Mayhem’s Architect

Of the hundreds of football games he has coached, this one sticks with Don Markham the way you’d remember a haywire cash machine spitting out stacks of twenties. It was 1986, and his Riverside Ramona High Rams were a sloppy bunch. “We went out there with 19 or 20 kids . . . I had no more linemen. I had to grab a PE student and put him in for a week, and I remember he wore sweats under his pants. We were ragtag and we looked terrible. And we played a real good football team.”

The opponent was Damien High of La Verne, and even one of Markham’s assistant coaches “thought we were going to get killed by this team.” By halftime, however, Ramona had built a 52-0 lead, and the nervous assistant had changed his tune, telling Markham giddily: “Coach, we oughta go to jail for what we’re about to do here.” Ramona won 68-12, which Markham recalls with amazement: “We, with not much, just annihilated them. Our system was rolling.”

And it has rolled ever since.

Markham’s system is called the double wing, a blend of the old--a Vince Lombardi-style running attack--with the downright prehistoric--an intricate shell-game deception from the leather-helmet era. It bears little resemblance to the pass-intensive West Coast offense that now dominates the sport: no wide receivers, nine men tightly bunched at the line of scrimmage, constant motion and a quarterback who blocks on almost every play. Telegenic glamour boys need not apply.

Double-wing advocates say that in his years of tinkering within football’s DNA, Markham--unlike most high school coaches--has actually managed to decode a few of its genetic secrets, creating a virulent new offensive strain. He unveiled it for that 1986 season, deciding it was time to see if the touchdowns came as easily when the chalkboard Xs and Os were real, live, imperfect teenagers banging helmets on Friday nights. Success was instantaneous, and contagious. It has made the former cop something of a guru among youth and high school football coaches around the nation.

After four years at Ramona he took his act to Bandon, Ore., where he inherited a team that had not had a winning season since 1968. The Bandon team began scoring 70 and 80 points in a game. State athletic officials responded by enacting a 45-point “mercy” provision that some still call “the Markham rule.” Returning to Southern California in 1994, Markham guided Bloomington High to a perfect 14-0 season in which it broke the national high school scoring record (since eclipsed), averaging 63 points per game. It was a moment of glory for the Inland Empire school, which held onto Markham for three more seasons. Overall, his double-wing teams have won 143 games while losing 38.

Thousands of high schools play football; a few hundred have adopted the double wing, according to those who have promoted it through Web sites, videos, clinics and a book. Advocates say it is easy to teach and enables teams with poor or mediocre talent to compete with stronger rivals, giving long-suffering programs a chance for instant success. “I guess cult is a bad word in your part of the world, but it is cultish,” says Jack Tourtillotte, principal and offensive coordinator at Maine’s Boothbay Region High, the 2001 class C state champs. “I have coached 31 years, and I would never run anything different.”

It is a triumph of system over athleticism, relying on gutty, hard-nosed kids who will buy into it in the absence of a roster full of future college stars--even if the buying-into part doesn’t always occur right away. “My sense is that if [Markham] goes to a new city, a lot of the kids are ambivalent at best,” says Gary Etcheverry, head coach of the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts and a longtime Markham fan. “He, in almost every case, is wildly successful in that first game. Kids who were ambivalent walk off the field in a daze.”

But as the offense has grown, so has the backlash. Parents complain that their sons’ individual talents as passers or receivers are obscured by the relentless running plays. Fans say the action is difficult to follow, and even some double-wing coaches consider it boring or inelegant. In the lockstep, TV-influenced world of football theory, the double wing is hopelessly uncool.

“Generally, it’s not in vogue. You won’t see it on Sunday afternoon or on Monday Night Football. To be quite truthful, it’s rather boring,” says Phil Bravo, head coach at Monarch High School outside Boulder, Colo. And he loves the double wing, having won 11 league championships in 16 years. So does Jerry Vallotton, assistant football coach at Foothill High near Redding and author of “The Toss,” a double-wing how-to dedicated in part to Markham. Vallotton acknowledges that the offense is “about as artistic as sumo wrestling.”

The sharpest attacks have come from coaches who call the humiliating scores an assault on sportsmanship, or who mock it as a “Pop Warner offense”--derivative, simplistic, outdated and a flop at football’s more evolved levels.

“If you’re in my league, I hope you’ll run the double wing. I’ll send a limousine,” scoffs Jim Walker, head coach at Redlands High, whose team shut down Markham’s Rialto squad, 30-7, in last year’s regular season Division I finale. “When you get up to the levels where you have 11 studs, and I’ve got 11 studs, you don’t see this offense. We had success against Rialto because we’re big, fast and play for four quarters.”

Though Markham didn’t realize it at the time, that defeat would be one of his final games at Rialto. The principal fired him in May after two winning seasons--the first in the school’s 10-year history--after he refused to commit to returning this fall. He had begun looking elsewhere, claiming administrators had failed to deliver on promises for a stadium and lights--basics that many lesser coaches take for granted.

But it would be out of character for Markham to remain anywhere for very long, given that he has changed jobs nine times in the last 20 years. While some of those moves were unrelated to football, it’s fair to say he lacks a survival gene that might have assured him a long tenure somewhere, had that been the overriding goal.

A slicker politician might have avoided the temptation to call some of his players who fought with teammates and got bad grades “a bunch of jerks,” as Markham said in The Times last December. A smoother operator might have retracted that statement, rather than reiterate it, in a later interview, while still employed at Rialto. (“That was the first nail,” he says. “I said they were jerks. Just said it like it was. I didn’t lie.”) Someone bent on ingratiating himself with administrators might applaud their pressure-packed efforts to raise academic test scores, rather than point out--correctly--that “as a PE teacher, I can’t do much about that.”

All of which helps account for the bull-and-bear duality of the past few months: In January, a Canadian pro team was angling to have this masterly innovator rebuild its offense; by early July, he was adrift--fired by Rialto then snubbed by Bloomington (2001 record: 0-9), which was looking for a new coach and which Markham had put in the record books just a few years earlier.

Even in elementary school, Markham knew he wanted to coach. Now 63, he was a receiver at Van Nuys’ Birmingham High, joined the Navy after graduation in 1957, then resumed playing at Los Angeles Valley College and San Fernando Valley State College (now Cal State Northridge). He set aside plans to become a PE teacher when he responded to a TV commercial in 1965 seeking hundreds of new recruits for the Los Angeles Police Department. As a patrolman assigned to West Los Angeles, he was dispatched one night in August 1969 to the home of film director Roman Polanski and actress Sharon Tate shortly after the Manson gang had completed its rampage. “It’s something you try to forget,” Markham says.

He had begun coaching a San Fernando Valley youth team on his days off, leading to a side job at Los Angeles Baptist High School, which won a CIF championship in his second season using a precursor to the double wing. “I asked the lieutenant for a Friday night off because we had a playoff game,” Markham says. “He said no, and told me I had to choose between police work and football. I told him I just did.”

This path has taken him to several points in Southern California, two stints in Oregon and several summers coaching in Europe. Home these days is an 18-acre slice of mountaintop overlooking Moreno Valley, which would make a dandy compound for double-wing cultists. Markham--a 250-pounder who looks like Lt. Kojak but comes off like Lt. Columbo--lives in a comfortable ranch house there with his wife of 39 years, Linda; they have three children. Preoccupied and technology-intolerant, he struggles with TV remotes, never uses a computer, has no cell phone and hesitates on dates, places--even grandchildren (there are seven, “I think.”) Linda, a former teacher, is the cheerful organizer who gently corrects Don on certain details, collates news clippings, maintains the Web site, shoots the coaching videos, responds to e-mails and makes the sandwiches for groups of visiting coaches paying $300 for a daylong master class.

While nonbelievers argue that the double wing works only at small or medium-sized schools, at least one member of the profession’s more elevated ranks is sold on the system’s broader viability. “People say it’s primitive. I don’t agree. I take offense at the idea that it’s just for high schools and below,” says Etcheverry, who planned to hire Markham as his offensive coordinator this season, only to have the deal fall apart after word leaked out that the Argonauts were eyeing a high school coach.

It works like this: seven players--the center, flanked by two guards, two tackles and two tight ends--are bundled tightly along the line of scrimmage, standing virtually shoe to shoe, rather than the typical foot or so apart. This impairs a defender’s ability to see who has the ball and effectively widens the playing field, giving the ball carrier more space to run. From this alignment, Markham runs plays that involve a herd of blockers--guards, tackles, even the quarterback--overrunning a proscribed area, Pamplona-like.

Just off the hip of each tight end is a wingback--a quick, elusive athlete who would play running back in a traditional offense. The quarterback lines up directly behind the center, usually holding the ball only long enough to pitch it to a wingback in motion or hand it to the fullback--the lone runner in the backfield.

The space on either side of an offensive player on the line of scrimmage is called a gap, and this formation creates 10 of them. Each presents a dilemma for the defense--a slit through which a runner might squirm toward daylight. With 11 defensive players responsible for plugging 10 gaps, there is little margin for error, and overloading defenders at one spot leaves others vulnerable.

Unlike most coaches, whose quarterbacks use a constantly shifting cadence, Markham’s swift snap count is the same on virtually every play: “Down . . . ready set go.” Such predictability lulls the defense into a rhythm that can be exploited when the offense needs a timely offside penalty. “He can pick up five yards almost at will,” Etcheverry says. Each play is an eruption of chaos within a tight cluster of crisscrossing bodies. Somewhere is a ball carrier; picking him out of the scrum and tackling him is the problem, especially with as many as nine boys blocking.

“The goal is to be able to get four yards on a bad play,” Markham says.

The double wing tilts the odds the way card counting can help a skillful gambler, Etcheverry says. “Blackjack is one of the only games I’m aware of where the house can tell you to leave . . . that you know this game better than we do. They can’t do that in football as long as you’re abiding by the rules, and [Markham] does--and he uses them to his advantage.”

For the winning side, the results can be enthralling. But oh, the humanity.

Ray Baker revisits a bad place in recalling the night in 1990 when his Gold Beach, Ore., team met Bandon and its first-year coach. Markham’s team won, 84-8, the most lopsided game in the history of Oregon prep football. “Talking to you I still get heated about it,” he says. “We were just decimated. It probably cost me my job at Gold Beach. It destroyed all credibility I had as a coach.”

In 1991, “I thought we did a better job, and they beat us 73-6,” Baker says, acknowledging a sense of relief when another Oregon school lost by an even wider margin to a team running Markham’s system. “So I no longer had the worst loss in Oregon football. Now I’m second and third.”

Baker says he respects Markham, even likes him, allowing that “to a football purist,” the double wing is “a beautiful thing.” But he contends that Markham and other coaches harm players and even the game itself by failing to take steps to keep scores down. “My harshness toward him is when the score is so out of hand, what are we doing to promote football, to promote sportsmanship?” says Baker, now head coach at Oregon’s Clackamas High. “I play to win, but I never want to win at the expense of the dignity of my opponent, or of young people at the high school level.”

Markham says he never tries to make the other team look bad and tries “everything in our power to make games look real,” while avoiding obvious hold-down moves that would also embarrass an opponent, such as punting on first down or playing an unskilled lineman at quarterback who is sure to fumble. But he doesn’t apologize for the scores, either.

“You’d have to know me. I’ve been beat bad before, well, maybe not worse than 40-0 or something, but I absolutely take no exception if somebody beats me 80-0. I would congratulate them. I don’t care how bad we get beat. I get upset that I couldn’t do a better job of coaching. But I don’t get mad at them.”

Hugh Wyatt encountered Markham in the 1980s when both were guiding Finnish teams in a league comparable to American community-college football. Wyatt converted to the double wing not long after a 73-0 defeat by Markham’s Helsinki Roosters, and soon implemented his own stylized version at high schools in the Pacific Northwest with considerable success.

He has since quit coaching to travel the country year-round consulting, leading clinics and selling his coaching videos. He hasn’t spoken with Markham in years--”we don’t have a lot to do with each other”--but is careful to credit him and considers him a “brilliant coach.” “Frequently in football there is the inventor, and there is the popularizer,” says Wyatt, who played for Yale in the late ‘50s. “Hundreds of schools have adopted the double wing. At least 300 are running what you could call my version, plus at least that many youth teams . . . . I’ll never achieve what [Markham] has achieved as a coach, but I’ve been able to market this.”

Bruce Eien’s double-wing moment of truth came in 1989, when his alma mater, Brethren Christian in Huntington Beach, suffered a 74-0 clocking by Whittier Christian. Eien was coaching elsewhere, but returned to Brethren the following season as an assistant and today is head coach. Rather than switch over to “the dark side,” he vowed to find an antidote for it. “I was fully embarrassed,” Eien says. “I started big-time investigating the whole thing.” That meant going behind enemy lines to attend Markham clinics, endlessly screening game films and even installing the system at the junior varsity level to help demystify it for the varsity. He outlined his strategies in the January 2002 issue of Gridiron Strategies, a Wisconsin-based coaching publication. His article on how to stop the double wing quickly became the magazine’s most requested reprint. Says Eien: “A lot of people are anti. They don’t think it’s real football.”

Such criticism raises the heretical notion that Lombardi (“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”) and Al Davis (“Just win, baby.”) might have got it wrong--that football has its aesthetic side, and that an unentertaining victory isn’t much better than a defeat. Wyatt recalls Pepper Rodgers, the onetime UCLA coach, telling him that even though he was gaining yardage successfully with the confounding wishbone formation, “the alumni hate it because they can’t find the football.”

Winning ugly didn’t bother at least some fans in Bloomington, who complained loudly in July when Markham was bypassed in favor of Stewart Roper of Palo Verde High in Blythe, Calif. Roper quit days later, sending Bloomington officials scurrying back to Markham, who was poised to become offensive coordinator at Eastern Oregon University. He accepted Bloomington’s offer to return, but there was a catch: He and his assistant coaches would have to fulfill the school’s commitment to take part in a CIF-sponsored sportsmanship seminar called “Pursuing Victory with Honor,” lest Bloomington resume partying like it’s 1994.

So while some coaches embrace the double wing, others recoil in horror, and still others plot countermeasures, the guy who dreamed it up is back at the school where the system attained its greatest lethality. Starting this month, he’ll be trying to add to his career total of 274 victories and five CIF championships; how long he remains this time is anyone’s guess. Markham just needs to coach, as he knew 50 years ago. “I can’t think of a better life than being out in the fresh air, lifting weights with the kids, getting kids ready to play as a team. I don’t want to give up right now as far as I can see.”

He even hopes to emulate Amos Alonzo Stagg, one of football’s founders--the legendary father of the forward pass who lived past 100 years of age and coached nearly that long. “Who was that guy . . . . He was up teaching punting at 98.”

Markham knew the story, he just needed a little help with the name.

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Steve Clow is a Times assistant National editor.