Fresh Air Around Beathard Breathes New Life Into Chargers
Wait a minute. Let me see if I have this straight.
The Chargers have hired a general manager who is open, fun-loving, opinionated, laid-back and maybe even a little bit irreverent?
Who’d they hire? Lee Trevino? Steve Martin? Or did Alex Spanos enlist his old buddy, Bob Hope?
Wait a minute. Let me see if I have this straight.
The guy they hired is all those things, and he knows football?
Who is this, Duffy Daugherty’s ghost?
In their own little way in their own little world, what the Chargers have done is tear down their own version of the Berlin Wall. This organization has forever been a closed society, withdrawn and suspicious. Everyone stepping off the elevator on floor 1-A at the stadium was considered a potential spy, or at least a threat to security.
All of that should change now.
Why?
Because Bobby Beathard won’t change.
Bobby Beathard is the new general manager only because he will be allowed to run an organization the way he wants to run an organization. He wouldn’t have taken the job if it came with a trench coat . . . and three barred doors between him and the public.
A man with Beathard’s talents has too many opportunities to have to settle for a job in a mausoleum, which the Charger front office had become. If Spanos wanted him--and Spanos did Beathard’s predecessor the disservice of saying he wanted him last spring--he could only have him on Beathard’s terms.
After all, guys with Beathard’s track record don’t fall into your lap very often. Here was someone who had built five Super Bowl clubs, two in Miami and three in Washington. So he quits his job in Washington, thus becoming available. Lo and behold, he has a home in Leucadia and likes to run road races and surf.
Spanos could not restrain his glee at this potential good fortune. He said he wanted to hire Beathard. Unfortunately, this was almost a year ago, and he already had a guy filling the only position that would interest Beathard.
That man was Steve Ortmayer. Suddenly, 7-year-olds with whiffle-ball bats had more clout than he did. Any suggestions that anyone other than Spanos undermined Ortmayer and drove him into seclusion and ultimately out of office are ludicrous.
In truth, Ortmayer was far from the best of men to head an organization already bankrupt in terms of community relations. That he drafted well was forgotten because he traded poorly and had a credibility quotient of minus-59 when the chill factor was considered.
Bobby Beathard is the right guy to heat things up.
Realistically, Beathard is not likely to draft a whole lot better than Ortmayer did, but he will improve the team if he can better assess veteran players obtained either via trades or Plan B free agency.
And he has already improved the image of the organization.
The team itself gave its fans hope with its strong finish. A 6-10 record did not represent improvement from 1988, but the end of this 6-10 season represented offensive improvement from the beginning.
Beathard’s challenge is to get the offense what it needs to get into gear before the defense starts to decline. The Don Coryell Chargers didn’t begin to assemble a semblance of a defense until the offense had slipped over the hill and ultimately down a cliff.
What the Chargers have done, with their strong finish and the Beathard hiring, is give their fans a couple of reasons not to forfeit their season tickets en masse, which they might have done had they been asked to renew two months ago.
What the Chargers also have done is establish themselves as a team on the upswing. And anyone who has followed the American Football Conference knows it does not take much of a swing to get from the bottom to the playoffs, because darned near anyone can make the playoffs from the AFC. It’s just a good thing for the AFC that the Miami Hurricanes are not a National Football League team.
Two weeks from now, when Beathard’s one-year tenure as a network color commentator comes to a close, a breath of air will hit town. It will not be a Santa Ana either, because this guy is fresh air rather than hot.
In the meantime, maybe some of the Chargers’ walls will start coming down. A new regime is taking over. It will likely realize that the guy delivering the bottled water isn’t a spy sent by Al Davis or Sam Wyche or Jerry Glanville.
And maybe Spanos will become a fan, no more and no less. Almost invariably, the smartest owners are the ones who realize how dumb they are, at least when it comes to football.
Alex Spanos will find that he becomes smarter and smarter in direct relation to how little Bobby Beathard is burdened with his input.
And he might just find that professional football doesn’t have to be as dreary as downtown Stockton after 8 p.m. It might even be fun.