Aboard the Lusitania in Tampa Bay

By Roger Kahn

The entry of John McKay into professional football, riding a swan boat across the glinting waters of Tampa Bay, was converted into a financial report by certain elements of the press. There is a lingering Neanderthal quality in some of our new sports journalism. If you can't find a sex angle, write money.

According to a glut of stories, McKay was leaving the University of Southern California--where he had won four national championships--for a salary of $175,000 a year, a $350,000 home, complete with furniture, maid, gardener and pool service, plus five new cars and a variety of land deals that could have seduced the Shah of Iran.

McKay's response was characteristic and brief. "Nonsense," he said. "The figures are wildly out of line. Actually, I'm going to Tampa for the cigars."

The Contract. In becoming midwife to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, currently staggering through their first season in the National Football League, John McKay won instant independence. At 53 he will not again have to worry about economic indicators. But by concentrating on the man's capital rather than his style, one misses the point. McKay was a great college coach who never publicly confused his success with the state of humanity. Football, he has suggested, is only a game. "You draw Xs and Os on a blackboard and that's not so difficult. I can even do it with my left hand."

Among the governors of the N.F.L., such talk is heresy. They insist that football is America, manliness, work ethic, integration and Vince Lombardi saying for the thousandth time, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." This, if it means anything at all, means that Lombardi saw a movie called Trouble Along the Way in 1953. Playing a football coach in that film, John Wayne mouthed the lines that everyone now attributes to Lombardi.

But like McKay, Lombardi had a style. It was ferocity. That, plus his victories at Green Bay, made him the focus for a generation of football writing. Presently, we heard from the right that Lombardi was the noblest Roman since Octavius. (Not Brutus. Brutus lost.) The left suggested that he would have made a perfect fascist. In the cacophony people forgot that Lombardi was only a football coach who put Xs and Os on a board--righthanded.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were formed from a pool of pro freshmen--"rooks" in the argot--and a group of veterans other teams considered expendable. Approaching Tampa, McKay said that it would take three years to assemble a competitive team. Meanwhile, he would do the best he could.

After three losses in exhibition games, the Buccaneers defeated the Atlanta Falcons, 17 to 3. "Ho-hum," McKay said, in controlled delight. "Another dynasty." Then came this championship season. Tampa lost consecutively to Houston, San Diego, Buffalo, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Seattle (another expansion team), Miami and Kansas City. When I caught up with them in Denver their record was 0 and 8, but their spirits were stained with hope. The Denver Broncos had been playing poorly, and a Denver physician who played football told me, "We need a new quarterback and a new coach." That complaint classically signifies trouble, and trouble--somebody else's trouble--was what the Buccaneers needed most.

The Game. The afternoon offered a brilliant Colorado sky. Denver scored ten points in the first quarter and McKay lost Lee Roy Selmon, his best defensive lineman, with a knee injury. But the Buccaneers resisted collapse. Helped by three penalties, Steve Spurrier put together a reasonable touchdown drive in the second quarter. Later Dave Green kicked a field goal and tied the game.

After the half, Tampa, sensing the possibility of victory, drove to the Denver 9. They stalled. The Buccaneers drove again, reached the 18 and got a field goal. Two good drives. Ball possession for most of a quarter. And a total of only three points. Then that brilliant sky fell on McKay and his urchins.

The Broncos scored on a 71-yd. pass play. Within a minute they intercepted and scored again. Soon the Broncos led by 48-13 and were trying for more.

Afterward McKay refused to congratulate his conqueror, Coach John Ralston, who came to Denver out of Stanford. Instead, he called Ralston a ten-letter word, "for stacking on the points." When Ralston was mentioned in a press conference, McKay chomped a cigar. "He's a prick. He always was a prick. I hope he gets fired," said this devoutly civilized man. From another world Lombardi smiled ferociously.

In his office at Tampa the next afternoon, McKay had regained his poise. "I shouldn't have said those things. Bear Bryant, my best friend in coaching, says that after a bad loss you ought to stay in the closet for a week. I know Denver needed a win and maybe Ralston was saving his job by winning big."

The Loser. Bob Moore, Tampa's starting tight end, played under Ralston at Stanford. "I'm not getting in between the two coaches," he said. "I'm used to winning. I won in college and I won with the Oakland Raiders and this is just awful for me. We lose every week and the group experience is negative. Sometimes I feel as though I were on the aft deck of the Lusitania."

Moore, who is black-haired and disciplined and handsome, shows how a pro can lose with the shadow of a smile. In three years I hope McKay shows the country how to win at professional football without presenting the game as a metaphor for life.

Winning is neither everything nor the only thing. It is simply better than losing on a Sunday under a high Denver sky. Then Monday comes and everybody, except the football players, has to go back to reality and work.

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