My wife has had a two-year–running cancer situation. She’s going to be fine. I’ve had a heart and diabetes problem. I think we were just getting to the point where we felt we needed to stop.
We were the worst team in college football when we came. We’ve built it up to the point where I think the next coach is ready to take it up a step. The infrastructure has been redone.We were pretty shaky on just towels and soap.
Whoever won that game won the national championship almost every year for about a 10- or 12-year stretch.(1)
I never felt noise like that when they came out.(2) They woke up all the echoes. If you were there, that game, the pressure on my ears–it took five minutes to get the game started after they came out because the place was chaos. I’d never seen anything like that.
The other thing, it was a national championship team. That was Joe Montana and a whole bunch of guys, so they were a great team. That was a team to be reckoned with if they were nude.
I’ve always thought Joe Montana was the best.
I was born in Chicago.Oak Park. We left when I was 5 in 1940 for Provo, Utah. My dad was in construction, and they had a big steel plant in Provo.We were there for three years during the second World War. It was like moving to the moon.
Wound up in Daly City,(3) and the first day I was there, I went to a baseball school. I was a catcher, and the other catcher with me was John Madden.
All through high school, we were going to play for the 49ers and the Yankees.We were going to be the first two-sport guys.
I don’t ever remember overcoming it. John was a stutterer, too. The phone, when I was a kid, terrified me in terms of just stuttering.
When John and I got really excited, no one could understand a thing we were saying, both stuttering at each other.
He was a tough guy.(4) He had some arrogance at the time, some aloofness. But he was tough. He never missed practice.
We built it around him.
Money.(5) It was a time when our organization didn’t recognize we were building everything around him. They thought he was just a player. He was the core.
In the history of the NFL, there was no team put together better than that team–Ditka, Buddy Ryan, and they hated each other, the quarterback, then their classy guy Walter Payton.
At the time, that was the most formidable defense. Buddy Ryan had put this together. No one understood it. They were coming with everybody.
They had an attitude about everything. Their field goal kicker had an attitude.
And the best possible coach you could have. He typified them. That’s who he was. That’s what that man is. I wouldn’t want to screw with that man when he’s 90.
John Madden and Pat Summerall, I had dinner with them before the game.(6) They said, “Now look, when you get the ball, don’t try to score. You’re never going to score.” They said, “Don’t try to make a first down. That’s out.” And They said, “What we think you should do is try not to go backwards. If you don’t go backwards, just try to keep the ball where it is, or maybe make a yard, that’s great.” And they were right.
John McKay told me, “Wherever you go, take a yellow pad,” which meant think about what you do.
1: In the Notre Dame-USC rivalry in the ’70s and ’80s.
2: For the “Green Jerseys” game at Notre Dame in 1977.
3: California.
4: Former Rams running back Eric Dickerson.
5: The reason the Rams traded Dickerson to Indianapolis in 1987.
6: The 1986 NFC Championship game against the Bears.
