Mora Was Just Waiting on the Sidelines

Most pro football teams, when the program starts to falter and the defeats pile up, look around the country for the biggest, meanest, fastest players they can find, guys who won Heismans, All-American honors, Hula bowls, Fiesta bowls.

Not the New Orleans Saints. You would have thought the Saints needed a lot of guys like that after seasons in which the team went 1-15 and 4-12 and fans started to come to games with bags over their heads.

Instead, the Saints picked up a guy who wasn’t No. 1 on any draft list. They picked a guy who had never played a down of big-time football, never made the pros, won a trophy or made the cover of Sports Illustrated and never caught, threw, intercepted or batted down a pass in the National Football League in his life. And not many anywhere else. A guy who was, by his own admission, “small and slow.”

On top of all that, he was 51 years old, turning gray and getting to the point where he could tell when it was going to rain by his knees.

You would have thought New Orleans had plenty of old, slow guys. I mean, this was a franchise not even Archie Manning could help, remember.

But, when they signed Jim Mora, the Saints got more than a rubber-armed quarterback or a blood-drinking linebacker corps or a fleet of gnat-fast cornerbacks and safeties. They got to do more than just take the bags off their heads. They got instant credibility in the league, even a chance to shout periodically, “We’re No. 1!”

There’s probably a hair’s difference between the best and worst teams in the NFL. The big difference, usually, save for the size of the injured-reserve list, is the guy on the bench. Football is a coach’s medium. When Vince Lombardi took a 1-10-1 Green Bay Packer team and turned it into a dynasty, the game got the message. All coaches understand the X’s and O’s. Some just understand them better than others.

Some coaches know the arts and mysteries of motivation better than other coaches. Bear Bryant did it with a drawl. Lombardi did it with a snarl. Knute Rockne did it with a sob story. Not all coaches can get guys to run through concrete blocks for them. Only the good ones. A soldier has to think the old man knows what he’s doing. Otherwise, he doesn’t go into battle to win, he goes in to survive.

Jim Mora has the same qualifications to be a leader as George Patton had. If there’s one thing he was, by the time he got his chance, it was qualified. Over 25 years, Jim Mora labored at staff level or in the bush leagues of the game. Three years in the Marine Corps produced a respect for the benefits of discipline.

He worked under some of the registered wily foxes of the game. He roomed in college at Occidental with Jack Kemp, who became a pro quarterback par excellence before he became a Presidential candidate. Mora coached at Occidental--assistant for 4 years, head coach for 3--but he always hankered to move out of the fight-fiercelies and into the hair-on-the-chest precincts of the game.

He was an assistant at Stanford under John Ralston, at Colorado under Eddie Crowder, then at UCLA under Dick Vermeil, Washington under Don James and, then the pros. First with Seattle’s Seahawks, then the New England Patriots.

For Mora, it was have-blackboard, will-travel.

There were few secrets to the game for him by the time he took his chalk and pointer to become head coach of the Philadelphia Stars in the United States Football League, where he fielded such smart, well drilled teams that they won the championship--division the first year and league title the last 2--each season and posted records like 16-4 and 19-1.

What impressed a lot of people was, Mora did it without a lot of stars he had to arm-wrestle the NFL for. Herschel Walker and Steve Young went elsewhere in the USFL, but Mora’s squad played like a team, not an all-star revue.

“They play you 60 minutes of every game and you better be ready,” a rival coach once warned.

When the USFL folded, NFL franchises characteristically scrambled for Walker and Young. But the Saints found they weren’t the real franchise savers. They opted for a general. They already had the army.

Jim Mora did not learn his football at the football foundries of the South and West. The son of a film cutter at 20th Century Fox, he was practically raised in Hollywood. When he finally emerged, the NFL had the typical reaction of the dance-hall gigolo, “Where have you been all my life?”

Mora could have answered that he was right there in the back room, teaching linebackers how to read offensive keys or tackles how--and when--to rush the passer.

Jim Mora is not one of your aloof, do-it-my-way-or-get-out coaches. He is as enthusiastic as a cheerleader. He doesn’t grab a parasol and strut up and down the sidelines as his owner, Tom Benson, does but when the Saints win a game--as they did in Anaheim Stadium over the Rams Sunday--Mora rushes off the field waving clenched fists in the air and shouting at the small cadre of New Orleans fans clustered at the dugout, as giddy as a sophomore at his first Yale-Harvard game.

Outside the locker room later, he peeled off his sideline headset and crowed excitedly, “Gentlemen, that wasn’t a big win, it was a big, big win. A humongous win. I can’t even explain how big a win that was.”

He purred: “I’m so proud of our defense. This was pretty much a ‘must’ win. I didn’t tell the team that before the game, but I knew it was.”

It was a somewhat un-coachly postgame talk. Protocol usually calls for a calm reflection, a blowing on the fingernails with a kind of bored I-knew-it-all-along expression on the face.

But, New Orleans has had a lot of coaches--and players--who could be blase. Jim Mora took a 5-11 team in 1985 and brought it all the way up to 12-3 last year and the franchise’s first playoff berth. If he wants to do cartwheels all over the clubhouse and prance up and down the field to “Muskrat Ramble,” it’s OK with the folks way down yonder in New Orleans.

He’s their No. 1 pick. And they didn’t even have to give up a draft choice for him.