Season Preview: Rams ’92 : The Man, the Legend Returns on a Mission: Get It Done on Game Day

He stands straight, and when he looks at you, his eyes burn. He locks his legs in place and crosses his arms. His mouth is cracked open, jaw out, and his eyebrows communicate a thousand unspoken thoughts.

He does not move.

This is how it works with Chuck Knox. With the players, with the media, with everybody. This is how he communicates and teaches, quick and without varnish or wasted effort. He stands in place, and everybody moves around him.

The clock is ticking, and he is saying very little.

“Questions, questions?” he says to start his dealings with the media, as much of a command as an opening to discussion. Come on now, he is saying, let’s get this over with.

Why should Knox waste his time painting pretty word pictures for the media when there is work to be done, players to be coached, fines to be levied? Get it done, get out, let everybody talk about it afterward.

That’s how you last 20 years in this league, he believes. That’s how you win for just about 20 years. Have a plan. Get it done. Talk later. If at all.

No hidden agendas, no lies, no regrets.

“I think what’s out front publicly is what you do on Sunday, on game day,” Knox says in a more relaxed moment, still cautious but not quite answering on his usual 24-second clock. “Did you win or didn’t you win?

“Some guys can run around, got a million quotes and this and that . . . and that’s fine, if that’s their modus operandi. But I think what it comes down to, regardless of how much talk you do, you’ve got to get it done on the football field.

“What you do speaks so well, you don’t need to hear what you said.”

What Chuck Knox does is so loud, he never needs anyone to hear what he says .

If the job gets done, who needs to hear a man brag? If it doesn’t, no amount of sweet words and emotional explanation is going to change that.

So here, in the beginning of what he acknowledges is surely his final ride on a two-decade NFL merry-go-round, Knox gets fidgety when asked if he considers this Ram team his legacy, the last and best chance to do the job right. To be remembered once and for all as a winner.

“I don’t think about being remembered by anything,” he says. “All I want to do is go do the job that I’ve got to do, that I’ve hired on to do. There’s more pride in that. There’s satisfaction in getting that done. So I can deal with that on a day-to-day basis.

“I’m not a big-ego guy. I don’t need to be running around, having a whole group of politicians, people telling me what a great guy I am, that type of thing. I can survive and relax when the day is done with my wife, my friends or what have you. I don’t need to be constantly told by somebody . . . it’s like an ego that has to be filled all of the time.

“I don’t race to find out what people are writing about me. Those things are necessary, but it’s not that I’m obsessed with that. . . . I just want to go do the job I’ve got to do.”

He looks down at a table covered with practice schedules, morning schedules, meeting schedules, then snaps his head back. Then he starts talking in the rhythmic, bouncing, Western Pennsylvania monotone that he falls into when he’s talking about something that really matters.

“Like today, we’ve got practice this afternoon, got Family Night tonight,” he said. “I had to check with a guy yesterday to make sure we have enough hamburgers and hot dogs. Make sure we have enough hats so we can give each girlfriend or spouse or whatever a hat, and the kids a hat. Make sure we have enough ice cream. Also, we’re going to have some kind of ice cream bar, where the kid can eat, easily dispensed rather than having a machine or something where you’ve got to make a cone, takes you forever, you know. I just wanted to make sure those things are done. Obviously I didn’t go do it personally, but I had some people here. I said you better check this. You better ask each player how many people are coming, get a tally here, well, how many staff people are coming.

“These are the deals that you’ve got to take care of.”

Want to know the challenge Chuck Knox is faced with every day as the Rams’ head coach? It’s planning the parties, the practices, the everything , obsessively, to make sure everyone is as focused as he always is.

That’s doing the job. Why waste time on anything else? When you have ice cream cones to worry about, how can you worry about what tomorrow’s headline will say? Do the job, which means do everything. Forget nothing.

“I certainly feel good about the challenge,” Knox says. “It’s a big challenge here. It’s like anything else, you make some progress and you fall back a little.

“You just have to stay the course. You can’t let a lot of things worry you. You can’t worry about things that you don’t have any control over, if you did that you’d be crazy.”

This is a football team that just about drove its last coach bonkers, showing vast promise, then crashing deep and painfully on the rocks of its own disastrous mistakes.

John Robinson, an emotional, thoughtful, at times careless man, lasted nine years, and it is a wonder the end didn’t come sooner. Patience and consistency were not what you would call his virtues.

“I try to keep everything in its proper perspective,” Knox says. “I just believe that no one coach, no one team, no one player is as good or as bad as the media makes him out to be.

“So I’m not up on Cloud Nine one day and down in the hole in the ground the next day, regardless of what’s said. I don’t take myself too seriously in that respect. I try to walk an even keel, not let those kinds of things bother me.

“Now, some people, whatever is said about them or written about them bothers them to the extent they can’t wait to get that person. They spend hours on the phone trying to change this person’s mind.

“You know, that to me is misdirecting energy. I’d rather get out there and talk to the football players. I’d rather get with my coaches and get coaching better than worry about something that was said regardless of how wrong it was. How are we going to change it?

“I better put the energy over here.”

The 1992 Rams are not a quick and easy fix, not even in the hands of a coach renowned for instant turnarounds. If ever a constant flow of energy was needed, the 1992 Rams are it.

Knox has had first-year playoff payoffs twice in his career, with the Rams the first time around 14 years ago, and with the Seattle Seahawks nine years ago.

But he does not compare the team he inherits this season to those situations, which involved the reviving of dampened spirits more than a wholesale talent influx.

Knox compares the task at hand to the job he assumed in Buffalo in 1978. It took Knox three seasons to right the wrongs of the Bills’ mid-’70s collapse. In the previous two seasons to Knox’s arrival from L.A., the Bills were a combined 5-23.

With the Rams, who have been a combined 8-24 in the previous two seasons, Knox has assumed control over a franchise that had its chance to move into the elite when it amassed 10 first- and second-round picks over a two-year period after the Eric Dickerson trade, then proceeded to land not a single impact player in the batch.

With the Rams, the first thing Knox did was revamp the scouting staff, install his own man, John Becker, as director of player personnel, and draft defensive tackle Sean Gilbert to straighten out a stooping defense.

“The situations were similar in that the talent level wasn’t what it should be,” Knox says, comparing his Buffalo experience to this one. “Everybody knows what happens if you make a mistake in the draft, what happens if you have 10 picks in the first two rounds over a two-year period, you should get some quality football players that should be of Pro Bowl caliber.

“The first thing we did in both cases was we tried to shore up the talent end of it. In Buffalo our first year, we won five games. Next year we won seven. And then the third year we were 11-5, won the division.”

So he sees the same type of progression for the Rams now?

“I would like to be competitive right away,” Knox says. “I want to be realistic, though. It’s going to take some time to get it done the right way.”

The Right Way According to Knox is strictly laid out, and never deviates. From L.A. to Buffalo to Seattle back to L.A., his way has always been the only way.

Everything is a plan. The practices. The travel to and from games. Sunday at 1 p.m. What to say, when to say it, what to wear on the sidelines.

“I think a head coach has to have a plan, a plan of action, to know where he’s going, how he wants to get there, where his team is going and how he wants the team to get there,” Knox says. “The thing about a plan, if you have a plan, it prevents you from overlooking the little things.

“Everybody does the big things, but it’s the little minute details that the consistent winners do and they do them exceptionally well.”

Leadership, to Knox, is knowing where to go and the talent to bring others along with you. Unless you know for sure, why should anyone follow?

Partly because of last season’s 10 consecutive losses has them ready for any kind of change, partly because Knox has given them no other option, partly because Knox is charismatic in his own, wordless way, the Rams players appear to be in tune with his plan.

“I don’t think about it,” Knox says. “I guess it just happens. You have to create the climate in which you give him an opportunity to be successful. This is the way. This is the right way. This is the best avenue for you to have a chance to be successful.

“That, to me, is a key thing. Because football players, they know what’s right and what isn’t right. They may not always admit it, but they know when they’re working hard and yet the work is toward a specific goal or objective. They know when you’re wasting time. They know it.”

This time around is Knox’s last time around, on that point he does not offer argument. He thought about quitting coaching when things got unruly in Seattle over the past two seasons, but decided he was not ready.

At 60, back where he started, Knox acknowledges he is building a team he wants to last well beyond his days with them. This is not an in-and-out job--he has been given the security of a long-term deal and owner Georgia Frontiere will let him coach as long as he wants to.

After this one, he will retire. And although he plays down the angle and the urgency of it, this is his last shot at a Super Bowl.

“Everything’s the same,” Knox says. “There’s the same sense of urgency just like when I was here before. I’ve still got to get the job done. If I didn’t get the job done, I wasn’t going to be around.

“But it isn’t like, ‘Oh, you figure a year or two years, (then) you’re out of here.’ I don’t think you can plan that way.

“If you plan that way, you’d go out and mortgage the future and pick up some guys right now that could give you some instant help. And you might start to win before the talent is really good enough to sustain it. That could happen to you.

“So I’m not thinking any further than getting the job done, building it, doing it the right way.”

Knox concedes that not too far off in the distance lies the day when he gives up coaching, the only profession he has known, his life since his first job at Juanita College in 1954, when he was 22.

He has not exactly warmed to questions about his eventual retirement. But now set in the knowledge that the Rams are his team for the rest of his career, ask him in the heat of summer 1992, about whether he thinks about retiring, and he answers plainly.

“It will rest on how I feel,” Knox says. “Do I still have the competitive fire burning? If I still really enjoy it. If I still feel I want to give it the commitment, the time that it takes, because it is a time-consuming job.

“I had less time off this off-season than I’ve ever had because so many things had to be done there at Rams Park.

“If I ever go to the point where I said to myself, on a constant basis, because everybody’s got a thought in mind when things are going tough, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be sitting on a creek bank somewhere throwing a line in the water or be out on a golf course with a couple buddies and having some fun?’

“And that’s natural. But if you become obsessed with wanting to do something else other than this particular job that you’re doing, that’s when I would say, ‘Hey, I’ve had it, it’s time for me to go off and let somebody else do it.’ ”

But those who know him best are quite sure that this day is far off, farther off than anyone who doesn’t know him might imagine.

“He just turned 60,” says Rams’ director of pro personnel Jack Faulkner, a long-time Knox comrade. “Hell, he’s got a long time to go yet. A long time. He might not quit until he’s 75, maybe longer, knowing him.”

Knox does allow that if a Super Bowl with the Rams is within reach, he might reconsider any retirement thoughts.

“I would certainly give that a lot of consideration,” Knox says. “I’d like to see where we are, how close we are. It’s still the ultimate goal, there isn’t any question about that. We’ve done everything else but that.”

He will lead the Rams onto the field of play again Sunday, in Buffalo, the city he left 10 years ago. He says he will feel the same as he did then, same as he has always felt when he has led a team into play. Sixty-year-old men, too, can feel the pull.

“Sure, I get a flutter,” Knox says. “It’s an emotional game. I get . . . I get those butterflies before (games). I still get excited about going out there, making something happen. I still feel a little frustration when they’re moving the ball on us. I’m a competitor.”

Knox might get excited, but it will not show on his face, in his eyes, or in the way he stands locked in place on the sidelines. All around him may be chaos, but in the middle of it, he is still.

In that locker room in Rich Stadium, when there is silence before the Rams enter the field, when Chuck Knox begins his 20th NFL season as a head coach, it will be like it always is with him. One step at a time.

“Well, I think that every day we’re building that,” Knox says. “Every day we’re building that. We’re talking about, you know, playing Ram football, Ram pride. You build it.

“It’s not one big emotional deal. Because you can’t predicate the whole season on just one game. You can’t blow it all there and say it’s over when you’ve got 15 games left. So you’ve got to build something that’s going to be sustaining.

“It must endure.”

Losers to Winners

Chuck Knox has a reputation for turning losers into winners--fast. He’s done it three times in his career and Ram fans hope he has a fourth in him. RAMS

1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 Pre Knox 8-5-1 6-7-1 With Knox 12-2+ 10-4+ 12-2+

+ indicates NFC West champion BUFFALO BILLS

1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 Pre Knox 2-12 3-11 With Knox 5-11 7-9 11-5+

+ indicates AFC East champion SEATTLE SEAHAWKS

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 Pre Knox 6-10 4-5 With Knox 9-7 12-4+ 8-8

+ indicates AFC wildcard entry LOS ANGELES RAMS

1990 1991 Pre Knox 5-11 3-13

Source: National Football League Record & Fact Book