Gruden Has Commitment to Communicate

Ignore the game; the show is on the sideline.

The will to win is right there, competing intensely with an appearance of innocence, contorted on the cherubic face of a Raider coach.

And isn’t that a contradiction worth observing.

“[Expletive],” snarls Jon Gruden, and the TV camera lingers, apparently fascinated with the choirboy’s one-word vocabulary. “[Expletive].”

A few days later, after a stirring victory over Minnesota, he’s sitting sheepishly behind his desk.

“Mom has a problem with me using that language,” Gruden says. “[Expletive], it’s not an image I’m very proud of, but I’m just a fired-up guy. You should see me on the golf course when I shank my six-iron. I can’t help myself.”

Al Davis has not called to complain because he has a young throwback by the tail, a 36-year-old feisty whippersnapper who has an almost blinding passion for football . . . like Al Davis in his prime, before litigation became his obsession.

“I have the same desire to win that he does,” says Gruden when asked what Davis had to say after a last-second loss to Green Bay two weeks ago.

“He’s not the only one [ticked] off when we lose. I mean, I’m not putting in 20 hours a day just for the hell of it. I want to win too, and I think that’s something that needs to be understood. And I’m going to win, because there’s just no feeling like it.”

It’s an attitude, compelling in the manner in which it has consumed him. While Gruden’s father was coaching at Notre Dame, young Gruden was 15 or 16 and focused on victory, sitting in the stands with his mother and the wives and children of other coaches--before he was ejected.

“Some guy was bitching because Notre Dame was beating Air Force, 24-0, and he didn’t think we were beating them by enough,” Gruden says. “So I turned around and cranked the guy. My mom was crying, the other wives were all upset and security was taking me away. Me, my heart was thumping because we were winning the game.”

Gruden says he knew when he was 10 years old he would spend the rest of his life around football, impressing his elders so much that he was coaching in Green Bay at 29 and working as offensive coordinator in Philadelphia at 31.

“Gru might look younger than some of the other coaches,” Raider fullback Jon Ritchie says. “But he makes up for that with wisdom, because he’s been thinking about football since the day he was born. He just gives off the feeling that football means everything to him in the world.”

Says Gruden’s father, Jim: “I’m glad it’s that important to him. He’s always been a guy that when he sets his mind to do something, he goes all out. I still can see him taking a mesh bag of footballs out to a field and throwing them, fetching them and throwing them some more. Every night, every summer.”

Watching his father coach for 17 years, then move into NFL administration and now serve as a regional scout for the San Francisco 49ers, Gruden went the length of the field in a profession that guarantees no happy endings.

“I remember my dad coming home while he was coaching at Indiana, the . . . kicked out of him every Saturday, seeing him sitting there at the dinner table, just humbled, totally beat the hell up mentally,” he says. “Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler would come in and just annihilate Indiana, 55-7, and I wouldn’t see my dad all week, and I’d wonder what are you working so hard for--I mean what are you guys doing if you’re getting beat 68-7 by Nebraska?

“But a few years later we’re all at Notre Dame and there’s Joe Montana and we’re kicking the . . . out of people 55-7 and it’s the greatest time of my life. Gawd, I just loved it, the competition, the thrill of a victory. It got me.”

The game has a firm grip on Gruden, who at times can be so intense, it’s as if he’s trying to tug his baseball cap right through his head. And that sourpuss face he makes on the sideline as he whips off his headset, it’s as if he has just bitten into anchovies after asking they not be put in his Caesar salad.

“He’s not losing it; he just wants it so badly,” says Bruce Allen, the Raiders’ senior vice president and son of former great coach George Allen. “He has passion, he has built-in enthusiasm and he has already sacrificed so much to get to that point where victory is so close.

“That’s part of this game. That’s why you see videotape of [George Allen] hopping around the locker room, clapping his hands and singing three cheers for the Redskins. Everyone works hard, but it feels so good to win.”

A bundle of energy, but not looking much older than a teenager, Gruden is only two years older than his quarterback, Rich Gannon.

“Our players know the dog will bite,” says Gruden, who used to listen to Bob Knight’s speeches as a locker-room guest while his father was coaching at Indiana.

Two years ago, Gruden lost his voice instilling his will in his players. Almost everyone, of course, works hard in this profession to be successful, but not many are as photogenic or so precise in enunciation. Although there is no crisscross in his background with Chuck Knox, his mouth draws back dramatically in the same way, the emphasis placed on the most pedestrian word, but emerging like the gospel.

“I was a communication major at the University of Dayton,” he says, pronouncing “Dayton” as if it were Stanford. “The one thing I remember in this persuasive speaking class was LOMM: Large, open, moving mouth. It’s what the great communicators of our time have. You watch some of the political figures speaking on television, they all have the ability to enunciate and communicate, and maybe that’s where I acquired that trait. But you know what, some of the words I wish I didn’t enunciate so well.”

Nonsense, the colorful words, armed with all that emotion, have been hitting their mark. Matched against the likes of Green Bay and Minnesota on the road to open the season, Gruden had his charges playing as if they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to have a chance of winning.

They took the Packers to the final seconds of the game and then fell.

“It was like winning the lottery, and then losing the ticket,” Gruden says. “Devastation.”

And while everyone was emotionally drained, he could not be. “I could feel everyone looking at me and wanting to know how we could lose that damn game,” he says of the flight home. “You have to have the resolve to come back, look them in the eye and tell them, we’re going to be good enough to win the next game.”

Try to make that case going back onto the road in Minnesota to play in the noisiest place in the league against the team most have already put in the Super Bowl. But then Gruden starts grinding, the Gruden glare bearing down on his players, and who wants to step forward and make the first mistake?

“When we went 80 yards on our opening drive in the second half to score, I lost it there,” Gruden says. “Boy, was I jacked. That’s what I love about all this, the competition--you can’t get this feeling anywhere else. What a rush.”

The Raiders are 1-1 this year, 9-9 under Gruden’s command to date. “Pretty average,” as he points out.

“It’s still early,” cornerback Charles Woodson adds. “There isn’t much to be impressed by yet. When we win a division championship, then I’ll be impressed.”

So be it, agrees Gruden, his eyes flickering at the challenge.

“The ambition and desire someone has doesn’t really mean anything because a lot of people have that,” he says. “It’s just fun to have something you really like to do. And if any of that rubs off on our players, then good.”

There’s no way to avoid it, and if charisma is worth anything, greatness might no longer be out of the reach of the Raiders.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Raiders in 1990s

After a good start this decade--they lost the AFC championship game to Buffalo in 1990--the Raiders have missed the playoffs the last five seasons (* playoff season):

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SEASON COACH RECORD

1990 Art Shell *12-4 1991 Art Shell *9-7 1992 Art Shell 7-9 1993 Art Shell *10-6 1994 Art Shell 9-7 1995 Mike White 8-8 1996 Mike White 7-9 1997 Joe Bugel 4-12 1998 Jon Gruden 8-8 1999 Jon Gruden 1-1

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