Don James Stands Out in a Crowd of His Peers

A Freedom Bowl is (choose one):

1. A football game played annually in Shreveport--or, possibly, Memphis.

2. The tabloid name given to what’s happening in Eastern Europe today.

3. A new 32-lane facility in Downey where the last 300-game was rolled.

4. A place where you go to watch the Easter sunrise services.

Actually, the answer is none of the above. A Freedom Bowl is a football game, all right, and a good one. It’s played right down the road from the Rose Bowl, but it’s not to be confused with the Rose, Super, Sugar or even the Gator, Copper or Peach bowls. It’s more like the John Hancock Bowl or even the Hall of Fame or Liberty Bowl. Made for television.

It’s held in Anaheim, which didn’t want to be left out of the bowl picture altogether. No self-respecting community should be without one this time of year. There are 22 of them sanctioned by the NCAA with some 2,000 players involved, but of course, the schools persist in resisting a national collegiate playoff. It would keep too many athletes out of the classrooms, they say. With a perfectly straight face.

Anaheim started putting together a bowl of its very own eight years ago for the most novel of reasons. A colleague, John Hall, writing in another paper, noticed gloomily that two of the nation’s outstanding college backs, Marcus Allen and Herschel Walker, had no bowl to go to that year. He suggested they contrive one for them.

I suppose that’s as good a reason for having a bowl game as any. I mean, not having a Marcus Allen or a Herschel Walker on your holiday screen is a cultural deprivation akin to not having a Toulouse-Lautrec in the master bath.

So they strung together the Freedom Bowl. Too late as it happens for Marcus or Herschel but just in time for the likes of Gaston Green, Chris Chandler, Chuck Long and a host of other stars who were to get a not-otherwise available opportunity to be showcased in a bowl game. They probably should call it the Statue of Liberty Bowl, a refuge for the huddled masses yearning to run free, the wretched refuse of football’s teeming shore.

It’s practically an institution now, the grandchild of them all. They’ve had five of them, but what makes this year’s renewal interesting is not the players, it’s a coach.

It comes as a surprise to students of the game that Don James, the University of Washington coach, has won more games in the Pacific 10 (or the conference’s various other names) than any coach in history, more than the storied Howard Jones, more than Pop Warner, John McKay, Red Sanders or Pappy Waldorf. Shortly, he will have won more games, period, than any Pacific Coast coach ever. He has won more football games at Washington than Knute Rockne did at Notre Dame. He’s no secret in the profession. His fellow coaches elected him president of the American Football Coaches Assn.

In another era, he’d probably be known as “the Fox,” or be called Bo or Bear or even Pop or Hurry Up. He’s not even Dr. J. Hardly anyone even calls him Mr. James.

James brings a new meaning to the term low profile . James is, like his teams, controlled, disciplined, programmed. But not robotized. In the ’78 Rose Bowl, James’ Washington team won the game because, late in the action with the ball on his 24-yard line, fourth down and a bundle, his team went for it. And made it.

His teams can be adventurous but seldom rash. They never panic. They lose, but not by much. Alabama beat him, 52-0, the fifth game he coached at Washington. Three years later, the Alabama victory was 20-17.

James’ record is remarkable when you consider the University of Washington is not your basic football factory. Coaches leave the Northwest in droves to coach in Texas, Florida, California. Players historically opt for the Northwest only if they have exhausted other options. “If SC or Notre Dame wants a kid, I don’t get him,” James concedes. Recruiting has been further complicated with the addition of Arizona and Arizona State to the conference. Seattle is a long way from the Sun Belt. The gag goes, “Washington: First in war, first in peace--and last in recruiting.”

None of this bothers Coach James, who is as stable a fixture in Seattle as the Space Needle and who is known as Home James because of his team’s penchant for winning on its own field.

In the Freedom Bowl Saturday at Anaheim Stadium, James meets a Florida team that is, like his, a highly underrated team that lost one game by five points, one by three and the other two by a touchdown. All this after losing its head coach to a scandal.

James’ team lost to Rose Bowl-bound USC by a touchdown and to all-world Colorado, the nation’s No. 1 team, 45-28--and only after running up 22 points in the fourth quarter. Washington lost to Arizona State by two points and to Arizona by three.

You may have a little trouble picking out Don James Saturday. He won’t be pulling any yard markers out of the ground and hurling them at the officials. He won’t be slamming his hat onto the turf, screaming at any players. He won’t pace up and down the sideline like a caged leopard. He’ll be hard to tell from the guy who’s there to pick up the towels.

After the game, he won’t keep the locker room door closed. It’ll be hard to tell from looking at him whether he won or lost. Either way, it won’t be by much.