Dear George: Make It Fun, OK?

Hiring George Allen to coach football at Cal State Long Beach is a little like getting Gen. George Patton to run a Boy Scout troop: You want a camp-out? He’ll plan an invasion. As a National Football League coach in the 1960s and 1970s, Allen definitely did things his way, to the point that the former Washington Redskins owner, the late Edward Bennett Williams, once lamented, “We gave George an unlimited expense account, and he exceeded it.”

Long Beach is a fine school for many things--business administration for one--but is no threat as a football powerhouse. The school almost scrubbed the sport three years ago because of money problems. The program won an eleventh-hour reprieve when alums and other supporters coughed up enough donations. Since then, the team has won 11 and lost 24. The 71-year-old Allen understandably views his new job as a challenge.

A challenge indeed, but of what sort? Allen hasn’t coached college football--which is supposed to mean amateur football--in a quarter century. This intense, driven man is likely to be a great mentor to the players only if he remembers the proper role of athletics in student life.

Winning isn’t the only thing, or even everything. Winning is the happy, coincidental outcome of a variety of human assets to be learned through college sports: teamwork, fellowship, discipline (up to a point), sportsmanship, fan loyalty (up to a point) and just plain having fun.

If the Long Beach 49ers do their best for Allen--and more to the point--if he is relaxed enough so that they all can have some fun, everyone will be a winner.