Post by TheShadow on Dec 24, 2005 21:31:05 GMT -5
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By Pat Toomay
Special to Page 2
When I met John Madden on my first day of Raiders training camp, in
July 1977, I was struck by his ease and affability, but I was most impressed
by his thoughtfulness. Before arriving in Santa Rosa, I'd driven from Dallas
to Tampa and back, flown cross-country, taken a "physical" and driven
another 60 miles to camp headquarters at the El Rancho Tropicana Motel.
Remarkably, Madden was not only aware of my extensive traveling, but he was
willing to alter camp routine to accommodate it. I was exhausted and he knew
it. "Take the rest of the afternoon off," he'd said. In all my years in the
league, I'd never encountered such flexibility in a head coach; I never knew
such leadership existed.
In the days and weeks that followed, other qualities surfaced that
differentiated Madden from his peers. Idiosyncratic behavior by players that
would have driven other coaches nuts was greeted with a shrug and a chuckle.
During film sessions, which many coaches regarded as an opportunity to
humiliate or shame, Madden kept criticism generic, rarely naming names.
Under no circumstances would he publicly condemn a player's character. That
didn't mean he wouldn't chew somebody out for making a mistake in practice,
because he would. But even those outbursts would be tempered by a wink and a
nudge, as if the whole thing were a kind of joke. Who was this guy? I began
to wonder. What experiences could have forged such a humane perspective?
My cynical friends thought I was being sentimental. Echoing hardline
Raider critics, they thought Madden had no choice but to deal with his
players in the way he did because it was a constraint of his job. After all,
they'd argue, Madden was only 31 when Al Davis hired him as linebackers
coach; he was only 33 when he took over the team. So he was just a kid.
Moreover, he was a big, unsophisticated lug of a kid, who had no pedigree
and no real head coaching experience. Thus, he was a perfect candidate for
the manipulative Davis. He was mere putty in Davis' hands. What else could
he have been?
My cynical friends would admit that Madden knew football, that he was
no dummy by any stretch. But they maintained that if Madden wanted the
Raiders head coaching job, he had to play ball with Davis. It was as simple
as that. Madden had to implement Davis' philosophy at every turn. Was it
Madden who loved wild-card players? No, it was Davis who loved 'em, because
Davis was a wild card. So Madden had no choice but to be the good father to
those nutcases. He was the way he was because he had to be. And there was a
cost. Where did I think those ulcers came from that drove him out of the
game?
For a while, this argument snagged me because I knew at least part of
it was true, and some of my own experiences on the team made me wonder about
the other part. Madden's youth and inexperience were indisputable. Insiders
had it that, at first, Madden sat in awe as Davis taught him. Madden's
expression was, "What better counsel can I get than Al Davis?" Later, Madden
would describe the relationship in language that both flattered and
distanced Al. "If I had an idea, I had to sell it," Madden would say. "But
it's the same with Al. He didn't tell me, he sold me."
This didn't exactly slam the door on the issue. In an interview with
Inside Sports after he retired, Madden exhibited the kind of sensitivity one
is forced to develop when working for a powerful, unpredictable superior.
Said Madden: "Al knows the football, the rules, the ticket situation, the
radio contracts, the advertising. He'd have a mood for each one -- he would
create his own moods. A mood for drafting, a mood for trading, a mood for
negotiating. One mood just kicks right into another. You can simplify a
simple person. You can't simplify Al Davis."
Madden also observed that Davis didn't have "the tools that are
visible to people to show feelings. Once," Madden said, "we won a big game
and my son Mike was in the locker room. He was in fifth or sixth grade. Al
said to him, 'What do you want? Name anything. A business? A motorcycle? A
store?' That's how he would try to show it."
Were the cynics right? Was Madden's underlying attitude of patience,
caring and understanding a kind of pretense? A mere act necessitated by a
lack of control?
Of course, the answer to this question would end up being a resounding
NO, but enough contradictory information was floating around at the time to
create doubt in anyone who was interested in the issue. For example, when
John Matuszak showed up wasted for the '77 AFC championship game and was
allowed to play even though he was struggling, many wondered how Madden
would have responded had the club's power equation been different. A related
incident involved popular defensive coordinator and former Baltimore Colts
great Don Shinnick, who was vociferous in lobbying for a hardline response
to such incidents as Matuszak's flop. Shinnick's lobbying -- on this and
other matters -- was done privately, behind closed doors, but Shinnick's
input was largely ignored. Eventually, Shinnick rebelled.
I suppose it was how Shinnick rebelled that did him in, because Don
was inspired in the mode he chose to express himself, appropriating Raider
insouciance to make his point. It happened during games. Rebuffed in his
efforts to effect things, coordinator Shinnick, rather than staying focused
on the game, as most coordinators would, retreated to the bench after
calling defensive signals. There, flipping his hat backward hip-hop style,
Shinnick would dig out of his pocket a hot dog or a bag of peanuts.
Grinning, he would munch away until somebody called him for the next series.
Man, these Raiders are something, I thought the first time I saw this, but
of course I was ignorant of the underlying politics. Inevitably, it all
ended badly. Asked by Davis to resign at the end of the '77 season, Shinnick
refused, saying we'd had a great year and he'd done nothing wrong. Davis
responded by firing him. Sadly, Shinnick was unable to land another NFL job.
My own interest in this drama was blunted by distance, as I was at
home in Dallas, enjoying the offseason, when Shinnick was dismissed. My
interest sharpened, however, when Davis replaced Shinnick with former Denver
defensive coordinator Myrel Moore. Moore was an exponent of the 3-4 defense
and was considered an architect of Denver's vaunted "Orange Crush." Being a
purist, however, Moore did not include in his scheme rushing four down
linemen in passing situations. This meant that our designated rusher
strategy, which had yielded 17 sacks from my position the previous season,
was going out the window. Needless to say, this made me a little nuts. It
also scared me because, despite the year I'd had, suddenly my job was in
jeopardy, as I was the antithesis of a 3-4 lineman.
In a 3-4 alignment, defensive linemen play nose up on their offensive
counterparts. Assigned a "two-gap" responsibility, their job is to
neutralize the offensive player and be prepared to slide off to either side
and make a tackle. Physically, the ideal 3-4 lineman is a fireplug like
Warren Sapp, with incredible strength and leverage. A 4-3 end, on the other
hand, can be quicker, lighter and more agile, since he only has to control a
shoulder of an offensive tackle. For me, playing nose up on the likes of Art
Shell, Leon Gray or John Hannah was more than a challenge. Giving away 50 or
60 pounds, as I routinely did, it was a fate worse than death. I simply
couldn't sustain the head-up pounding meted out by these much larger
players.
Of course, this radical shift in strategy was not explicitly
announced, but as we got into training camp, it quickly became obvious what
was going to happen. Startled by what I felt was the absurdity of chucking a
proven defense, I went to Madden. After explaining my confusion over what
our owner intended by making this switch, I blurted out the question that
was haunting me: "What in the hell does he expect from me?"
"You'd better worry about what I expect from you," Madden replied.
He was right, of course. If this was the situation, then I'd better
adjust to it or I would be out of a job. Still, the whole thing struck me as
absurd, so I began to reconsider the arguments of my cynical friends, or at
least to re-evaluate my notion of the club's power structure, so that I
would be better equipped to understand who I needed to please. Where did
Madden stand on Shinnick's dismissal? I wondered. Could he really be in
favor of chucking our defense?
Such was the state of things as we opened the '78 preseason. On a
certain level, the club was reeling. A blown call by an official during the
'77 AFC championship game had cost us a second consecutive appearance in the
Super Bowl, a game that we would have won, I believed, since historically
Dallas had difficulty matching up with the Raiders. As if that wasn't
enough, a popular coach had been replaced by an enemy turncoat who, with
Davis' blessing, was intent on changing everything. Adding fuel to the fire
was the rumor that Madden, during a May minicamp, had been hospitalized with
ulcers.
Compromising one's principles -- and being forced to live with that
compromise -- can take a toll on one's health, and this was the cynics' take
on Madden's condition: He was buckling under the stress of working for a
megalomaniacal boss. In reflecting on his situation later, Madden would be
less specific in his assessment, attributing his persistent pain simply to
"coaching." In a memoir written after he retired, Madden admitted that he
started thinking about quitting after winning Super Bowl XI. At that point,
he said, he had only one more ambition -- to win 100 games in his first 10
years. After the '77 season, when he had 94 regular-season victories, he
realized that no coach in the NFL or AFL had ever done that, especially with
the same team. As it developed, he won 103, but during that final '78
season, as Madden put it, "I began to burn out."
At the time, you could tell something was wrong. No longer the
blustering, confident "Pinky" of yore, Madden seemed agitated and fretful.
During practice, he would chew on towels and would frequently produce a
brown bottle from which he would gulp a chalky white substance that would
leave residue on his lips. In the locker room, on planes, in the office,
spasms of vomiting became routine.
In the vacuum of Madden's distraction, the new coach, Myrel Moore,
began to assert himself and one player, Ted Hendricks, took offense. Mocking
Moore's emphasis on weight training, Hendricks had his own weight rack
constructed and erected on the practice field. With empty cans for dumbbells
and with strategically placed beverage holders, the contraption was a
hilarious addition to the other equipment arrayed there, but it was also a
biting reminder of the old Raider spirit that Moore had been hired to
vanquish.
Of course, it was tempting to view all of this as petty squabbling
among twisted royals. After all, we were among the league's elite, a success
by any standard -- why couldn't we get a grip? Perspective was what was
required, but nobody could have anticipated the incident that would restore
it nor the devastation it would leave in its wake. For those of us directly
involved, life in pro football would never be the same.
----
Coming Attractions: In Part 2 of his look at what makes John Madden
tick, Pat Toomay talks about Madden's response to Darryl Stingley's
paralyzing injury and the former Raider coach's famous fear of flying ...
and explains the powerful and humanizing connection between the two.
Former NFL defensive end Pat Toomay played in the league for 10 years
(1970-79) with the Cowboys, Bills, Bucs and Raiders. He is the author of two
books, The Crunch and the novel On Any Given Sunday.