Travelin’ Man Has Another Challenge : Lou Saban, Assistant Prep Coach, Has Finally Done It All in Football

High school football in September, Florida style, comes with high humidity, a half-moon overhead, a pleasant Atlantic breeze cooling the temperature to 82 degrees.

The Martin County Tigers have bused up the coast from Stuart to open their season against the mighty Melbourne Bulldogs, the defending Region 6 AAAA champions who thrashed them by scores of 44-0 and 44-6 last season. Reporters are out in force--but not all to cover the game. They are there to cover a coach. An assistant coach.

Louis Henry Saban, twice the coach of the year in the old American Football League and the man who put O.J. Simpson’s professional career in gear, has resurfaced in Florida. He will turn 65 next month and, as defensive coordinator for Martin County High School, has finally found a job he likes. Or has he?

You remember Lou Saban: the Marco Polo of coaching, the Sultan of Sayonara. Now you see him, now you don’t.

For those keeping score, Saban held 11 head coaching jobs in 35 years, two of them with the Buffalo Bills. He was fired three times, but he resigned seven times. The other time, in his first job at Case Institute in Cleveland, the school dropped the program.

Once, at the University of Cincinnati, he tried being an athletic director. For 19 days. That time, he fired himself, but whatever way it happened, it was always toodle-Lou at the end.

Now, in the late summer of ‘86, he is far from the mainstream of his profession, with Martin County, playing tenaciously on defense, nursing a 6-0 lead at halftime. As the Melbourne County marching band plays “Rock Around the Clock,” Saban is summoned to the press box for a radio interview on WMMB, “1240 on your dial.” It isn’t NBC but, hey, he’s been there.

As the second half starts, Saban stands beside another defensive coach, Mike Lundgren, and quietly calls the defenses for Lundgren to signal in to Don Yocum, the middle linebacker. By the fourth quarter, Melbourne is threatening.

The Tigers stop one drive at their 30-yard line; then, on the next play, quarterback David Giunta throws a touchdown pass to Charles Mosley for a 12-0 lead. But Melbourne comes right back and scores on a long pass, making it 12-6, and soon is on the move again.

Saban’s last football job was at the University of Central Florida, where Bill Cubit, who is half his age, was an assistant. When Saban left in the middle of the ’84 season, Cubit took over, and Saban again went to work for his old friend, George Steinbrenner, as a scout for the Yankees in the Carolinas. He built a house in the hills near Hendersonville, N.C., fully expecting to settle down.

Then Cubit took the Martin County job this year and started looking for a staff. He phoned Saban for suggestions, but then the talks took a different turn.

As Cubit tells it: “I said, ‘Hey, Coach, I’ve got a job for you. It pays $22,000 a year, and I’ll let you drive my Firebird.’

“He laughed. Then he called back the same afternoon.

“He says, ‘You serious?’

“I said, ‘Well, yeah. I’m serious if you’re serious.’ ”

Said Saban: “I decided, well, what the heck, scouting season was about over. I didn’t want to sit up in a tree house.”

Some people feared that Cubit had hired a fox to guard his hen house. Cubit differs.

“We’ve got a unique relationship,” Cubit said. “The thing my wife said at first was, ‘How are you gonna feel? Is it gonna hurt you?’ I said, ‘If I can get Lou Saban, I mean, gee, I’m an idiot if I don’t do that.’

“When he first came down to coach, I’d look over at him and feel good about him being there. Hey, anything (publicity) he gets I’m happy for. I bring in every article. ESPN called today and I rushed to him and said, ‘Hey, coach, this is great,’ and he said, ‘Well, if it helps our program I’ll do it.’ ”

Cubit isn’t concerned about his players becoming star-struck.

“When Sports Illustrated came, our kids got the biggest kick out of it,” he said. “All of our JV kids were in the picture.

“A lot of good things are happening in this program. It puts Martin County on the map. We may even get some recruits out of it. Maybe they’ll move into town. But they’ve gotta be 6-4 and 250. We don’t have any of those kids.”

Saban, who also does some teaching in the school’s work experience program, another subject in which he seems to be qualified, has given the team a lift, even if most of the players had never heard of Lou Saban until this summer.

“We know now what a great coach he is,” Yocum said. “I mean, when Sports Illustrated comes to your practice . . . “

Melbourne’s Tom McIntyre, the rival coach, wasn’t worried about Martin County having a ringer.

“I think it’s a great thing, a man willing to help a program and some kids,” McIntyre said. “This is what Lou Saban has done throughout his life. I don’t look at him as a ringer. I think it’s a big plus for high school football here.”

If Saban ever had roots, they apparently have withered away.

His hometown is LaGrange, Ill., but he played college football at Indiana University and was a running back with the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference for four seasons, 1946-49. He was all-league his last season before taking the coaching job at Case, one of the leading institutions in postwar atomic research.

“Football for those kids was just a sideline, and rightfully so,” Saban said.

After three years, Saban said, the school president walked in and asked him, “ ‘What would you do if we dropped football?’--cold turkey.”

He was an assistant at Washington and then Northwestern before becoming head coach of the Wildcats. Steinbrenner was one of his assistants.

Recalling that job, Saban said, ruefully: “One of those handshake deals, and before I knew it I was out on the street again.”

There followed three good seasons at Western Illinois, where he had a 20-4 record before the AFL was formed and Billy Sullivan hired him to coach the Boston--now New England--Patriots.

“I thought, well, I’ll take the plunge, and in the middle of the second season, Sullivan walked out onto the (practice) field after the fifth game and canned me.

“I says, ‘Billy, you gotta be kiddin’!’ We’ve got a hell of a football team right now. (Mike) Holovak took over, and they went on and won the rest of their ballgames. Holovak was a member of my staff.”

But there always seemed to be another job around.

“They’d fired what’s-his-name (Buster Ramsey) up at Buffalo and asked me if I’d take over. We had four great years there,” Saban said.

“Then they said, ‘We’re gonna restructure your position.’ But when you’re living with 45 players and (management) starts changing your responsibilities, they get very suspicious as to where the authority is.”

Saban quit with five years remaining on a 10-year contract. Next stop: the University of Maryland. The Terrapins were 4-6 in his only season.

“The program was floundering, and I wanted to make sure the president stayed with the program,” Saban said. “He wasn’t so sure they wanted to get back to big-time football. (I told him,) ‘I want to know what’s gonna happen here. I don’t want to get fired. I’ve already been fired.’ ”

Meanwhile, Saban checked out an opening with the Denver Broncos. When Maryland found that out, he was fired.

“I dashed to a phone. I says, ‘I’d better get a job.’ I called (Bronco owner) Gerry Phipps and he said, ‘Hey, come on out here and write your own ticket.’ ”

But the Rockies were not Shangri-La.

“After five years we’d had a tough struggle,” Saban said. “The only thing they were remembered for was their (vertical) striped socks. So after 5 1/2 years, I decided maybe the thing for them to do was to get a new face.”

He resigned and wound up in Buffalo again, where he found a running back named Simpson whom nobody seemed to know what to do with. Saban gave him the football, which he ran into the Hall of Fame.

“We got it going, and all of a sudden the same damn thing happened,” he said. “They wanted to go in and change the structure, and we started to go the other way.”

Saban had records of 38-18-3 and 32-29-1 in his two stints at Buffalo and is the only coach to have left there a winner.

Later, he was watching a baseball game at Yankee Stadium when Steinbrenner urged him to become athletic director at Cincinnati to bail out that foundering program. Steinbrenner always seems to have a job for Saban--president of the Yankees, manager of a race track--but it’s not always the right job.

That time Saban said: “George, I don’t want to be a director, because when you’re a director you’ve got everybody’s problems. I’d rather coach.”

But he took a four-year contract, launched an exhaustive study of the program and made his report to the regents.

“At the top of the list was to remove the director of athletics and to hire an in-house man at a savings of 40 or 50 thousand dollars,” Saban said. “It kind of went over the tops of their heads. They said, ‘Explain it.’

“I said, ‘I would recommend that you fire the director of athletics.’ ”

About that time, the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., was looking for a coach. Saban accepted a six-year contract, with some misgivings, he said.

“I knew it was gonna lead to troubles, primarily because when I was hired the president wasn’t involved. I wasn’t sure he had any use for me.

“Then one thing led to another over an incident that was tremendously embarrassing to me, and I had no choice but to make my move. I still haven’t told anybody why, except two people.”

To this day, Saban will not elaborate, and when he took his next job at West Point, Ed Pope, the sports editor of the Miami Herald, blistered him in his column.

“I wrote, ‘Beware, Army. You hired a deserter,’ ” Pope recalled the other day. “And everything he’s done since has supported that.”

But Pope also said: “He’s a very likable guy, and he’s responsible for the program being the power--the Hurricanes are ranked No. 2--that it is.”

Army didn’t work out, either.

Saban said: “The general that hired me walked in one day and says, ‘I resigned.’ I’ve always felt that a new man coming in is entitled to have his own man.” So Saban resigned.

Central Florida was a mistake, Saban said. “Got it going in one year--totally turned it around. We created a small miracle. They said, ‘Well, no, we don’t think that. We’re going to change your assignment. We’re not sure what we’re gonna do with you, but you’re no longer the football coach.’

“I said, ‘I’m not gonna be put in a closet. Pay me. I’ll be glad to get out.’

“Well, I no sooner get out the door than the Orlando Sentinel came out and said, ‘Lou Saban resigns. There he goes again.’ ”

The Melbourne Bulldogs, backed by a home crowd, are back at the Martin County 30, first down, trailing 12-6, with time running out. The scoreboard clock at the far end of the field has quit, so an official on the sideline is keeping the time with a digital watch he holds in his hands.

Time out. Saban goes onto the field to talk to his defense. The game officials seem startled but ignore him.

“I went out there and said, ‘Gentlemen’--and they look at me kind of strange when I say gentlemen--’it’s in your hands. It’s the ballgame. Give us 78 Rush.’ ”

The aroused Tigers sack Melbourne’s quarterback on three straight plays, then rush him into an incomplete pass on the fourth.

Cubit smiles and assures a visiting reporter: “We weren’t supposed to win this game.”

Saban is reborn.

“When they did that, I found myself cheering,” he says.

“The kid that was playing on the nose, Louis Gipson, was having a tough night. I said, ‘Louie, I need a big one from you.’ And those kids went out there . . . all of a sudden I see No. 77 (Gipson). If I were to choose one player to make the big play, I would have selected him. He walked off saying, ‘I did it, I did it.’ I’ll remember that the rest of my life.

“I was here for two weeks and not any of ‘em knew who I was, until the Sports Illustrated article came out. A young writer here asked one player about me. The kid said, ‘Lou who?’ That’s the way I wanted it.”

Lou Who coached 97 victories in the pros.

“I always wanted to win a hundred,” he says. “I don’t think that chance will ever come. But I don’t worry about that anymore. I’ve had one roller coaster ride.”

He walks off the field smiling to himself and feeling good all over.

“Well,” he says to nobody in particular, “that was fun.”

LOU SABAN: MAN IN MOTION

Employer Years W-L Why left Case Institute 1950-52 10-13-1 Disbanded Northwestern 1955 0-8-1 Fired W. Illinois 1957-59 20-5-1 Resigned Boston Patriots 1960-61 7-12 Fired Buffalo Bills 1962-65 38-18-3 Resigned Maryland 1966 4-6 Fired Denver Broncos 1967-71 20-42-3 Resigned Buffalo Bills 1972-76 32-29-1 Resigned Cincinnati 1976 (Ath. dir.) Resigned Miami (Fla.) 1977-78 9-13 Resigned Army 1979 2-8-1 Resigned Central Florida 1983-84 6-10 Resigned

Note: Saban also was an assistant coach at the University of Washington in ’53 and at Northwestern University in ‘54, and served as manager of Tampa Bay Downs race track from Aug. 8, 1980, to Feb. 5, 1981; as president of the New York Yankees in ‘81-82, and as a Yankee scout from ’82 to present.