The Happy Coach

The football season's on the wane, December doth approach, The frost is on the pumpkin And the blast is on the coach.

Thus Sportswriter Lenny Anderson described the grim days when losing coaches quail before alumni complaints and. in their wishful dreams, head south for a job at Georgia Tech, the school that has yet to fire a coach. But if the Yellow Jackets have a happy habit of hanging on to their coaches, the coaches have a happy habit of fielding winning teams. Last week, just to keep the record straight, Coach Robert Lee Dodd's unbeaten engineers eased past Duke's Blue Devils, 7-0.

Brought up on the self-confidence of hard-driving John Heisman who taught Tech football in 1904, the Yellow Jackets mellowed just a bit under domineering Bill Alexander, who ran the Tech squad from 1920 through 1944. But neither Heisman nor Old Alex was proper preparation for Bobby Dodd.

Wives on the Bench. Born in Virginia, Bobby Dodd, 48, learned his football as an All-America quarterback under Tennessee's General Bob Neyland. For all the hardscrabble competition of the big-time college game, he never lost his stubborn notion that football was meant to be fun.

As Old Alex' backfield coach in the early 19303, Dodd taught the Yellow Jackets a hipper-dipper type of crowd-pleasing ball that he kept right on polishing after he took over from his ailing boss in 1945. Tech backs threw the ball around with gay abandon--forward passes, laterals, double laterals, pass-and-laterals. Everybody got a kick out of the game, especially the alumni who now count 97 regular-season victories, only 27 losses and three ties in twelve Dodd seasons.

The squad itself gets the biggest boot of all. Once the season starts, practice sessions seem to be mildly organized periods of horsing around. Scrimmages are out of the question. "You work too hard during the week and you leave your best on the practice field," says Dodd. While backs brush up on their assignments, linemen horn in and take a crack at carrying the ball "to give them some variety." Groups wander off to play volleyball, using a goalpost crossbar as the net. Touch football is a favorite time-killer. Every few minutes the routine is changed so the boys will not get bored.

"I have only two rules," says the relaxed coach. "All players must go to church on Sundays and they must all wear coats and ties on road trips." Other coaches, hard-put to keep their musclemen in line, stare goggle-eyed when Dodd takes players' wives to games, seats them on a sideline bench near the team.

Ore in His Pocket. Opposing coaches insist that the one indispensable part of that system is Dodd's luck. "If an atom bomb went off in this room," said Georgia's Wallace Butts at a football banquet last winter, "Bobby Dodd would come up with a handful of uranium in his pocket."

Tech rooters knew it was more than luck last week when Fullback Dickie Mattison came through in the clutch with a fourth-quarter touchdown. Even when the going was rough, the worst worrywarts in the stands watched their coach calmly chewing on a blade of grass, relaxed and remembered their mildly irreverent motto: "In Dodd we trust."

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