"They're Still Human Beings" (1960)

The unfeeling tough-guy act always wears thin--in sports and beyond.

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Lou Rymkus

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I.

The first coach to ever win an American Football League championship was a man named Lou Rymkus. In 1960, the league’s inaugural season, Rymkus was hired as the coach of the Houston Oilers; he was the son of a coal miner who played on the line for Notre Dame, once inserting himself right back into a game after getting 14 stitches from an elbow to the upper lip. He spent a year with Washington in the NFL, then joined the Cleveland Browns of the All-America Football Conference after World War II, largely because coach Paul Brown promised to double his salary. Rymkus became a key cog in the most dominant franchise in the AAFC’s short history—a team so consistently good that it eventually caused the dissolution of the entire league.

Rymkus was an archetypal tough guy. He had a nose and chin that “seemed designed to shovel cement,” wrote columnist Mickey Herskowitz. He once left a game in Chicago with a police escort after getting penalized three different times for unnecessary roughness. And after his playing days were over, he became an archetypal tough-guy coach. One night, he was drinking at a Boston hotel before a game between his Oilers and the Patriots, the bartender announced last call. Rymkus grabbed the bartender by the lapels, yanked him halfway over the bar, and growled, “It can't be closing time, because I'm still drinking.”

That evening, as Herskowitz told it, the bar made an exception and lifted its curfew.

Rymkus often made his players scrimmage twice a week during the season, pushing them to the point of exhaustion. He threatened to take a whip to them, and he seemed serious about it, because Rymkus seemed serious about everything. “If you smiled it was like you had committed a crime,” quarterback Jacky Lee said. “If a guy laughed, Lou would stop practice and lecture us on being hard-nosed.”

After winning that AFL title in 1960, the Oilers decamped to Hawaii for training camp. Rymkus found this choice unacceptable. Hawaii, he argued, was no place for grueling work. By then, his players had begun to despise him, and it had affected their play. “You listen to a coach telling you how bad you are,” said George Blanda, the team’s other quarterback, “you finally begin to believe it yourself.”

When the Oilers started the 1961 season with a 1-3-1 record, Adams fired Rymkus and replaced him with assistant Wally Lemm, a genial man who came to the job with the radical philosophy that his employees should enjoy their work. And with Lemm as their coach, the Oilers won nine straight games and a second straight AFL Championship in 1961.

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II.

I stumbled upon the story of Lou Rymkus while doing some research on another project last week. At around the same time, I came across a story from The Athletic’s baseball writer, Eno Sarris, set at the sport’s winter meetings back in December. In it, Sarris quotes a number of executives who wonder whether baseball’s data-driven revolution has reached its peak; if every team has access to essentially the same analysis, where does the advantage lie?

The answer, several executives told Sarris, no longer lay in angling for some statistical advantage. It came down to actual humanity.