John Blanchette: It never gets old

Even John Gagliardi came along too late to beat Gonzaga University in football. The Bulldogs dropped the sport in 1941.

But basketball? Quite another matter.

This normally would be very much beside the point, but when it comes to John Gagliardi – who has won more football games than any college coach – nothing is beside the point. On Saturday, he brings his team from Saint John’s University in Minnesota to Spokane for a meeting at the Pine Bowl with unbeaten Whitworth College in the NCAA Division III playoffs. That’s the context. But anytime the 80-year-old patriarch of the game is part of the story, it lurches into a Mobius strip of anecdote, philosophy, one-liners and monologue on the rigors and wonders of longevity – all of which measure the man far better than numbers ever could.

Just for the record, however, here’s the record: 442-119-11. That’s in 54 years at Saint John’s, and four before that at Carroll College in Helena.

Where he was also the basketball coach. And the baseball coach. And the track coach.

“I was the whole show,” he said. “but I loved it. I was 22 years old. And we had a darned good basketball team.”

Which they proved one February night in 1952 when a Helena boy named Walt Romasko laid one up at the buzzer to beat the Zags 68-66.

“They’d come in on a swing to play Montana and Montana State and thought they’d warm up with us,” Gagliardi said. “I used to say I had my brother-in-law refereeing, but the guy didn’t like it when I used to kid about that. He wasn’t my brother-in-law, of course.”

Nonetheless, he was an official and thus fair game.

“Worst ones were when we played football up at the University of British Columbia,” he claimed. “They had a first down inside the 10, at about the 8-yard line. Four downs later, they measured on the 1 and gave them another first down. Oh, I’ve seen some homers.”

He has, in fact, seen it all. Only the end is not in sight.

“If I retired, I’d be lucky to get a phone call,” he said. “At least you called me.”

At Florida State, they’re hollering that Bobby Bowden is geezered out at 77 – just as they were trying to chase Joe Paterno into a rocker at Penn State a few years ago. Bill Doba is a pup by comparison down at Washington State and there’s a Greek chorus in the stands at Martin Stadium squawking that he’s too old.

“I get these calls from reporters asking about Bowden or Paterno and the problems they’ve had,” Gagliardi said. “The question isn’t that they happen to be losing – it’s how do they win so long? That’s not so easy. All the great coaches had some hard times because it’s impossible to win forever.

“Except guys like Rockne – and they had the good fortune to die before they had to coach very long.”

At Saint John’s, they get the message. They were sweating it a couple of years ago when Gagliardi’s wife, Peg, retired as the athletic department’s administrative assistant, thinking maybe he’d be right behind.

“Who would you bring in to succeed him?” Tom Linnemann, a former Johnnies quarterback, asked USA Today in 2003. “Does the Pope appoint somebody?”

This is one old coach no one is any hurry to replace. For one thing, the Johnnies have never been more successful – they’ve won 10 or more games eight of the last nine years, and haven’t had a losing season since 1967. They were D-III champs in 2003, the year he also passed Eddie Robinson on the all-time victory list.

But for another, the Saint John’s family understands they’ve been blessed with an American original – an intensely competitive yet thoroughly gentle soul, who has coaxed more excellence out of young men with wisdom and warmth than any martinet has with high volume and humiliation. The proof is in the turnout – 178 players are on the roster, many of whom may never play – and the return rate. That 2003 team included 18 sons of former Gagliardi players on it. This year, two grandsons of ex-Johnnies suit up.

Oh, he believes in a stern “no.” Just not the “nos” you’d expect.

For the Johnnies, there is no tackling in practice. No whistles. No calling Gagliardi “coach” – his name is John. There is no compulsory weightlifting. No playbooks. No calisthenics. Well, that’s not quite right. The Johnnies are fond of the “Nice Day Drill,” in which they loll on the grass and comment on the pleasant afternoon.

This gleeful disdain of some of the hoariest have-tos of college coaching has its roots in Gagliardi’s first gig. Before his senior year at Trinidad Catholic High School in Colorado in 1943, Gagliardi’s coach jumped into World War II. The school nearly canceled the football season, but Gagliardi talked the priests into letting the team coach itself.

“The thing we hated most was calisthenics,” he said. “We threw those out right away.”

Maybe it wasn’t cause-and-effect, but the team won a league championship.

“Coaching isn’t that important if the kids can do it,” he said.

The Benedictine monks hired him at Saint John’s because he said he didn’t need scholarships and that he could beat league bullies Gustavus Adolphus and St. Thomas. Since he’d never heard of either school, he had no reason to say he couldn’t. The ranks of the monks have thinned in recent years, especially the old school types who were Gagliardi’s own Greek chorus. He misses that, and not only because they were a good source of material.

“They took a vow of poverty,” he once said when asked about the perks of his job, “and I guess they think I did, too.”

Yet it’s not as if he never had a chance to leave – even Bud Grant, whose son Mike played for Gagliardi, asked him to be an assistant with the Minnesota Vikings. But the years at SJU became decades because he understood the most important thing in coaching – in anything – is being able to do it the way you want.

Also, there was the winning.

“The only time I’ve ever talked about the record,” he said, “was when one of my coaches was telling a recruit, ‘You’re going to play for a coach who set a record that’s never going to be broken.’

“After the kid left, I said, ‘Don’t you think we’ll ever win another game?’” Truth is, he may never stop.