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Coaches are the philosophers of America, my father always said. People don't read Nietzsche and Plato, but they listen to the coaches. They teach us about life, not just sports.
For a certain generation in a certain place, the name George Allen has a special meaning. It's not the firebrand conservative former Senator and Governor from Virginia, famous for mocking an American of East Indian origin as a "macaca". It's his father.
For those who were children in the 1970s in the Washington DC area, the name George Allen has a magical ring: the Coach of the Washington Redskins, the man who single-handedly gave birth to a football dynasty that would mark, and continues to mark, a city whose usual reputation is for political infighting. There are two kinds of Washingtonians: the natives - who are the minority - and the outsiders. In most cities, the natives are the majority, and they gang up on foreigners. I've lived in Boston for two decades now, but I'm still an outsider. The locals who are my age, in the their mid forties, can claim they have been here twice as long as me. My roots are in Washington, where I grew up, and my Redskins cap still vies with my Patriots hat in a daily tug-of-war.
Washington, as we all know, is a city of politics, and the politicians come from other states, and they come for a few years, or a few decades, at a time. But they're not from there. They're always outsiders. And their hangers-on, and staff, and retinue - all from Ohio and Michigan and New York and Nebraska. They're not from Washington. And they're the majority.
The natives are a small, repressed minority. The people of DC, ironically for the capital of the "free" world, are disenfranchised: they don't have a congressman or senator. Their only meaningful vote is for president.
Which brings us to Coach George Allen. The business of Washington is politics, and the workers are all foreigners. Political rights are practically non-existent. If the natives wish to take pride in their town, they don't have the economy; they don't have government. All they have is culture, and within American culture, sports takes a central place. And in Washington, in the 1970s, sports was a desert. The baseball team - the lowly Washington Senators, perennially last in the same division as the mighty Yankees and Red Sox - had left in 1971 to become the Texas Rangers. The basketball team - the Bullets, now Wizards - was in Baltimore. There was no hockey. Only the Redskins existed, and they were horrible. Since their founding in 1932, they had never won any championship, and losing seasons were the standard.
Then came Coach Allen. I recently read a classic book, The Future is Now, which chronicles Allen's life and times ending at his peak, around 1973, right after the Redskins went to, and lost in, the one and only Super Bowl in his tenure. I expected hagiography; I got tragedy. Throughout that old childhood book, now read with an adult's eyes, I couldn't avoid seeing the tragedy in the man. A great coach, no one doubted, but hyperactive, and difficult, and sometimes duplicitous, and unstable. The psychiatrist in me wants to diagnose hyperthymic personality, which would put him in the company of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Such people need to be in charge; they can't serve others. Allen was in charge only with the Redskins, and even there, eventually the owners decided to remove him. This was his tragedy, he was hyperthymic, and thus incredibly creative, but at the same time unstable and unable to compromise.
Allen was a young man in a hurry, even when he wasn't a young man. After coaching the defense of the 1960s Chicago Bears to a championship, he negotiated his first head coaching job with the Los Angeles Rams, apparently without the permission of Bears founder/owner/head coach George Halas. Halas was furious, later badmouthing Allen as a liar and cheat in a NFL owners meeting. The legendary Vince Lombardi, present at the meeting, leaned over to the Rams owner, and quipped: Sounds like you got yourself a helluva coach.
Allen lasted five years with the Rams in the late 1960s, clashing repeatedly with the owner, who didn't like Allen's hard driving style, or his future is now theory of football (see below). I'd rather lose my way than win Allen's way, the owner decided, and he fired Allen, despite winning seasons.
Then the Redskins came calling. Lombardi had just died of cancer, one year after coming to Washington to apply his magic to the moribund franchise. The Redskins seemed unable to be resuscitated from the dead. The owner, Edward Bennett Williams, was desperate. He wooed Allen and gave him all he wanted. (Williams later said that Allen had received an unlimited budget, and exceeded it).
For the first, and what would be the only time, in his life: George Allen had a free hand in the NFL. And he went to work achieving what Lombardi couldn't: he rebuilt a franchise that would later go on, in the 1980s and 1990s, to win three Super Bowls and become one of the premier teams in the NFL.
That was later, though. First, Allen had to fix what had been forever broken.
Allen's theory was this: the best way to have a good team is to trade college draft picks for older veterans who are good, but near the end of their careers, and thus other teams are willing to trade them. This is how, after his arrival in 1970, Allen could field a Super Bowl team within two years. The problem with the theory is that those old veterans last 3-5 years at most. And then, since all the future college draft picks had been traded, one is left with no good young players to take their place. Hence Allen's teams declined from 1975 until he was fired in 1977.
Here's the real tragedy: In 1978 Allen was briefly rehired by his old team, the Los Angeles Rams, but then fired by its owner, who wasn't willing to fully cede power to the coach, before the season even started. Allen never had another NFL coaching job. No one gave him another chance. The Rams and the Redskins, that was it - despite the fact that Allen still has the third best winning coaching record in football history (after the legendary Lombardi and John Madden).
For the American football nerds reading this blog, perhaps Allen's major innovation was to put emphasis on special teams - punting and kicking and punt and kick returns - previously a backwater of no interest: he invented the special teams coach; he was the first coach to emphasize special teams as a way to score points and cause turnovers; he put defense ahead of offense but he seemed to even put special teams ahead of defense.
Allen invented the term "sack". He devised the nickel defense. Multiple future NFL coaches served under him as assistants. He was tough on his players; practices were serious. He agreed with Lombardi's reported comment that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. He cared about nothing but winning. He even hated to lose exhibition games. He made the workaholic coach de rigeur. He skipped Christmas during the football season. He slept in a motel near the practice facility, or in his office. He ate ice cream or peanut butter because he didn't have to chew, thus allowing him to nourish himself more quickly and return to work. He drank milk incessantly, and refused to curse.
Allen had boundless energy, unending ideas, complete focus, and passion. He emphasized the emotional, wanting to know everything about his players' lives - becoming their counselor and confidant so he could get the most out of them as players. His grin was wide and came from a deep place within. He loved football to the exclusion of all else.
The Redskins went on to win in the 1980s and 1990s another way: they used draft picks and young players, along with some veterans. But the franchise turnaround began with Allen. He breathed life into the team. He made the team, and the city, believe in itself once again. From then on, while other theories of football might prevail, the Redskins won not just because of those theories, but because of their new attitude - their willingness to put all their efforts into the sole goal of winning.
George Allen, the hyperthymic creative extrovert, understood emotion. Maybe that was his greatest bequest to the Washington Redskins, and to the people of the nation's capital.
Despite these victories of hindsight, George Allen, while living, suffered the tragedy that, after a decade of head coaching, the profession wouldn't let him coach again. His Republican friends from California - Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan - paid attention to him, and Reagan even briefly gave him a position as head of a national exercise commission. But without coaching, Allen was adrift, denied the ability to express his genius at the peak of his career. In 1990, at age 71, a dozen years after his last coaching job, he couldn't resist any longer and became head coach at Long Beach State College in his native Los Angeles area. Long Beach was a long way from the Redskins, but Allen still gave it his all. As in every other head coaching job he had, he took a losing team and immediately achieved a winning record. It came down to the last game; the team needed a win to have more wins than losses on the year (they were 5-5). Long Beach won; the coach was doused with ice water (we couldn't afford Gatorade, he later said); he was carried in the air. It was his Super Bowl.
A few weeks later, he died, from the effects of the icy dousing, some say.
He didn't get the chances he should have; he wasn't appreciated enough for what he did; but, in the end, Coach George Allen went out a winner.
