At my father's funeral in January 1991, several men told me, "Your father died a winner." His fatal heart attack came just after he had completed a season as head coach of the Long Beach State 49ers, a Division IA squad he adopted a year earlier because the university was threatening to cancel its failing football program. According to his doctor, my father's health probably started to deteriorate seconds after the final game of the 1990 season -- a victory that gave the team its first winning record in four years -- when the players doused him with a bucket of ice water. After the game, sitting in his wet clothes, my father answered reporters' questions. They wanted to know why George Allen, the legendary National Football League coach, had accepted such a small-time coaching job.
"Look," my father told them,I'd give a year off of my life to win."
Six weeks later, he was dead.
When his former players told me, "Your father died a winner," what I heard was this: it's a shame your father didn't last longer in the N.F.L. For while my father's career with the Los Angeles Rams and the Washington Redskins was hugely successful, his relationship with owners was filled with tension. Owners were not enamored of his free-spending, power-wielding ways. If a player asked for $50,000, my father gave the guy $60,000. If a player hesitated before signing a contract, my father offered a television, a stereo, even a car as incentive. One month, he ran up $10,000 in telephone bills, trying to persuade players to join him and cajole rival coaches to trade him their veterans. My father also helped players mend their marriages; he sent them Scripture and found them off-season jobs. Working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, he fueled himself on a diet of milk and vitamin injections. "Chewing's a distraction," our mother explained to us. "Your father's afraid it might take his mind off football."
But in time his approach proved to be his undoing. It wasn't just the owners who tired of him -- even as they came to emulate his style of buying, selling and trading players; the men on the field turned away from him, too. My father helped to create a system in which players could hold out for more money, search for the best deal and use their newfound leverage to decide where they wanted to play. Given the choice, many eventually concluded that maybe they didn't want to play for someone as driven and devoted as my father. In short, the N.F.L. George Allen helped to create had little interest in its demanding creator. In 1978, my father's era ended just as the league's multimillion-dollar enterprise began.
After my father died, I spent years reading his journals, trying to understand him. In one note, he answered phantom questions that must have loomed over him during his 12-year exile from the National Football League. "Listen, I did things my way, and that's the only way I know how," my father wrote, "and when I die, I'll have no regrets."
The note was signed, and dated, a few days before his death.
ne of my strongest memories of my father's life in football begins in December 1968, when he was abruptly fired from his first head coaching job with the Los Angeles Rams. Back then, playing pro ball was a part-time job, and a player who devoted six months of the year wearing a numbered, nameless jersey was sacrificing body and bones for the common good of the team. Football was divided between two tribes -- the N.F.L. and the American Football League -- and a 50-yard-line seat at the Los Angeles Coliseum cost $5.50. The average player earned $25,000 a year, and even star players held down off-season jobs to subsidize their paychecks: Roman Gabriel, the Rams quarterback, worked in sales for Sportabs, a vitamin company, and Deacon Jones, a defensive end, worked in sales and promotion for Schlitz.
On the morning after Christmas, when Dan Reeves, the Rams' owner, telephoned my father and told him: "Merry Christmas, George. You're fired," my father was so shaken by the news that he could not bring himself to share it with my three older brothers and me. That night, while watching the dinnertime sports on TV, we kids learned that Dad had been fired. It was hard to believe. The year before, he had shared the title of N.F.L. Coach of the Year with Don Shula of the Baltimore Colts; now Dad was out of a job. A few days later, 12 Rams players held a televised news conference, beseeching Reeves to reinstate their coach. "We won't play," his players said, "if George won't coach." My father stood beside his men, dark sunglasses covering his eyes.
By protesting, the Rams were endorsing the style of my father, whose hard-edged techniques had, in two years, transformed the Rams from Western Conference cellar-dwellers into contenders. Yes, the Rams wanted to practice without any breaks for drinking water. Yes, players wanted to be fined for being overweight ($100 per pound) or for coming late to a meeting ($500 per minute). They wanted to do these things because they believed in the man known as "the Ramrod of the Rams," and if they couldn't play for Allen, well, then, they would toss in their jerseys and refuse to call themselves the Los Angeles Rams.
Back then, I, too, would have thrown in my jersey, anything, to see my father happy. After the firing, my father seemed as unhappy to be home with us as he was to be off the playing field. As an 8-year-old, I studied the blitz and the bomb and the sack in an effort to get closer to my father. I listened carefully as my mother relayed the football news from the sports pages.
Following the firing, my mother read me an article written by a reporter who had called the Rams Reeves's "toy." I had never heard something so huge described as something so small. My father had taken Reeves's "toy" from him, the reporter argued, by raising players' salaries so high that the Rams now had the highest payroll in the league. And so Reeves tore the toy from my father's hand and, by firing him, had indirectly said, "You can't play anymore, George." It became clear to me then that my father's childhood dream of coaching pro football could, at any time, be taken away.
I also saw how quickly it could be given back. Only 11 days after the firing, Reeves rehired my father. No raise, no praise, no promises that he would not be fired again. Reeves claimed that the players' revolt had nothing to do with his decision. "Allen's intense loyalty and devotion are the sole reason I rehired him," Reeves said, standing beside my father, at another news conference. When reporters asked the coach for a comment, my father read a short statement he had prepared. But when he got home that night, he told us, "I'm back because my players stood up for me."
After the firing, my father felt he had to prove himself worthy of the job all over again. Before the 1969 season began, he predicted that the Rams would go undefeated that year. Leading his Rams onto the field for the first home game that season, my father expected a standing ovation from the otherwise lukewarm, seen-it-all, Hollywood fans. "If I don't get a standing ovation, I've failed," he told reporters before the game.
But at that game, the fans stood only at the sight of the military color guard as they marched onto the field for the national anthem. As soon as I heard, "And the home, of the, braaaaave!" I scanned the sideline until I saw my father, accompanied by my brothers, begin his gamelong pace while my mother and I took our seats in the stands. Our frequent moves, our nightly dinners without Dad and our Christmases spent gathered around a TV wondering if we would advance one step closer to the championship came down to this. Now, our family could scream, coach, smoke, curse, cry and pray -- all in the hope that somehow we'd still remain in one place under one roof for one more year if we could only do one thing that day: win.
I felt I had a place in my father's world then. I wasn't just a girl in a white lace blouse and a fake leather miniskirt, chain-gnawing my chocolate cigarettes. I wasn't just a superstitious child rubbing her miniature gold football locket on her skirt's belt loop to bring her father's team good luck. I wasn't just the kid at school who knew more than most kids about football and a little less than most kids about civil rights and Vietnam. I was a fan. And I was never happier than I was then, at the Rams games.
By the end of the 11th week of the 14-week season, the Rams were the only unbeaten team in the league, and it seemed that my father's prediction for an undefeated season might come true. Suddenly, he was the toast of Los Angeles. Our postgame celebrations took place at Matteo's, an Italian, red-leather-booth bar and restaurant in Westwood. There, Dean Martin would greet us with a cigarette and martini in hand. Dean had been to the game. He'd beaten us to the bar. He'd tell my father, "Great win, George," and then ask why he had called a draw play on third down and long.
Standing beside them, riding high off the victory, I would fall into a reverie, imagining that Dean would ask me what I wanted to drink. "How about a Shirley Temple," the bartender would suggest. "Give the girl a Martin," the tall, dark actor would say. "Give the girl a virgin Dean Martin!" And as I sipped my drink I would imagine him singing, "Everybody loves somebody sometime."
After my father drank the restaurant dry of all its ice-cold milk, he would drive us home down the dark, desolate, Sunday freeway. My three brothers would fall asleep in the back. I'd kick off my game-day shoes, rest my head on Mom's lap and put my feet across Dad's lap. As the steering wheel skimmed my ankles, I would try not to fall asleep. I generally failed. I would doze off, wishing that our victories would never end.
y father hardly ever slept. Even sleeping pills could not prevent him from plotting for the 12th game -- against the Minnesota Vikings in Los Angeles. Like the Rams, the Vikings had already earned a playoff berth. Reporters called the game "meaningless." My father scoffed at their ignorance. "There is no such thing as a meaningless game," he told reporters. "Every game is the biggest game of your life." One reporter noted that my father was putting unneeded "emotional strain" on the players. Remember the start of last season, he asked, when Allen revved emotions so high that, by the end of the season, the team was emotionally strung out and physically spent?
The Rams lost to the Vikings, 20-13. In the locker room afterward, one reporter suggested that perhaps now the pressure to have a 14-0 season had been lifted. "Pressure?" my father replied, "We like pressure; we want pressure. People who don't like pressure ought to be dead!" Another reporter said maybe the coach could go out and enjoy himself. "Enjoy myself?" my father shrieked. "Nobody should go out and enjoy himself after a loss."
My mother and I listened to the interview over a fan's transistor radio in the tunnel outside the locker-room doors. Standing on the slick, mossy-wet ramp with one gas lamp as our light, we waited beside the woman who kept the transistor positioned on the child's seat of a shopping cart filled with homemade brownies. We called her the Brownie Lady because she made brownies for every player and coach, each one individually wrapped in a paper towel marked with the man's name. She was a short, stocky woman with an eye patch that she constantly readjusted with thick fingers. My father once offered her free tickets but she declined. She believed that listening to the games on her radio was bringing the Rams good luck. When my father exited the locker room, he never failed to stop for a few moments to talk to her before greeting anyone else. Now, hours after the game had ended, she stood, loyally waiting along with us, the last three fans. In her shopping cart, one brownie remained, marked COACH ALLEN.
I had wanted to go home with my brothers George and Gregory, who caught a ride with an assistant coach, but my mother told me, "No, your father will be glad to see you." The longer we waited, the more I dreaded the drive home. When the field lights went off, the tunnel went completely dark, and I could not even see my mother beside me. The Brownie Lady took my hand in hers. Her palms were rough as tree bark. "There he is!" she whispered, and I saw the faint impression of my father's hunched walk up the tunnel's ramp. My brother Bruce followed close behind.
I stepped up to greet my father, but he walked right past me.
When the Brownie Lady offered him his brownie, he said, "I don't deserve it."
The Brownie Lady handed the brownie to me, telling me, "Tell him, next week, I'll make his with walnuts; maybe that will bring us good luck."
I took the brownie and followed my parents and my brother to our car. Once we were all in, Mom and Dad up front, Bruce and I in the back, I blurted out: "We're still in first place! We still have the best record in the National Football League!" I was about to add, "It's only your fifth loss in 40 games!" when Bruce elbowed me in the head. Dad put the key in the ignition, he started the engine, and said, "Jennifer. . . . " As soon as he said, "Jennifer," I knew I had made a big mistake. "Jennifer," he said, "after a loss like this, those other games don't mean a damn thing."
Mom lit a cigarette. Bruce began to read the game's play-by-play aloud; "Vikings versus Rams, coin toss. . . . " As I listened, the seemingly abstract words -- clipping, offside, face mask -- took on a gravity I had never heard before. Each word was ripping a limb off my father. "Every time I lose," my father used to say, "I die a little."
Once a winning streak is broken, it is hard to regain momentum. The 1969 Rams went on to lose the last two games of the season, and then they lost to the Vikings in the first round of the playoffs. Heading into the 1970 season, my father had the second best winning percentage of any coach in the league. But when the Rams failed to reach the playoffs that year, my father received another telephone call from Dan Reeves. Reeves said he could not talk long. He was lying in a hospital bed and had been undergoing cobalt treatments for Hodgkin's Disease. He quickly fired my father. "It was a cold conversation," Dad told us after he hung up the telephone. "No gratitude, no appreciation, no thanks for what I've done."
wo weeks later, my father signed on to lead the Washington Redskins. At the time, it was the most lucrative coaching contract in the N.F.L. -- a seven-year, $125,000-per-year deal that came with a chauffeur, an option to purchase 5 percent of the team, an unlimited expense account and the title of head coach and general manager. My father persuaded the team to purchase six acres of Virginia forest and in two months had built a $500,000, year-round training facility; Redskin Park, the first team-owned athletic complex, would soon become a model for the rest of the league, which was still practicing on broken-down college campuses and torn-up stadium fields. He hired a handful of Rams players and another handful of Rams coaches and even his former Rams security guard -- a 65-year-old retired police detective -- to bring to his new team the same "character" he had brewed at the Rams. Within a few months of his arrival, Edward Bennett Williams, the team's president and Washington power broker, noted, "I gave George Allen an unlimited expense account, and he has already exceeded it."
Like the Rams, the Redskins were a team my father had to lift out of the bottom of the standings. To do this, he traded future draft choices for proven veterans. There was Bill Kilmer, a quarterback who would later check himself out of a hospital to appear in a playoff game. There was Bill Brundige, a lineman who would eventually play with torn knee ligaments. And there was Larry Smith, a running back who would become famous for playing with a broken leg. In the final moments of one game, with the Redskins behind, Smith caught the ball on the 5-yard line, got hit at the 4 (breaking a bone in his leg) and again at the 2 (breaking another bone), then drove into the end zone for the winning score. The team had the highest average age in the league, earning its players the nickname the Over-the-Hill Gang. Reporters questioned why my father had mortgaged draft choices for a chance to win in the present. "The future?" my father replied, "The Redskins haven't been to the playoffs in 29 years, and you're worrying about the future? We're going to win now: the future is now."
And they won. In 1971, my father's first season, they reached the playoffs and my father earned his second N.F.L. Coach of the Year Award. And in 1972, on New Year's Eve, the Redskins beat the defending Super Bowl champions, the Dallas Cowboys, 26-3, in the National Conference title game.
When the game ended, Redskins fans stormed the field. They tore down the goalposts. They ripped up bits of souvenir turf. They reached out to my father as he was lifted high, transported like a king on the shoulders of two mammoth Redskins. The marching band played "Amazing Grace." Fans were singing, "Amen, amen, amen."
"Let's get out of here," my mother said, and we waded through the sea of drunken fans to squeeze our way down to the locker-room level, where we were pressed up against a concrete pillar by fans who had barged through the security doors. I was squirreling around arms and legs to reach our car, when one fan grabbed my coat and asked, "Can I have your autograph?"
"Mine?" I asked. "You want mine?"
"Yes!" he screamed. "Yours!"
He handed me his Redskins pen and his championship-game souvenir program.
My hand shook as I tried to sign my autograph.
"Sign it," the fan told me, "George Allen's daughter."'
I thanked the fan because, for a moment, standing in my own little spotlight, I had forgotten who I was.
"Best wishes," I signed the program. "Your friend, George Allen's daughter."
t was 1977. after six seasons, five playoff berths and one unsuccessful visit to the Super Bowl, I saw how swiftly the tide could change. Reporters started to describe my father's philosophy as "peculiar," his work ethic as "megalomaniacal" and his personality as "the team's biggest problem." A new generation of players began to feel the same way. After all, the word "superstar" had arrived in the league's vocabulary and players could now receive guaranteed no-cut contracts. The N.F.L. had recently signed deals with the television networks totaling $140 million a year: overnight, the value of teams skyrocketed. For the first time in pro football history, teams would now earn money regardless of whether they won, lost or tied.
My father had one year remaining on his contract. In a renewal clause, Edward Bennett Williams removed an option from the original contract that allowed him to purchase 5 percent of the team's stock. When my father first arrived at the Redskins in 1971, owning a bit of a team was not a lucrative enterprise. Even Vince Lombardi's widow had sold back her late husband's share to Williams. But now, with the merging of football and television, my mother believed my father deserved a bit of that profit. My father, who once offered to work free to earn his first assistant-coaching job at a college, was never interested in money. When my mother insisted that Williams reinstate the stock option, the team president refused. "I've tried to tell George that the option is worthless," Williams told a reporter. "Sports franchises are not very good investments these days."
My father never signed the contract. On the eve of the 1977 season, my parents and I were watching the news on the kitchen TV. I was a teenager now who could always count on seeing my father for dinner once a week. I could also count on not exchanging one word with him as we watched his career dissolve. That evening, the sportscaster reported that a player who chose to remain anonymous had told him, "If George Allen says, 'This is the biggest game of your life,' one more time, I'm going to vomit."
I poured my father some milk.
My father stared at the TV.
My mother motioned for me to turn it off. The public support of the '68 Rams players could not have been a more distant memory.
At season's end, my father was fired. He learned the news from my brother Gregory, who had heard it on the car radio. "I've given the Redskins, the organization, the players and the community everything I have -- my heart and soul and my health," my father told reporters who immediately telephoned our home. "And this is what I get -- fired."
My father's record could not protect him. He may have been the most successful coach in Redskins history, but he was also the man Sports Illustrated described as "the most unpopular coach in the N.F.L.," and for the first time in my life I began to wonder if winning really meant anything anymore in the National Football League.
wo weeks later, in February 1978, my father stood beside his new boss, Carroll Rosenbloom, the acne-scarred, Gucci-tailored owner of the Rams.
"Can you live with George Allen?" one reporter asked Rosenbloom.
"Hell, yes, I can live with George," Rosenbloom said. "I can live with him if he wins."
I watched it all on TV. I watched my father say what I had heard him say at every news conference -- I just want to coach." I watched the owner say what every owner had said on hiring my father -- George Allen is the last coach I will hire." And then, I watched reporters ask what they always asked when a new head coach is hired -- the contract, how much, how long?
"We discussed a year-to-year," Rosenbloom explained, "but we finally agreed on a week-to-week contract."
The roomful of reporters laughed. Even I laughed. I thought we had it made. We'd returned to our old home in Los Angeles, and I'd live out my final year of high school while watching my father take his new group of Rams to the Super Bowl. In three out of the last four seasons, the Rams had played in the N.F.C. championship game and lost. All my father had to do was inspire the players to put in the extra effort required to reach and then win the Super Bowl. But only days after his appointment, several Rams complained about their new coach. "I can't believe Carroll Rosenbloom would do such a thing to his team," said Isiah Robertson, the team's All-Pro linebacker. "I can't play for George Allen. I want to be traded." And on the day my father arrived at Rams headquarters, the sports-page headlines read, "George Allen has been welcomed to Los Angeles with a gun to his head."
In August, at the first preseason game, my mother and I sat in the same Coliseum seats we sat in years before. During the national anthem, my mother turned to me and asked, "Am I here now or then?" Things seemed nearly the same until the game was under way: players dropped passes, tacklers missed tackles, backs fumbled balls. At halftime, the fans booed the team off the field. By the final gun, the Rams had lost. In the tunnel to the locker room, a couple of Rams executives stood, smoking cigarettes. I recognized one from the Dan Reeves era. He looked the same -- same long sideburns, same year-round golfer's tan. The Brownie Lady was nowhere to be seen. My mother asked the executive if he had seen her, and he replied: "That old bag with the bum eye? She croaked a long time ago."
When Dad stepped out of the locker room, Mom asked him, "Don't you want a day off?" Dad shook his head, No. He hadn't had a day off in the seven months since he'd taken the Rams job. That night, he returned to his single bed in his dorm room at training camp. The following day, he doubled the number of practices and started refusing to allow players off the field until each play had been performed perfectly. He also installed a Don't Walk on Grass rule: "We run on grass; only mailmen walk on grass," and he yelled at players to pick up their discarded Gatorade cups. In the cafeteria, he noted the illogical location of saltines in the food line -- saltines should be next to the soup, not next to the dessert. In the offices, he complained about the decor -- torn carpet, a broken water fountain, a painting of a sunset -- how are those things going to motivate the team to win? At night, he did bed checks, and after everyone had gone to sleep, he telephoned the front-office executives at home, insisting that the men work on Saturdays.
A few days later, several starters stormed out of camp. One said, "I can't work with George Allen." Another claimed, "His system is too complicated."
Before kickoff at the second preseason game, nine Rams called in "sick." My mother and I stayed home, listening to the night game on the radio in our dark, unlighted den, envisioning the eight dropped passes, the missed field goal, the 54 yards in offense. The Rams lost, 17-0. It was the first shutout inflicted on my father in 133 games.
"It's just a matter of time before the players grasp my system," my father explained to Rosenbloom after the defeat. But Rosenbloom didn't have time. He fired my father the following day.
My father never returned to the N.F.L., though he would have jumped at the chance. A few days after his funeral, I found several handwritten notes in his office at home. They had been written during the most difficult season he ever had -- that 1978 season, the first he had spent away from the football field in more than 30 years. I read them because they were too painful to ignore -- these thoughts he had written down while waiting for the telephone ring to hear yet another owner say, "You're the last coach I will ever hire."
Rams five-year record before George Allen: 19-48-3.
Rams five-year record with George Allen: 49-17-4.
Redskins seven-year record before George Allen: 42-51-5.
Redskins seven-year record with George Allen: 67-30-1.
Job security -- never wanted it -- rather accept the risk.
But now, I'm having trouble.
Everything I worked for and gained has been destroyed.
Like taking an instrument away from a musician.
Hired to be fired from the start.
I just wanted to coach.
I sure liked doing a good job.
Who will hire me now?
Try to think of yourself as a winner.
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000924mag-allen.html
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