Читать книгу Sid Gillman - Josh Katzowitz - Страница 13

four ASSISTANT COACH

Sid Gillman didn’t have to travel very far to take the first step on the path of his newly realized coaching career. Same city, same university, same expectation of winning. But with a new exciting coach who promised to lead Ohio State out of the pit of mediocrity that Sam Willaman had dropped it off before resigning. It was a new offense and a new sense of purpose—for the Buckeyes and for Gillman.

Gillman had planned to be a lawyer, the same as Schmidt when he was on his way to graduating from the University of Nebraska. Neither expected to be a coach. Both men’s plans changed.

After their first meeting, Schmidt blew Gillman’s mind with his plans and with his strategy. Gillman impressed Schmidt as well, and though Gillman still planned to attend law school, he agreed to take a student-assistant job under Schmidt for Ohio State’s spring practice of 1934. Though he was supposed to use the money made in the spring to help pay for law school in the fall, he realized soon after that he could not escape football’s grasp. He would leave the law books to somebody else. He would be a coach, just like his mentor Schmidt. Maybe slightly less crazy and paranoid, but just as hungry for winning and with a penchant for never thinking about anything other than football.

“I haven’t seen a law school yet,” Gillman said later in life. “I wasn’t interested in anything else after that.”

He had been drafted by the NFL’s Boston Redskins after graduation, and they sent him a contract to sign so he could begin his professional playing career. “Maybe I will,” Gillman thought to himself. “Maybe I’ll play.” He went so far as to sign the contract, but in the end, Schmidt convinced him of his true path. It wasn’t the law. It wasn’t taking over the family business of movie theaters (“I needed him in the business,” Sid’s father, David, said. “He wasn’t interested.”). And it wasn’t playing football. Instead, it was coaching college kids for little money in exchange for the many responsibilities, problems, and headaches. That’s where Gillman’s journey would take him, where he’d really shine.

He performed odds jobs for Schmidt while participating in practices and coaching clinics that first spring at Ohio State, but Schmidt didn’t have the money to hire Gillman full time. Instead, he turned Gillman loose into the wild.

Into the arms of Esther, as it turned out. Gillman had graduated in the spring of 1934, and at that point, he didn’t have enough money to marry Esther. That would have to wait until Gillman procured a full-time job. “I got paid [as an Ohio State student assistant coach], but very little,” Gillman said many years later, turning to his left to address his wife with a smile. “It wasn’t enough to take care of you, baby.”

That changed, however, when an official from Denison University, a small liberal arts school 30 miles northeast of Columbus, called Ohio State athletic director Lynn St. John and asked for a recommendation. The school needed a third coach for its three-man staff, and St. John spoke highly of Gillman, the All-American who had been one of the top Buckeye ends of all time. Denison called and offered Gillman the job, and he gratefully accepted. The second step had been taken, and it was going to lead Sid and Esther to Granville, Ohio, for $1,800 a year. It was, in Esther’s eyes, a princely sum of money. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Esther exclaimed to her mother as if they had hit the jackpot.

Even better? It allowed Sid and Esther enough money to get married in 1935, nearly a decade after that Sweet 16 party had brought the two together. They wed in a formal affair at the Curtis Hotel in Minneapolis, and afterward, they set sail on their honeymoon. To Chicago. For the College All-Star Game. So Gillman could work and bask in his loves (football and Esther). You want romantic? Well, Esther received the most romantic honeymoon Sid could have imagined.

“I planned every inch of it,” Gillman said. The blissfully wedded couple stayed at the Morrison Hotel, and after attending football practice every day, they went to jazz clubs every night. On the day of the Chicago College All-Star game, the two attended the contest at Soldier Field, and with Esther clad in her powder blue wedding dress, the skies opened at halftime and drenched the field. Esther took refuge under a newspaper and waited out the storm. Not surprisingly, the newspaper wasn’t much of an umbrella, and the rain soaked her dress. To make matters worse, she lost her purse that day. But still, the two were together, watching football, and in love (if you visited them at their home more than 65 years later, all three facts would still be true).

After a brief return to Minneapolis following the honeymoon, the two set sail for Granville in a used DeSoto convertible that featured a rumble seat in back (unfortunately, the whereabouts of the Dangerous Dan McGrew, Gillman’s college jalopy, have been lost to history). Among their belongings stuffed into the car: a used 35-millimeter film projector that Gillman had bought at a hock shop in Chicago.

At the time, the couple had only $25 to their names. The projector cost $15. The couple couldn’t afford it. Even though he had seen himself on film at Ohio State only a half-dozen times during his playing career, Gillman had an inkling about the importance of watching film. He had to have it. He bought it. Esther could have killed him, but she was also intrigued by the new teaching tool. If she was going to be married to a football coach, she wanted to learn everything she could about the game that would keep him up at night. The two arrived at their new home in Granville, and after they took out a loan from Denison head coach Tom Rogers so they could buy groceries, Sid and Esther tacked up a white bed sheet to the wall and turned on the film projector.

Gillman—and Esther, to some degree—never relinquished the habit.

While Gillman prepared himself to start coaching by studying film, he also strapped on the pads himself. In order to earn more money and to fulfill a request made by an old friend, Gillman traveled to Cleveland on the weekends to play for the professional Rams. It wasn’t the NFL—he had already turned down that chance—and Gillman considered the first edition of the American Football League a rinky-dink startup, but he also wanted to help out his buddy.

The reason Gillman joined the team in the first place was due to an old Ohio State teammate named Buzz Wetzel, who had been a fullback on Francis Schmidt’s original squad. Wetzel had tried to draw up enough interest and capital to start a pro football team in Cleveland, and he had recruited Gillman and former Ohio State players Gomer Jones (a 1935 captain) and Max Padlow. But after realizing his idea was probably not going to come to fruition, Wetzel told his former teammates to forget it. Jones went to the NFL’s Chicago Cardinals, Padlow to the Philadelphia Eagles, and Gillman to Denison.

At the last minute, Wetzel secured the financing, but with the caveat that the team be built around the top players from the state of Ohio. The financiers, which included a lawyer, a publisher, and an ink manufacturer, realized that the smart way to make back their money was to build a following based on players the Cleveland-area fans knew the best. The more Buckeyes, the better. Gillman didn’t have much desire to play pro ball, because there wasn’t much money in it and because it wasn’t nearly as popular as college football (one advertisement in the Rams program desperately tried to explain “Why pro football is faster and more interesting to watch than college football”). But Wetzel was an old friend, so Gillman agreed.

And what a team it was. The 1936 Cleveland Rams squad featured seven All-Americans, and with talent like that—plus, the ability to buy top-notch seats at League Park at a bargain price of $1.50—the Rams were a popular attraction. In the home opener, they walloped Syracuse 26-0 in front of 5,000 spectators, and the scene convinced one writer to exclaim, “Give the Cleveland Rams a few seasons together and they’ll take a place right alongside the best pro teams of the nation.”

Gillman was having a wonderful time taking the field with his old Buckeyes buddies. He would play games Sunday, practice with the Rams on Monday, and then return to Denison to coach the rest of the week. The 25-year-old Gillman was learning from one of the great mentors of his life in Tom Rogers, and he was trading sweat and blood every Sunday in the pros. Life was pretty good for the Gillmans with their white sheet tacked to the wall and $1,800 a year filling their bank account.

Life was pretty good for the Cleveland franchise as well, drawing interest from the NFL. While the Rams were successful on the field and at the box office, the rest of the AFL slowly crept into the murky waters of irrelevance. With the franchise’s options limited, the monopoly-hungry NFL threw the Rams a lifesaver, and with a strong fan base and a stadium already in place, the ownership group accepted the invite. It spelled doom for Gillman’s pro career.

With the AFL on the brink of insolvency (the NFL, once again would be a league by itself after the 1937 season), the NFL decided to punish those who had flouted its rules in order to play for the enemy league. Since Gillman hadn’t reported to the Redskins after they acquired his rights and then had the temerity to join the NFL’s opposition, the league banished Gillman—along with Padlow and Jones—from playing in the NFL for five years. News reports deemed the decision outrageous and unfair, and nearly 5,000 fans signed a petition of protest and sent it to NFL president Joe Carr and the league’s executive council. Homer Marshman, president of the Rams, gave a two-hour speech at a league meeting in which he reminded those there that part of the reason the NFL wanted the Cleveland franchise in the first place was because of the three players it had suspended. The protest fell on deaf ears.

“It’s hard to figure out,” Jones, a Cleveland native and an eventual College Football Hall of Famer, said after learning of his punishment. “I talked with the manager of the Chicago team and he said it would be all right for me to go from the National into the American league, especially since I was going to play at home. I never thought I would have to get a written release. It now looks like I’m stuck, but I certainly hope to get reinstated.”

It never happened. Instead, Jones eventually ended up as a long-time assistant coach for Bud Wilkinson at the University of Oklahoma, and after Wilkinson retired in 1964, Jones took over. He went 9-11-1 in two seasons, and he resigned afterward (though he stayed on as athletic director). Padlow joined the Cincinnati Bengals of the AFL, but after the season, the league disbanded and Padlow’s career ended.

Gillman, meanwhile, returned to Granville and his assistant job at Denison. He turned on the film projector and never looked back again. He was not a player anymore. He was only a coach.

Sid and Esther were settling into his new job quite nicely in the small town of Granville that featured the picturesque college of Denison. To the Gillmans, it was a beautiful place—aesthetically and professionally. Though the Gillmans were Jewish and Denison, at the time, had a Baptist affiliation, religion was never an issue.

“They asked if we wanted to go to church; they learned and we learned,” Esther said. “There was no disapproval. It made us all better. This is how you learn about each other.”

While Gillman was beginning his coaching career, Esther’s thoughts kept returning to her dream job: becoming the mother to a trove of children. She, largely through the anti-Semitism in her home town, wasn’t a schoolteacher. She never earned her college degree. Watching film at home with Sid was fine, but it didn’t fulfill her in the same way raising children could. A white sheet tacked to the wall couldn’t compare to a blanket wrapped around a baby. “At the time,” Esther said, “I never thought of anything else.”

On September 25, 1936, she got her wish, giving birth to her daughter, Lyle. A year and a half later, on January 23, 1938, Barbara—who would become known as Bobbe—arrived to give Sid a trio of women in his household to whom he must attend. The adjustment, as was to be expected, was immediate. Esther spent much of her time soaking the cloth diapers in the bathtub. When Sid arrived home from football practice, he’d take out the washboard and scrub the diapers clean. They’d rinse and rinse and rinse some more before boiling the diapers on the stove to sterilize them for the next day’s use. By the time the diapers were ready to be hung dry, it was 2 a.m. Neighbors marveled that the Gillmans’ laundry was on the drying line so early in the morning; it was Esther’s secret that she performed the chore in the middle of the night.

Denison had mixed results from 1934 to 1936. The team went 13-10-2 in those three seasons, but in 1937, the program had a breakthrough, going 6-1-1. Rogers was making a name for himself and his coaching staff—his career winning percentage of 66.7 is second in school history only to Woody Hayes—but even in the program’s down times, Sid always found comfort in his family. If football was his No. 1 priority, his family, at this time in his life, was No. 1-A. When Sid knocked off work in the evenings, he’d pick up the bassinet containing Lyle and set it next to him. If he switched rooms, Lyle and her bassinet came with him. He needed those kids on top of him at all times, so Gillman physically carried them wherever he roamed inside his house.

Likewise, when Lyle went to sleep, she needed her father nearby as she dropped into unconsciousness. So, Sid would place her in the crib, and he’d slowly back away. He’d get to the top of the stairs, and he’d wait. Then, he’d slip down one step. Then another. Then another. When he reached the bottom, Lyle, more than likely, was sleeping, and Gillman could resume his night. He had no other choice. Lyle demanded it. “She was a tough little girl,” Sid said. “She had to have her own way.” If that meant Sid had to wait on her like a butler while she fell asleep, so be it.

As Bobbe grew into adolescence, her mother could sense the maternal instincts in her blood. If Esther needed a minor chore performed or if Lyle needed to be calmed down, Esther could rely on Bobbe to make sure it was done. You can still see that today. Lyle readily admits that Bobbe is the den mother who makes sure the remaining family sticks together like glue. If plans need to be made, there’s a good chance Bobbe is the one making them.

Gillman wasn’t destined to keep his family for long at Denison. Even after taking the job under Tom Rogers, he still worked with Schmidt part time, and Gillman’s astonishment continued to grow as he watched Schmidt operate. They spent hours together at Ohio State drawing up plays and strategizing about the best times to run Schmidt’s eclectic schemes. Schmidt worked hard, and one reason the childless Schmidt saw Gillman as a son was because Gillman worked just as hard and with just as much passion. Schmidt was a pass-oriented coach, and Gillman became fascinated with the art. It was elementary thinking perhaps (though most of the rest of football’s coaches hadn’t learned the lesson), but Gillman reasoned that since you can score quicker and more efficiently if you pass the ball, it made sense to incorporate the forward pass into your offense. That might have been the most important thing Schmidt ever taught him.

Not only that, but in 1938, Schmidt gave him one of the best gifts he could have received: a job at one of the top collegiate programs in the country. Gillman was on his way back to Columbus as a full-time Buckeyes assistant.

Schmidt liked his stand-in son so much that the 26-year-old Gillman was the only assistant coach Schmidt ever hired at Ohio State (athletic director Lynn St. John usually did the deed). Schmidt wasn’t concerned that Gillman was Jewish, although this already was becoming a problem for Gillman, considering he couldn’t land another job in the Big Ten because of his religious background. Instead, Schmidt gave him $2,500 a year to coach the team’s ends.

It was not the nirvana Gillman might have envisioned.

Schmidt was always seen as bizarre. He was confident and sarcastic. He forgot players’ names, and if he happened to remember, he frequently mispronounced them. He was also mean. Once, a player named Johnny Vaught—who went on to great success as Ole Miss’s coach—made a mistake at practice and asked, “Coach, where do you want me to go on this play?” Replied Schmidt, then the Texas Christian coach: “You can go straight to hell as far as I’m concerned—you’re not doing me a bit of good.” In that day and age, it was rare for a coach to say something like that to one of his players, and it didn’t help Schmidt’s relationship with them.

When Gillman joined the coaching staff before the 1938 season, Schmidt’s paranoia was impinging on his team’s growth. Most of his assistant coaches were rendered irrelevant, because Schmidt ran every part of practice himself. He trusted hardly anybody else, so the assistants chased errant footballs and ran errands for the head coach. Schmidt did everything else. Making matters worse, most of them didn’t have full access to Schmidt’s playbook. He kept those encyclopedia-thick treasures locked away—literally. Gillman was close enough to Schmidt to have earned access to the entire Schmidt catalog, but he was forbidden from parceling out the knowledge that came with it.

In fact, Schmidt began handing out assignments to his players that featured only the job that particular player was supposed to accomplish on that certain play. In other words, instead of giving an actor the full script of the movie, Schmidt, the director, produced only the lines that actor was supposed to recite. The actor would have no idea of the plot or what else his character was supposed to experience. In effect, he couldn’t do his job effectively, because his lines had no context. It was the same thing with an offensive tackle. If he didn’t know what the assignment was for the guard next to him—or for that matter, the quarterback and running back—how could he understand the totality of the play itself? Schmidt’s paranoia forced him to this measure because he was scared of the consequences if his playbooks fell into the wrong hands. But clearly, it wasn’t an efficient way to run a football team.

Schmidt’s offensive innovations were beginning to lose their effectiveness, the losses began to pile up, and though the Ohio State students enjoyed his zaniness, his act was wearing thin. A couple of three-loss seasons were followed by 1940’s 4-4 debacle, and players began to grumble about him, saying they were poorly conditioned and that they spent too much time on offense and not enough time hitting on defense. They began holding players-only meetings on a weekly basis, and some started skipping practice. Then, Michigan dominated Ohio State 40–0, the Buckeyes worst loss in 35 years, and it was clear that Schmidt was on his way out the door—of his job and, maybe, of his sanity.

At the team banquet, Jim Langhurst, a departing captain, presented Schmidt with a gold trophy, and Schmidt, touched, broke down in tears, saying, “This gets my goat. It sure means a lot to me.” The gold trophy, however, simply added to the weight already on his shoulders.

After the banquet, Schmidt, with his job almost surely at an end, traveled to Los Angeles to scout the December 7 contest between Notre Dame and Southern California—which was to meet Ohio State in the second game of the 1941 season. When Schmidt returned, he was told that his five assistant coaches, including Gillman, had turned in their resignation letters. Nine days after the USC-Notre Dame game, Buckeyes athletic director Lynn St. John met with Schmidt to discuss the state of the program, and later that day, Schmidt, who finished his term with a 39-16-1 record, was forced to resign. He held out hope that the athletic board would reject his letter of resignation. But that night, during a secret 2-hour, 40-minute meeting at the Faculty Club, the athletic board unanimously accepted it. Ohio State was moving on.

Schmidt would coach one more season, going 3-7 in 1942 at the University of Idaho, and after the school ended the program, he died September 19, 1944, as an insurance salesman.

“When he came to Ohio State, Big Ten coaches were on a fairly well-established pattern,” Gillman said after learning of Schmidt’s death. “Francis turned things upside down, gambled with a wide-open, lateral-passing game, and began winning games for Ohio State. Rival coaches couldn’t keep up with him. Some of his own players couldn’t keep up with him either. That was his one fault. He tried to teach too much offense. There were always a few players who couldn’t get it all. Those few always kept him from reaching perfection.

“If Francis had any real fault it was his neglect of fundamentals in favor of developing his offensive tactics. His players spent so much of their time learning their assignments on the dozens of different plays he gave them that they had little chance to practice other phases of the game.”

Gillman surely is correct, but he fails to mention what might have been Schmidt’s biggest lesson to Gillman. His inability to stay organized eventually doomed Schmidt, and it was never more clearly on display than when Joe Williams, the sports editor of the Syracuse Herald-Journal, stopped off to visit Schmidt while on his way home from the World Series in Cincinnati. Williams entered the Buckeyes’ locker room, and he was struck dumb by the hundreds upon hundreds of Schmidt’s plays (highlighted in yellows, reds, and purples) hanging on the wall. These obviously weren’t important enough for Schmidt to keep locked away out of sight. Wrote Williams: “The effect, if baffling to the mind, is soothing to the eyes. You find yourself thinking of a sunset in the Swiss Alps.” Williams asked local reporter Lew Byrer about it, saying it was a little strange that anybody could walk into the locker room and study Schmidt’s playbook. Said Byrer: “Nobody knows what they mean anyway, and I doubt if even Schmidt does.”

Gillman realized that in order to surpass Schmidt’s level of success, he needed a system that was impeccable in its organization. Any other way would distract him from the task at hand. Any other way could possibly kill his coaching career.

Without a job, Gillman returned to Denison to coach, once again, for Tom Rogers. Paul Brown had been hired at Ohio State to replace Schmidt, and though at least one news report 15 years later claimed that Gillman had become friendly with Brown at the time—which is, frankly, hard to fathom—Gillman never approached Brown for a job to stay on as an Ohio State assistant. And Brown never asked Gillman.

So, the Gillmans returned to that small town with that picturesque college, and Gillman helped Rogers lead the team to a 7-1 mark during the 1941 season, the program’s best finish in 27 years.

But December 7, 1941, changed the American landscape, sending coaches and potential players into military service as the country declared war on Japan for the Pearl Harbor attack and, later, on Germany.

Gillman didn’t have to worry about getting drafted into the military—“I had so many children at the time, I had every (deferment) classification that the good Lord created,” he said. But he wanted to make some sort of sacrifice for his country. He was set to join the V-5 program, a naval aviation cadet program, with Tom Rogers, but officers told Gillman he was too overweight. An angry Gillman told them to forget it.

When he accepted his next job at Miami University, Gillman took a night shift at a factory where he was supposed to make metal caps for the bombs the military would drop on its enemies. Gillman would end football practice, and then he’d work from 6 p.m. until midnight, doing service for his country.

His kids, though, remember the ashtrays.

“Daddy used to smoke a pipe,” Lyle said. “He made these ashtrays and only daddy could lift them because they were made out of steel. He made these with scalloped edges and a cup where he could lay his pipe.”

Said Bobbe: “Yeah, he wasn’t very good with his hands. That’s all he knew how to make.”

“I didn’t try to avoid the service, but that’s exactly the way it came out,” Gillman said. “I eventually got a 1-A card which said I was ready for the service. But the war was just about over by then.”

By 1942, with the U.S. entrenched in war in two different theatres, Gillman continued his life the only way he knew how: by coaching and studying football. He was also ready to move on to his next destination. Francis Schmidt had showed Gillman the possibilities of how to expand a great offensive mind, and Gillman, showing his appreciation, wore bow ties in homage for the rest of his life. Tom Rogers showed Gillman it was possible to gain respect and maintain discipline from players without having to yell and embarrass them in front of others, and Gillman, showing his appreciation, would name his first and only son after Rogers in homage.

But Gillman was ready to trade one picturesque campus for another, trading Granville for Oxford. He was willing to do it for the chance to run his own team.