Fouts the Sum of Many Parts : Quarterback Is Retired, but the Man Moves Ahead

SAN DIEGO--The Chargers and San Francisco 49ers will play a late-season football game today, the details of which many of the people who attend will forget within a matter of weeks.

It is not likely they will be as quick to forget the halftime ceremony at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, during which the Chargers will retire No. 14--the jersey Dan Fouts wore for 15 glorious and painful years as their quarterback.

Fouts has the week off from his job as a CBS-TV pro football analyst. That is his new career. In less than 6 months behind the microphone, Fouts has displayed the same combination of candor, curiosity and preparedness that earned the respect, if not the friendship, of almost everybody who has known him.

Moreover, Fouts says, “I have tremendous peace of mind.”

There has always been more to him than an arm and a voice. With Dan Fouts, the sum of the parts adds up to a lot. And those parts paint the picture of a complex man--one who won’t look back--one who will die happy if, at the end, he’s still trying to prove that the best times of his life are ahead.

FOUTS THE LEGEND

“You just can’t realize how big and fast these guys are and how slow and puny and weak I am and what a mismatch it is,” Fouts said at his retirement party last spring.

Yet he left with 42 team and 7 NFL records. He threw 254 touchdown passes, and he completed passes for 300 yards or more in 51 games. Mismatch indeed.

“He was a workhorse,” says Ronnie Lott, the 49ers’ Pro Bowl defensive back. “Everybody talks about how (Chicago quarterback Jim) McMahon should have been an offensive lineman. Well, Dan would have been a great defensive lineman.”

As it is, Fouts walked away from the playing field with his health, his wealth, his honor and his sanity, not necessarily in order of importance.

“Dan Fouts was the Chargers for 15 years,” says Al Saunders, the head coach who is still looking for a replacement.

FOUTS THE OPPONENT

In 1982, Fouts and Wes Chandler combined to beat 49er cornerback Eric Wright for 3 touchdowns in a 41-37 victory at San Francisco. Wright remembers.

“When you went up against the Chargers,” Wright says, “you knew it was going to be bombs away.”

“Dan was intimidating simply because he would stand in there and take all (the punishment) a defense would give him,” San Francisco Coach Bill Walsh says. “If there was anybody who would stand strong right in the eye of a rush, it was Dan.”

FOUTS THE SON

Fouts grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, the son of former 49er play-by-play broadcaster Bob Fouts. He would eventually follow his father’s footsteps into the booth.

Do you think Walter Cronkite would have been proud if his son had become a network anchor? Do you think Cronkite would have been proud if his son had stopped first to serve as President of the United States?

“I’m pleased for Dan that he’s found a life after football that’s lucrative and interesting,” Bob Fouts says. “I don’t necessarily consider that he’s following in my footsteps. We hope he’ll carry the profession to a higher standard. Certainly he’ll make more money than I ever did.”

Lining the walls of Bob Fouts’ office are pictures of Otto Graham, Johnny Unitas, Y.A. Tittle and a lot of other quarterbacks of high repute. One day several years ago, Bob Fouts looked at that wall and blinked. “It was hard to comprehend,” he says. “My kid was surpassing these people.

“But I’m proud of him as a man first of all. His football exploits were a pleasant surprise.”

Sports broadcasting is overrun with ex-jocks who owe their spot behind the microphone to looks or athletic ability. Career broadcasters don’t get to become professional athletes when they retire. And they are painfully aware of how often unfair the converse is.

The irony of this is not lost on career broadcaster Bob Fouts, whose son is now an ex-jock in the booth.

“I resent ex-players in the booth only if they become pedestrian and fall back on all those cliches,” he says.

FOUTS THE FAMILY MAN

Around their impeccably decorated home in the wooded hills of Rancho Sante Fe, Dan Fouts is known to his family as the “French Chef.”

“You know, French toast and French fries,” says his wife, Julianne.

Dan and Julianne Fouts met at the University of Oregon almost 20 years ago. They have 2 children--Dominic, 10, and Suzanne, 9. Dominic is named after Dominic LaRusso, the Oregon speech professor and renaissance man who has influenced the lives of Dan and Julianne ever since they took his class in non-verbal communication.

Julianne Fouts is currently studying to become a family therapist. On the two nights a week she attends classes at National University, the “French Chef” cooks dinner for the kids.

“He’s a wonderful father,” Julianne Fouts says. “When he’s home, he spends as much time as he can with the kids. Our family is very important to him. We are his highest priority.”

Fouts and his son--they call him “Nick”--play catch in the yard just as other fathers and sons do. They also kick the soccer ball around. Fouts’ competitive nature is more likely to rear its head in the spelling games the family plays together. He helps both of them with their homework.

As a wife, Julianne Fouts has most appreciated the support her husband has provided for her in developing her own interests. “We’ve had some rough times,” she says. “But we’re still married. Football is not easy. And being married to a celebrity is not easy. We started dating before he was a celebrity. And he’s the same regular old person now that he was before he became a celebrity.

“One hard part is losing some of your privacy and having to share your husband with other people. But the hardest part was watching him play. I loved what he could do. But when he would get hurt . . . that was very, very hard for me.”

FOUTS THE TEAMMATE

In the 12th week of the 1985 season, the Chargers trailed the Houston Oilers, 34-28, with less than 2 minutes to play in front of a howling mob at the Astrodome. The end zone was more than 80 yards away.

“I’ll never forget it,” Charger guard Dennis McKnight says. “Our heads were kind of hanging a little bit, and here comes Fouts jogging into the huddle. He says, ‘Hey fellas, let’s go down, get 7, get on the plane and get outta here.’

“Then I saw everybody pick up their heads and stare at him. It was like . . . he said we’re going to do it . . . and we all believed him.”

The Chargers moved down inside the Oiler 10. But they got hung up and found themselves looking at fourth and goal from the 12.

McKnight: “He came back onto the field after a timeout and said, ‘OK guys, give me a little bit of time on this, and it’s a touchdown. I promise you.’

“And I’ll never forget blocking and blocking and blocking for what seemed like an eternity. And I looked out of the corner of my eye, and all of a sudden I saw Wes Chandler waving his arms with the ball. It was like that whole sequence made me realize the rest of my career that when he said we were going to do something as a team, I just believed it.”

Unfortunately, Fouts didn’t play defense. The Oilers raced right back up the field and won, 37-35, on a 51-yard field goal by Tony Zendejas with 2 seconds remaining.

FOUTS THE STUDENT

Dominic LaRusso is a burly, former semipro football player who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington in 1950, got his Ph.D. in speech at Northwestern and became the most popular teacher at the University of Oregon.

He was attracted to Dan Fouts and Julianne, the girl Fouts was dating at the time, the first day they walked into his classroom. He says both remain among “the five brightest” students he has ever taught.

“Dan was an outstanding student because of his curiosity and dedication,” LaRusso says. “But more for his ability to see beyond the obvious. But that curiosity enticed the hell out of me.”

LaRusso is much more than a rhetorician. He is also an accomplished physical therapist and an expert in the science of body language.

At Oregon, LaRusso and Fouts devised experiments together based on the importance of perception in communication. LaRusso’s contributions enabled Fouts to train his long and short-range vision in a football context. With the use of televisions Fouts factored in the concern of the blind-side rush.

Lack of funding curtailed any meaningful expansion of their efforts. But according to LaRusso, they were approaching a breakthrough whereby aspiring quarterbacks could sharpen vision and instinct through perceptual exercises. They were zeroing in on the Inner Game of quarterbacking.

FOUTS THE BROADCASTER

LaRusso and Fouts’ father both regularly critique Fouts’ work. So do the bosses at CBS during twice-monthly conference calls to the directors, producers and announcers.

There are no won-lost records or quarterback ratings with which to judge his work anymore. “Public feedback was something I never really cared about as a player anyway,” Fouts says. “I was more interested in what the players and the coaches thought than the press.”

The analyst’s trap is giving in to the temptation to tell the viewer what just happened instead of why it happened. To be able to avoid that trap, Fouts spends 8 to 9 hours a day Tuesday through Saturday reviewing tapes and interviewing coaches and players.

Fouts’ initial exposure to football was as a fan rooting for the home team. “This,” he says of his new job, “is the best of both worlds. I get to root for both teams. Because if they do well, we’ll have a good game, which will make for a better broadcast.”

FOUTS THE HARD GUY

Fouts is well-read, well-rounded and a terrific after-dinner speaker--the kind of guy whose brain you’d like to pick in an oak-paneled den over brandy and Macanudo cigars.

But he’s had this problem over the years projecting warmth. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly and can’t really see why anybody expects that he should.

He’s honest to the point where LaRusso worries about his future in broadcasting because of Fouts’ disdain for corporate politics. “If they expect him to get involved in that, he will tell them to go to hell,” LaRusso says.

Fouts never patronized sportswriters. And many of his own teammates were put off by what they took to be his inherently superior and aloof nature.

“The thing with Dan was a lot of people thought he was cold at times,” McKnight says. “But with Dan, he’s not just going to go out of his way for a rookie or something like that. You have to earn his respect.

“The people who thought he was cold or stuck up when they first knew him never really got to know him. They didn’t earn his respect.”

And once you did earn Fouts’ respect?

“You were one of his boys,” McKnight says.

FOUTS THE PROTEGE

San Francisco’s Walsh is not so much a genius as he is a superb technician. He has refined the science of footwork for quarterbacks and turned it into a precise, balletic art. During his year as the Chargers’ offensive coordinator in 1976, he imparted that art to Fouts.

Fouts had just come off a disappointing 1975 season in which he had thrown 10 interceptions and only 2 touchdown passes. Injuries had slowed his progress, and there was even talk about trading for a more durable, mobile, dependable quarterback.

“Dan was determined to do something about this,” Walsh says. So the two of them went to work in February, 8 months before the beginning of the 1976 season.

“He was determined to improve,” Walsh says. “And he gave it every bit of time required to change his style and develop his sophistication of understanding defenses and developing the footwork and mechanics to time his passes. We worked on the field and in the classroom and made the breakthrough.”

FOUTS THE CHARGER ALUM

He works for CBS, the network of the NFC. So he has seen more of the 1988 Rams than the 1988 Chargers. And his relations with the three most powerful men in the Charger organization--owner Alex Spanos, operations director Steve Ortmayer and Saunders--were strained at the end.

But, Fouts says, “I firmly believe the Chargers are on the right track. They may have let too many good players get away. But who could have foreseen so many developments and injuries. Certainly there has been no lack of effort. Very often you see teams with similar records fold their tents at this time of year.

Spanos is the one who decided to retire Fouts’ jersey. No other Charger--not even the nonpareil Lance Alworth--has been honored this way in the 29-year history of the team. The Chargers briefly retired the jersey of offensive lineman Ron Mix. But they quickly un-retired it when Mix joined the Raiders in 1971.

Spanos will be involved directly in the halftime ceremony. “I think that’s very appropriate,” Fouts says. “I’m really pleased. My relationships with both owners (Spanos and Gene Klein) were similar to my relationships with opponents. They realized what kind of competitor I was. But that’s all water under the bridge now.”