The Voice of Experience : Harland Svare Has a Message for Young NFL Coaches and People Who Own Their Teams: Be Firm and Patient

Harland Svare was 31 when the Rams promoted him from defensive line coach to head coach halfway through the 1962 season.

He was the youngest coach in the history of an old league, and all these years later, it’s a distinction Svare still holds.

He remembers, though, that he didn’t give it much thought until this year, when two other 30-somethings, Dave Shula and Bill Cowher, are leading a new youth movement in the NFL.

It’s a league with an assortment of coaches in their 30s or early 40s, the youngest of whom are Shula, 32, Cincinnati Bengals; Cowher, 35, Pittsburgh Steelers; Bill Belichick, 39, Cleveland Browns; Dennis Green, 43, Minnesota Vikings, and Mike Holmgren, 44, Green Bay Packers.

What problems do young coaches face? And what advice does Svare have for them?

“I don’t think anyone craves advice,” he said the other day in Del Mar, where, on the road to the race track, he is co-proprietor of a flourishing health-and-therapy clinic.

“Anyhow, age isn’t all that important. Your grasp of football isn’t (decisive), either. All NFL assistants know football. We live in difficult times now--but that doesn’t have anything to do with it, either.

“Looking back on my years in the league, I think the only thing that matters in coaching is getting along with people. The thing that counts is forcing football players to do what you want them to do--and making them like it.”

Svare, whose name rhymes with starry, smiled.

“Make people enjoy being pushed, that’s the key,” he said.

Svare is a forthright, cheerful sort who had begun with the Rams as a linebacker. Eventually he was to put in 3 1/2 years as their coach, which was longer than most of his predecessors lasted. Later, after a tour as a general manager in San Diego, Svare coached the Chargers for 2 1/2 years.

He realized too late that he had been ill-prepared for such a career. He could look back, on only 1 1/2 seasons as an assistant coach, including a year in New York and a few months with the Rams. Even so, he was a football expert in 1962, his players used to say.

“I know I was old enough at 31 to handle the football problems,” he said. “But I also know that I didn’t handle people well at all.”

The whole thing, he says, is maturity.

“Dave Shula is old enough, if he’s mature enough,” Svare said. “The maturity thing pops up in so many ways. At 32, you’re lucky if you’ve seen enough to draw on your experience every time something goes wrong. And a whole raft of things go wrong every day on a football club, on and off the field.

“I think some kids might be that mature. They’ve somehow managed to experience almost everything. But most young people haven’t.”

TOUGH GUY

Those who flew on Ram charters 30 years ago still remember the Sunday night that Svare, nearly consumed by rage, sat silent and alone all the way home from a game in which his team had played listlessly and lost.

A day later, having made up his mind on the airplane, he scrimmaged the Rams most of the afternoon at their practice field in Burbank--although Monday scrimmages were, and are, so rare in pro ball that nobody can remember another.

“If you don’t play Sunday, you’ll play Monday,” Svare screamed as he drove the team on its usual day off. “And if you don’t play next Sunday, you’ll scrimmage next Monday.”

On the sideline, it was noted that the players didn’t really seem to mind. Though bruised and aching from the beating they had taken only 24 hours earlier, they practiced with obvious enthusiasm until Svare had had enough.

When, a week later, they lost again, the Rams wondered openly if they would have to put in another dreadful Monday.

They didn’t.

“I thought about it, but I couldn’t read the (players),” he said. “I hadn’t had enough experience (leading) people. I was immature. I was inconsistent, too inconsistent.”

It was, he confessed, his worst failing as a coach.

If he were Dave Shula’s age, and just now taking charge of an NFL team, knowing what he knows, how would a 32-year-old Svare proceed?

“I’d be a tough guy with a warm heart,” Svare said. “I’d be tough as nails and warm as your best friend.

“I’m for total free agency after four years in the league, and I would also do whatever I could to (maximize) their pay and perks. But I’m convinced now that football players have got to be handled with a rough hand. To be a good player, you have to be pushed right to the limit of what you can stand.

“Nobody likes to be criticized, but unless their faults are pointed out to them every time, football players just don’t develop, regardless of how much talent they have. It’s human nature to think you can work out on your own, to think you’re working hard. But if somebody isn’t driving you, you’ll never reach your potential.”

At the same time, Svare said, everything depends on getting each player to understand that there’s nothing personal in the way the coach attacks him on the practice field.

“You have to be a loving, caring father figure to each one, even if you’re about the same age,” he said. “You have to think of ways to make each of them realize that the harder you drive them, the more you love them, because football is that kind of game--a very, very tough game.

“It’s a funny thing about a football team. If they’re sure there’s nothing personal in the way you drive them, they’ll respond to hard work. Deep down, they know it takes that. They even enjoy the feeling they get when they feel that they’ve done something tougher on the (practice field) than any other team. In a way, I guess, it’s like the (U.S. Marines).”

OWNERS’ GAME

“The way football is now, you win when you have an involved owner,” Svare said. “You lose if you have an absentee owner. I suppose there are some exceptions, but sooner or later, things always go to hell on a team with absentee ownership.”

It is Svare’s view that NFL coaches, regardless of ability, seldom control their own destiny in today’s large, high-powered organizations.

“You want to know if Shula and Cowher and those other young people are going to make it, and I tell you that nobody knows,” he said.

“Nine times out of 10, the organization they land in is the difference for a new coach, young or old. The problem is that the things that were wrong with the organization when the coach was hired are still there.

“How does management handle salary misunderstandings? Do they leave the players angry and confused? How good is the scouting department? Are the same faces still there--the faces that drafted the personnel that couldn’t win last year and the year before?”

It often happens that a new coach makes a surprisingly fast start, as Cowher did this year in Pittsburgh. Then, often, new coaches falter.

“The deep-seated problems in a football organization don’t always show up right away,” Svare said. “It’s like being married. The problems may not start on the honeymoon, but they’re there.”

NFL club owners, he said, share one thing.

“They never want to fire the coach,” Svare said. “After all, they hired the guy. They’d hang onto him indefinitely it weren’t for fan criticism and media criticism. It’s the talk shows and the newspaper writers, and the newspaper’s letter writers, who do most of the firing today. The owner feels that his hands are tied.

“That’s why any new coach, young or old, better be iron-backed. He better know how to push people around, how to lean hard on his players and as hard as possible on management. He only has one real friend--himself.”

THERAPIST

In their 55 years the Rams have had 17 or 18 head coaches, depending on whether you count Chuck Knox once or twice.

Svare, 12th on the Ram list, launched his coaching career as a 1960 assistant in New York, where he remains the answer to a trivia question: Who succeeded Hall of Famer Tom Landry as defensive coordinator of the Giants?

The answer is the same to another trivia question: Who succeeded Hall of Famer Bob Waterfield as coach of the Rams?

Waterfield, the UCLA quarterback who in 1945 and 1951 led the Rams to their only NFL championships, was less effective as a coach.

He had brought Svare in to help out--so on the 1962 morning that the Rams changed coaches, Svare, disbelieving and distressed, drove immediately to his friend’s home.

As Waterfield told it before he died several years ago, Svare asked: “Is it true, Bob?”

“Yeah, I’m leaving,” Waterfield said. “I’m going hunting, and if you had any sense you’d leave, too, and go hunting with me.”

Few coaches ever have that much sense. What’s more, Svare had reached a goal that he had been thinking about since childhood in Clarkfield, Minn., where he was the fourth of five children in the family of a butter maker.

From college football at Washington State, he joined the Rams as a 17th-round draft choice in 1953.

In 74 NFL coaching starts, Svare was 14-31-3 with the Rams and 7-17-2 with the Chargers. With both franchises it was a time of rebuilding and slow growth with young players, or he wouldn’t have been hired. Not at 31.

He remained a favorite with the owners who hired him, Dan Reeves in Los Angeles and Gene Klein in San Diego, to the end of their days.

As Reeves said in later years after replacing him with George Allen: “I had more fun losing with Svare than winning with Allen.”

Today in his role as a health clinic professional, Svare lives in Del Mar with his wife, Annette, a New Yorker who was Giant owner Wellington Mara’s secretary. The Svares have a daughter.

His clinic partner is Pete Egoscue, developer of a method of rehabilitation through motion, posture and anatomical therapy.

Svare still watches pro football closely, he said. And he has an unconventional recommendation to make to club owners who hire unusually young coaches.

“Let them grow. Give them time,” Svare said. “They’ve got something--or you you wouldn’t have hired them. Tell the world you’ve guaranteed them four full years, no matter what. And stick to it. “