BURNSIE : Vikings’ Jerry Burns Isn’t Typical NFL Coach, and Doesn’t Want to Be

They call him Burnsie. He is a pro football coach. His is perhaps the strangest team in the National Football League, and Burnsie, no doubt, is the league’s most unusual coach.

The team is the Minnesota Vikings, who sometimes lose spectacularly to pushovers, then rout powerhouses.

The coach is Jerry Burns, a 61-year-old Viking veteran who is so nervous that he jumps at his own shadow.

“Snakes and spiders and rodents scare him to death,” former Minnesota fullback Bill Brown was saying the other day.

Thus at training camp one year, Burns’ players, who love him like a grandfather, made an oversized plastic spider and hung it behind the movie projector in a darkened film room.

When Burns turned on the projector, the spider’s shadow was the first thing he saw.

“He jumped 2 feet up and 3 feet back,” said Brown, a Minneapolis businessman who was Burns’ first All-Pro fullback at Minnesota.

“He crashed into the guys in the first row, knocking them into the second row. And the second row fell into the third row. It was really funny.”

Picking himself up, Burns said: “I’m going to get the guy who did that.”

But he never did.

“He never really tries,” Brown said. “That would spoil everything, and he knows it.”

If people play practical jokes only on people they like, Burns might be the most harassed man in Minneapolis.

There was a day when Mick Tingelhoff, then an All-Pro center for the Vikings, met him on the way into practice, and mentioned a problem he was having with a new offensive play.

Cold weather annoys Burns as much as it bothers his team--he wears long underwear on the nicest fall days in Minneapolis--so he had his hands in his pockets as Tingelhoff opened his playbook, exhibiting a small garter snake.

The snake and Burns jumped at the same time, and as his hands flew out of his pants, Burnsie’s car keys went one way and his change the other, clattering down the street.

“We love to see Burnsie jump,” said Brown.

The most significant fact about this team is the remarkable relationship that the coach has with his players. Their closeness is much of the reason for the Vikings’ success, in their view.

“He’s a players’ coach,” said halfback Darrin Nelson. “An original. A great players’ coach.”

Defensive star Keith Millard said: “(Burns) is the best thing that ever happened to this team.”

Yet, after 21 years with the Vikings, 18 as offensive coordinator and 3 as head coach, Burns knows hardly any of the players by name.

“He used to call me No. 10,” said Fran Tarkenton, who is merely the most famous Viking, as well as a Hall of Fame quarterback.

Burnsie, however, doesn’t play favorites. On a recent Viking trip, a groupie ran up to him and said, breathlessly, “Aren’t you Jerry Burns?”

Blushing, Burnsie looked away and stammered, “Well, I guess so.”

If he doesn’t know his own name, he seems to know how to win, at least in the Minneapolis Metrodome, where the Vikings will play the Chicago Bears Monday night.

He is the first Viking coach with a winning record in each of his first 3 years--he was the first, actually, with a winning record in his first year--and if the Vikings turn back the Bears to earn the home field advantage in a wild-card playoff game next week, they’ll be 11-5 for 1988.

In an era of parity, not bad.

During the game, you won’t have any trouble recognizing Burns. He’ll be the little runt on the sideline. He’ll be the rumpled, little old elf with the worried look, the unkempt gray-blond hair, and the disheveled clothing.

“You may not believe this, but I’ve actually seen Burnsie comb his hair,” Viking General Manager Mike Lynn said. “Of course, it wasn’t yesterday.”

His friends and opponents agree that Burns is the strangest specimen in the league. Compared to the giants he bosses around and plays against, he’s not only a pint-sized 5-foot 9-inch, 150-pounder, he has this prominent, gnarled, leathery face. It is the face of a walnut. As he says, he has wrinkles on wrinkles. He is an old 61.

Writer Steve Aschburner of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune once asked Burns what it was like to get up in the morning and look in the mirror.

“Makes me sick to my stomach,” Burnsie said.

This hasn’t, however, bothered the generations of winning coaches who wanted him by their side, starting long ago with George Allen and Forest Evashevski, and including Vince Lombardi and Bud Grant, the two champions for whom Burns was first a defensive coach and then an offensive coach in Super Bowls I, II, IV, VIII, IX and XI.

For years, great coaches have gravitated toward Burns, who, when he was in charge at Iowa a quarter-century ago, gave Notre Dame’s Lou Holtz his first job as a graduate assistant.

“Neither Holtz nor Burns looks like a coach, and neither was a great college football player,” said Star-Tribune writer Sid Hartman, noting that Holtz began as a 160-pound linebacker for Kent State, and that Burns played 150-pound junior varsity football at Michigan, where he won a coin flip one year and got to make a Rose Bowl trip with the Wolverines.

“What counts is that both know how to handle people,” Hartman said. “And both know what it takes to win.”

Even so, Burns is careful not to overemphasize the values of winning, as he acknowledged recently.

Asked his philosophy, he said: “If (the Vikings) prepare themselves as well as they can, and if they practice hard and play hard, I have no complaints--win or lose.”

Realizing that this is a nearly indefensible stand for a football coach, Burns makes sure his team realizes that it’s only a personal view--one definitely not shared by 1980s sports fans.

“Nobody comes out to see a football team play,” he tells his players. “They’re there to see you win.

“Management isn’t paying you to play football. They’re paying you to win.”

Still, when running back Nelson dropped a pass and took Minnesota out of the playoffs last winter, sending the Washington Redskins to the Super Bowl, Burns couldn’t bring himself to reprove the errant player.

Asked what his coach said to him, Nelson replied: “Not a word.”

Burns did go home and talk it over with his wife, Marlyn, the mother of his five children. Asked how Burnsie had really felt about Nelson’s drop, Marlyn told a radio reporter: “Jerry just felt bad for Darrin.”

That’s vintage Burns.

Marlyn Burns won’t talk to newspaper reporters. But according to Minneapolis broadcaster Gary Gilson, she involves herself so closely in Burnsie’s career that when someone turns the discussion to his failure as a college coach at Iowa, she always says, “We were fired.”

So Marlyn makes it unanimous. Everyone loves Burnsie.

THE CLUB: LIFE ON A ROLLER COASTER

Anthony Carter, the Vikings’ uncommonly talented wide receiver, was unhappy last year that they only threw to him 38 times in 16 games, and that they never asked him to return punts, which had been his specialty at Michigan.

One day it occurred to him that the coaches weren’t aware of all his talents. Anonymously, he sent Burns a large, impressive, 4-color poster that Michigan had produced when he was in college. It showed Carter carrying a punt for a touchdown, and included his punt-running statistics.

At the Vikings’ next game, on fourth and 10 for the New Orleans Saints, Burns growled, “Hey, 81, get in there.”

Carter saluted, ran out, and ran the punt back 84 yards for a touchdown, starting the Vikings off to the 44-10 rout that shoved the Saints out of the playoffs.

“I suppose the poster helped them make up their mind,” a smiling Carter said afterward.

The rap on Burns and his offensive assistants is that they don’t always get the most out of the great players they have. Their opponents say that Minnesota’s short-yardage offense was absurdly inefficient last year. They say Burns was much too slow to recognize that Wade Wilson is one of the league’s finest quarterbacks, and much better than teammate Tommy Kramer. They say Carter was misused, and under-used. And on and on.

Officially, the Vikings deny everything.

It could, however, be true that Burns’ players as a group are the most talented in the conference, if not the league.

Where the average NFL team is proud to employ three or four Pro Bowl types--what the scouting departments call superstars, or blue-chippers--Burns appears to have five on offense alone.

They are Carter, Wilson, tackle Gary Zimmerman, underrated tight end Steve Jordan, and underrated center Kirk Lowdermilk.

Despite which, Minnesota’s real strength is its defense.

The Vikings are a 1-team all-star team, defensively, with wild man Millard at tackle, smooth Joey Browner at strong safety, and reliable Chris Doleman at end, not to mention nose tackle Henry Thomas, cornerback Carl Lee, and swift linebackers Scott Studwell and Jesse Solomon, among others.

The nine who were voted into this year’s Pro Bowl were Carter, Wilson, Zimmerman, Jordan, Millard, Doleman, Browner, Lee and Studwell.

No other NFL club placed more than seven.

Curiously, with all their aces, the Vikings lost twice this year to the league’s worst team, Green Bay. But in successive weeks they also routed two playoff-type teams, New England, 36-6, and Chicago, 31-7.

At Chicago’s Soldier Field, the Vikings toyed with the Bears on a day when, before Coach Mike Ditka’s heart attack, a healthy Jim McMahon was in the lineup along with the other Bears who were subsequently injured.

Two weeks later in sultry Miami, the Vikings blew a 24-7 game to a Dolphin team that has won only 5 other times this year in 15 weeks.

All this strengthened a roller-coaster image that the Vikings have borne throughout the Burns era.

He said he can’t explain it--although it could be due to his coaching style, which is hands off. He lets offensive coordinator Bob Schnelker run the offense, and defensive coordinator Floyd Peters the defense.

Nonetheless, as board chairman, Burnsie is always watching, belying his bedraggled sideline manner.

At a recent game, after the Vikings had moved to a first down at the other team’s 37-yard line, he intervened, sort of.

He went up to Schnelker and said: “Consider this 4-down territory, Bob. I ain’t gonna kick it.”

“Right,” said Schnelker, who was happy to hear ahead of time that he could plan on running or passing on fourth and 2, if necessary.

It was. And in due time, the Vikings scored. And eventually won.

“There’s too much talk about who calls the plays,” Burns said this week. “We all work on the game plan. Schnelker calls the same plays I would.”

Earlier, in a visit with Twin Cities newspapermen, he had put it this way: “I’m like the captain of a ship. My job is to get the ship from A to B, and to help me do it, I’ve got a navigator, an engineer, and everything else. The captain doesn’t shimmy down to the boiler room and stoke the fires.”

Then, winking, Burns advised his listeners not to take him too literally.

“I don’t like that bull about the captain going down with the ship,” he said.

THE BOSS: LIFE ON A MILLION A YEAR

There doesn’t seem to be much danger, at the moment, that Burnsie will sink. His admiral, the man who got him all his talent--including no fewer than five starters out of the old United States Football League--is Mike Lynn, the club’s executive vice president-general manager who seems to be solidly behind the coaching staff.

All told, Lynn has built a better balanced team, and probably a better team, than the Vikings had when they were going to 4 Super Bowls in the ‘70s. And their owners are grateful for this.

They pay Lynn more than $1 million a year, probably the highest salary in the league for a non-owner. Noting that he has the powers of an owner, some say it’s more than $1.5 million.

Lynn has otherwise made a novel contribution to NFL economics, paying his rookies the league’s smallest salaries, and his veterans the largest incentive bonuses.

A different kind of general manager, Lynn also exempts his coaches from any responsibility for the draft, which he has been running himself--with the assistance of top aides Jerry Reichow and Frank Gilliam--since he took control of the club in 1984. He had joined the Vikings a decade earlier.

The drafts of recent years have brought some of the NFL’s meanest and fastest athletes to Minnesota, which is a little strange. For Lynn is neither mean nor fast, and he isn’t much of an athlete. At 52, he is a slender, classy dresser, very civilized, organized, and aggressive.

Rather the opposite of Jerry Burns.

Son of a Scranton, Pa., druggist who died when he was 12, Lynn began as a newsboy and theater usher in a family that had 10 children, and, first to last, three fathers.

“My mother married three times, and buried three husbands,” he said.

In high school at Morris Hills, N.J., Lynn didn’t have time to go to class, and finished last, he said, in the class of 1955. His senior year, the story goes, his teachers kept him eligible for basketball by awarding him incompletes in every subject.

“Then when the season was over, they all gave me F’s,” he said.

Forced to prep for college at summer school, he dropped out of Pace University in New York after a semester or so and never went back.

And this guy is worth $1.5 million a year?

He wasn’t at first.

After progressing from theater usher to manager of a chain of theaters, he wound up a few years later in Memphis, Tenn., where, on the side, his company operated a failing American Basketball Assn. team.

Asked one day to save the franchise, Lynn met the payroll by trading the club’s three best players to the Carolina Cougars for three young players and cash--$250,000.

When the three youngsters floundered in their first Memphis start, a fan stood up and yelled: “We’ve seen enough of these guys. Where’s cash?”

Soon, the chant was rolling through the auditorium: “We want cash! We want cash!”

That was enough for Lynn, who moved on to the group that was trying to bring an NFL franchise to Memphis. When the city opted instead for the USFL, Lynn moved on to the Vikings.

The father now of four, he brought along a wife, Jorja, a former Miss Mississippi finalist, with whom he lives the good life in two exciting residences--a 4-bedroom beach house at Lake Minnetonka, the big suburban Minneapolis lake, and an antebellum plantation mansion that he bought a few years ago in Holly Springs, Miss., Jorja’s home town, which is 30 miles south of Memphis.

Jorja Lynn grew up loving that old house.

The Lynns have 750 feet of shoreline on a point at Minnetonka, where their neighbors are among Minneapolis’ first families, Honeywells and Pillsburys, and where, on lazy summer afternoons, Mike drives around in his high-powered Viking boat, a flat-hulled Chris Craft that can pull six water skiers at one time.

Friends said that he and Jorja never vacation anywhere except at Lake Minnetonka--or Holly Springs, where their white, colonnaded town house, which sits on 15 mid-town acres, has been called the most attractive mansion in the state. Reportedly, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s family lived there in 1863 when Grant besieged Vicksburg, 200 miles to the South.

After the Vikings had played a Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit last month, Lynn and his family flew to their Mississippi estate for a brief holiday.

“We had 37 for Thanksgiving dinner,” he said.

Jerry Burns, busy back in Minneapolis, wasn’t on the guest list that time.

“Burnsie was laying siege to New Orleans,” said Lynn.

A few days later, the Saints fell. It was a 45-3 rout.

Gen. Grant would have been pleased.

BURNSIE: HE AIMS TO LIVE AND LET LIVE

On opening day at the Viking training camp last summer--as the head coach began his 21st season in the NFL--an acquaintance asked: “Hey, Burnsie, you looking forward to getting under way?”

Burnsie looked even sadder than usual. “Can’t say that I am,” he replied. “I’d just as soon be sitting on my boat, having a beer.”

He says he can only keep his sanity by keeping perspective.

Burns-watchers agree. The Star-Tribune’s Bob Sansevere remembers an afternoon when, after a defeat a day or two earlier, everything went bad for Burns again. The Vikings practiced poorly, then reporters hazed him at a news conference.

In his office later, a friend sympathized, “Tough life, eh, Burnsie?”

“It could be worse,” the Minnesota coach said cheerfully.

“How?” he was asked.

“It could be Chernobyl, and we’d blow the whole deal,” he said.

Burns is an unusual combination of nervous and relaxed.

“I’m a live-and-let-live person,” he said. “Sure, I recognize the need for discipline on a ballclub, but I’m not a strict disciplinarian. The best way to play football, in my opinion, is to relax and enjoy it.”

On the sideline, however, in a big game, it’s a different world. His players talk about the time last year that their opponent flubbed a field goal in the final minute of a game that the Vikings won by 3 points.

Burns immediately ran up to his kick returning specialist and said: “Now, when you return this kickoff . . . “

“Hey, Coach,” another player said, heading for the locker room, “they missed the field goal.”

Burns, like most people, is a composite of his experiences and background. Born in Detroit, where his father was a Chrysler accountant, he was the youngest of eight children.

His ambition was to play quarterback for Michigan but he never was able to put on more than 150 pounds.

He did play, a little, but never on a scholarship. And what he can’t forget is that before he graduated with a B.S. in physical education, he washed dishes, 3 times a day for 3 years, at a fraternity house.

That was after he had spent 4 years in the Navy, as World War II wound down, as an aircraft gunner.

He has spent the rest of his adult life as a coach, hitting an early peak in 1961, when, at 34, he moved from backfield coach to head coach at Iowa.

“He was too young for that,” they said when Burns was fired 45 games later with a 16-27-2 record.

“He’s too old for that,” they said in 1984 when Bud Grant’s job surprisingly came open at Minnesota.

At 57, Burns didn’t think so--he had been the offensive coordinator of a 4-time conference champion--but without consulting him, they gave the job to young Les Steckel.

When Burns was 58, they brought Grant back. When Burns was 59, in 1986, he finally got the job.

One of the oldest coaches in football, he was hired in part because his approach is one of the most youthful.

“He’s like a kid,” said Lynn. “He makes football seem special. He enjoys it so much that the players have this unique feeling for him. They want to win for him, because he’s Burnsie.”

For exactly the same reason, Burns enjoys winning, too. Anytime. Anywhere.

One day in Minneapolis last summer when he was playing a favorite game, racquetball, Burns came face to face with the awful truth that he couldn’t put the ball where he wanted it.

Suddenly, he was on the verge of losing to Star-Tribune columnist Jim Klobuchar.

“I thought I had him,” Klobuchar remembers.

Then Burns called time out.

“A timeout in racquetball?” Klobuchar scoffed. “There isn’t any such thing,” he yelled as Burns squatted and, for a moment, meditated.

Ignoring his opponent, Burns, a moment later, said, “Time in!”

And, having thrown Klobuchar off guard, he came back to win, 21-19.

On the job at Viking headquarters, Burns has modeled his program after Bud Grant’s. The Vikings still work a shorter day than most teams do, they’re in training camp for a shorter period of time, and Burns leaves his coordinators strictly alone--as if they were in quarantine--as Grant did in the days when he often went duck hunting on the morning of a game.

There is really only one noticeable change from the old days: Burnsie does his cussing on the sideline now. One of the NFL’s most picturesquely profane coaches, he had spent nearly 2 decades as the Vikings’ eye in the sky, connected with Grant’s headset by a private line, swearing at the officials over the telephone.

At a game one day when Grant smiled for the first time in 2 months, quarterback Tommy Kramer, who was standing nearby, nudged a tight end and whispered: “Burnsie just came up with a new cuss word.”

On the press level at the stadium, the coaches’ box adjoins the owners’ box. And in the old days whenever a Viking owner brought a female companion, Lynn always went in and briefed her before the opening kickoff.

“Ignore the guy ranting and cursing next door,” he said. “He’s really a very nice guy--it’s just that referees drive him crazy.”

Away from football, Burns, like Lynn, lives the good life in multiple housing.

The official Burns residence is in upscale suburban Eden Prairie, where the Viking offices are.

In the land of 10,000 lakes, he spends off-season weekends on his boat, a big houseboat that he berths in the St. Croix River on the Wisconsin border.

And he vacations at his villa in Jamaica.

He would doubtless give it all up--for a while, anyway--to win the Super Bowl next month.

He’s thought about that, but he doesn’t want to talk about it.

When a Minnesota reporter asked him to compare the 1988 Vikings to the six teams that he helped coach into the Super Bowl in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Burns said he didn’t have the foggiest.

“Maybe time and Pabst Blue Ribbon have dulled my memory,” he said.

Times researcher Doug Conner assisted on this story.