Breeze, Beathard Refresh Chargers
Monday afternoon. First full day of the Chargers’ mini-camp. Sun beating down on Mission Valley.
Uncomfortable?
Hardly. A breeze wafting from the ocean kept the air fresh and warm rather than hot and stifling.
How appropriate.
The Chargers’ little corner of Mission Valley has been awash in fresh air lately. This is literally and figuratively the springtime of The Bobby Beathard Era as general manager. Attitudes are so upbeat that even front office veterans are openly talking of Beathard’s arrival being this organization’s version of glasnost .
The NFL itself is a suspicious place populated by suspicious people, and the Charger front office was just a microcosm of the whole. For all intents and purposes, it might as well have been surrounded by a moat and barbed wire. The Charger offices always reminded you of what the Pentagon must be like.
An example, I suppose, would be the press relations office, which, of necessity, is frequented by the media. When the Charger offices were remodeled a few years ago, this was moved outside the main offices, presumably to keep the untrustworthy denizens of the media from having unescorted access to the inner sanctum.
This isn’t to say that the Chargers have thrown everything wide open. You can’t exactly step into Beathard’s office and ask him if he would like to buy a box of Campfire Girls matches. But people in the Charger organization are more relaxed.
At this Monday afternoon practice, in fact, Beathard was there in a pull-over shirt, shorts and running shoes sans socks. This is a man without pretense. With the exception of a certain basketball coach, guys who call themselves Bobby rather than Robert or Bob can hardly be accused of pomposity.
When Beathard learned that a writer wanted to visit with him, he trotted across the practice field and extended his hand in a greeting. I was used to Charger front office types sending the messenger back to find out exactly what it was I wanted.
I asked him about attitudinal changes in the organization, and he seemed perplexed.
“It’s tough for me to tell,” he said, “because I don’t know what it was like. If attitude has changed for the better, that’s good. But it’s nothing I can consciously say I came in here and wanted to change.”
To be sure, Bobby Beathard will be measured by what he is consciously trying to change, and that is the fortune of the team itself. He comes to an organization that has had two winning seasons in the past eight, both either strike-interrupted or strike-tainted.
More than coincidentally, attitude is also playing a role in terms of his personnel changes. People who rock the boat are being thrown overboard.
Anyone seen Jim McMahon lately?
He wasn’t a fit.
Anyone seen Gary Anderson lately?
He might have been a fit, but there was the matter of this contractual impasse of more than a year’s duration.
“I met Gary, and I liked him,” Beathard said, “but it was an impossible situation. Rather than let it drag on, I wanted to go and do positive things.”
Anderson is gone.
And so are others, though Beathard chose to leave them nameless. On this day, Beathard was more interested in looking ahead at a team he felt was going in the right direction.
“I also know areas where we have to get better,” he said. “We’ll either get there by the guys who are here improving or by making trades later.”
Beathard is candid enough to identify troubled areas, even though they are not exactly deep secrets to anyone with a passing knowledge of this team’s recent history. One is obviously at cornerback.
“There’s a good chance that we’ll go through the season with what we have now,” he said. “You go around the league and look at the cornerback situation, and it doesn’t seem like there’s enough of them to go around. Everyone’s reluctant to trade them.”
This was a Charger general manager explaining exactly what he would like to do even though he didn’t know if he could do it. This team’s fans will know where this man stands.
No one, of course, can predict where the Chargers will stand when spring and summer are gone and fall arrives. It was 6-10 a year ago, last in the AFC West. The future being fantasy, it is not out of the question to suggest that the Chargers have playoff potential.
“You never know,” Beathard said. “You start off winning, and everyone plays better. You have to get an attitude where you play up to your potential. Most teams have to play over their heads to make the playoffs, and you have to play over your heads when you get there. You have to get the right guys who have football as their No. 1 priority.”
Bobby Beathard used the word attitude only once in that paragraph, but it was an unspoken part of every sentence.
His protest that he was not consciously preaching changes in attitude may have been correct in that changes subconsciously--or quietly--attained may be deeper and more lasting. Should the Chargers take the AFC by storm this year, it will be because of a gentle breeze.