It’s impossible to establish precisely when they hit bottom. The well was so wide there was room enough for any number of Tampa Bay Buccaneers players, coaches, front-office personnel and even fans to choose their personal favorite.
The modern-day Bucs have their own low points and the barometer, strangely enough, is the color of their uniforms.
“There were a lot of lows,” Warren Sapp said the other day. “But I guess when we walked into the last game in San Francisco and Sam Wyche tried to make us put on all-orange uniforms, that was probably the lowest.”
The survivors who had to wear the orange–Sapp, John Lynch and Derrick Brooks–called it Dreamsicle orange, and they associated it with all the embarrassment of years past.
They didn’t know embarrassment.
Rich McKay did. He was a senior in high school when his father, John, left his job as coach at Southern California, where he had won four national championships, and moved the family to Tampa. Rich McKay, now the Bucs’ general manager, does not mince words when recalling those first years.
“It was not hard, it was miserable,” he said as his team prepared to play in its first Super Bowl on Sunday against the Oakland Raiders.
Accustomed to success with the Trojans, the McKay family wasn’t prepared for failure, Rich acknowledged.
“We were very spoiled kids,” he said. “We were always worried about what the score of the game was going to be and how bad were we going to beat [someone], and all of a sudden they’re thinking the same thing about us. It was traumatic.”
As the expansion Bucs’ first coach, John McKay was as cantankerous as he was erudite, as funny as he was brilliant. If the franchise’s 0-26 start through 1976 and most of ’77 was hard on his family, it was harder on him.
Locals wore T-shirts that read “Throw McKay in the Bay.” They showered him with soft drinks and stronger spirits as he left the field each Sunday.
McKay never tried to curry favor, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had in those early years. To Floridians, McKay was a Yankee, a California snob who spoke a language they did not try to understand. And when he disparaged his own offense with remarks like, “We couldn’t score against a strong wind,” they didn’t laugh.
Johnny Carson did, almost every night. Once he invited McKay to be a guest on the “Tonight Show,” but the coach declined. People wondered who would have won the battle of one-liners.
McKay’s reputation as a football innovator–the modern-day I-formation and the 3-4 defense were his creations–took a back seat to his uncommonly droll sense of humor.
“Bear Bryant and I were out in a boat one time,” McKay once told the Washington Post, “and a youngster asked Bear if he’d get out and walk on water, like everybody said he could. Bear declined.
“So,” McKay shrugged, “I had to get out and walk around just to please the kid.”
McKay might have loved current Bucs coach Jon Gruden, but in one respect they would have nothing in common.
Take this commentary on coaching McKay delivered before the Bucs played Rams for the 1980 NFC championship:
“I didn’t build character at USC and I don’t `motivate’ now in the pros,” he said. “I’m preparing for the Rams game by not working very hard. I’m going to play golf this afternoon, then get my beauty sleep.
“I’ll burn no midnight oil, and I’ll look at no more films. I’ll talk to the team Saturday for about 34 seconds. Overcoaching is the biggest bugaboo of the postseason.
“I don’t believe in all that coach’s gibberish about `lateral motion’ and all those other terms. My wife has good lateral motion and she can’t play at all.”
The Bucs lost that game 9-0, but it’s doubtful that McKay sleeping in the office that week would have helped matters.
Players’ coach? McKay didn’t know what the term meant, though he was on the phone with O.J. Simpson on the infamous day Los Angeles police chased murder suspect Simpson and former USC teammate Al Cowlings around Los Angeles in Simpson’s Bronco.
Can you imagine a present-day coach admitting, as McKay readily did, that he would rather lose with young players to secure the No. 1 draft pick than succumb to public pressure to play or trade for veterans? McKay chose quarterback Doug Williams of Grambling No. 1 in 1978, and Williams helped lead the Bucs to a 10-6 season in ’79 and that NFC championship berth.
They returned to the postseason in ’81 and ’82 before falling back to 2-14 in ’83 as rumors of drug problems and racial turmoil swirled about the team. Williams left for the USFL when team owner Hugh Culverhouse refused to meet his contract demands.
Just as they were when they beat the Saints to break their 0-26 streak in 1977, the Bucs became just another bad team after that as the ’80s became a journey through mediocrity. The ’84 team went 6-10 with Steve DeBerg at quarterback and Lee Roy Selmon in his last season.
It was John McKay’s last year as well, and as some observers sat awestruck, he walked off into the Florida sunset with a 41-21 home victory against the Jets on Dec. 16, 1984.
McKay had ordered his defensive players to allow the Jets to score late so that James Wilder, the top rusher in Bucs history, could return to the field to try for a record. Wilder never got his NFL record for combined yardage from scrimmage, and the NFL fined McKay for his actions. But he never apologized.
McKay later said his health was what made him quit. Cataracts were affecting his eyesight, and he needed angioplasty the next year. But he also left with a broken heart, leaving a team whose owner refused to spend money and a fan base that never appreciated what he had started.
The irony is that these Bucs are his Bucs as much as anyone’s, a team that may make a better fashion statement but is still built on the defensive foundation he created–a no-nonsense team he surely would appreciate.
John McKay died of complications from diabetes June 10, 2001.
“I think he would be very happy,” son Rich said as he fought back tears in the NFC championship locker room last week. “I think he’d like this football team.
“I would have loved to see him see it through, but by the same token I think he took great pride in the fact that the franchise did turn. It had gotten back to being respectable.”
Just like the old man.
