Blue Collar Football
16.
Doc Erskine had not only established a program at Riordan High School, but he had also put his stamp on it. From his first season, when he had upset Bellarmine to win the 1966 WCAL championship, he had put Riordan football in a new category. Instead of an apprentice team from a recently opened school, Riordan had arrived as contenders, someone other schools had to seriously prepare for, a school talented youngsters ought to consider. In this work, he was not alone.
He had hired as an assistant coach, Gil Haskell, who had played under Pat Malley at St. Ignatius when Doc first appeared on the scene, then for Vic Rowen in what was then a successful program at San Francisco State. (Bill Walsh once said that it was Rowen who created the vaunted West Coast offense). Haskell would later coach St. Ignatius, then go on to the college level, where he went to the Rose Bowl with USC. Eventually he moved to the NFL, where as a coordinator for the Packers and the Seahawks, he earned three Super Bowl rings.
Doc was always good at spotting talent.
The strange thing was that, for a cerebral coach, Doc promoted a visceral style of football. Robert Horace Erskine was what later would be called a nerdy kid in horn-rimmed glasses. Unathletic himself, he became a student of the game, all games. Born in Illinois, he gravitated to the South, where his first sports job was as a team trainer, hence the nickname “Doc’. Applying his gift for close observation, his sense of nuance, he became good at developing players first at the high school and then the college level. He coached, sometimes simultaneously, basketball, football and track. At Loyola University in New Orleans, he was named head basketball coach while he was still a student. There are people who are called students of certain games. Doc was a scholar, and not of just one game. At Jesuit High School in New Orleans, Erskine’s teams won four prep championships in football, plus five in basketball and four in track.
Loyola University hired him to coach football. After two seasons he moved to Oklahoma as an assistant coach where he became known as “the longest-traveling scout in the nation.” Neither a backslapper nor a networker, without wife or family, he became a kind of coaching itinerant, moving with the jobs and sometimes with the seasons. He worked as an assistant at Marquette, then served in Army Air Corps Intelligence during the war, after which he returned to Marquette.
When he turned up in San Francisco in the late fifties, he considered himself retired and was at first living in a motel. Hoping to get active in sports again, he looked around at local schools: Jesuit, all-boys St Ignatius was like home.
As a kind of football intellectual, Doc might have been expected to experiment with the new formations then entering the game---I-formation, split lines, run-and-shoot. Instead, he went the other way: put your best athletes on defense; run the ball, then run it again. Fundamentals beat flash. Exhaustively repeated drills limited mistakes—turnovers, penalties—and kept the ball out of opponents’ hands. It wasn’t spectacular football, but team achievement in what was after all, the ultimate team sport. Its reward the shared satisfaction of becoming good at something that is difficult to do well.
His personal style was understated, respectful. He was not a yeller. He never negated a player; at St. Ignatius, Tringali did that.
When something went wrong, a play or formation that simply wouldn’t work, Tringali’s solution was simple: “Let Doc fix it.”
He knew and could teach key players—centers, linebackers, cornerbacks, safeties-people who handled the ball- the crucial silent language of football: the hand signals and body language that signaled a change in blocking assignments or pass coverage, a hard count coming or a quick kick. He understood the importance of nuance in a game that can seem at first merely brutal.
He didn’t call plays; rather he trained quarterbacks to call their own. Then all his shrewd observational skills were combined in scouting opponents, sizing up weaknesses, preparing a game plan. When teams Doc coached played, they were ready.
He was not Pat Malley; he didn’t recruit promising athletes from among the student body. And he didn’t, like Vince Tringali, draft or browbeat boys into turning out. Instead, Doc worked with the young men at hand, studying individual players to see what they needed, then instructing them in the technique that made them more effective.
As a coach he was more of a teacher than a charismatic tribal chieftain.
He got results. In four seasons in the very competitive WCAL, Doc’s Riordan teams went 26-9.
But Doc, neither physically strong or athletic, was now old in a young man’s game. He had already retired once and lived alone with no family to look after him, He was diabetic. In 1970 he retired, this time for good.
“When I got the USC job,” Gil Haskell recalls, “I went to tell Doc. He was in the hospital.
He never came out.”
Doc Erskine died, at 74, in l978
The nomad coach had found a home. The field at Riordan High was named in his honor. As was a trophy awarded annually to the winner of the Riordan-St. Ignatius game.
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In August 2022, word arrived that the two most famous teams in West Coast college football were leaving the Pac-12 conference to join the Midwest-based Big Ten. In a move reflecting the increasing consolidation at the top of American economic life, USC and UCLA were joining a league that sprawled from Nebraska to New Jersey in order to become part of a reported 7.5-billion-dollar television broadcast package involving a consortium of three different networks expected to earn each school $100 million annually. Beginning in 2024, the two California schools would no longer be regularly competing against institutions from their own part of the country. The Pac-12, a 107-year-old conference of Pacific Cost teams had, in effect, been decapitated.
The two Los Angeles universities were dreamscape teams for high school players, the teams that formed part of your own ambition, the teams that top players from your own league went on to play for, that embodied the promise of athletic recognition. Of the 1962 St Ignatius National Number One team, no fewer than seven players were recruited by USC. Now The Trojans were just another part of a collection of distant powerhouses. Teams you could never realistically hope to see, much less play for. It got harder to imagine yourself playing big-time college football.
The absorption of the famous Southern California schools into a nationwide conference had been a countermove to match the growing wealth and power of the SEC, a collection of Southern tams like Alabama, Georgia and Florida that had recently added the universities of Oklahoma and Texas. The SEC had negotiated a television contract many times the size and reach of rival conferences, and teams in other parts of the country, including USC and UCLA felt they had to keep pace.
Unmentioned in this was the change in rules, known as the NIL, that allow college athletes to be paid for the use of their name, image or likeness in advertising or media promotion. USC and UCLA, both located in the national heart of film and television, including commercial production, offered a significant added attraction for both the Big Ten as well as for potential star players: at least one outstanding player, a recent USC transfer, has already contracted to appear in uniform, in an airline commercial.
At the start of the 2022 football season, according to Scott Ostler of The San Francisco Chronicle, the USC roster included thirty-three players who had transferred from other schools, including five of the eleven starters on offense, plus the quarterback, and the head coach. Some rival schools, according to The New York Times, view USC, “as some NIL Bogeyman, tempting their best players with sweet offers.”
This also raises the question of whether Traveler, the large white horse traditionally galloped around stadiums by a rider in a Trojan-warrior costume following a USC touchdown, will soon be pounding over the turf of Nebraska, Michigan and New Jersey.
The lure also applies to coaches. With the enormous payout for broadcast rights from the major television networks, schools in the prominent conferences like the Big Ten and the SEC can afford to hire away top coaches from less lucrative programs, offering enough money to offset even the appeal of building, at one school or university, a lifetime legacy.
It appears that one approach for college football teams to compete with the pros is to become them.
This growing inequality of football wealth and power ultimately threatens the future of the game itself. If football’s still growing popularity depends solely on the play of name-brand college teams and the pros, who was going to care about hometown high schools and community colleges that furnished the players and coaches?
With more wealth and attention going to star players and star coaches, what will happen to the simple sustaining pride of making the team? And football’s core promise of team play itself?
No wonder that at a time when football’s popularity and generation of income are at an all-time high, there are areas of the country where the high school game, which is its source, is on life support. A study by an association of state high schools concludes that interest in the sport at the high school level has declined throughout the United States. Coaches report that, outside of football-happy areas like the South, it’s harder getting kids to turn out. Some schools have had to discontinue football because of the lack of enough players.
With this, some significant life lessons are going unlearned. Maybe Ron
Calcagno’s observation that nobody ever went into coaching for the money no longer holds true.
The quarterback went down backwards with the ball still in his hands; he landed hard and didn’t get up, Players from both teams began dropping to one knee around him as referees tried to shoo them out of camera range. The crowd fell silent: this was Tua Tagovailoa’s second potentially concussive hit in less than a week. Four days earlier, in a game against the Buffalo Bills, the Miami Dolphins quarterback was led off the field following a hit, after he staggered and collapsed to his knees while trying to return to the huddle. He spent the rest of the first half in the locker room, but returned to play in the second half. Now the stadium crowd and a national Thursday Night Football audience watched for nearly ten shocked minutes before he was carried off on a gurney
The emotional power of the moment and its aftermath spread throughout the media, the team and league management and the players union. “Tua should probably never have been playing,” said Fox analyst and former linebacker Emmanuel Acho. “He displayed neurological trauma last week; we disregarded it, labeled it a ‘back injury’ and let him back in the game.”
Just days before, the NFL players union had begun an investigation into Tagovailoa’s previous hit, which led to an amendment in the league’s concussion protocols. Previously a player with “gross motor instability”, difficulty getting up or walking, could return to play if doctors decided there was an orthopedic reason for his unsteadiness. The amended protocol which took effect the following Sunday, prohibits a player returning to play if he shows ataxia “a term describing impaired balance or coordination caused by damage to the brain or nerves.”
Tua Tagovailoa did not travel with his team to the following Sunday’s game.
“This is not part of the deal that anyone signs up for,” said Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel “even though you know it’s a possibility.”
The conflict between what football demands of players and what it gives to them in return remains within the game itself. It is probably inextricable from it. Beyond the rule and equipment changes and the amended protocols, there is the risk and dare nature of football which is part of why we watch it. An appeal that is as old and visceral as the Iliad. As William James said of war “The horror makes the fascination…It is life in extremis.”
Is it then simply blood lust that has us watching football, that prevents us, despite the danger, from looking away? Or is it something more? Fuller? The knowledge that these young men, no matter how strong or fast or agile at this moment, will one day decline and die, and that it could begin at any moment, and that this is the stone truth that makes what we are watching so compelling? So fascinating to our glance at and absorbing of our attention? Is this not the tragic dark against which the physical light shines brightest?