‘Tis the Season : Year After Year, Detroit Lions Start Late Winning Streak to Save Coach Fontes’ Job

Pro football’s most embattled head coach is explaining blocking patterns when, through a nearby picture window, a postcard appears.

It is snowing. Suddenly. White swatches bob and weave through the dark sky as if the world is a decorative glass ball and somebody is shaking it.

Wayne Fontes of the Detroit Lions stops in mid-scheme. He stares outside.

“Look at that,” he says. “You know, I just want to stand here and sing.”

And so he does.

“Frosty the Snowman . . . “ he begins crooning at the top of his impressive lungs.

When, one wonders, is the last time anybody heard Don Shula sing? Or seen Jim Mora smile? Or noticed that Marv Levy was even breathing?

Fontes finishes most of the first verse before shaking his head.

“You know, I’m pondering my thoughts as I look outside,” he says. “I’m just glad to be alive.”

Go ahead, you fire him, this coach with a button nose and two eyes made out of coal. This jolly, happy, tormented soul.

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Fontes sometimes stares at the TV until 3 a.m. His wife, Evelyn, will try to comfort him, and he won’t even hear her.

“It’s a terrible thing when your wife talks and you aren’t listening,” he said.

During the season, he rarely leaves his house except for work. On the road, he doesn’t leave his hotel room except for meetings.

“I don’t want anybody saying the Lions lost because Wayne Fontes was out partying,” he said. “I don’t want to give anybody the chance.”

Room service, TV, the night deepens, the mind strains.

The owner warns of his firing. Fans are chanting for it. Some members of the media are demanding it.

He wonders, and worries, and hates himself for wondering and worrying. It’s just football, right?

“My children come up to me and say, ‘Dad, why do you put up with this, why don’t you just quit,’ ” Fontes said. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think about it.”

Then Wayne Fontes, having survived another day, will walk out of a meeting room and sing.

“I take more shots in this league than anybody, but you know something?” he said. “I’m going to be fine. I tell my players, don’t worry about me, don’t go winning one for the Gipper.”

But it could happen again this month, for the third consecutive year, an extraordinary man saved by ordinary events.

The Detroit Lions win two games, and Fontes keeps his job.

If they defeat the overmatched Jacksonville Jaguars and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, no matter what anyone else in the NFC does, they will clinch a playoff spot and Fontes is expected to return for an eighth full season.

Which seemed farfetched six weeks ago when an embarrassing loss in Atlanta gave the Lions a 3-6 start.

Which prompted owner William Clay Ford to promise “changes” if the team didn’t make the playoffs.

Which meant Fontes. Again.

But that was a five-game winning streak ago.

That was before Fontes said, “I’m like the big buck out there in that field. Everybody is taking shots at him, but that big buck is still standing.”

That was before Fontes, when asked about unruly fans in his home Silverdome, said, “If they are yelling and screaming over me, and fighting over me, keep doing it.”

That was before his players realized, once again, what they would be missing.

Nobody plays harder in the NFL than those who are playing for something they love. And the Lions love the league’s most refreshing and resilient, if not the most brilliant, head coach.

They don’t love him enough to win games early in the year so he doesn’t have to sit up all night. But they love him enough to play hard when it counts.

Last season, with Fontes’ job on the line at Thanksgiving, the Lions went 4-1 the rest of the season.

The previous season, in the same situation, they won three of their final four games after Thanksgiving to make the playoffs.

“There is something special between Wayne and this team that nobody on the outside understands,” Lion wide receiver Herman Moore said.

There’s a lot about Fontes no one on the outside understands.

When he was promoted from interim to head coach in December 1988, he closed the deal with Ford in the 12th-floor office of the auto maker’s glittering headquarters.

But after returning to his car, he couldn’t find his way out of the parking lot.

“I just know Mr. Ford was watching me from that 12th-floor window thinking, ‘Who have I just hired?’ ” Fontes said.

When a security guard finally escorted Fontes off the premises, he decided to visit a church and give thanks. He pulled into the nearest one, walked inside, then stopped in his tracks.

“There weren’t any pews, nothing,” he recalled. “Then I saw a guy with a beanie. I was in a synagogue.”

Not that it stopped him from praying.

“It’s all the same God in the end, right?” he said.

When he took over, the team had gone five years without a winning season. In three years, they were the NFC Central champions and finished one game short of the Super Bowl. Another championship and wild-card playoff berth followed.

Six full years, three postseason appearances, the winningest coach in Lion history with 60 victories.

But Fontes is also four losses from becoming the franchise’s all-time losingest coach.

He is a round guy with the Fred Flintstone face who often wanders the sidelines as if lost. Rarely does he wear a headset. Rarely does he speak to players who have just left the field.

He has had difficulty deciding on his quarterback (he had a three-man rotation two years ago), his offense (Barry Sanders or a passing game?), his defense (this year’s schemes changed at midseason) and even his well-being.

Earlier this year he sprained his right ankle. It has since healed, but he refuses to remove the brace while the team keeps winning. He recently mentioned this superstition and then limped across the room for emphasis.

However, he was favoring his left side.

“Hey Wayne,” said an observer. “Wrong foot.”

These and other foibles have led some Lion fans to actually cheer against the team this month so Fontes will be fired. Remember, this is a town where Joe Schmidt once coached, Alex Karras once blocked and Dick LeBeau once tackled.

“People would like Wayne if he was more like Mike Ditka,” said Jack Dunleavy, local restaurateur and close friend of Fontes. “They want somebody who will rant and rave and act all tough. That is just not Wayne’s style.”

How much does Fontes want to be liked? He is the only member of his extended family, including his wife, who does not pronounce his last name “Font-ez.”

He changed the Portuguese pronunciation in college at Michigan State when a coach called him “Fonts” and Wayne didn’t want to correct him.

Fontes is the son of a steel worker and spent some of his childhood in pro football’s birthplace, Canton, Ohio. But he takes his coaching philosophies from a different sort of man who employed him at USC in the mid-1970s and later with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Friends say he is John McKay, only heavier.

“He is like McKay, the next generation,” said Dave Levy, a Lion assistant who worked for both men. “He doesn’t like necessary meetings. He expects his players to be self-starters. He likes effort football, emotional football.”

So to Fontes, as important as three-hour practices are the individual talks he gives while traveling to road games.

Like McKay, and unlike most NFL coaches, Fontes sits in the last row of the team plane while his coaches sit up front.

“The whole flight, guys come back and lean over in the aisle and talk to him about everything,” said Dunleavy, who travels with Fontes.

Also, unlike all but a few coaches, Fontes holds a weekly team meeting with no assistants in the room.

“He lets us know that it’s just him and us, together,” said Johnnie Morton, Lion receiver and former USC star. “You can tell, Wayne cares about us as men.”

He also never publicly criticizes players, which endears him to them but infuriates fans.

“If he is losing and comes out and says, ‘This bleep needs to do this and this,’ the working-class stiff reads this and says, ‘Oh yeah, way to go,’ ” Levy said. “But he won’t do that. So they wonder about his emotion.”

They wouldn’t if they were in the Astrodome locker room last weekend after the Lions’ 24-17 victory over the Houston Oilers.

Moore had two touchdown catches and the defense held the Oilers to fewer than 100 yards rushing, but the game ball was given to tackle Zefross Moss.

Reason? Moss’ wife had given birth earlier in the week, and Fontes wanted the team to applaud a man simply for handling the pressures of work and home.

And how they applauded. The 6-foot-6 Moss nearly broke down. The back of the plane was crowded that night.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Mr. December

Wayne Fontes’ Detroit teams traditionally start off like lambs before finishing like Lions, as evidenced by his monthly record in seven seasons.

September: 12-16 (.429)

October: 11-11 (.500)

November: 11-16 (.407)