COMMENTARY : Allen Plotted All the Way to the End

Attendance at National Football League games never has been greater nor media coverage more comprehensive. Certainly, television revenues are higher than ever. Yet, to anyone who was there, interest in the sport today is not as consuming as it was in the early 1970s, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Two decades ago, it bordered on mania. The arrival of the “Monday Night Football” crew in a city was cause for civic pep rallies. The hard sell of the Super Bowl by the networks was constant and jarring. And the nation’s No. 1 fan sat in the Oval Office and watched football on TV while war protesters picketed across the street from the White House.

Actually, Richard Nixon was more than just an armchair spectator. He vacationed at Key Biscayne, which gave him the opportunity to watch the Miami Dolphins and the license to telephone coach Don Shula with a play for his team to use in Super Bowl VI. But his heart remained with the Washington Redskins, whose practices he occasionally would enliven with a quiet appearance, in the company of a small army of secret security men. George Allen, who abhorred distractions of any kind, welcomed him.

Not only were both men ruthless in the pursuit of victory, but they shared an affiliation with Whittier College in Southern California. Nixon had been a scrub football player at the school. Allen had used his coaching position there as a springboard to the pros. “I laughed when I saw Dick Nixon suggest a play to George last year,” said Dr. Paul S. Smith in the days before Super Bowl VII. Smith had instructed the former president in constitutional history. Later, as president, Smith hired Allen from Morn-ingside College in Iowa. “Do you suppose (the Redskins) get in the huddle,” Smith said, “and say, ‘Let’s run the Nixon play?”’

Such was the state of the nation in 1973. And, truth is, it never was a laughing matter to Nixon nor to Allen, who died on New Year’s Eve shortly after finishing a comeback season at Long Beach State. Neither was renowned for his whimsy. This would be the Super Bowl in which Allen, at the zenith of his career, hired a man to chart the angle of the sun at the Coliseum before the game even though he previously coached the Rams in the same stadium for many years. This would be the Super Bowl in which Allen proclaimed, “To win this game, I’d let you stick a knife in me and draw all my blood.”

The Redskins did not win the game, the only Super Bowl in which Allen coached. But that’s not the reason the Redskins let him walk after the 1977 season despite an overall record of 69-35-1. The price he exacted for success was too high in terms of control and monetary commitments. And he wasn’t above making an end run around league rules and regulations, even ethics. He was fined by the NFL for trading draft picks he didn’t have both in Los Angeles and Washington.

But he won. And his obsession rubbed off on the nation’s capital, where he stirred players and fans with emotional appeals and created a rivalry with the Dallas Cowboys out of his fertile imagination. Edward Bennett Williams, the celebrated trial lawyer who served as president of the Redskins, likened Allen to a German general. “He thinks he’s supposed to commit suicide when he loses,” Williams said.

Allen never did lose much but he managed to commit professional suicide just the same. He considered Christmas a distraction, eating a distraction (one reason he said he favored ice cream, which was easy to digest), sleeping a distraction, and expected subordinates to feel the same. He asked secretaries and ballboys what they had done to help the Redskins win games. Nothing else mattered.

Certainly, lack of success wasn’t a factor in the Rams’ decision to fire him in 1978, shortly after rehiring him. The man didn’t even make it through the preseason under Carroll Rosenbloom. There was talk of a player mutiny after Allen issued an order that forbade sitting on helmets during rest periods and ordered linebacker Isiah Robertson to pick up a paper cup he tossed on the practice field. “You have to have discipline,” the coach said. “The field is our living room.”

I always thought much of this was calculated, that the man was in the business of creating a profitable image for himself, until I sat in the kitchen of his beautiful Mediterranean-style home overlooking the Pacific Ocean two months after his dismissal from the Rams. The reason we were in the kitchen, I soon learned, was part of an overall plan.

“It’s better for you and I to sit at the kitchen table than over on the couch,” Allen explained. “This way we can face each other instead of looking sideways. We don’t have to slouch. You’ve got a place to write, I hear the phone and we don’t have to reach for our coffee.”

The man had thought of everything. “Organization,” he said, “is where you put the centerpiece (on the table). I took a masters in organization. The first day in class I wouldn’t analyze what the teacher said but how he was organized. ... I don’t have much of a sense of humor, I guess. But everything we do is for a purpose. Where we put a desk, where he have a window.”

Despite campaigning for many positions, Allen never got a fourth chance in the NFL. To him, winning was everything; to franchise owners, it wasn’t a sufficient reason to put up with the man. He did coach the Chicago Blitz and the Arizona Wranglers in the short-lived United States Football League and last year, he accepted the challenge of turning around a dying college program.

Of course, he won. But this time it apparently was at the cost of his own health. Allen, 72, was busy planning, busy organizing for the 1991 season on the day he died. I know that because the news reports say he died in his kitchen, with the phone nearby.