The Movie of His Life Will Be All Game Film

They have been married for 66 years, and when Sid Gillman, one of the greatest football coaches the college and professional games have produced, came to the telephone, I said, “Wow, 66 years to the same woman--that’s amazing.”

The coach fired right back, “Not if you’ve seen my wife.”

We talked Friday on Gillman’s 90th birthday, the innovative coach with the bow tie, considered the father of the modern passing game, who had the Rams in the championship his first year in the NFL and who would also become the first coach of the Los Angeles Chargers.

He’s back living in Century City, and this morning at 10 he will be in front of his TV for the start of another NFL Sunday, and pretty darn irritated too, as he said, that there’s no professional football here anymore.

Probably no one has dedicated as many hours in a lifetime as Gillman to studying the game of football, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he asked John Wooden for home video of his own 90th birthday celebration to see how the Wizard handled all those candles. He’ll figure out how to get them all.

The Kansas City Chiefs, Rams and Raiders still send Gillman videotape of their games so he can break them down each week, studying the personnel and evaluating the strategy--still eager, as he said, to learn something new.

“I’d hate like hell for something to happen on the field and not know anything about it,” said Gillman, the oldest living member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “It’s the only way I know to stay abreast of what is happening in football.

“If somebody calls and wants to know about this or that, I want to know what I’m talking about.”

For the past few years the calls have still come, but it’s been tough on the coach to take them, health problems confining him to intensive care, and then forcing him to start over--learning to walk, to use a fork again--and “it’s been a struggle all right and it’s still going to take some time,” he said. “But I’ll have it licked.”

He’s already defied the statistics, and survived an aortic aneurysm and the delicate surgery that followed, and when I asked him what it meant now to celebrate his 90th birthday, the coach said, “It means I got at least another good 20 to go.”

Third and long, of course, never bothered Gillman, because while everyone else was trying to grind out four yards a carry, he was having his guys chuck it down the field. “Quickest way I know to get points on the board,” said Gillman, who has been enshrined in both the college and professional football halls of fame.

“I was packing my parents’ things up when they moved to L.A.,” said Tom, Esther and Sid Gillman’s youngest child. “There were all these photos and inscriptions from these really famous people, and it became evident to me looking at everything this man has done in his life that he was always one step ahead of everyone.”

This is the guy who recommended a high school coach by the name of Vince Lombardi to replace him at Army. This is the innovator who tried to convince NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle to play a big game at the end of the 1963 season that would later be known as the Super Bowl. This is also the man responsible for giving Al Davis his first coaching job in the pros.

As a 90th birthday present, I forgive him for that.

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WATCHING FILM, or videotape as it is today in the game of football, has become as accepted and necessary as gaining 10 yards for a first down, and it all began with Gillman, the son of a movie theater owner.

In his father’s theater, they used to show newsreels before the main feature with a sports highlight tacked onto the end of each news update, and Gillman had the projectionist snip those highlights so he could study them.

He became so serious about studying game film that, as the story goes, he told Houston Coach Bum Phillips, “Watching game films is better than making love,” to which Phillips replied, “Either I don’t know how to watch films, or you don’t know how to make love.”

Esther laughed when I mentioned that, and then came right back with a quote of her own for the ages: “This old man really knew how to make love,” she said.

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YOU CAN still hear it in Esther’s voice, the unabashed admiration for a man who caught her attention playing the piano as a high school student at a Sweet 16 party.

“If I hadn’t learned how to play the piano,” Sid said, “she might never have noticed me.”

They’re still going strong, Esther said, because they’ve spent so much time with young people in their long lives, and they’re still married, she said, “because you have to be in love first.”

Like Penn State’s Joe Paterno--Paterno’s wife overwhelmed by emotion at midfield after Paterno became college football’s winningest coach Saturday--this has been a journey taken together. But also like Paterno, Gillman’s humility won’t allow him to talk about his contributions to the game. “That’s for someone else to do,” Gillman said.

Mention, L.A. however, and a crowd of 102,368 in the Coliseum to watch Gillman’s Rams at work in 1957, and he said, “I remember; I was scared to death.”

After a five-year run with the Rams, he became the Chargers’ first coach for owner Barron Hilton, playing against Denver before 9,928 in the Coliseum and prompting Hilton to move his team from L.A. to San Diego. It was L.A.’s loss, San Diego getting the very best out of Gillman, who assembled one of the most exciting offenses in pro football history and won the AFL title in 1963.

“You look back at everything, and it’s been just wonderful,” Esther said. “Times have been tough recently for Sid, but you don’t get depressed, because look at all the good years we’ve had together.”

But what do you give someone for their 90th birthday? I asked.

“Respect,” Esther said. “That’s all--just respect.”

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T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com.