COMMENTARY : Breaking Broncos or Coaching Them, It’s High-Stress Pursuit

There are even more stressful ways of making a dollar than coaching a professional football team.

You can walk a high wire for the circus, be an air traffic controller, hunt great whites in scuba gear, hear confessions or go undercover busting Bolivian drug lords.

You can umpire Little League baseball games, cat-burgle the Empire State Building, command the Red October, staff the complaint window at K mart or work a paper route across the South Bronx.

You can do exorcisms, bounce drunks at a biker bar, handle public relations for Zsa Zsa Gabor, search for the Maltese Falcon or cover the Sacramento Kings for a newspaper.

I have probably left out a few.

Still, beyond question, coaching professional football is a high-stress pursuit. Witness Denver’s Dan Reeves, a driven and excitable man, who was carried off a practice field nine days ago complaining of chest pains.

He checked into a hospital, had his engine bored out with a high-tech scraping process called an atherectomy, and Tuesday--six days later--was back coaching the Broncos, saying how everything will be fine from now on as long as he avoids that old devil cholesterol.

The risks must be worth it to Reeves, who can’t need the dough and doesn’t seem insecure about who he is. Yet his very reason for being seems to be the pursuit of a Super Bowl.

Maybe I’m dumb.

I don’t get it. Larry King had a heart attack. That’s another one: Do a TV show in the evening, and a radio show almost till dawn, and in between write a newspaper column. King says he had a cigarette on the way to the hospital, refusing to give up the things he liked doing until the doctors got his attention by implanting five arterial bypasses.

Now, he runs and eats lots of granola and avoids filet mignon as if it were poison.

Granted, poor diets cause heart attacks. It isn’t just stress. But beyond any question, your ticker’s biggest enemy isn’t food, it’s too much adrenaline--which happens to be the life’s blood of football.

Paul Brown, the coach who redefined the game in the 1950s, knew what it took to win football games: “I doubt if any football team can succeed,” he said, “unless the coach has the final word on everything from the draft and trades to all the responsibilities of a general manager.” The burdens implied here are obvious.

In Don Coryell’s first game as coach of the Chargers, the San Diego crowd gave him a standing ovation that lasted for minutes.

He had coached the college team there and was an immensely popular choice. Later, he was asked if it moved him--and he astonished the writers by seeming astonished. Coryell HADN’T NOTICED!

“I was thinking about the game,” he explained.

The late Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy perhaps best defined the qualities needed for coaching: “You have to be smart enough to understand football,” he said, “and dumb enough to think it’s important.”

Apparently, Reeves is well-qualified. Football is a game, supposedly. It has little impact on the overall human condition.

When, 300 years from now, some historian’s textbook on American history gives the 20th Century its nine or 10 paragraphs, my guess is you’ll find no mention of football at all.

John Madden, I think, understood that. When he had done all there was for the doing as the coach of the Raiders, John walked away, saying: “I gave it everything I have, and I don’t have anything left. . . . I’m retiring from football and coaching, and I’m never going to coach again in my life.”

Since then, he has done beer commercials and TV analysis and seems more, rather than less, of a person.

If I go down with chest pains tomorrow, and doctors have to go in and scrape the plaque from my arteries, try to guess how long it will be before I write the next column in hot pursuit of my Pulitzer.

Here’s a hint: It will be more than six days.

My old man was a businessman. He smoked black cigars, drank Scotch in occasional volume, loved a good steak, and the only time I remember him breaking into a run is the one time he chased me out of the kitchen and down the block, pausing to break a whippy limb off a lilac tree. I never saw him perspire. Not once. He lived to be 95, and it was cancer that got him, not stress. A week before he died he was out raking leaves.

His trick was never forgetting that building race tracks and shopping centers was what he did, and not what he was.

I wish Reeves well. I hope he earns his Super Bowl and lives to enjoy it.

If he does not, I wouldn’t want to be the boss of the Broncos, having to explain to Reeves’ family why I didn’t insist that he take some time off.