would enjoy the coaching profession,” he said.

Reynolds’ pupils this summer include Riki Ellison, who started next to him last year in the 49ers’ four-linebacker defense. Impressed with Reynolds’ work with Ellison, Walsh called him a coach on the field.

When Reynolds was asked last week if that was an indication of his teaching ability, he answered that it was not.

“There are things you can do as a player to help other players that you can’t do as a coach,” he said. “It’s hard to explain, but I think you can get through to them better as a player.”

Moreover, Reynolds would prefer to coach Reynolds types, and he fears there aren’t many of those left.

“The players I used to play with (8 or 10 years ago) were a lot tougher mentally,” he said. “The softer our country gets, the softer our players get.”

In any case, he thinks he can more than hold his own on the field with 1980s softies.

“I may be gone from this team, but maybe not from another,” he said.