A Family Tree : Coaching Bloodlines Run Deep

In the beginning, there was George Halas, Paul Brown and Steve Owen. And from these cornerstones of modern professional football, you can trace whole chunks of the game--terminology, philosophy and, perhaps most importantly, coaches, many coaches.

From Halas came George Allen and from Allen came Marv Levy, Jack Pardee and Ted Marchibroda. Brown trained Bill Walsh, who sent five former assistants--Sam Wyche, George Seifert, Dennis Green, Mike Holmgren and Bruce Coslet--into head jobs in the NFL. Owen handed a piece of chalk to Tom Landry, whose Dallas dynasty developed Dan Reeves and Mike Ditka.

The same thing is true in basketball, baseball and hockey. Coaches beget other coaches and those coaches beget still others.

Rod Dedeaux, the longtime baseball coach at the University of Southern California, provided Sparky Anderson’s first exposure to baseball and four of Anderson’s players have become big league managers.

Almost 20 years ago, Dick Motta coached a Chicago Bulls team that included Rick Adelman, Jerry Sloan and Bob Weiss. The next year, Matt Guokas was on the team. Then he moved on to Washington and coached Wes Unseld. In Dallas, he took Allan Bristow under his wing. All--except Motta--are currently head coaches in the NBA.

Ted Green, Terry Crisp and Rick Bowness all passed through Boston and general manager Harry Sinden on the way to head coaching jobs in the NHL.

Sometimes, cross-pollination occurs. Casey Stengel gave us Billy Martin, who gave us Lou Piniella and Jeff Torborg, unless you credit Torborg to Walt Alston, who gave us Tommy Lasorda and Roger Craig, unless you credit Craig to Anderson. In the NBA, Bristow played for Motta but was an assistant for Doug Moe. Adelman played for Motta, then assisted Jack Ramsay, who owns his own branch of the NBA coaches family tree, which includes Guokas, as well. Guokas also was an assistant under Billy Cunningham. Ditka played and coached for Landry but that essentially was on a lend lease from Halas.

Sometimes, the lines blur between sports. Boston Red Sox manager Butch Hobson was a quarterback at Alabama under Paul “Bear” Bryant and wound up running a baseball team.

No one got into coaching more unexpectedly than Landry. After World War II, he came out of the Air Force at age 24, determined to spend a couple of years in pro football and then move on to something more stable. “I never intended to coach,” he said. “I was looking to get out of football.”

Owen, however, had other ideas.

“In 1950, a bunch of us had come to the Giants from the New York Yankees . . . Otto Schnellbacher, Harmon Rowe, all good players,” Landry said. “We were getting ready to play Paul Brown’s great Cleveland team. Steve came in and said, ‘We’re going to play a 6-1 defense.’

“We had never used that before. That was all he told us. We looked at each other. Somebody had to take charge, so I did.

“In the dressing room, Steve was at the blackboard. He said, ‘Here, Tom, show them what we’re gonna do.’ He handed me the chalk. We shut them out 6-0. That was the birth of the Umbrella Defense.”

Landry became the Giants defensive coach under Jim Lee Howell and went to the expansion Dallas Cowboys in 1960. In 1965, he signed free agent running back Dan Reeves. “He was an overachiever,” Landry said. “He was like me, not fast. He had to find a position. He was a smart competitor and he taught himself what he had to in order to stay. He took advantage of opportunities.

“We got Ditka as a backup tight end near the end of his career. He caught a touchdown pass in our first Super Bowl. He became an assistant with us and was determined to go back to the Bears.”

Reeves is in his second decade coaching Denver and has taken the team to three Super Bowls. Ditka fulfilled a pledge to Halas, restoring the Bears to respectability highlighted by the 1986 Super Bowl championship.

Anderson’s baseball championships began long before that and his roots trace to Dedeaux’s dugout at USC.

“I came out to California from South Dakota at age 9,” he said. “We lived one block from USC. One day, a ball came into the street. The student manager was looking for it and couldn’t find it. I did and took it back. I asked for the boss. Rod said, ‘You’re an honest boy. Would you like to be my batboy?’ ”

For six years, Anderson absorbed baseball strategy from Dedeaux. “Rod called me ‘Georgie’ and he called everybody else ‘Tiger,’ ” Anderson said. “I was such a hangout. I was there for everything. It was a bad neighborhood and that saved me. It was a place for me to go everyday.”

Anderson grew into one of baseball’s most successful managers, first at Cincinnati and now at Detroit. “Rod’s standard joke at reunions is, ‘The only one who was successful was our batboy,’ ” he said.

Sparky has sent four players into big league dugouts--ex-managers Pete Rose and Bill Plummer and current skippers Hal McRae and Tony Perez.

“Hal is coming along,” Anderson said. “His first year was a struggle. It’s like anything else. You struggle with direction, understanding your own way. You struggle with which way to go. In the end, you can’t go any way but your own way.

“Tony will do well but it will take time. He’ll be helped by the gamut of personalities he’s played and coached for--Dave Bristol, Vern Rapp, Russ Nixon, Rose, Piniella, me. You learn from those around you, but it comes to one thing: You are who you are. Don’t be different. He’s Tony Perez. He can’t be anybody else.”

In basketball, Motta’s family tree may have the most branches. “Every assistant I ever had in the pros has been a head coach,” he said. Besides the half dozen current NBA head coaches who played for him, he also had Clem Haskins, now the head man at the University of Minnesota.

“The first guard into the game always sat by me on the bench and the first forward sat next to him,” Motta said. “I talked to those guys a lot. It’s a survival thing to keep from going crazy. A lot of times, you’re alone with no assistant.”

Motta came to the NBA Chicago Bulls from Weber State with 13 years of coaching experience beginning at the junior high school level through high school, junior college and college. Who was his mentor?

“Myself,” he said. “I coached in the pros the way I did in college.”

The key to his acceptance, he said, was Jerry Sloan. “We had an early camp. It was a lot harder than they were accustomed to. Sloan watched a lot. I got close to him and he accepted me. After he accepted me, the team accepted me. Everything was built around him. He was the cornerstone.”

The Bulls were a challenge. “We were slow and couldn’t jump,” Motta said. “We ground it out. They saw the fruits of that and got confidence in me. There was serenity of a game plan with structured practices.

“You don’t have to be a great player to be a great coach. The great ones have no patience to teach. They’re so gifted, they wonder how guys can make dumb mistakes. The guy on the bench appreciates being there if he’s honest. He’ll work harder at the game.

“I don’t know why so many of them became coaches. Maybe it was just luck. Maybe it was the style we played or the way we organized practices, the utilization of time and drills. There’s a great deal of satisfaction to it, but it doesn’t put sugar on your Wheaties.”

Which is why Motta is teaching a course at Utah State University. The title: Basketball Coaching Methods.

Who would know better?