John Gagliardi began his letter—neatly produced by playing the Olivetti or the Underwood, one of those manual pre-laptop writing machines—“See. I can type.”
I had interviewed him a couple of weeks earlier at St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., where Gagliardi was in the 34th of his eventual 60 seasons coaching the school’s football team. He already was wildly successful at collecting championships in the NCAA’s non-scholarship Division III, but that wasn’t the news. The real story was how Gagliardi had an approach to his sport that was so foreign as to be a football non sequitur.
That was 1987, and it simply did not follow then—any more than there might seem a logical progression now—that Gagliardi’s rejection of tackling in practice, of playbooks and agility drills, of calisthenics and war terminology, of clipboards and whistles and blocking dummies, could set such an enviable example of gridiron might.
Anyway, Gagliardi was recalling back then how his coaching career began as a 16-year-old high school junior. And how, “meanwhile, there was a junior college in town”—Trinidad, Col.—“and I was also playing basketball in high school and the coach at the junior college asked me if I’d like to play for him after the high school season was over.
“He told me,” Gagliardi said, “to go to night school and take typing” to be eligible for the college team. “I wound up lettering four years in junior college in basketball—two years while I was still in high school. I got to be a hell of a typist.”
When Gagliardi died this week at 91, six years after retirement, he took with him a humanity and a wonderfully sly sense of humor. More than his 489-138-11 coaching record—by far the most accomplished mark in college football history—was his outrageously sane approach.
A football team that didn’t practice tackling? “That came to me,” he said, “as a young guy who was getting killed in practice” during his high school playing days at Trinidad Catholic.
No calisthenics? No drills? No laps? “When I was in high school,” he said, “we had a coach I learned a lot from. All negative. He was a fanatic on calisthenics and drills. Torturous stuff. And laps, laps, laps. We were worn out before we started. My memory of it was that Hell must be like this. Those damn duck walks. I hated them. Years later, everybody was told how bad those duck walks are for your knees. Anyway, then we’d scrimmage. We’d kill each other in practice. I came within a hair of not hanging in there.”
What saved his playing career, and launched his coaching vocation, was when that negative coach was called to military service during Gagliardi’s junior year. The school principal intended to disband the football team but Gaglilardi, the team captain, saved the day by volunteering to coach.
“We just wanted to play,” he said. “First thing I did was throw out all the calisthenics. See, I had noticed all the kids who would go play intramurals never did all the drills and that stuff, and I never saw any ambulances going over to their fields. The ambulances always were coming over to us.”
And another thing: “Our coach used to say, ‘Hit somebody! Kill somebody!’ But I noticed that I was the guy getting killed,” Gagliardi said. “The only tragic flaw in his system was that, when we lined up, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I was the tailback—you know, the old single-wing, Notre Dame Box and all that—and I noticed that when I’d call a play, there would be panic in the linemen’s eyes. ‘Who do I block?’ I thought the first thing we ought to do is figure out who to block.”
When Trinidad Catholic proceeded to win the state championship that year, Gagliardi had found his calling—and the conviction that a football coach need not stand on ceremony. At St. John’s, he did without staff meetings, grading of game film, the existence of a training table. No player was considered too small. No player ever was cut from the team, with in excess of 150 on the roster some years and as many as 120 sometimes used in the same game.
His players employed The Beautiful Day Drill, in which they would lie on their backs, gazing up at the foliage and Minnesota sky, observing to one another, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” The team had an informal Canadian Award, no more than a verbal prize, given to players who made it through the chilly Midwestern autumns practicing only in shorts. There was an inordinate amount of fun.
To those incoming freshmen, intent on proving they were worthy footballers, who asked Gagliardi, “Who do I hit or kill?” Gagliardi’s answer was, “That’s not the way to make a tackle. First, you’ve got to line up in the right spot. You’ve got to go to the right spot. You’ve got to figure out where the ball is. You’ve got to not get blocked. You’ve got to pressure the ball.
“You do all that, eventually you’ll make the tackle. Besides, if you’re in the hospital, you won’t make the tackle. And I hate visiting hospitals. If we tackle in practice, who do we hurt? Our own quarterback and running back. They’re human. They’ve got knees and mothers.”
In 2010, when the National Football League at last acknowledged the risk of brain damage inherent in the sport, I called Gagliardi, who often noted that “we haven’t made a tackle on the practice field since 1958.” Might such a system save the pros from further head trauma and long-range health and legal issues?
Gagliardi, who once declined to take an assistant coaching position with Bud Grant’s Minnesota Vikings, insisted that NFL coaches “certainly don’t need my advice. I’m not looking for converts. Certain things—religion, politics—you’ll never change.
“But I think we led the world in fewest injuries. It isn’t rocket science to me. I’ll never forget the first time we won the national championship and, at a clinic afterwards, a fellow says to me, ‘Don’t you think, if you’d have hit more in practice, you’d have done better?’
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We played 12 games and won them all. I don’t know how we could’ve won 13.’”
My type of coach.