Club 14’s Proprietor Quietly Closes Down After a 15-Year Run

Ninety-nine percent of the messages on Dan Fouts’ telephone answering machine Wednesday night and Thursday morning were from his old chums in the media, and he skipped through those.

One message stopped him and made him chuckle.

“I got a call from the NFL Alumni Assn.,” he said. “I guess that’s where we’re at.”

Indeed, as everyone had come to suspect, Dan Fouts was retiring after 15 years as heart and growl of the Chargers.

Fittingly, this man went out just as he had played. He went out as a man larger than his team . . . or at least larger than the Chargers as an organization.

In the three months since the 1987 season ended, Fouts was silent about his plans for the future. He answered questions on the subject with good humor but remained as evasive as he never was in the face of a pass rush.

This silence had to be difficult, because he was being blitzed by the Charger organization’s insistence that it desperately needed a quarterback. The Chargers might have quietly shopped around until Fouts formally announced his retirement, but instead they chose to take a route that emphasized dissatisfaction with the man who had had the job for so long.

It was embarrassing to watch such a man blindsided by his own team.

And yet he remained silent.

The final blow came this week, when a columnist reported that Fouts had already been bought off for 1988. The genesis of this information was nowhere to be found, since the article did not contain the vaguest of attribution. But the column served the Charger front office nicely.

Dan Fouts, the world had thus been informed, was a man with absolutely no bargaining position. Dan Fouts was through as a Charger.

He had finally been stripped of the facade of respectability he might otherwise have been able to maintain, and his own organization had done much to chip away at the veneer.

It was as if Dan Fouts had been sniped at until he was flushed from hiding. And Thursday was his day to come out from the shadows like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in their final scene, which was to say spitting fire from both barrels.

After all, wasn’t that the way Fouts ran an offense?

But that was not the way he ran his farewell media gathering. He was all dignity and wit and appreciation.

No controversy would intrude upon this occasion.

It was a day to distribute bouquets, and his neatly trimmed yard was big enough to provide all the flowers he was passing around to family, friends, teammates, coaches, fans . . . and even the media.

Throughout the questioning, Fouts avoided implications that there was any estrangement between himself and the organization.

It was easy to explain, for example, why this most private of men had called a news conference at his magnificent hilltop estate rather than the stadium.

“I trust you people,” he laughed.

Really . . .

“Well,” he said, “it’s not like I want you to come over every day.”

The route was marked quite nicely with a directional sign on Via de la Valle, a sign bedecked with blue and gold ribbons. The street sign itself was wrapped in blue and gold crepe paper.

You see, Fouts’ problems are not with the real Chargers . . . and never have been. His battles have always been with the folks at the upper edges of the organization.

Fouts’ people have always been the worker bees. Forget the owner’s box. Give him his teammates and the secretaries. Give him the people in the trenches.

For years and years, Club 14 has been the most exclusive and private organization in town. The membership included Fouts and the Charger secretaries, and they met each Friday afternoon during the season for a little chitchat.

A similarly exclusive occasion was the Saturday night dinner, Fouts hosting the interior offensive linemen. He ran through some of the names--Don Macek, Ralph Perretta, Ed White, Doug Wilkerson and Russ Washington.

“The next day,” Fouts mused, “we’d go out and put 40 (points) on someone. That’s what it was all about.”

All the linemen Fouts named are gone, and that is significant. Their departures surely hastened his, because his health has not been the same since injuries and retirement began to erode the wall in front of him.

Of course, the most significant organizational change took place in the fall of 1986, when Don Coryell was eased out as coach. Never before, perhaps, had a coach and quarterback been so perfectly suited for one another. Coryell was the plutonium and Fouts was the neutron, and they produced the NFL’s most explosive offense.

“If it wasn’t for Don,” Fouts said, “we wouldn’t be here, this house wouldn’t be here and I sure as heck wouldn’t be here.”

Fouts insisted that the decision to retire was his alone, just as Coryell had insisted that the decision to resign was his alone. Fouts said he was no longer capable of playing, at least to his standards.

But the haunting reality was that the club had already been callous enough to make it known that Fouts could no longer play to its standards.

Maybe Fouts was providing some insight into his own feelings when he was talking about Don Coryell’s dismissal.

“Personally,” he said, “it was tough to see him treated that way. Professionally, it just shows that it always comes to an end. That’s the way it goes. That’s the game.”

Goodby, Club 14. . . . Hello, NFL Alumni Assn.