A Coaching Trilogy: : Players Who Knew All Three Have No Trouble Telling Them Apart

The first of the three, everyone knew and loved.

The second, few knew, and nobody knew quite what to feel.

The new one is too new to really be known, but most think he will be easy to know when he’s not so new.

Got that?

Those are the basic feelings of current Charger players who have played for the past three coaches.

There was Don Coryell, favorite of all. There was Al Saunders, respected from afar but obscured behind the paper work he did with such efficiency. And now there is Dan Henning who, by virtue of the limited time he has been in town, cannot be fully categorized. But early returns are favorable.

Don Coryell’s 8 1/2 years as coach of the Chargers are best remembered through stories from the men who surrounded him. Dennis McKnight, a center/guard who will miss this season because of a quadriceps injury, played for Coryell for five seasons and doesn’t mind recalling a few of his favorites.

There’s the one where the assistant coaches show up in the morning at the office and find Coryell face down on the desk, asleep, with the projector reel still whirring, and the film slapping against the machine. And there’s the one where an assistant finds Coryell walking through the parking lot wearing a blank expression on his face.

The assistant: “Coach, what’s the matter?”

Coryell: “You know, I thought I drove my car to work this morning.”

The assistant helps him look and finally spots the car. Turns out, Coryell has left it at the practice field on the other side of the parking lot and returned to the stadium with one of the other coaches.

“During the season,” McKnight says, “his mind would just be so focused on the game, the team and the preparation that nothing else really mattered. He was just that type.”

But there was something more than just an undying devotion to the game. What sticks in the minds of the current Chargers who knew him best was his way of showing the players he cared about them as individuals. Not in a superficial way, and not with a lot of phony, motivational hype. It was genuine emotion, and the players knew it.

One season, after the final game, McKnight remembers Coryell sitting in the locker room, upset about the losing record. Before too long, he walked over with tears in his eyes, hugged McKnight and said: “Some day you’re going to go to the Pro Bowl.”

Players knew they could trust Coryell.

“I guarantee you right now you could go ask anybody who has ever played for him, and if he said, ‘Hey, I need you to run into that wall for me,’ they’d do it,” McKnight said. “You knew he’d never ask you to do something that he wouldn’t do.”

Center Don Macek played for Coryell for all 8 1/2 seasons and vividly remembers the day Coryell resigned.

“That was a very sad day for me,” he said. “I really loved the guy.”

Macek saw Coryell a short time after that season at a social function. Coryell came up to him and thanked him for saying so many nice things about him in the newspaper.

“I said, ‘Hey, coach, all I did was tell the truth,’ ” Macek said. “I have so much to thank him for that he had no business thanking me for anything. There’s not enough I can say about him.”

It doesn’t seem so long ago that Charger owner Alex Spanos was saying how well Al Saunders reflected on his organization. Perhaps it was because Saunders himself was so well organized.

Nobody will deny Saunders’ ability to administrate, to tackle the desk work and put everything in neat and proper order. But that extra something from the Coryell era was missing. And since the victories didn’t come any more frequently than they did in the end under Coryell, Saunders was fired at the end of last season.

Macek gives a simple explanation for Saunders’ demise, saying: “Last year, we didn’t win enough games.”

But nestled somewhere among those losses is another reason. The players didn’t identify with Saunders’ coat-and-tie approach. Or, at the very least, they weren’t able to relate to him as anything more than a coach.

“I didn’t really know Al Saunders,” said Lee Williams, defensive end. “I wasn’t close to him at all.”

While Coryell let the players retain their own personalities, Saunders was more of a drill sergeant, striving for a certain degree of uniformity. Players couldn’t take their helmets off during practice. They couldn’t drop down on one knee during breaks. Everything was designed to build mental toughness, but it didn’t quite work.

“Sometimes at this level you have to let (players) be men and trust them,” McKnight said. “(With Saunders) everything was more regimented. Maybe it was too much. Some guys start to fight that, and if guys are fighting, that’s not good for the team.”

Said Macek: “(Saunders) wanted everybody to act and dress and do things the way he wanted it to be. I think at this level it is advantageous to let people be themselves.”

It could be that Saunders wasn’t completely understood. Cornerback Gill Byrd, who says he knew him better than most, said: “I don’t even know if it was the fact that Coach Saunders wouldn’t tolerate a lot of guys’ personalities as much as guys didn’t think he would, so they held back while he was around.”

It’s hard to say. After all, he wasn’t around that long.

Go out to practice, and you might see Dan Henning lining up opposite center Courtney Hall and pretending to rush.

Someone might say, “Run him over, Courtney.” And Henning will laugh.

The lighter touch has returned to this team. And Henning doesn’t wear a tie.

Make no mistake, there are plenty of serious moments. Henning can be as demanding as the next guy or, in this case, the last guy.

“He’s got a stare that can stare right through you,” McKnight said. “You wonder if he’s mad at you sometimes.”

Business is business. But there is time for a joke and a laugh during a meeting, time to tell the players they are free to cruise El Cajon Boulevard at night after practice.

Just the other day, Williams told Henning he went to college at Bethune-Cookman, not generally regarded as a high-profile school. Before he knew it, Henning was rattling off the names of five or six people he knew from the school.

Players have taken to his approach.

“You don’t have to be around him for a hell of a long time to get to know what type of guy he is,” Williams said. “He’s real straight-forward.”

With Henning’s personality comes a splash of optimism.

“I think he exudes some confidence and poise that is rubbing off on the players around him,” Macek said. “That’s a feeling we haven’t had in a couple of years. When a team becomes confident and poised, that’s when they play their best football.”