As High School Coach, Ken Houston Is a Pro With His Kids

Ken Houston is standing in the middle of a high-school gym trying to convince a couple of bashful and slightly self-conscious teen-age boys that the Harlem Shuffle isn’t quite as hard as it might look. Then he starts to demonstrate. Two steps to the right, kick, two steps to the left, kick. Soon the boys and their gym teacher are almost in step, clapping their hands and dancing to the music just as the bell rings mercifully to end the school day.

“Some things just never change,” Houston says later. “The boys still hate to dance, and the girls still hate to play basketball.”

Other things never change as well. When Houston was completing a Hall of Fame professional football career with the Washington Redskins in the 1970s, he always told anyone who asked that when he retired he wanted to go back home and “work with the kids.” Some athletes say it because it sounds good. Then they drive off in the Mercedes and call their agents from the car phone.

Not Ken Houston.

These days the man George Allen once described as the best strong safety in the history of professional football still looks as if he could play the game. He is almost 44, lean and muscular as he walks the halls of Westbury High School in blue coaching shorts, a polo shirt, high white socks and sneakers.

He teaches four physical education classes a day at the Houston school, patrols the corridors, coaches the varsity football team and serves as the athletic director. Every morning he’s up at dawn to get to school for first period, and many days he’s not home until 8 or 9 at night. There are practices to oversee, films to review, lifting in the weight room, skull sessions with his team and his staff.

Still, it’s all he ever wanted to do. He knows that now, though people keep asking him why he’s coaching high school when he would seem to be an ideal candidate to be in the pros, perhaps even as a man who surely could become the first black head coach in the NFL.

Houston does not rule out the possibility of getting back to the pros. But he has a bitter taste from his last experience. He spent four years as an assistant with the Houston Oilers, then lost his job when defensive coordinator Jerry Glanville replaced Hugh Campbell as coach in 1986. Houston thought sure his colleague would ask him to stay on to coach a secondary that he built from scratch with four rookies. But the phone call never came, and Houston decided then and there to take a different path.

“It was time for a change on my part,” Houston said. “The Oiler experience was a disappointment, but I’m not bitter about it. When they let the staff go they gave everybody plane tickets to Mobile (Ala.) for the Senior Bowl so we could talk with other teams about getting a job. I didn’t go. I decided I did not want to uproot my wife again, I did not want to get on that merry-go-round.”

So he got off. He took a job at inner-city Houston Wheatley High School and spent three years at it, struggling to get youngsters to come out for football and losing every year with undersized, outmanned teams. This year he made the move to Westbury, a bigger school in a better neighborhood that plays at the highest level of Texas football. So far his team is winless, with close losses in its first two games and a 72-0 blowout by Houston Sterling, the state’s seventh-ranked team, last Friday.

“I told him I don’t care if you win or lose,” said Shirley Johnson, the principal at Westbury who hired Houston. “Just having him here with us is the most important thing. Kenny was the first coach I interviewed. He came here early and that told me something. The minute he walked in the room, I knew this man was so kid-oriented. He couldn’t say three sentences without the word ‘kid’ in there.

“I don’t know much about the technical football stuff, but I knew that was going to be there. What I didn’t know was his impact on these kids. This man supervises the halls; he’s got the most unbelievable caring attitude. He’s like a Pied Piper. Everywhere he goes he’s got a trail of kids following him. And our attendance at the games has picked up; all the daddies want to see him.”

His players are equally enthusiastic.

“There’s no question that we’re learning from the best,” said James Beasley, a junior who shares Houston’s old position, strong safety, with classmate Robert Swaim. “He’s always telling us we’re giving him a headache or a heart attack. But he’s always watching us, telling us what to do, where to go.”

“We don’t argue with him, that’s for sure,” said Swaim. “He’s a Hall-of-Famer. He’s the best. How can you argue with that?”

Added cornerback Dexter Goodson: “If you make a mistake, he doesn’t jump all over you. He’ll pull you over, show you what you did wrong and let you go back out and play. We work real hard, but he makes the game fun.”

In 14 years in the NFL, the last eight with the Redskins, the game always seemed fun to Houston. He was as gifted an athlete as ever played, voted into the Hall of Fame the first year he became eligible. He was one of Allen’s trusted “generals,” a team leader in every sense, a brilliant cover man who hit with stunning swiftness and an occasionally lethal forearm. He made arguably the most famous tackle in Redskins history, stopping Walt Garrison at the goal line in the closing seconds to preserve victory in a tense Monday night game against the Cowboys in 1973.

But Houston doesn’t waste much breath talking about the past, because his present and his future don’t allow much time for reminiscing. He still sees his old teammates every once in a while. Diron Talbert lives in town and they cross paths. Alvin Reed, a college and pro teammate as a tight end at Prairie View and with the Oilers, and traded with him to the Redskins for five players in 1973, is still his best friend and lives 30 minutes away, working as a community-relations expert with the city’s Metro system. Even Jack Pardee, his last coach in Washington, is just a few miles down the freeway as coach of the University of Houston.

It was Pardee who touched off a firestorm of criticism for not putting Ken Houston into his final home game of the 1980 season. Occasionally they see each other, and Houston said: “We’ve never talked about that day. At the time it was just very disappointing. I certainly would rather have played that day. It meant so much to me, and I hope it meant something to the fans of the Redskins. But it wasn’t done maliciously, I’m sure of that. Jack doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. He was the coach, I was a player, and now it’s over.”

And now Ken Houston is a coach, a teacher, and a role model for his kids in every sense of the word. He is also a father for the first time. He and Gustie, his wife of 22 years, have a girl, Kene, a year old. The Houstons also are watching over their nephew, Rubert, a ninth-grader who moved from Louisiana and lives with them in a comfortable suburb filled with tree-lined streets and young families. There is a bass boat parked in the driveway, and Houston rhapsodizes about the 33-acre farm -- and the well-stocked pond -- he bought years ago that serves as the family’s weekend country escape.

The NFL just seems so many miles away now. This past summer Houston was contacted by David Cornwell, the NFL’s director of equal employment and an assistant league counsel, and asked to participate in a minority fellowship program that seeks to expose promising young black coaches to the pros, with hands-on experience at training camps around the country. The idea is to get them more experience and provide NFL front offices a larger talent pool for filling coaching vacancies.

Cornwell, a native Washingtonian who played high-school football at Sidwell Friends, grew up idolizing Houston the player and wanted him to get back into the NFL mainstream. He talked with Houston about spending the summer with the Los Angeles Rams, but Houston decided he couldn’t take the time away from his high-school team. He was moving into a new job. He had to organize his players and pick a coaching staff.

Cornwell said he was disappointed, but still believes Houston can have a future in the NFL.

“You always hear all this talk about who is ‘qualified’ and I don’t particularly like that kind of talk,” Cornwell said. “But in this case, this man’s qualifications are impeccable. I know he’s highly respected among head coaches, assistant coaches, everyone who ever comes in contact with him. I can’t think of anyone across the board who enjoys so much respect. His playing background and his coaching background would be the perfect mix for a pro job, from assistant to head coach.”

Houston says he appreciates everything Cornwell tried to do, and will not immutably close the door to returning to that level of football. But he is a proud man and says: “What would I learn in two months in a pro camp that I didn’t know from 14 years of playing and four more of coaching the Oilers?

“I don’t want that to sound like I’m thumbing my nose at the NFL. But after all that time, I think I know football. That’s not a conceited statement, and I’m sure there are many people who know a lot more than I do. I also know there are steps you have to take, from assistant to coordinator to head coach. But a lot of head coaches they’ve got now seem to do it faster than that. I know I am qualified to do it. But right now the timing just isn’t right.”

So Houston will stay at Westbury High School “for as long as they’ll have me,” he said. “This is for the kids, not for me. I don’t have to be selfish, I don’t have time to think about me.”