Question: Do football coaches still fire up their teams? Or have the pre-game and halftime soliloquies gone the same way as the gospel tent?
Born, perhaps, of Notre Dame legend Knute Rockne”s alleged “win-one-for-the-Gipper” halftime exhortation that supposedly inspired the 1928 Irish to beat then-potent Army, they seem to have given way to more subtle entreaties. Such as, “Lipschitz, you mindless mound of offal — how could you jump offside on third and one?”
I remember a story about a coach bringing tears of rage to the eyes of his players at a southern university in a game against a northern institute by reminding them that those good-for-nothing Yankees are the descendants of the Bluecoats who put your granddads in those graves out there. The coach was from Michigan.
I never heard Vince Lombardi riling up the Green Bay Packers when you could still get pro players excited about something other than money. And I wasn”t there when the cantankerous Woody Hayes held forth in an era when even the Columbus sportswriter — fellow named Paul Hornung, no, not that Paul Hornung — was moved to sing the school”s fight song. And I”m glad I wasn”t.
But I did have exposure to a coach named Frank Kush, who fit their genre while coaching the Sun Devils of Arizona State University.
Kush was a tempest and a disciplinarian of the first order. On a crosstown trip from the stadium to the locker room back at University of Texas-El Paso after a loss, Kush spotted a vacant high school stadium with its lights still on. He promptly stopped the bus and ordered his players onto the field for a postgame, late-night scrimmage.
In the northern Arizona province of Payson, Frank held a preseason camp, which his players came to know as “Stalag Kush.” A disciple of Duffy Daugherty, he once attempted to employ one of Duffy”s strategies for heightening adrenaline.
The trick to be used just before his team left the locker room was to exhort, “I want to see you go out of here with fire in your eyes,” and just at that moment pulled a blazing torch made of newspapers lit by an assistant from behind his back and held it aloft.
Daugherty must have done it in a fireproof locker room. The one at Fort Collins, Colorado, broke out like a tinderbox. The Sun Devils stormed out with tears in their eyes from smoke inhalation — not to meet Colorado State so much as to escape the blazing locker room.
Kush and another favorite coach of mine, the late Jack Elway, were at opposite poles in temperament and that”s undoubtedly the reason John Elway chose playing baseball for a New York Yankee farm team rather than report to the Washington Redskins upon his graduation from Stanford. Elway was the Skins” No. 1 draft pick, but Kush, who had moved on from ASU by then, coached them.
The antithesis of Kush or any granite-browed coach, Elway loved nothing so much as a vodka martini, which he quaffed by the number after practices and which doubtlessly had something to do with his nickname of “Sundowner.”
The only Jack Elway player I remember being truly stoked about an upcoming game was a linebacker on the eve of Jack”s San Jose State meeting Stanford, led at the time by his son.
“Do you have any goals in mind for this game?” I remember asking.
“Yes-s-s!” the linebacker hissed. His face took on a strange, wolfish glow, “I want to kill John Elway,” he enthused.
I don”t know how well Jack fired up his teams, but he periodically fired up Mrs. Elway. Once, Janet Elway hurled a table lamp at him.
“It was coming right at my head,” he recalled. “But I was lucky that it stopped by its cord because it was still plugged in.”
The button-down technicians and the creative — Paul Brown, Bill Walsh, Tom Landry, and others of that ilk — have long since replaced the emotional coach who could stir the soul, roil the blood and build the pride. I suppose I should have seen this coming in days long past just by the actions of the first coach I ever dealt with. His name was Phil Kreuger and he doubled as an English teacher at Yuma (Ariz.) Union High School. I”m still not sure how I feel about his pet name for me, “Boswell, the boy scribe.” Kreuger did well at Yuma and was selected Arizona coach of the year.
In the years after that, he became a general manager for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But he may have elected to take that position for something other than macho reasons. As a head coach at a college sometime between Yuma and Tampa Bay, Kreuger developed a phobia.
“I was afraid to look at the scoreboard,” he said.
Editor”s note: John Lindblom, a former Bay Area sports beat reporter, is a sports reporter and columnist for the Record-Bee.
