Giving thanks to coach

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By GARY SHELTON

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 11, 2001

Perhaps you begin with the defeats. There were certainly a lot of them, after all, and too darned many came in a row.

When you remember John McKay, then, perhaps the wrong side of the ledger is as good a place to start as any. After all, his first Bucs team went oh-for-1976. In all, McKay lost his first 26 games as a professional coach, and his team earned every one of them.

Throughout it all, there was McKay, laughing through the pain. In those awkward, stumbling first steps, McKay was the only reason to smile when someone mentioned that professional football, sort of, had come to Tampa Bay. The execution of his offense? He was in favor of it. The future of his kicker? Capece was kaput.

That was McKay. He wielded his cigar like a comedian's prop, and he used his wit like a shield. He taught Tampa Bay about losing with grace and humor, that the game just didn't matter that much. Although most quickly forgot those lessons, McKay made those early days something warm in your memory.

On the other hand, perhaps you begin with the victories. There were stacks of those, too. There were Rose Bowls and national titles and a lot of days when John McKay's rear end fit just fine on the shoulders of his players.

As you attempt to define McKay, this, too, seems like a good place to start. People tend to forget what a force McKay was as a college coach, back when his Southern Cal teams won four national titles in 16 seasons. He was Woody. He was Bo. There for a while, you could argue that he was even Bear. Year after year, he would lead great teams, always featuring great tailbacks, and the sight grew so common you thought it would last forever.

In the end, however, it was not losing that defined McKay, and it was not winning.

It was how rapidly he was able to take a team from one side of the scoreboard to another.

This was his greatest gift. Remember the 1979 season? The Bucs were going into their fourth season, and they had seven victories -- total -- in their history. They were worst, and a blink of the eye later, they were first. They went 10-6 that year, and they came within one victory of the Super Bowl. McKay was as funny as ever, but that year, only Bucs fans were laughing.

It might have been the biggest turnaround in football since, well, since McKay went from almost getting fired in his second year at USC to winning the national championship in his third.

Who was McKay? He was the face of the Bucs in those early years, and yet Tampa Bay was slow to embrace him. He was the man who joked about the failure of his teams even while it gnawed at him from the inside. He was the private man with a public occupation. He spent his career in the limelight, and then he walked away from it and turned invisible.

Most of all, he was a football coach.

That's how you should remember him today. More than anything else, remember him as the guy on the sideline trying to figure things out.

He was a coach. He believed in the profession, in the codes and conduct it demanded. He believed in the rules. It used to drive him crazy to see coaches prance about the field with their fists in the air, as if no one had ever won a game before them. It used to annoy him to hear ex-coaches turn into critics in the name of analysis. There was no way he was going to be one of them.

Oh, there are other adjectives that fit. McKay was caustic and controversial, intelligent and infuriating, stubborn and staid. He was about the I-formation and the 53 defense. He broke down the walls of segregation at Alabama when Sam Cunningham ran through Bryant's defense, and he laid down his team against the Jets in order to get James Wilder a shot at a record. He gave O.J. Simpson to the world. He picked Lee Roy Selmon over everyone. He picked Ricky Bell over Tony Dorsett.

Most of all, McKay is the man who picked the Bucs over Southern Cal.

He came in 1976, packing up his legend and heading into an area of the country that expected coaches to sound like Bear Bryant and Wally Butts and Johnny Vaught and the rest of them. He was supposed to rumble, with a mumble mixed in with a grumble somewhere along the way. He was supposed to talk about mommas and daddies and character.

Maybe that was why Tampa Bay was so slow to warm to McKay. The fans were new to pro football, but they were pretty sure that losing wasn't supposed to be funny. McKay came across as aloof, as sarcastic. McKay used to say that people never forgave him for coming from California, which is why he kept reminding everyone he was from West Virginia.

It couldn't have been easy on him. At Southern Cal, he had won three out of every four games, and he had reached the ultimate status of a college coach. When you thought of his school, you thought of him.

He traded that in for an expansion team that couldn't get out of its own way. In 1976 the NFL didn't view expansion the way it later would with teams in Jacksonville and Carolina and Cleveland. There weren't free agents. There weren't extra draft picks. If a veteran player was here, it was because he had proven he couldn't play somewhere else.

McKay always denied it publicly, but there were times he regretted his decision to leave college coaching. Of course he did. Had he stayed at Southern Cal another 10 years, he almost certainly would have won another national championship or two. But there, he had to give speeches constantly to support his income. Here, he was one of the top-paid coaches in the NFL. On the other hand, here also had the stigma of 0-26. Here, he coached the Bucs near the top, but they were unable to stay.

Perhaps the unrepeated success spoiled Tampa Bay's fans. Perhaps it changed owner Hugh Culverhouse, who hadn't had to spend much to win. But by the 1984 season, fans were yelling to throw McKay into the bay. Doug Williams was gone, which bothered McKay more than he showed. His health was not good. He stepped down.

Given McKay's public stature of a man known for what he did with his punch lines as well as what he did from the sidelines, an outsider might have figured he would be leading parades around here for years. He could have been a television analyst. A radio star? Who was funnier? Who was more recognizable?

Instead, McKay disappeared into the shadows. As for Tampa Bay, it was embattled with the coach of the moment -- Leeman Bennett, Ray Perkins, Richard Williamson, Sam Wyche. Losing franchises don't honor yesterday's heros.

The past few years, as McKay's son Rich has done an admirable job as general manager of the Bucs, the elder McKay would surface from time to time. There was something warm, something wonderful about the sight and sound of the old coach in twilight.

Finally, Tampa Bay knew enough to say thanks.

Finally, McKay was around to hear it.

As we search for ways to remember the passing of McKay, that isn't a bad place to start, either.

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