Glanville Is the Dean of NFL Coaches : Houston Coach Is Rebel, His Cause Is Super Bowl

At a Texas costume party not long ago, Jerry Glanville, the unconventional coach of the Houston Oilers, won the door prize as best-dressed guest. His wife, Brenda, finished second.

Amusing the late-night movie fans at the party, they went as James Dean and Natalie Wood.

Glanville sees himself as the reincarnation of Dean, the rebel without a cause. He also sees himself as a pugnacious but successful football coach. That is perhaps a harder role to play, but the early results have been encouraging.

The first National Football League coach to use four wide receivers in his basic offense, he has twice led the feisty Houston team into the playoffs. Only four other NFL clubs have made the playoffs in each of the last two years.

Glanville, 47, who began his career a quarter-century ago, can coach football players, they say here, although it’s the other things about him that have made him notorious:

--As the fast-talking, outgoing leader of a club whose colors are scarlet, blue and white, he’s the one who, on the sideline, invariably wears black golf clothes.

--He’s the character who leaves tickets at the will-call window for Elvis Presley, the Phantom of the Opera and other celebrities, deceased, mythical and otherwise.

--He’s the radio host who warns listeners to cancel their subscriptions to Houston papers if they want to talk to him.

--He’s the up-from-nowhere product of a boisterous Detroit tenement. As he says, “The day I was born, my mother and I were the only two persons at the hospital who hadn’t been shot or stabbed.”

--Most prominently, he’s the coach who goads his players to hit, hustle and fight so furiously that they customarily lead the league in penalties assessed.

“On the road, we only have one rule,” he tells the team. “Leave your game on the field. No fighting is allowed in restaurants or saloons--unless I’m on the floor, being pinned down by somebody.”

The line gets a laugh, as most of Glanville’s lines do. He always seems to be playing to the crowd, always seems to be enjoying himself. At Houston’s practice facility, strutting around in a big hat, he looks a bit like country singer Johnny Cash. He has the same chiseled features, the same devil-may-care air, though he isn’t that tall.

“As you can see, my mama wasn’t prejudiced against short people,” he says.

Given his druthers, Glanville would have been the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, and he has built his team in his image. It is a bad-boy image that was engraved on the minds of TV viewers two years ago when, after a Pittsburgh-Houston game, Pittsburgh Coach Chuck Noll refused to shake hands.

Instead, side by side with Glanville, Noll strode off the field gesturing angrily and yelling that Glanville’s players were out to deliberately hurt his players.

One NFL coach saying that to another in public, in plain view of thousands, was a stunner. Glanville, of course denied the charge, but a writer who knew him well at the time said: “(Glanville) never saw a black eye he didn’t admire.”

Another reporter has noted: “Playing for the Oilers means never having to say you’re sorry.”

There is ample evidence that most of Glanville’s players feel that way.

“I think it’s a good image for us,” safety Kenny Johnson said. “A lot of teams don’t like us--they say we play dirty ball--(but) there aren’t that many dirty hits in the (tapes).”

To Glanville, a good hit is a de-cleator. Literal definition: knocking a player out of his cleats.

One year when a big lineman threatened to retire, then wavered, saying that he was afraid that if he went, “My dad will kick my butt.”

Glanville told him: “If you do go home, send me your dad.”

A pugnacious image is different to maintain, however, without victories, and the Oilers’ slow start this season--Houston is 2-2--has led Glanville’s critics to question whether his tactics have become counterproductive.

“That is the story line in Houston now,” says Ray Buck, a reporter for the Houston Post.

Says Post columnist Mickey Herskowitz: “The Raider-Gestapo image could be outdated in the NFL. It’s harder to intimidate pro teams now.”

Among the Oilers concurring is Warren Moon, the first-class quarterback, who has advised his teammates to please deliver fewer late hits from now on.

“Some of our guys need to learn how to cool it,” Moon says.

Club owner Bud Adams, however, has become a supporter of Glanville’s approach.

“I used to (favor) getting rid of bad boys,” Adams says. “But I realize now that you can’t win in this league with all nice guys. You’ve got to teach aggressive football today.”

Linebacker Robert Lyles thinks so, too.

“We’ve got a lot of wild guys,” he says. “(Glanville) is so loose, and it allows us to be loose.”

That is Glanville’s kind of guy.

“If you want to stay (on this team), you’ve got to hustle, you’ve got to hit,” the Houston coach says. “That’s my philosophy. (Whether) you’re an Oiler player or coach, you’d better be a little wild, and it helps to be crazy.”

IN THE CAVE

It was during the summer of 1959 that the American Football League was organized in K.S. (Bud) Adams’ Houston office, in the building he built the year before, the low-lying, block-long Adams Petroleum Center.

Thirty years later, Adams, who is on Forbes magazine’s list of America’s wealthiest persons, still handles all his interests--California and Texas ranching, marketing, transportation, oil and gas exploration and pro football--out of the same office, which is about the size of a football field.

Or about the size of the cramped Oiler offices a floor or two away.

Distinctively decorated in various Indian themes and colors, Adams’ historic office, where he and young Lamar Hunt sat down and plotted the challenge of the established NFL, is an obvious tribute to his Indian heritage.

“My mother’s brother was a principal chief of the Cherokee (tribe),” he says proudly, pointing to the chief’s picture.

It’s on the wall of Adams’ comfortable, adjoining den, which he calls his cave, where he relaxes, and where he ponders the future of the Oilers.

There are some respects in which this man is the most unusual member of a lodge of strange NFL club owners. For one thing, although he is a former University of Kansas halfback, he never calls an Oiler play, never butts in.

“He’s a dream of an owner,” Glanville says. “If you were to rank the 28 owners according to how much they interfere with their coaches, (Adams) would rank 28th.”

Adams’ patience, however, doesn’t match his forbearance. When he decided to promote defensive coordinator Glanville with two regular-season games remaining in 1985, the Oilers had their 13th head coach in 26 years.

“Talk about quick hooks, nobody’s record is worse than Bud’s,” a fellow owner complained that December.

At the time, a team in the same state, the Dallas Cowboys, had had the same coach all 26 years of its existence--Tom Landry, who lasted another three.

In a franchise that always seems to be in flux, six of Adams’ coaches, incredibly, lasted a year or less. One of them was Sammy Baugh.

Another Oiler coach, Lou Rymkus, won the AFL championship in his rookie year, only to be fired the next year--halfway through a season in which, improbably, his successor, Wally Lemm, carried on to win the AFL title again.

Then, after a 10-0 record, Lemm was gone.

Glanville has already more than doubled the tenure of the average Oiler coach, which should be making him nervous.

Nor can it soothe him to hear that Adams has already picked out his successor, Jackie Sherrill, who left Texas A&M; recently under a cloud.

“You have to ask if (changing coaches once more) makes sense,” Herskowitz says. “But given the history of the franchise, the less sense it makes, the more believable the rumor.”

The franchise holder himself doesn’t buy the rumor, or so he says. When the subject comes up, Adams, a pleasant, soft-spoken, big man, says simply: “I’m happy with Jerry Glanville.”

Thinking it over, he adds: “We’re in a selling game in pro sports--and Jerry has brought some pizazz to the NFL. It’s easy to forget that a lot of people come for the dancing dolls and the music and color. When Jerry puts on that black shirt of his, he’s telling sports fans something.”

It was reported last year that Adams resented Glanville’s game-day black because it clashed with the Oilers’ official blue and white.

Says Adams: “He asked me about it, and I told him, ‘Hell, Jerry, black is all right with me--as long as you’re wearing black underwear, too.”’

Glanville maintains that if Adams had even frowned that day, he would have hopped right out of black into blue, or orange, or even rainbow pants, if Adams wanted that.

“There are enough things to get fired for,” he says. “I’m not going to get fired because the owner hates black.”

Is he worried about Sherrill?

“I told (Adams) that after he and I have been together awhile, this will be regarded as the best coaching job in America,” Glanville says. “Everyone will want it. Let Jackie get in line.”

AT THE LAKE

On the Perrysburg (Ohio) High School football team in the late 1950s, Jerry Glanville, the younger of two brothers, struck up a lasting friendship with a boy named Jim Leyland, who, some said, was as crazy as Jerry.

Now managing the Pittsburgh Pirates, Leyland sometimes sleeps on a bench in the clubhouse after a night game preceding a day game.

There was a recent morning in the St. Louis clubhouse when, just before dawn, Leyland woke up one of his coaches, Rich Donnelly, and sent him outside to see if it was raining.

Donnelly complained later: “There I was, in my pajamas, standing at second base at Busch Stadium at 6 in the morning.”

That reminds Glanville that he used to sleep in a bowling alley. Glanville family biographers say that his father and grandfather once managed pool halls as well as bowling alleys.

At high school graduation, Glanville left to play linebacker for Montana State, later transferring to Northern Michigan. But later, when he began his college coaching career, he returned to his roots, taking over as the coach of the women’s bowling team at Western Kentucky.

An associate from those years recalls the day that Glanville barked: “OK, ladies, let’s get our minds out of the gutter.”

With a master’s degree from Western Kentucky, Glanville coached college football for seven years, always as an assistant, and then pro ball for 14--as an assistant at Detroit, Atlanta, Buffalo and Houston--before he was anointed by the Oilers.

Looking back on his first quarter-century in football, he says: “Coaching isn’t a job. I’ve never had a job. I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this. It isn’t much, but they do pay me.”

He lives with his wife and son, Justin, 7, on Sugar Lake, which edges Houston in the suburb called Sugar Land.

Not far from Glanville’s swimming pool, a sign on the lake in his back yard reads: “Beware of Alligators. No Swimming.”

Oyster Creek “runs up from the gulf to the lake,” he says. “And alligators have to live somewhere, you know. One of them, a big one--he must have been six, seven feet long--ate the neighbors’ dog.

“I been chasing that alligator ever since. Don’t let your feet hang over the dock. Old Sparky is in there.”

The only fisherman in the family is Justin, who was out in the back yard, tracking catfish from the Glanville dock one day this summer when he began screaming.

“I thought it was an alligator,” Brenda Glanville says. “But it was only a big old catfish. Nearly as big as Justin. Jerry had to run out and pull him in.”

Georgia-born and bred, with a soft Southern accent, Brenda evokes images of Scarlett O’Hara.

“When Jerry was (coaching) at Georgia Tech, we were next-door neighbors,” she says. “Jerry and I lived next to each other for six months before we even met.

“Then I dated him for seven years before we were married. So I can’t say that I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

ON THE EDGE

It began last year when, on the day of an Oiler exhibition game in Memphis, Glanville quietly left a pair of tickets for Elvis Presley.

“Elvis lives,” he said at the time.

Next, in Cincinnati, he left a pair for actress Loni Anderson, who starred in the TV show, “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Those tickets weren’t picked up either--but when she heard about it, Loni sent him an autographed picture.

“She signed it nicely,” Glanville says.

Then in New York, hitting pay dirt, he left a pair for the Phantom of the Opera--who returned the favor with two orchestra seats on the aisle.

“So we went to (an airline) and got two round-trip tickets to New York,” Glanville says. “Then we auctioned the whole package off--the show tickets and the airline tickets--for the Ronald McDonald House. Raised $4,300.”

Brenda Glanville is a Ronald McDonald House officer. She works there several days a week, and also lines up Jerry’s players to help serve the parents of ill children on holidays.

For his part, each week, Jerry spends his Thursday lunch hour at a Houston children’s hospital, and his game-day guests are often children. On a recent Sunday afternoon, one of two guests on the Oiler bench was a child with terminal cancer. The other, Glanville said, had been pronounced dead 11 times.

“Glanville is a bundle of contradictions,” Dallas Morning News reporter Mark Johnson said last year after spending most of a week in Houston.

Yes, but can he coach football?

“That’s still the question,” Herskowitz says. “At least, the players are giving him more credit now.”

Probably Glanville’s best player, Bruce Matthews, who moved up last year to become the generally acknowledged best NFL guard, says, “We’re well-prepared going in (to a game).”

Houston writer Buck, who watches Glanville daily, says: “He’s a typically sound NFL X’s and O’s guy who (not so typically) takes a lot of chances. He has the talent on offense--but defensively, he’s getting a lot out of the players he has.”

Glanville involves himself closely with both Houston platoons.

“He calls just about every defensive play,” quarterback coach Kevin Gilbride says. “Offensively, he calls a good bit of the plays.”

As an NFL coach, the distinctive thing about Glanville, besides his reckless approach, is that he is more far-seeing than most. He was several years ahead of his time in the four-receiver football that is just now achieving widespread exposure.

“I first (coached) the run ‘n’ shoot in 1964 at Lima (Ohio) High School,” he says.

He calls his version the red gun formation.

He works a coach’s regular seven-day week, with a few hours off each Friday to see his family, but his other interests--fast cars and paranoiac media-watching--are not so typical.

At his Sugar Lake home, he stables four coal-black cars: two 1950 Mercurys, a new Corvette, and a new pickup truck with a fuel-injected Corvette engine and a $2,000 CD player system. The truck, he says, will do 120 m.p.h.

“That’s in the first half-block,” he says.

Run ‘n’ shoot expert June Jones, the Detroit assistant who was with Glanville last year and who remains a member of their longstanding mutual admiration society, says: “Most of the time, Jerry only goes 100 m.p.h. He once made it to training camp--a good seven-hour trip--in four hours.”

In Texas last spring, he competed on a quarter-mile track with 30 other drivers in identical cars.

“I won the national celebrity drags,” Glanville says.

One of his 30-year-old Mercurys is a show car. “It’s the same car that James Dean drove in the movie, (‘Rebel Without a Cause’)” Glanville says. “We’ve used it to raise nearly $100,000 for charity.”

On hot days, his cars are all easy to identify. He uses James Dean windshield screens to protect the interiors.

All-black interiors, of course.

Houston’s many sports reporters--print, radio and TV--don’t know what to make of all this. He’s an enigma to most of them--to give him the best of it. Although he seems to get along with those he sees and amuses regularly, he has had long feuds with some others.

He says his four leading critics--two sportswriters, a radio reporter and a TV personality--have never been at one of his practices or news conferences.

Outwardly, he appears not to mind those who disapprove.

Says Buck: “If you don’t like Glanville, he probably didn’t like you first.”

Inwardly, however, as many coaches have said, every man hates his critics. And Glanville goes to unusual lengths to keep track of and challenge his.

“He has ways of taping every (Houston) sports program,” a Houston radio reporter marvels.

Glanville denies this, but adds, mysteriously, “I know what’s going on, because every coach I’ve got listens to a show.”

If, in Glanville’s opinion, he is criticized unfairly or inaccurately, he promptly telephones the errant critic and tells him so.

“It is my duty,” he says.

Neutral observers long ago concluded that Glanville would be better off if he stuck with football and ignored his detractors, but that isn’t Glanville’s way.

A defensive expert throughout his career, he has been on the offensive all that time, indeed all his life. His way is to attack.

“More than any person I’ve known, Glanville lives on the edge,” Buck says. “He’s the kind who wouldn’t worry if he looked out the window of his airplane and saw an engine on fire.”

Glanville agrees.

“Life is only fun,” he says, “if you live on the edge.”

Doug Conner of The Times library assisted with research for this story.