That precious image of The Coach remains with every built boy who grows up to watch “Monday Night Football.” But coaching football in the big time is a different thing altogether. To succeed, a Coach Chips must transmogrify himself into some sort of Perotian, Iaccocan type-organizing, administering, media-ing. Football coaches are not like baseball managers, who keep wearing uniforms, just like their kid players, spit often and reside in the clubhouse; nor are they like basketball coaches, scrubbed, sartorial idols, the anchormen of sport. “What I miss the most is not being able to coach anymore,” Dennis Green, 43, the new head coach of the Minnesota Vikings, says wistfully.
Coaching the actual game of football isn’t even done any longer by people known as coaches. Coaching falls to men called coordinators. “A head coach has so many other things to take care of that if I tried to do the coaching, the offense and defense would have to slow down just to let me catch up,” Coach Green says. So, as he lumbers up and down the sidelines, ursine, wired into the coordinators, he can retain only veto power … if he’s quick. “Like this Sunday, there’s a third and one on the 35. Jack [Burns, the offensive coordinator] tells me, ‘Denny, we want to go for it. We’ll try a play-action pass here, but if that doesn’t work, we’ll run on fourth.’ So I say, ‘OK,’ and then I switch to my other line and tell Tony [Dungy, the defensive coordinator] to look out, we might be leaving his guys with bad field position, and then I tell special teams that we won’t be needing them to kick. Then I watch.”
If a head coach isn’t secure in ceding such authority, then he cannot succeed. Yet it is his singular burden that he alone must set the team tone. “The first thing I told everyone here is hey, we’re all on this ship together, and there better not be any son of a bitch getting on board with a pickax and a life preserver looking to break out by himself if things get tough. The only way a football team can work is everybody has to count on everybody else. Easy. But what I emphasize is that you have to come to accept this unconsciously. You can’t worry about the man next to you. That’s not your responsibility. You have to trust my evaluation for that. That’s my responsibility.”
Notwithstanding, Green does manage to indulge himself and coach a little, still. “I run the Look Squad when we practice during the week against the starters.”
“You coach the scrubs?”
A scowl. “Not the scrubs. I said: the Look Squad.”
“Denny, a lot of people don’t know what a Look Squad is. Can we live with ‘reserves’?”
The scowl softens. “Well, all right. But it’s important for me to coach the re … the Look Squad, because”-here he shakes a meaty finger for considerable emphasis “it tells everybody that if the head man is coaching those guys, then there’s no job in this organization that isn’t important.”
That’s a most uncoachy thing to hear from a big-time coach, but it may be explained by the fact that Dennis Green recognizes better than other NFL coaches what it’s like to be restricted to the fringes, limited in the reasonable dreams. All the time he was toiling as an assistant, developing a full, coherent coaching philosophy, he could never be certain that he could ever apply what he was constructing except, perhaps, to some Look Squad on somebody else’s team somewhere. For Green is a black man, and until he was hired by the Vikings this year, no professional franchise had ever, in the history of the sport, gone out and sought the best head coach, and then declared that that man just happened to be an African-American.
In days of yore, the Minnesota Vikings owned a reputation that would have pleased their stout Norsemen namesakes, for the Vikes were no-excuse brutes pounding the other NFL softies into their tundra. In the last decade, that noble reputation was turned upside down. Minnesota moved into a dome, and the Vikings became a bunch of climate-controlled prima donnas. There was racial bickering and general disgruntlement. “I guess they hired me because they were desperate,” Green says, He shrugs. “But why not? Northwestern hired me because they were desperate, and so did Stanford.” At Northwestern, in fact, in 1981, when Green accepted his first head position, succeeding a man who had gone 1-31-1, he actually had to declare: “I am not a wacko.”
Rather, he was simply black. Today, with Green gone to the pros, not a single major college-football program is run by an African-American. At least Green is preceded by Art Shell of the Los Angeles Raiders. But Shell was such an insider, with the Raider organization for two decades, that even blacks in the football community refer to him as an asterisk hire. As with general managers, college athletic directors might accept blacks to coach divertissements, such as basketball or track, but football is an executive position. A pro-football staff is larger than an entire basketball squad, and, as we know, backbones are formed in football. Football is serious, and therefore coaching football is best trusted to someone like, well-someone white, like the man doing the hiring.
“Whatever happened,” Green says, “I always thought of myself as a leader. I believed that I could be a head coach, for anybody. You know, the philosophy is still the same, wherever you are. Sure, the atmosphere changes relative to the group you’re in. But the principles of leadership remain constant.”
And so, too, do the factors determining the choice of football leadership. It takes a confluence of rare, fortuitous circumstances. In Minnesota, Green got the call not only because the team was falling apart, but because the internal turmoil had thrown up a club president who was, in the eyes of the dubious football establishment, as lacking in the necessities as, say, any black coach. Although Roger Headrick had been an eminently successful financial executive, he was a patrician, with no experience inside the sideline stripes, and it was widely assumed that he was keeping the president’s seat warm until a quote real football man unquote could be located. However, instead of looking through the usual pigskin ant tunnels, Headrick “applied the same sort of process as I did when I was seeking to find a manager at Pillsbury.” This careful, deductive search produced one candidate who had just finished building Stanford back to an 8-4 season. And then Headrick met Green, and was terribly surprised at what he saw. “I expected him to be much taller,” he says.
Green is not, in fact, a particularly prepossessing figure. He features a classic windbreaker ensemble, with turquoise jewelry and a stocky lineman’s build (actually, he was a halfback at Iowa). Instead, Green is merely self-evident, at once unambiguous and full of fun, a rare combination that will take you a long way in football. A 7-2 record will take you the rest of the way. As the Vikings have moved into first place in the Central Division of the NFC, the Twin Cities have fallen utterly in the new coach’s thrall. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune gushed last week: “The Vikings believe everything that Green says and do everything he tells them to.”
Green’s speedy construction of this good Viking ship lollipop was based as much on subtraction as on addition. Very quickly, he eighty-sixed four of the brightest established heroes on the team-most particularly Hershel Walker, the unsociable running back who had been that had gutted the team two years before. Jettisoning the four veterans not only moved four keen young players up, but it also called out an audible clearly to every other slacker on the desultory ‘91 Vikes. Green then brought in a new offense from the Redskins, and picked up a bunch of yeomen castaways. And left this way, with the second oldest roster in the league, the Dennis Green Vikings throw off resonances of the George Allen Redskins-those irreverent ’70s outfits that captivated the corporate NFL with a bunch of grizzled old players producing for an original of a coach.
As has been the case in basketball for years, one line of coldly pragmatic reasoning says that hiring a black coach makes good sense simply because a vast majority of the athletes are black. In fact, as has also been proved in basketball, if things sour, black players will quit on a black coach every bit as quickly as they will on a white one. Dungy even reveals the ironic little secret that “it was some of the black guys around here who were the last ones to come around to Denny’s way of doing things.”
As for Green, he is himself already bored with all this first-black stuff. He’s had to wear that jacket again and again, as he’s found new and higher purchase in his profession. He holds out his turquoise-garnished hands. “Yes, yes, I know I’m a trailblazer,” the coach of the Look Squad says. “I know all that. But I also know I’ve never had to apply for a job yet.” The question remains, then, whether Green’s success will finally force athletic directors and general managers to solicit applications from other black coaches.
PHOTO: Resonances of the great Redskins squads of the ’70s: Minnesota takes on Tampa Bay
