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Hank Stram dead at 82
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Embracing the circus
For Stram, the NFL media was never a nuisance
Posted: Tuesday July 5, 2005 4:10PM; Updated: Tuesday July 5, 2005 4:10PM
Hank Stram is carried off the field after his Chiefs won the 1970 Super Bowl over the Vikings.
Walter Iooss Jr./SI
I've often wondered how Hank Stram would have fit into this modern world of the NFL, this era of the buttoned-up coaches who might see fit to hold two or three 20-minute press conferences a week, who put their assistants off-limits, who act like they're finding a cure for cancer. He probably would have laughed himself sick.
"Come over here, siddown, what do you want to know?"
How well I remember Hank, with his toupee and flamboyant red vest under his dark blazer, as he patrolled the sidelines, giggling, snapping off his one-liners. He liked action. He liked crowds ... and writers around him, plenty of them. The media circus was meat and potatoes for him.
Even when an ugly story broke the Tuesday before Kansas City's 1970 Super Bowl victory over the Vikings, the Chiefs' hotel was hardly a place hostile to writers, as it would be today. The story was that Stram's quarterback, Len Dawson, had been associating with a known gambler, Dice Dawson (no relation), and you could draw your own conclusions from that.
As soon as the news appeared on TV, Kenny Denlinger of the Washington Post and I headed over to the Fontainbleu, the New Orleans hotel housing the Chiefs. These days we would have been met by a cordon of police at the door, backed up by a squadron of worried-faced NFL people herding the media into some ghetto somewhere. But the Fontainbleu was wide open.
Kenny and I took the elevator up and knocked on the door to Dawson's room. He answered it and the three of us, plus his roommate, Johnny Robinson, the safetyman, stood there yacking for a while.
"There's absolutely nothing to it," Dawson said. We were surprised that there weren't any security people around, but this was Hank's hotel and Hank liked the media. We stopped by the Chiefs' offices on the mezzanine floor, figuring they'd be calling a press conference, and later on they did, but when we arrived, the PR man, Jimmy Schaaf, was there to greet us.
"Yeah, Hank said a bunch of you would be coming over," he said. "He said to call room service and get you taken care of." And that's what he did.
"Room service? Send up around 10 pounds of shrimp remoulade to the Chiefs' offices, OK?"
And, of course, Dawson played, was the MVP of the game and nothing came of the accusation. During the offseason I asked Stram about the loose way he had handled what could have been a major crisis.
"Have writers ever cost us a game?" he said. "Does it matter what's written? Well, yeah, it means something to me, because it helps me get my ideas across. The dumbest thing you can do is get mad at the press."
And his ideas came pouring out like a flood after that 23-7 victory in Super Bowl IV. It had really been a triumph of that great K.C. defense, the innovation of the stacked linebackers, the odd front that allowed 270-pound Curley Culp to manhandle Minnesota's undersized center, Mick Tingelhoff. But it was Stram's offense that got all the ink.
Who can forget him, miked on the sidelines ... "It's like stealing out there!" when one of his wideouts caught still another square-out underneath the Vikings corners, playing back? Or the three Frank Pitts end-arounds K.C. ran ... oh no, not again, it can't work again ... each one for good yardage. Or the sucker trap that gave little Mike Garrett a five-yard TD, the ultimate in flim-flammery, designed for the great pursuit of DT Alan Page. And of course Page took himself out of the play, following the guard who was pulling out -- to nowhere -- as Garrett walked in.
Stram football. Trick-'em football. He liked to hide little backs in the slot, behind his monster linemen, and sneak them downfield as pass catchers. When Dawson was hurt during the Super Bowl season, Stram designed a rollout attack for his big, mobile rookie -- Mike Livingston, who won five games with it. So the tactic stayed in the playbook, only now it bore the name, "Moving Pocket," which became the watchword for Stram's phrase that swept the football world during the offseason: Football of the Seventies.
But in 1970 the world caught up to it and K.C. finished out of contention, and the offense was next to last in the AFL, but that was OK. Stram had gotten enough mileage out of his genius offense, enough ink. Which nobody begrudged him, because he was a fun guy to be around. He'd take care of you. And after all, some coach had to win ... might as well be Hank.
There were bullying sides to his nature, though. He loved to run up scores. Jets linebacker Larry Grantham remembered a 48-0 loss in K.C. in 1963, with Stram calling timeouts at the end so the Chiefs could score again.
"We didn't have a charter flight back, we had a commercial flight," Grantham said, "and it was gonna be close, getting to the airport. We ended up rushing to the airport without taking showers. And there was Stram calling all those timeouts. We were screaming at him, cursing the guys on the field, and Dawson was holding up his hands, like, 'What do you want from me? It's not my idea!'"
"In 1962 we beat Buffalo in September, 41-21, and Hank called timeout at the end, so we could score again," Dawson recalled. "I told him on the sideline, 'What are you doing? We have to play these guys again this year.' Hank said, 'Just run the play.'
"Sure enough, we played them in December and they beat us and got some of our guys hurt. But that was Hank. He liked to score."
On the road, we'd always run into Hank's Traveling Circus. He collected odd characters, fringe guys he thought might be able to help him in some way. A weird crew. He had a gigantic ex-tight end named Lloyd Wells who looked like a kind of bouncer. Wells claimed to be a photographer but no one ever saw him take any pictures. There was a writer and publisher of a small football weekly who reminded me of the character Duke, in Doonesbury, with the little stars popping around his head. We called him Skylab because he always carried a little attache case, supposedly with all sorts of chemical paraphernalia.
I often asked people why Hank always wanted this guy around. "Because he hears things and passes them on," I was told.
My favorite was a fellow called Pittsburgh Joe Littman, who was Hank's special scout in that city. He knew everything there was to know about whatever happened in Pittsburgh. Once I met him in an after-hours joint downtown. I was covering a Steelers game, and the club had mysteriously suspended a player, and all the papers were wondering why. So I asked Pittsburgh Joe, and he laughed and announced it to the guys in the after-hours place and half a dozen of them all piped up at once, "Because the kid's a druggie. He's been dealing."
When halfback Mike Adamle came to the Jets from the Chiefs, I asked him what Hank was like to play for. He mentioned his weight-training facilities in the basement of the stadium -- the newest, most modern in the league -- and then he told me what Stram had said the first time he addressed the team in camp.
"It sounded like something from the pulpit, 'Weights are truth.' 'Gosh,' I said to myself. 'For all these years people had been going to the monasteries in Tibet to find out about truth, and here it is right under our feet.' It was terrific of Hank to point it out to us."
For Stram, the NFL media was never a nuisance
Posted: Tuesday July 5, 2005 4:10PM; Updated: Tuesday July 5, 2005 4:10PM
Hank Stram is carried off the field after his Chiefs won the 1970 Super Bowl over the Vikings.
Walter Iooss Jr./SI
I've often wondered how Hank Stram would have fit into this modern world of the NFL, this era of the buttoned-up coaches who might see fit to hold two or three 20-minute press conferences a week, who put their assistants off-limits, who act like they're finding a cure for cancer. He probably would have laughed himself sick.
"Come over here, siddown, what do you want to know?"
How well I remember Hank, with his toupee and flamboyant red vest under his dark blazer, as he patrolled the sidelines, giggling, snapping off his one-liners. He liked action. He liked crowds ... and writers around him, plenty of them. The media circus was meat and potatoes for him.
Even when an ugly story broke the Tuesday before Kansas City's 1970 Super Bowl victory over the Vikings, the Chiefs' hotel was hardly a place hostile to writers, as it would be today. The story was that Stram's quarterback, Len Dawson, had been associating with a known gambler, Dice Dawson (no relation), and you could draw your own conclusions from that.
As soon as the news appeared on TV, Kenny Denlinger of the Washington Post and I headed over to the Fontainbleu, the New Orleans hotel housing the Chiefs. These days we would have been met by a cordon of police at the door, backed up by a squadron of worried-faced NFL people herding the media into some ghetto somewhere. But the Fontainbleu was wide open.
Kenny and I took the elevator up and knocked on the door to Dawson's room. He answered it and the three of us, plus his roommate, Johnny Robinson, the safetyman, stood there yacking for a while.
"There's absolutely nothing to it," Dawson said. We were surprised that there weren't any security people around, but this was Hank's hotel and Hank liked the media. We stopped by the Chiefs' offices on the mezzanine floor, figuring they'd be calling a press conference, and later on they did, but when we arrived, the PR man, Jimmy Schaaf, was there to greet us.
"Yeah, Hank said a bunch of you would be coming over," he said. "He said to call room service and get you taken care of." And that's what he did.
"Room service? Send up around 10 pounds of shrimp remoulade to the Chiefs' offices, OK?"
And, of course, Dawson played, was the MVP of the game and nothing came of the accusation. During the offseason I asked Stram about the loose way he had handled what could have been a major crisis.
"Have writers ever cost us a game?" he said. "Does it matter what's written? Well, yeah, it means something to me, because it helps me get my ideas across. The dumbest thing you can do is get mad at the press."
And his ideas came pouring out like a flood after that 23-7 victory in Super Bowl IV. It had really been a triumph of that great K.C. defense, the innovation of the stacked linebackers, the odd front that allowed 270-pound Curley Culp to manhandle Minnesota's undersized center, Mick Tingelhoff. But it was Stram's offense that got all the ink.
Who can forget him, miked on the sidelines ... "It's like stealing out there!" when one of his wideouts caught still another square-out underneath the Vikings corners, playing back? Or the three Frank Pitts end-arounds K.C. ran ... oh no, not again, it can't work again ... each one for good yardage. Or the sucker trap that gave little Mike Garrett a five-yard TD, the ultimate in flim-flammery, designed for the great pursuit of DT Alan Page. And of course Page took himself out of the play, following the guard who was pulling out -- to nowhere -- as Garrett walked in.
Stram football. Trick-'em football. He liked to hide little backs in the slot, behind his monster linemen, and sneak them downfield as pass catchers. When Dawson was hurt during the Super Bowl season, Stram designed a rollout attack for his big, mobile rookie -- Mike Livingston, who won five games with it. So the tactic stayed in the playbook, only now it bore the name, "Moving Pocket," which became the watchword for Stram's phrase that swept the football world during the offseason: Football of the Seventies.
There were bullying sides to his nature, though. He loved to run up scores. Jets linebacker Larry Grantham remembered a 48-0 loss in K.C. in 1963, with Stram calling timeouts at the end so the Chiefs could score again.
"We didn't have a charter flight back, we had a commercial flight," Grantham said, "and it was gonna be close, getting to the airport. We ended up rushing to the airport without taking showers. And there was Stram calling all those timeouts. We were screaming at him, cursing the guys on the field, and Dawson was holding up his hands, like, 'What do you want from me? It's not my idea!'"
"In 1962 we beat Buffalo in September, 41-21, and Hank called timeout at the end, so we could score again," Dawson recalled. "I told him on the sideline, 'What are you doing? We have to play these guys again this year.' Hank said, 'Just run the play.'
"Sure enough, we played them in December and they beat us and got some of our guys hurt. But that was Hank. He liked to score."
On the road, we'd always run into Hank's Traveling Circus. He collected odd characters, fringe guys he thought might be able to help him in some way. A weird crew. He had a gigantic ex-tight end named Lloyd Wells who looked like a kind of bouncer. Wells claimed to be a photographer but no one ever saw him take any pictures. There was a writer and publisher of a small football weekly who reminded me of the character Duke, in Doonesbury, with the little stars popping around his head. We called him Skylab because he always carried a little attache case, supposedly with all sorts of chemical paraphernalia.
I often asked people why Hank always wanted this guy around. "Because he hears things and passes them on," I was told.
My favorite was a fellow called Pittsburgh Joe Littman, who was Hank's special scout in that city. He knew everything there was to know about whatever happened in Pittsburgh. Once I met him in an after-hours joint downtown. I was covering a Steelers game, and the club had mysteriously suspended a player, and all the papers were wondering why. So I asked Pittsburgh Joe, and he laughed and announced it to the guys in the after-hours place and half a dozen of them all piped up at once, "Because the kid's a druggie. He's been dealing."
When halfback Mike Adamle came to the Jets from the Chiefs, I asked him what Hank was like to play for. He mentioned his weight-training facilities in the basement of the stadium -- the newest, most modern in the league -- and then he told me what Stram had said the first time he addressed the team in camp.
"It sounded like something from the pulpit, 'Weights are truth.' 'Gosh,' I said to myself. 'For all these years people had been going to the monasteries in Tibet to find out about truth, and here it is right under our feet.' It was terrific of Hank to point it out to us."