Sez Me
There is a fine line between friend and acquaintance.
John Robinson and I were acquaintances who conducted ourselves as friends whenever we saw one another. Which wasn’t often.
But, for whatever reason, with us, it was friend/acquaintance at first sight. It was made more unique in that he was coaching football at USC and with the Rams in L.A., and I was not around him much at all. It was more like a few-times-a-year basis.
As a rule, football coaches, so many riddled with paranoia, are difficult to know — especially for members of the out-of-town media. Don Coryell barely tolerated local press. He treated reporters from somewhere else as the CIA might foreign spies.
John, who spent many of his later years living in the North County, passed from pneumonia on Monday at age 89. He was the best coach I’ve known giving and talking with the media. He was funny. He was insightful. He was a great football coach. Master of knowing the drill.
It was Coryell who brought the I formation — the greatest running formation — to USC as an assistant under John McKay in 1960. Robinson, who had studied under McKay, perfected it. He was the best run coach in history, and one of the all-time recruiters.
In any event, I’m pretty sure there aren’t many coach-reporter relationships that began the way ours did.
It was 1978, and I was covering the Aztecs and college sports for the Evening Tribune, renamed The Tribune, and then The San Diego Union-Tribune at the 1992 merger. Under Robinson, USC was the No. 1 team in the country, featuring 17 players who would play in the NFL, three remarkable future Pro Football Hall of Famers — Marcus Allen, Ronnie Lott and Anthony Munoz — and two Heisman fellows, Allen and Charles White (both of whom led the NFL in rushing).
It was that year, after USC whipped the Crimson Tide in Alabama, that Bear Bryant said of the Trojans: “I’d take their culls.”
So, one day I called USC trying to get an in-person interview with John, whom I’d never met. He agreed to a 10 a.m. meeting in his Heritage Hall office.
So I drove up and was sitting in the outer office when John came out and walked up to me.
“Are you Nick? I’m sorry. I have a luncheon with backers at Fluor Industries at noon, and Fluor’s helicopter has been grounded, so I’ll have to drive, he said.
Fluor, which now employs 30,000, was SC’s biggest backer then, building Heritage Hall. He wasn’t missing that meeting for me, of all people. So he said: “I have an idea. Did you drive up here? Are you going back to San Diego after this? Tell you what, why don’t I drive your car to Fluor (located in Irvine just off the 405) and you can interview me along the way.”
So that was our first meeting. John drove — and spoke — very well. (I never would have gotten in a car with Coryell behind the wheel. We might have ended up in Newhall.)
A few years later, John was named head coach of the Rams, and I became beat guy for The NFL Team That Used to Be Here. So I went to the NFL Owners Meetings in Palm Springs. I don’t know how it works now, but then, one morning was set aside for the media to meet with the coaches for breakfast.
I was sitting at a table when John came in, spotted me, and came over and sat down. He was delightful.
Later, I went to the Rams’ training camp in Fullerton. I was standing on the sideline during practice. John was in a golf cart and suddenly came by.
“Get in,” he said. “Let’s take a ride.”
That’s how it was with John and me. He was the driver and I was the passenger. RIP, friend. …
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