Читать книгу Sid Gillman - Josh Katzowitz - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION

The stadium rises from the side of Interstate 30 like a spaceship that just happened to crash-land in north Texas. The behemoth cost Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the citizens of Arlington, Texas, a cool $1.2 billion, the most expensive sports construction of all time, and, in turn, the stadium looks like it was built on a different planet.

This immense structure is a symbol of what the NFL is today. Like everything else in Texas, it’s humongous, and no expense was spared to make the stadium’s patrons as comfortable as possible. At the same time, Jones reaches as deeply as he can into those same fans’ pockets.

The stadium sits off the interstate named for legendary Cowboys coach Tom Landry, but this is not the kind of football stadium he would recognize. Inside, the centerpiece is the video board that hangs like a Boeing 747 over the turf. It’s the biggest TV in the universe, and with its high-definition capability, it’s like watching real life above what is, in fact, a real, live game.

Actually, it’s tough to decide where to look when you’re watching a game at Cowboys Stadium—the field or the video board—because they both look so spectacular. Do you look at the gorgeous sun setting over the Caribbean Sea, or do you focus on those beautiful blue waters that shimmer underneath? Same problem here. The entire viewing experience is almost too eye-popping to comprehend.

Today is Media Day for Super Bowl XLV, and with Jones serving as the maître d’, this event is as big as big can possibly get. That’s the way he’s lived his life and the way he’s built his team. Going bigger than humongous is a way of life in Texas, and it’s a way of life in Jerry World.

Before the game, Jones talked about his desire to set an all-time Super Bowl attendance record (for the record, he would fail), and he sold expensive tickets to those who wanted to stand outside the stadium and watch the game on large HD screens.

Yet, by God, Cowboys Stadium is a magnificent structure, light years away from Super Bowl I, which was played in cavernous—not to mention, old—Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in front of a 60 percent-full crowd and which featured a halftime show with a trumpeter named Al Hirt and two college marching bands. (Super Bowl XLV, by contrast, featured the Black Eyed Peas, tragically one of the most popular bands in the world.)

Five days before the championship game, I stood on the turf at Media Day, the largest TV in the world precariously hanging above my head, and all around me, the worst part of the modern game was on display. The part where the clowns rule the afternoon, where entertainment means more than the game.

On days like this, knowing it’s hardly ever a good idea to bring your laptop to the circus, you can forget about getting any work done.

Put Sid Gillman in a scene like this, and it’d be like putting a football coach on the moon.

During Gillman’s era, mostly during the heyday of the American Football League when a band of upstart owners and players tried to break through the NFL’s monopoly in the 1960s, teams desperately tried to draw attention to themselves. But their ideas weren’t usually insulting to the viewers.

Many aspects of Super Bowl XLV week were exactly that, and though Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers outdueled Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger as Green Bay won its fourth championship, the winner these days is really a secondary issue. For fans—and, let’s face it, the corporate sponsors and bigwigs who fill the stadium to watch two teams they most likely care very little about—it’s all about the experience.

This is the NFL of the 21st century. Money rules all. Sponsors and advertisers are worshiped. The fans pay exorbitant ticket prices, especially if they’re forced to buy on the secondary market. Hell, they pay ridiculous prices just to stand outside. Everybody but the owners gets shortchanged.

The game is different from the time Gillman coached, and most who play the game today wouldn’t recognize Gillman’s contributions.

Since I started this project, one of the most interesting obstacles I’ve run into is the lack of name recognition for Gillman, one of the game’s most important coaches. Most fans of my generation who were born after Gillman’s head coaching days were behind him wouldn’t have ever heard his name. To be honest, I knew nothing about him before I started researching my first book, Bearcats Rising, but the more I read about him and the more I talked to people who played for him, my fascination grew.

Simply put, Gillman was an innovator. On the field, off the field, in preparing for games, in preparing for a season, on social issues, and on rule-bending. He’s the most important person in professional football that hardly anybody remembers.

I’ll give you an example.

During Super Bowl Media Day, I asked 10 offensive players—5 from the Green Bay Packers and 5 from the Pittsburgh Steelers—if they had ever heard of Gillman. I asked offensive linemen and running backs and tight ends and wide receivers. I asked stars and scrubs. Nine of them said no, they’d never heard Gillman’s name.

The one player who said yes is a Packers tight end named Tom Crabtree. He happened to play at one of the colleges where Gillman once coached. I asked him if he knew anything about Gillman, and his eyes lit up. “He coached at Miami Ohio, didn’t he?” Crabtree asked.

Among other places, I responded. You know anything else about him?

“Um, that he won a lot of games?” Crabtree said in less than confident terms.

Yet if I’d asked those players about Gillman’s more famous contemporaries—say, Vince Lombardi or Paul Brown or Woody Hayes or Bill Walsh—a lot more than one of them could have given me a usable answer.

So, I ask: Why has Gillman fallen through the cracks of NFL history? Why do we lose sight of him in the glare of today’s ever-flashy Super Bowls? Gillman was just as innovative as any of the coaches I mentioned above (hell, Gillman helped tutor Lombardi, and Walsh’s West Coast offense took much of its inspiration from Gillman’s teachings), so why isn’t he as well known?

Theories abound from those who knew Gillman well.

Some say it’s been many years since Gillman coached on the sidelines, that he’s simply a man forgotten.

“There’s been a little separation in time,” Super Bowl–winning coach Brian Billick said. “But within the profession, the regard that Sid Gillman is held in is second to none.”

Some say it’s because Gillman never won a Super Bowl title of his own.

“There seems to be an inordinate focus by the media, which then contaminates the football public, that the only measure of a player and a coach is, ‘Did they participate in a Super Bowl or did they win a Super Bowl?’” said Hall of Fame offensive tackle Ron Mix. “That is such nonsense.

“I know this is a silly example, but it’s somewhat reflective of that attitude. If I meet somebody new and the person who’s introducing me says, ‘You know Ron played professional football, and he’s in the Pro Football Hall of Fame,’ the question almost immediately is, ‘Oh, did you play in a Super Bowl?’ My response is, ‘Look, there are about 5,000 Super Bowl rings.’ Then I show them my Hall of Fame ring, and I say, ‘There are only about 200 of these rings. Why would I need to participate in the Super Bowl?’ They seem to measure coaches by asking if he won a Super Bowl.”

Some say it’s because he didn’t seek out the spotlight, and therefore, the spotlight didn’t shine on the memory of Gillman after he died in 2003.

“Dad always refused—and we yelled at him and cajoled him—to have an agent,” said Lyle Gillman, Sid’s oldest daughter. “Never had one. He would have a local TV show or a local radio show, but he didn’t want to ever put himself in the spotlight.”

Some, though, are brutally frank.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because Sid … well, I don’t know,” longtime Dallas Cowboys personnel director Gil Brandt said.

What we do know is this: Gillman’s influence lives on in today’s game. Those who know Gillman and understand his impact refer to him as the father of the modern passing offense. Today’s players might not know Gillman’s name, but they’re intimately familiar with some of his groundbreaking concepts.

Five days after my failed “Do you know Sid Gillman?” experiment at Media Day, the Packers led the Steelers 28-25 midway through the fourth quarter. Green Bay had built an 18-point lead, but Pittsburgh had regained momentum and if the Steelers forced the Packers to punt, Ben Roethlisberger—who had willed his team to victory so many times in the past—could be counted on to, at the very least, tie the game.

The Packers faced a third-and-10 with six minutes to play, and they desperately needed to convert the first down. As center Scott Wells snapped the ball to Rodgers, three Packers receivers, including Greg Jennings as the inside man (the one closest to Rodgers) lined up to his left. Tight end Jordy Nelson was the lone receiver on the right side of the line.

Rodgers took the snap, and the play unfolded. As Rodgers took his five-step drop, three defensive linemen rushed the Green Bay offensive line, and all of them were engulfed by the Packers. Two linebackers stayed in the middle of the field to ward off any short or medium crossing routes. Six Steelers defensive backs chased the Packers’ receivers.

Lined up against Steelers cornerback Ike Taylor, Jennings curved to his left as if to cut into receiver Brett Swain’s path, and then, like a plane circling the runway in preparation for landing, Jennings moved toward the middle of the field where Rodgers found him, skimming the ball over Taylor’s outstretched hand and into the comfortable embrace of Jennings’s arms.

It was a seam route, a common path taken by modern-day receivers trying to advance the ball down the field. Today, every offense runs a seam route—when the receiver lines up in the slot position (between the outside receiver and the offensive line, near the hash marks) and runs straight up field. It hardly looks like anything that’s innovative.

In Gillman’s day, though, this was pioneering, because wide receivers didn’t line up in the slot and because tight ends weren’t a big part of most team’s offensive passing attacks.

“Most teams did not run down the seam,” said Greg Cosell, who has worked at NFL Films since 1979 and coauthored the book The Games That Changed the Game. “Basically, back then, you played with two receivers, a tight end, and two running backs. Sid’s big innovation was that he took [running back Keith] Lincoln out of the backfield and made him his third receiver. He’d line him up in the slot. The whole idea of seam routes, which Sid strongly believed in, was that if you controlled the middle of the field, the area between the hash marks, you could win in the passing game. That stands today.”

Back in the Super Bowl, Jennings had made his move, emulating the type of route that Gillman had worked so hard to develop. The ensuing catch gave the Packers a 31-yard gain, a first down, and allowed them to take more time off the clock in their eventual triumph.

It was a result that would have made Gillman smile.

Keith Lincoln, sitting at his home in Pullman, Washington, could recognize the importance of the route and what it meant to a league when virtually nobody used more than two receivers at a time. Lincoln doesn’t spend too much time watching football these days, and if you really want to talk about the minutiae of route-running, he points you to other former players, other people. But even though most of the players actually participating in the Super Bowl had no idea where and when the seam route was born, Lincoln knows why Gillman’s theories—35 years after his last head coaching job—were so important to the game.

“Sid was one of the first people to lengthen the field, and he worked hard at that,” Lincoln said. “You have to remember that back in the 1950s, it was black and blue football. You ran the ball. But Sid was the guy who really, really believed in covering the whole field. Against us, the defense couldn’t have the damn safeties three or four yards off the line of scrimmage, like they could before, because we’d throw it over their butts.”

Gillman’s ideas made the game of football different than it had ever been before. He shifted the paradigm and transformed the sport into the kind of football you see today, the kind that has made it the most popular spectator sport in this country. You might not know about Gillman. But you know his ideas. And you know his essence.

In the end, it doesn’t matter much why Gillman isn’t recognized by today’s fans in the same way Lombardi, Brown, and Hayes are remembered. He didn’t coach for more than a half-century to be canonized after his death anyway. He stayed involved in the game for nearly every day of his 91 years on Earth because he loved it and because he never could find a way—or a need—to part with it.

After the Packers completed their Super Bowl XLV triumph, Rodgers was named the game’s MVP and, as such, he did the annual “I’m going to Disney World” commercial spot. Jennings, meanwhile, was lost in a sea of confetti. If Rodgers was the one showcased on that enormous HDTV inside that spaceship of a stadium, Jennings was the one in the supporting role in the background. If Rodgers was the star, Jennings was still stuck in the shadows.

Much like Sid Gillman—the coach who has fallen through the cracks of history but whose impact on the game should not ever be forgotten. Because he was an innovator, because he’s the only coach in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame, because his concepts are still used today more than ever.

Because they still work.