Oilers Did Save Glanville From the Showers

The game at the Astrodome ended, in overtime, with the home team’s head coach, Jerry Glanville, on his knees, and with the strength coach squatting right behind him, squeezing him tightly around the chest, as old Herr Heimlich might have done if some poor soul had been choking on a bone from a chicken.

The Glanville maneuver was applied because the coaches of the Houston Oilers were excited. Their kicker had just succeeded on a field goal that eliminated the Seattle Seahawks from further American Football Conference playoff action, and Glanville had dropped to his knees just before the kick, praying the kid wouldn’t miss.

“Wow!” Glanville said, when the other coach wrapped his arms around him.

The coach, dressed in his usual ensemble from Johnny Cash Clothes for Men, rose to his feet, jumped up and down and did a yippie-ki-oh-ki-ay. And so did his coaches and players.

And now, a few days have passed, and Glanville’s guys have regained their composure, and they have moved along to new business. They have another playoff game coming up Sunday at Denver, one that will put them in the AFC championship game should they win.

That’s right--that’s how close the Houston dadgum Oilers are to making it to the Super Bowl. Two wins away.

These are the very same Houston Oilers who, not a dozen weeks ago, were thisclose to picking up the whole kit and caboodle, a caboodle including chin straps and jockstraps and everything, and moving the entire franchise to sun-filled, fun-filled Jacksonville, Fla.

Everything was going haywire for the Oilers at that time. Their football players, like everybody else’s, were on strike. Their owner, Bud Adams, was being wined and dined and hailed as the greatest Florida hero since Ponce de Leon by civic officials in Jacksonville. And their fans were fed up.

A couple of weeks before, at the season opener against the Rams, a lot of those fans did not even bother to show up. The “eighth wonder of the world,” the Astrodome, was as empty as a sportswriter’s head.

After the strike was called, Houston’s replacement team had to travel to Denver. About 5,000 more fans showed up for that game than had showed up at the Astrodome to see the real Oilers play the Rams.

Glanville got a kick out of that.

“I suggested to Bud Adams that, considering the way we were treated up there, we should move to Denver and play on alternate Sundays,” he said.

There was no way in the world this little spitfire of a coach could have guessed back then that his football players not only would come to feel more comfortable at home than they would in Jacksonville or Denver, but that they would make the National Football League playoffs and have a shot at You Know What XXII on Jan. 31 at San Diego.

These are glad times for Jerry Glanville. We are not talking here about a man who has achieved the heights of coaching. We are talking here about a 46-year-old lifer assistant coach who never ran a team on any level until he took over Hugh Campbell’s job 14 games into Houston’s 1985 season.

Before that time, the Detroit-born Glanville had held nine coaching positions--every one of them as an assistant. He worked at two Ohio high schools. He worked on college staffs at Northern Michigan, Western Kentucky and Georgia Tech. He was an aide with the Detroit Lions, Atlanta Falcons and Buffalo Bills before joining the Oilers, also as an assistant.

Glanville has not been fitted for too many championship rings in his day.

When this season began, he wondered if this would be his darkest hour. Nothing seemed to be going right. At one point during training camp, the Oilers had to evacuate their dormitory at Angelo State and move into a motel, which Glanville, obviously an Alfred Hitchcock fan, promptly christened the Bates.

“I’m afraid to take a shower, because I’ve seen Norman walking outside,” the coach said one day. “I saw his mother propped up by the swimming pool.”

He tried to keep his sense of humor, in case things got worse. Which, of course, they did. Just before the home opener, as the coaches were mapping out their game plan, their offices caught fire. Within minutes, firemen were pouring into the building with hoses and axes.

Glanville wondered what was next. Already he was tired of all the annoyances, tired of all the Jacksonville talk, and tired of trying to get something in return for all the money the Oilers shelled out for their first-round draft choice, wide receiver Haywood Jeffires.

“I don’t think we gave him a million dollars to be a decoy,” Glanville said. “If that’s all we wanted, we could have gone down to the sports store and paid $29 for a decoy.”

Woe was the team. Within weeks, the strike was on, and unity was gone. Quarterback Warren Moon felt betrayed by veterans who started crossing the picket line. He also fumed at the rookie Jeffires, who avoided the meetings and practices the strikers had called. Moon said the kid deserved no respect, and had none. The kid said Moon was not his friend anymore, and never would be.

But, something good happened. Houston’s replacement players turned out to be halfway decent. By the time the regulars returned, the team’s record was a healthy 3-1.

To this day, Glanville realizes what a turning point that was. He still remembers what happened when the replacement players turned in their equipment.

“I was told these guys were going to buy three dozen eggs, sit by the railroad track and tell our regular team that they better not screw up our good record,” Glanville said.

Against the odds, they didn’t.

So, here we are. The Houston Oilers, a team that last season won 5 of 16 games, have a shot at the Super Bowl. The Houston Oilers, an outfit so wimpy that the team’s No. 1 fan is the vice president of the United States, could follow the likes of the Chicago Bears and New York Giants into pro football history.

It’s the craziest thing since Norman Bates.