Bearish Attitude Doesn’t Hold Water at St. John’s

John Gagliardi picked up his office phone not long after his 114th career defeat and sounded, well, defeated.

“I don’t like to take those losses,” he said. “You’ve got to be careful you don’t analyze yourself into a depression.”

With stadium gates closed on his 50th season at St. John’s (Minn.), the old coach was going to need a little down time to recover from the Johnnies’ recent semifinal-round defeat in the Division III playoffs.

I was in Collegeville five years ago and could fairly imagine Gagliardi sitting there in his office, shoes off, staring out the window toward a melancholy winter -- how come the losses hurt more than the wins feel good?

Gagliardi’s 114th defeat, it has to be noted, came one week after he recorded career win No. 400, against Linfield College of Oregon.

That victory left the 76-year-old Gagliardi eight shy of Eddie Robinson’s record total of 408, a milestone likely to be passed next season.

“It all depends on my health,” Gagliardi said. “I’m not going to retire, I’ll tell you that.”

It seemed an odd twist that Gagliardi earned his 400th victory just as ESPN started its 24/7 publicity blitz for “The Junction Boys,” the cable movie that chronicled the brutal 1954 Texas A&M; football training camp led by first-year coach Paul “Bear” Bryant.

It is now part of semi-fictionalized cinematic lore, the tall tale of Bryant busing the Aggies west for 10 days of torture. The Junction survivors, like war veterans, retell their stories in round-table discussions -- although always mindful to absolve the beloved Bryant, arguably the greatest college football coach.

I thought of Gagliardi because, as he is poised to become football’s winningest coach, I knew he had spent a half century debunking the boot-camp mentality shared by Bryant and other contemporaries.

Gagliardi took over at St. John’s in 1953, the year before Bryant arrived at Texas A&M;, and watched, aghast, as coaches employed hard-headed tactics to teach kids the tough lessons of football and, if you believed the rationale, life.

“That’s the way coaches thought it had to be done,” Gagliardi said. “There was no other way. That was a time when parents beat their children and employers were tough on their employees. I don’t know, it was a different world.”

Gagliardi could only change his small corner of it.

In 1943, after his coach at Trinidad (Colo.) High was drafted into World War II, the 16-year-old Gagliardi took over as player/coach.

The first thing Gagliardi did was let his players drink water at practice -- considered a sign of weakness.

“I was living in a coal mining community and I saw the mules and I said, ‘Hell, they let those mules have water,’ ” he said. “The miners knew you’ve got to let them have water or they die.”

Gagliardi’s novel approach to the game eventually evolved into a system he called “Winning with Nos.”

At St. John’s, there are no blocking sleds, no mandatory weightlifting requirements, no whistles, no jumping jacks, no tackling during practice, no spring practice, no practice if there are too many gnats, no practices longer than 90 minutes, no calling the coach “coach” and no training camp that remotely approaches Junction.

Gagliardi’s system produced three national titles, 34 consecutive winning seasons, and not one player who jumped a fence at midnight to escape football hell.

“I always questioned a lot of things,” Gagliardi said. “I never believed everything. I always knew calisthenics did nothing. People just thought it was impossible to function without those things.”

For years, people told him his tactics could never work at higher levels of football.

“I don’t know why not,” Gagliardi still argues. “We’re not that far removed from it. We’re obviously not a Division I school but, what the hell, we’re not playing soccer.”

Former Minnesota Viking coach Bud Grant, a football neighbor for years, subscribed to many of Gagliardi’s ideas, but few others strayed from football’s meat-grinder blueprint.

Why not?

“I don’t know,” Gagliardi said. “Probably because Vince Lombardi and Bear Bryant, a lot of these guys were successful, but they might have been successful the other way too. I think a lot of it was because of the military. They were military guys and the military did it that way.”

Gagliardi is down after his most recent defeat, deflated but not out. By the end of our conversation he was talking about a Johnnie squad that next year returns five players on offense and seven on defense.

He looks forward to breaking Robinson’s record but not to the fanfare. He thinks his most impressive accomplishment is never having been fired; others would look to Gagliardi’s remarkable staying power.

Even the great Robinson lost his grip at Grambling near the end and essentially was forced out, yet St. John’s football, like its coach, has aged gracefully.

The Johnnies appeared in the Division III championship game two years ago and advanced to the semifinals each of the last two seasons.

Since 1990, St. John’s has posted a record of 132-23-2. Florida State has gone 137-23-1 in the same span.

“I think of Bobby Bowden, Joe Paterno and myself as just hitting our strides at age 70,” Gagliardi joked.

He says winning 400 football games has been as much about survival as success.

“Your health has got to stay pretty good,” he said, “but you’d better keep your great players healthy too.”

With the countdown to 408 on hold until next fall, Gagliardi stops to reflect and replenish -- hydration is the key! -- before resuming this most unconventional journey.

“When it’s all settled, and you have whatever you have, it’s pretty good,” he said of his accomplishments. “But I’ve been one of the few who ever won 300, and they haven’t put up any statues of me, so I don’t know what this will do. I don’t see my life changing. My wife still expects me to take out the garbage. Nothing changes.”

Not true.

At a small college in Minnesota, a long, long way from Junction, everything changed.