by Mark Bowden
One of the early lessons was that ability and courage weren’t enough, not by a long shot. Talent was nothing until Coach gave you a shot. America is thick with potential NFL Hall of Fame running backs and receivers who never touched a football in a real game because they dropped an easy pass in an early practice or fumbled once too often in a high-school summer scrimmage or who back-talked Coach in front of the other boys and were sent packing. Coach decided which players deserved mention when the college scouts did their annual rounds or, at the college level, which players deserved to have videotapes of their heroics packaged with music and narration and mailed to the pro scouts. Coach decided which kid’s dropped pass meant he had bad hands or was just having a bad day, which kid deserved a second chance because his head was screwed on straight, and which kid the team would be better off without. Coach wasn’t always right, of course, and his judgments weren’t always completely objective or evenhanded—hence the tendency for black kids to be chosen to play running back or wide receiver (speed, agility, jumping ability) but not quarterback (intelligence, quick judgment), and for white kids to be chosen to play middle linebacker or free safety (field generals) but not cornerback (speed, agility, jumping ability). The racial makeup of position assignments on the NFL football field wasn’t just the result of ingrained corporate racism; it reached all the way back to those first playing fields in small towns all over America. It reflected this nation’s bedrock prejudices, preserved by the immutable oligarchy of Coach.
The pro coach was a zealot. He had spent years, often decades, studying obscure canons of strategy, of slot-back formation versus single-back sets, of run and shoot versus single wing, of overlapping zones versus man to man, of blitz&burn versus bend-don’t-break— things even the most observant fans only vaguely comprehend. Coach invented and preserved the codes and jargon that described these complex stratagems, handed down from one generation to the next with refinements and subtle variations. Each jealously guarded the quirks of his own system. Players joining a new team were novitiates, issued the new playbook like a breviary, learning first the new language before they could attempt the mysterious scriptures traced out in X’s and O’s. Coach was keeper of the flame.
Most of the NFL’s twenty-eight head coaches were former marginal players who became devotees of the cult, unlike the other meatheads who played until their knees gave out and then—poof—turned back into oversized job seekers in ill-fitting suits with pathetic pre-middle age limps. Coaches were football’s lifers: you stayed on when the money and the cheering died out; you volunteered; you carried water buckets, picked up towels if you had to, until you latched onto an assistant’s job at some small college, trying to turn high-school flashes into real football players, getting paid a pittance but still possessing enough of the old pro aura to hold the kids in thrall. That might lead to an unpaid assistant position on a pro staff, then, after a season or two, maybe coach of special teams or tight end or wide receivers, haunting the locker rooms and film rooms and weight rooms, a monk in the sweaty temple of true manhood … watching your klutz kid brother, say, the one who always envied you, who used to turn green in the stands watching you don the holy pads for weekend battles, now promoted to his own high-rise office with a secretary and an expense account and his own fucking 800 number, while you’re working eighty, ninety, a hundred hours a week in humid, smelly basement rooms under crumbling stadiums, never seeing the wife and kids, enduring the daily tedium of practices, squinting at game films, trying to get these superstars (now half your age) who all make— what? A hundred, a thousand times your salary? Trying to get them to work together well enough to actually execute one or two of the plays that existed with such subtle clarity in your mind’s eye. All for the privilege of still being out there on game day, on the sidelines, maybe, but definitely still in it, still part of the Game, soaking up the blood-quickening roar of the fans—who individually were the lowest of the low, but who, collectively, were the very fountain, the wellspring of everything that mattered—toughing it out year after year, decade after decade, until there came, at long last, your chance, the miter (in this case, a headset) was placed on your head, the whistle draped around your neck, the ever-present pack of local reporters went to work creating your legend, immortalizing your oddities of expression or habit (which later would be shown as proof either of your genius or your unfitness, depending on how many games you could win), and, lo! you had arrived, anointed, one of the twenty-eight NFL head coaches, a High Holy Priest of the Pigskin.
And while the League attended to TV contracts and marketing spin-offs and season ticket sales and expansion and the amazingly lucrative chore of entertaining the masses, coaches tended the flame— the eternal flame of victory, succinctly saluted by the immortal St. Vince Lombardi when he pronounced “Winning is everything.” Deep inside the slick multimillion-dollar corporate edifice of the NFL, beyond the salary disputes and media controversies and Players Association lawsuits and free agents’ wars, each season coaches labored to assemble forty-seven young men, inspire them with a chance at excellence, urge them to seize the emotional opportunities afforded by another team’s public arrogance or their own sense of personal pride (or, in the case of the ’92 Eagles, by the loss of a beloved brother), and lift them above the swirl of extraneous ambition and greed just to play—and win. That was what mattered in the end. And Coach? He was the guy who knew how to win. Bottom line.
The two fiefs, League and Game, needed each other. Without the marketing muscle and know-how of the owners, the Game would still be a weekend diversion on scruffy small-town lots. But without Coach, without the wisdom, energy, and will that made the Game authentic, all the slick worldwide marketing schemes of the League would be so much glitter and noise.
There was occasional tension between the two fiefs, but the smart NFL owner had learned to defer Game decisions to Coach, and modern Coach had learned to be diplomatic, polite, and respectful of his boss. The new, corporate NFL coach mingled comfortably at cocktail parties in the owner’s living room, learned to salute, at least publicly, the invaluable guidance and support afforded by the commitment of such a successful, worldly gentleman. Corporate Coach understood the necessity of his players wearing color-coordinated socks and keeping their shirts tucked in and having the hue of their face masks match. But the old-timers, the leather-helmet-no-face-mask men, were incorrigible. They viewed owner and team management as unfortunate necessities at best—somebody had to promote the games and sell tickets—and at worst as corrupt distractions. Owners were dilettantes, rich boobs who thought their money entitled them to stick their noses where they didn’t belong, men who were owed a certain politeness and occasional audiences and honesty (at least most of the time, except about the real important stuff), but who wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t set one toe through the front door of the temple.
And no coach in modern football better personified the latter than Buddy Ryan. He knew exactly where the line was drawn. He knew it back in Gainesville, right when he started—which explains why he didn’t last too long. The school board (if not the town) got fed up with him. It fired him at the end of his second season. “They just didn’t like Buddy, and he didn’t like them,” recalled Bill Williams, one of Ryan’s original players who went on to become school-board president himself. “See, at that point in time in his life, Buddy didn’t have a whole lot of tact.”
Then or ever.
Suffice it to say, nothing in Norman’s storied past had adequately prepared him for being bossed around by a runty, nearsighted good ol’ boy spitting tobacco juice in a paper cup—an employee, yet!
Buddy had grown up one of six children in a four-room house on a farm so small it barely deserved the name. His parents maintained a virtually self-sufficient existence just outside Frederick, Oklahoma, during the Depression, growing their own vegetables, slaughtering their own chickens, milking their own cows (that was Buddy’s job, every morning). He grew up in a house with no electricity and n
o indoor plumbing. His mother was German, short and stout the way her most famous son would be, and his father, Red Ryan, was a redhaired Irish house painter who lived fiercely, whether working, drinking, or mixing it up with anybody who looked at him cross-eyed. Buddy played football in high school and helped train quarter horses and never aspired to do anything else.
College recruiters started showing up at the Ryan farm in Buddy’s senior year. Red was amazed. He figured football for a waste of valuable working time on the farm, an opinion he repeated often, but events would force him to change his mind. One day a coach from the University of Arkansas paid a visit and explained a scholarship offer.
“Let me get this straight,” said Red (as Buddy later remembered it). “You’re gonna give my son his tuition and his room and his board? And fifteen dollars a month? And all he’s gotta do is go to school and play football?”
“That’s right,” said the coach.
“That’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of,” said Red.
Buddy wasn’t exactly wowed either. Instead of going to school, he joined the National Guard in ’50 after finishing high school and was promptly sent to Korea, where he served for two years and played for the Fourth Army’s championship football team in Japan. He came home to a football scholarship at Oklahoma State and played on both sides of the line while earning a degree in education.
Buddy never stayed anywhere long, but his devotion to the Game was unstinting. He signed on at Gainesville after college and then spent one year as high-school athletic director in Marshall, Texas, before latching on as an assistant at the University of Buffalo. He got married there, had three boys, and, demands of the Game being what they are, was divorced by the time he left in ’65 to take an assistant’s job at Vanderbilt. From there he spent a year out in the Philippines at the University of the Pacific. The New York Jets’ Hall of Fame head coach Weeb Ewbank opened the door to the pros for Buddy in ’68.
That was the year the modern NFL was born. It brought the retirement of both St. Vince, patron saint of football, and Chicago Bears nonagenarian George Halas, who, legend had it, erected the first goalpost with hammer and nail. It was also the year when, amid the general upheavals of the times, pro football got stood on its head by the upstart American Football League’s brash, stylish Joe Namath, prototype of the modern pro quarterback, who thumbed his nose at perennial NFL powerhouse Don Shula’s Baltimore Colts and guaranteed victory in Super Bowl III. He then delivered a 16—7 victory. Namath got all the press. His success won the AFL’s wide-open passing game instant credibility. But it was the Jets’ defense (with Buddy coaching the linemen) that held Shula’s juggernaut (they were 13-1 that year) to just one face-saving fourth-quarter touchdown. Buddy spent two years (’76—’77) with the Vikings as a line coach before he was hired in ’78 to build and run a defense of his own for the Bears.
He was forty-seven years old and had spent a decade in the shadows, watching, learning, and planning for this moment, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do. Buddy had one of the rarest phenomena in modern pro football up his sleeve: a genuine innovation. For nearly a century coaches had been designing different ways to arrange eleven men on a football field either to advance or stop the ball. By the seventies, variations in defenses reflected differing philosophies to an extent, but mostly reflected the strengths and weak nesses of a coach’s personnel. As conventional wisdom had it (and football was a bastion of that) there were simply more ways of moving a football than stopping it. Offensive coaches were the game’s geniuses, credited with crafting clever new plays and cunning new systems. Success on the other side of the ball was credited to players. They were either big and mean enough to stop the run or they weren’t. Either they were quick enough to stay with receivers or they weren’t. The defensive coach was responsible primarily for spotting and nurturing talent and rarely got noticed or mentioned when the players on the field did their job well.
But Buddy had come up with a new way of doing defense, a way that reflected his conviction that the soul of the game was not artistry, but guts, aggression, and brawn. You didn’t win with strategy and finesse (Buddy saw those as offensive traits); you won by bringing the heat! He had been watching carefully from the sidelines for two decades and witnessing (it galled him) the growing stature of the overpaid, goldenarmed quarterback. Buddy had been with the Jets and Broadway Joe for the birth of this trend and noted the extensive efforts old Weeb would make to protect the linchpin of his aerial offense. Namath may have had a million-dollar arm, but he had dime-store knees. On certain passing plays, Weeb would assign as many as nine players just to block. Well, figured Buddy, if this was the price offenses were willing to pay for their fancy-pants passing game, he was going to exact it in full if he ever got the chance. If it took nine men to protect the quarterback, Buddy would send ten after him. Even if they didn’t get there in time to disrupt the pass, the heat was enough to rattle even the most iceblooded quarterback. His system’s basic alignment was 5—1—5, with at least one linebacker taking his place alongside the front four and one dropping back into pass coverage. Two cornerbacks, two safeties, and a linebacker formed the back five, with the middle linebacker reacting in the center, empowered to redirect the forces as he saw fit. But that alignment was just a formality, a way of organizing the defense in your mind. On the field, Buddy would shift personnel all over the place, moving both safeties up to the line sometimes, dropping linebackers into pass coverage if needed, but, most important, keeping the whole squad in such determined motion that quarterbacks and offensive linemen never knew from one play to the next what to expect. Except trouble.
The essence of bringing the heat was, of course, the blitz. Buddy had dozens of variations. There was the 59 blitz, named after linebacker Gary Campbell’s number. There was the Taco Bell, named after strong safety Todd Bell. There was the cheeseburger blitz, which was named after Al Harris, a gargantuan outside linebacker who had the nickname “Destroyer” until he showed up for his first Buddy camp. “The only thing I’ve seen him destroy was a cheeseburger,” Buddy quipped, and that was that. Buddy would blitz on first down as readily as on third down. He’d blitz inside his own twenty-yard line as readily as inside the other team’s. He’d blitz cornerbacks, safeties, and linebackers, sometimes all at once. He’d advertise his blitzes brazenly, then back his boys off for a play or two, then flood the line with extra linebackers and defensive backs, routinely lining eight eager, ferocious players on the line of scrimmage, daring quarterbacks to get rid of the ball before getting trampled, making them feel … the heat.
The original man in the middle was Doug Plank, a somewhat undersized but smart, leathery linebacker who wore number 46. Plank’s number gave the system its name, but the 46 didn’t really hit its stride until future all-pro middle linebacker Mike Singletary began to master it. With Singletary as field general, orchestrating the shifting blitzes and coverages from moment to moment, sometimes changing the defense’s alignment three or four times before the snap of the ball, the Bears became a power in the NFL. The 46 defense grew out of Buddy’s whole philosophy of life and football (the two being, basically, the same): If you are determined enough and (most important) tough enough, you can just plain beat teams into submission. Buddy’s swarming rushes wouldn’t allow offensive linemen to work blocking stunts and double up on mammoth defensive ends, and the sheer numbers in his banzai frontal assaults clogged rushing lanes. God, how his players loved it! People got hurt playing against the Bears. Buddy didn’t disguise his pleasure when that happened. Of all the defenses in the NFL, his was the most feared. His bloodthirsty tactics were considered offensive by most players and coaches, but to Buddy it was just defense.
He downplayed the cerebral aspects of his strategy, just as he kept his own academic credentials quiet. On the Bears’ locker-room bulletin board Buddy posted his own homespun summary of Buddyball:
TAKE THE SUMBITCH AWAY FROM ‘EM INNA HURRY
The attack-dog style reflecte
d Buddy’s disdain for the fancier half of the Game, the offense, the squad that put points on the board and excited fans (hence bolstering revenues) and made for pretty NFL Films videos set to neoclassical music and narrated in John Facenda’s stirring baritone. To Buddy the perfect football game was a 2-0 affair won with a brutal sack in the end zone, preferably in the closing seconds—the highlights reels would be empty and the training rooms full. Buddy’s players loved the system because it elevated them to a breed of toughness apart from normal hominids and because it gave them latitude on the field. From time immemorial, Coach had always sorted out early in that first high-school summer what he judged to be the thinking ballplayers from the dim brutes and sent the brutes over to learn defense. Needless to say (considering the sorters), a disproportionate number of black athletes were assigned to the defense. Buddy loved the brutes, no matter what their skin color. They were the real football players, not the nifty ball handlers who got their pictures on the cover of Sports Illustrated. And, my, how the brutes loved Buddy back (especially black players, because Buddy cared about winning more than racist myth and would play the best athlete no matter what). You had to have intelligence and nerve to play Buddyball; you had to gamble and sometimes you had to get beat. But if you played it the way he wanted it, win or lose, he would fuss over you as if you were a future Hall of Famer. He was a champion motivator. Most people didn’t know this, and wouldn’t guess it, but ol’ Buddy had earned his master’s degree in education between coaching duties and prided himself on being able to teach the intricacies of his system well enough so that players could make it work out on the field on their own. “We’re proving for the first time that it’s possible to think and play defense at the same time,” quipped Singletary, with evident pride.