Fame Has Yet to Catch Up With Joiner

Charlie Joiner stood along the ropes next to the fifth tee at Torrey Pines North and patiently autographed first a pairings sheet and then a business card.

As Joiner sauntered down the fairway, where his tee shot rested dead center beyond anyone else in his Buick Invitational Pro-Am group, an Asian woman walked up to me with a bewildered look.

“Excuse me,” she asked politely. “Is the gentleman famous?”

“That’s Charlie Joiner,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Is he entertainer?”

“Football player,” I said.

She looked even more bewildered. She obviously knew little about football. What she did know, or at least perceive, was that football players are big.

“But,” she said, “he is so little.”

I tried to explain that wide receivers came in different size packages, but “wide receiver” drew a blank look. She smiled, however. She was apparently satisfied knowing she was following someone famous.

Given an opportunity to make myself more clearly understood, I could have and would have told her how Charlie Joiner is so much bigger in status than he is in stature. You would not know it by talking to him or maybe even looking at him, but that is part of his charm.

Charlie Joiner has always been a quiet man. As a player, he did not have the dramatic flair of a Kellen Winslow or the dash and splash of a John Jefferson or the controversial arrogance of a Dan Fouts. And yet he blended with those guys in what was a perfect offensive recipe concocted by Don Coryell.

When he retired after the 1986 season, he did it as quietly as he could. He was not one to court fan fare. This was not a klieg lights and red carpet guy.

He went to work as an assistant coach, an ideal position for a man with his temperament. He disappeared, as assistant coaches tend to disappear. Doing his job was all he wanted to do.

Just as quietly, Charlie Joiner is disappearing from San Diego. When Dan Henning went out the door, the assistant coaches went with him. That was the way it was written. Assistant coaches tend to be a rather generic bunch, absorbing their demise en masse.

And so it was reportedly not too long afterward that Joiner had been hired as wide receiver coach by the Buffalo Bills. This too was back of the section news. He would quietly take his quiet and professional manner to a new city and a new team in another corner of the continent.

Wrong.

Charlie Joiner has been too important for too long hereabouts to just wander off and become an answer to one of those whatever-happened-to questions.

Obviously, both good and bad have been spread among his 16 years with the Chargers, 11 as a player and five as a coach.

“Playing under Don Coryell,” he said, “was the highlight of my career he said. Playing with Fouts and Winslow and Jefferson and (Wes) Chandler and all those guys. That was really fun. I enjoyed those years.”

There were even highs and lows within those years.

The one-game highlight, to Joiner, was winning the 1979 AFC West championship. He did not mention that the game was against Denver on a Monday night. He did not mention that San Diego was in an absolute frenzy over the Chargers. He did not mention that Charlie Joiner went to the locker room twice that night to have injuries repaired and came back to catch the decisive 32-yard touchdown pass from Fouts.

Charlie Joiner wouldn’t mention his heroics.

The low light, he said, was that game in Cincinnati for the AFC championship in January, 1982.

“It was 57 degrees below zero,” he said. “I didn’t enjoy that.”

Those years were jammed with big games, exciting games. San Diego enjoyed football like it has not enjoyed football since. Unfortunately, as an assistant coach, Joiner has also suffered through the lean years of late.

“I wish we could have won more games as coaches,” he said, “but we didn’t. The result is that they make changes. I hate not coaching in San Diego any more, but life goes on.”

For Joiner, life will go on in Buffalo.

“My wife kept telling me I wouldn’t be happy out of football,” he said. “I thought I had a good chance in San Francisco, but it didn’t work out. I went to Buffalo and they treated me so nice and (head coach) Marv Levy was such a nice guy.”

Niceties, you see, are meaningful to such a man.

The woman who thought maybe he might be an entertainer and then didn’t think he could possibly be a football player was right on the mark with her very first perception.

Charlie Joiner is a gentleman.