Some Things Just Don’t Ever Change

The world has changed in a number of ways since you and I were young, Maggie--hair dryers in the clubhouse, million-dollar contracts for two-inning pitchers, soccer riots, tennis tantrums.

But sometimes I think the biggest change that might have occurred is in football coaches.

The game bears little or no resemblance to the one Walter Camp played at Yale or even the one George Gipp played at Notre Dame. The dropkick has disappeared, and the forward pass has taken over. But the biggest change may be on the bench.

The football coach in antiquity was a dour character, the repository of more doom than a Russian novel. To a man, football coaches gave pessimism a new meaning. They made Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna.

“Stagg Fears Purdue” was almost a standing headline in the early days of the century when the Grand Old Man coached at the University of Chicago. Stagg never lost to Purdue--or to anyone else much--in those days. He beat Purdue, 39-0 in 1906, 56-0 in 1907, and 40-0 in 1909, the very years those headlines were making the rounds.

The archetypal doom-sayer of the craft was a Cassandra in cleats named Gilmour Dobie, known as Gloomy Gil to generations of early day sportswriters. Gloomy Gil won 179 games from Washington to Navy to Cornell to Boston College but every one was a complete surprise to him to hear him tell it.

He once took a team with four All-Americans on a “familiarization” tour of an enemy field. He led the squad instantly to the 10-yard line. “Never mind the rest of it. This is where you’ll spend the afternoon,” he told his troops. “With your backs to the wall.”

Sportswriters invented the crying towel, a mythical tear-stained terry-cloth rag, to describe Dobie’s public persona. A Niobe of the dressing room.

The coaches were the last of the hand-wringers, the wolf-criers. It became the fashionable approach. It was designed to lessen the expectations of the alumni, deceive the oddsmakers, evoke the sympathy of the press.

The coach who would concede that his forces had a chance, who would admit that they were not outmanned and overmatched, was considered a most reckless kind of crapshooter. If he betrayed the slightest degree of public confidence in his boys, he ran the risk of having it hung on an opponent’s dressing room door to inflame passions against him.

Bo McMillin at Indiana moaned about his “po’ lil boys.” It was not modesty, it was a tactic. It was Napoleon hiding his reserves. The old trap play.

The ideal temperament for a coach was black despair cloaked in bottomless pessimism. One year, when Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy had a team that would have been a 10-point favorite over a pride of lions, he was heard to groan before the season that it was highly doubtful his forces would make a first down all year. The listeners quickly took up a pool to book the bet, but Leahy quickly closed the book.

The late Red Sanders of UCLA, when practicing behind closed gates before a USC game he would win 34-0, was asked what his team was working on. He sighed and said: “Kickoff returns and goal-line stands. We expect to be in a lot of them.” Well, they were. But they were the other guys’.

The X’s and O’s of the coaching profession are still the same. A first down is still 10 yards, a touchdown is still six points. But if you were paying attention the other day, you would have noticed character building has undergone a drastic change since Gil Dobie’s day.

Football coaches have not gone into professional wrestler’s bombast but, if you checked the preseason utterances of UCLA Coach Terry Donahue or USC Coach Ted Tollner, you were perhaps aware that both of them expect to make plenty of first downs this season.

Told that his Trojan varsity had been picked No. 1 by one publication--a piece of news that would have put Gil Dobie into cardiac arrest--Tollner allowed as how that was healthy. He added: “I’d rather have our football team feel good about themselves and feel confident . . . as long as they don’t take it for granted.” Amos Alonzo Stagg would have swooned. “Tollner Fears Nobody” would have been today’s headline.

Terry Donahue weighed a schedule that would have had an old-time coach weeping uncontrollably and allowed as how it was probably a good thing to get his team blooded. He recalled the year his team had played Georgia at Georgia, Nebraska at Nebraska and Arizona State and BYU at Pasadena and lost three and tied one--but, after that, the rest of the schedule looked easy, including the Rose Bowl game, which UCLA won, 45-9.

Old-line coaches used to take the position that playing a team like Nebraska at Nebraska was like taking on a leopard in a tree or a grizzly in a berry patch. “I will use it (the schedule) as a motivating force,” sunnily argued Donahue.

What has happened? Where are the fear-the-worsts of yesteryear? Have coaches changed?

Probably not. The stakes have changed. Dobie, Leahy, Stagg fearing Purdue had no autumnal competition. The pros were not yet abroad in the land. Neither was television.

“We have to sell tickets today,” admits optimist Donahue. “We want people to come to the games, to watch on TV. We can’t tell them they’re investing their time and money in a bunch of overmatched, poorly trained underdogs. We have to show the kids we have faith in them and get the public to have faith in them, too. We’re in show business now.”

A reporter was sympathetic. “Do you want us to say then, that, now that you’ve beaten SC three times in a row and four out of five, you now have the hang of beating them and expect to keep on doing so?”

Donahue blanched. “Oh, my God, no! Don’t say that!” he said. “You should see the athletes they have over there!”

Football coaches haven’t changed. Neither has show business. So, is Barnum going to knock the elephants?