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Before Cooke’s arrival, the team had played in one Super Bowl, in 1973, losing to the undefeated Miami Dolphins. After he came to town, the Redskins made a habit of Super Bowls, winning three of four in a decade from 1983 to 1992.
This was a dynasty with no end in sight, except, of course, Cooke’s plan to live forever ran up against the inevitable in 1997.
His team was sold in 1999 for $800 million to Daniel Snyder, a 34-year-old entrepreneur who grew up a Redskins fan in Maryland and who, as owner, suggested that underlings should address him as Mr. Snyder.
He led us to the place we are now. It’s a bad place: Zero Super Bowls in his 24 seasons, two playoff victories, and, yes, absolutely, the team’s name had to go, but, come on, “Commanders”? Really?
To be incompetent for 24 seasons is to be reminded of an idiom once uttered by Edward Bennett Williams, the legendary Washington lawyer with a side gig as part owner and president of the city’s football team, in charge while Cooke lived out west.
EBW said, “A fish rots from the head.”
It’s now certain that such rotting can go on for, oh, pick a number, 24 years.
National Football League teams seldom stay bad forever. Bad teams get first choice of college stars. Also, a team’s financial well-being is ensured by the league divvying up television’s billions, every franchise profiting equally, no matter a franchise’s sorry, sordid, serial instances of incompetence.
I digress. Let us return to the best of times. On one such day, Jan. 22, 1983, the earth moved. Damned if it didn’t. RFK Stadium, bless its creaking bones, quivered under tens of thousands of happy feet. The capital of the free world had become Hog Heaven. The Redskins whipped up on the Cowboys, 31-17, John Riggins irresistible, Joe Theismann ascendant, everyone riding the Hogs to the Super Bowl two weeks later with the billionaire owner–cheerleader declaring of the day’s spectacle, “This is controlled delirium.”
From RFK’s second level, Jack Kent Cooke waved a hand over the bedlam. Fans flooded the field, tore down a goal post, ripped up chunks of turf and misbehaved as if transported to joy long denied. All of it launched the theatrical Cooke on one of his flights of oratory that often soared miles past pomposity but, in that moment, passed as God’s honest truth.
“There is a coagulation, a community of interest here that is astonishing in its depth,” Cooke said. “All over this city. The rich, the poor. The black, the white. The communists, the socialists. The affluent, the unpossessed. All are bound together in this city on this day by these Redskins.”
They won that season’s Super Bowl. Joe Gibbs was the coach, unforgettable if, in his second season, not yet truly known. Big Dave Butz was the unmovable anchor of football’s best defense. With delight, Dexter Manley took people apart. Mark Moseley missed but one of 21 field goal attempts that season. Those glorious Hogs — Russ Grimm, Joe Jacoby, Mark May, Jeff Bostic, George Starke — cleared the way for Riggins rolling to the tune of an 18-wheeler’s air horn. Dedicated readers of the Peanuts cartoon strip judged it good and right that the Fun Bunch’s main touchdown catcher was a wide receiver, Charlie Brown, at last an action hero.
Six years earlier, in 1977, I drove to Redskin Park to meet coach George Allen. His desk sported a sign asking visitors, “What have you done today to help us win?” Allen soon got sideways with EBW, never a good position to be in with a trial lawyer who once won an acquittal for Jimmy Hoffa. Allen was told to absent himself.
Cooke was no fanboy. He had run teams in baseball, basketball, hockey and football. In 1981, Cooke chose to fire coach Jack Pardee but kept the general manager, Bobby Beathard. When Beathard told Cooke he should hire a coach he had never heard of — Gibbs, then the San Diego Chargers offensive coordinator — Cooke asked only that Beathard bring this Joe Gibbs to New York at season’s end. He’d like to size him up.
Beathard, a California surfer boy comfortable in shorts and T-shirts, arrived at Cooke’s Waldorf Astoria apartment in a sports coat and a loosely knotted tie he’d bought that morning. There began an evening’s talk, an audition. The coach answered the owner’s questions. The general manager listened, his work done.
You know the rest, the Hall of Fame stuff.
Now the team is sold again, forced from Mr. Snyder’s hands by the league’s wise men. Let us hope the next owner, one day soon, sees controlled delirium on the stadium grass.
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