Tough going ...

Possibly the most intriguing question going into the 2004 NFL season had nothing to do with teams and players, but a coach.

Would Tom Coughlin of the N.Y. Giants make it through the season?

A Phi Beta Kappa of the hard-rock school of coaching, Coughlin had never stopped stupefying the press with his rules and edicts on practicing, playing, dressing, and his improved version of the Ten Commandments. He was generally accepted as a winning coach and the coach most likely to end up on a couch.

He started the season with two defeats and a vote as worst coach in the league. He then won two games and was hailed as the second coming of Vince Lombardi. There's where we left him and started writing this editorial.

Coughlin made us realize all over again that football is so complex and physically demanding that it's only for the kind of coach who enjoys challenges and will kill himself meeting them. He's got to be tough to prepare his team for mortal combat. But he also has to understand what he's demanding of the players and to meet them halfway.

The question we have always asked of the football intellectual is: What goes into the making of the truly great coach--besides, of course, outstanding personnel, excellent assistants, a friendly schedule, and an imaginative press (to whom every coach who wins two straight games becomes an instant "genius")?

The only answer that ever satisfied us was tendered by a retired football coach who had been schooled by Notre Dame legend Frank Leahy.

"Football is the hardest and most demanding of our sports. How do you ask your players to surrender their bodies to you and let you work them to death? I believe that most coaches have an awareness of this kind and will stop somewhere in their demands on the players. But there will always be coaches who will stop nowhere."

We had to interpolate, "Are you talking about coaches who will kill a kid to put a number up on the scoreboard? That's not coaching. It's barbarism."

"Don't get dramatic," was the answer. "Coaches aren't out to kill anyone. All I'm saying is that some coaches feel that the only way to win is by out-slaving the other guy.

"Like Vince Lombardi. He was a brilliant man who knew what it took to win and would do anything to get it out of his players. When his players used to tell you that Coach Lombardi was a fair man who treated everyone the same--like dogs--they weren't kidding. The weirdness of it was that the players, after retiring, were astonished to find that they now revered their old coach."

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Which leads to a puzzling question: Why did Lombardi have to wait until his 45th year to get a head coaching job?

Allow us to close with an anecdote about him. When he was the assistant backfield coach of the Giants, his two great halfbacks were Frank Gifford and Kyle Rote.

The Giants' equipment man was a classmate of ours whom we often met at football luncheons. We remember asking him about the kind of relationship that Lombardi had with his two College Hall of Famers.

Our friend smiled. "They thought Lombardi was a funny man. They were always kidding him and laughing at his response to them."

Well, 468 years before, they also used to laugh at Christopher Columbus.