CHAPTER 1

Home of the Chokers (Late 1940s)

Following his military service Jack Swarthout could not havelanded in a place more in need of what he had to offer thanthe community around the public high school in Hoquiamon the east end of Grays Harbor, Washington.

He was book smart and military tough, a believer in rules,punctuality, all in a place that had a historic dearth of intellectualpursuits and more than it needed of booze, broads,and quick money, usually in that approximate order. Thiswasn't postwar middle America from a Chamber of Commercecampaign. It was part timber boom town after everythingwent quiet and part poor man's Reno, all of it stillliving off blue-collar jobs in the mills or at the docks. Nobodywould have confused Hoquiam with Mayberry. Herethe deputies needed more than one bullet and had betterknow how to use a gun.

Swarthout was something of an odd bird, a mix of an egg-headed,voracious reader and a by-the-rules-boys war-hardenedveteran and eccentric fitness freak. He was a reader ofscience fiction and history as a kid, firing his imaginationwith dreamy possibilities through books and periodicalsthat lifted his thoughts beyond the difficult realities of dailyrural life in 1930s America. He was told, and believed withevery fiber of his being, that he could be whatever he wantedto be and that a good education was the passport to gethim there.

What they had in common, Swarthout the individualand Hoquiam the community, was a lack of pretense. Intowns like Hoquiam and nearby Aberdeen, your smarts,sweat, and reliability took you a long way. It was a littlemore involved than that for Swarthout, who was enoughto let his imposing presence work for him while his mentalagility kept him a few steps ahead of the football playershe coached and his staff. Swarthout may have asked fora little more than the community in which he got his startas an unconventional high school coach with an ability tomotivate his players, but he was never a bully. It never gotpersonal with him.

As a coach Swarthout used a compelling mix of the tangibletechniques of precision blocking and tackling, packagedwith concepts that were abstract for his time. He wasone of the early postwar pioneers who wanted to exploit defenseswith a surgical passing game instead of relying on afew simply executed pass plays designed to make an overlyaggressive defense pay for stacking up to stop the run.Swarthout wanted more than a generic passing game. Howmuch of a difference can you make when you try to do everythingbetter than your opponent?

His military background and football experience taughthim to give vigorous attention to physical discipline whilehis vivid imagination filled his head with abstract concepts.To Swarthout, anything was possible if you worked hardenough. The real question was, what exactly is it that youwant to do?

All coaches need a key player at the right time to make theirideas relevant, and the relationship Swarthout had with hishigh school quarterback in Hoquiam turned out to be determinativein the development of the spread offense yearslater. Swarthout had no way of knowing how the passinggame concepts he installed at his first coaching job wouldeventually evolve, but his spirit of adventure and sound techniquewere the seeds from which it all sprouted.

Swarthout had attended the University of Montana on athleticscholarship and played football for the Grizzlies untilgraduation in 1942, when the Reserve Officer TrainingCorps sent him off to Officer Training School and deploymentaround the world. By then football played a starringrole in the character development and morale of the Americanmilitary, which was, effectively, the greenhouse for generationsof football coaching ideology.

Having emerged from elite schools in the Northeast, footballspread quickly across the United States in the twentiethcentury and was considered to be compatible on several levelswith the goals and aspirations of the armed services. Football'sfocus on physical fitness, attention to detail, knowingyour role as part of the team—all of it reinforced and enhancedmilitary life. Navy preflight schools established atthe universities of North Carolina, Iowa, and Georgia andat Saint Mary's College in Northern California assembledfootball teams to compete against the top college squads inthe country. The navy teams more than held their own.

How much has the world changed? In the twenty-first centurytroops come home from overseas in anonymity, lookingfor jobs, struggling to keep their families afloat. DuringWorld War II they came home to local acclaim and took positionsof respect and authority, often in football.

The list of preflight football coaching veterans includesAlabama legend Paul "Bear" Bryant, Missouri's Don Faurot,and Maryland's Jim Tatum, all football coaches before,during, and after their service. Bud Wilkinson came out ofan assistant coaching position at Iowa preflight and later ledOklahoma to a still-standing record of forty-seven consecutivevictories.

The Army team at West Point was a national power duringthe war years, with talent backed up by more talent, allof it led by running backs Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis.They dominated Heisman Trophy voting for three years,winning the prize in 1945 and '46, respectively.

Football sold the military and the military sold football toAmericans, each invigorating feelings of patriotism, effort,and honor. When victorious men came back from World WarII and the Korean War and got involved in college football,they married two institutions that still worked toward mutualbenefit.

Many of the returning vets were former players—likeSwarthout—who became coaches at small colleges or highschools after their tours of duty. They weren't just lookingfor jobs; many of these war veterans believed football was aninstrument, maybe the best one at the time, to move youngmen, and the country, in a new direction. It offered the kindof pull-together teamwork talk that still occurs today, butthe rewards seemed so much closer after World War II tothat particular group of coaches.

Seldom have post-military opportunities had as much influenceas they did at the time those enlisted men returned toclassrooms and football fields after the war. They left DesolationRow and returned to the Avenue of the Americas,believing they could do anything and football was the carriagethat would take them where they wanted to go.

People around the bay of Grays Harbor, Washington, ringedby the workingman's town of Hoquiam and just to the eastthe more "upscale" Aberdeen, were more than ready forwhat Swarthout had to sell. The two towns relied on a burgeoningtimber industry that had frantically deconstructedthe surrounding forests for profit and turned the region,in less than a century, from a pristine emerald dreamlandinto a smoldering pile of careless economics and witless personalvices. It was as though the region had gone on a longdrunk and was finally realizing it needed to sober up andmake something of itself.

If it were possible to view a time-lapse motion picture ofGrays Harbor from the 1790s through the arrival of the firstwhite settlers in the mid-1800s, the appearance of the railroadin 1895, and Swarthout's arrival roughly fifty years later,it would be a chilling piece of film to behold. The areahad been inhabited by the Chehalis, Quinault, Wynoochee,and Humptulips tribes for hundreds of years prior to May7, 1792, when Boston fur trader Robert Gray, the first whiteman to explore the area, crossed the bar into the dewy quietof the pristine bay that would eventually bear his name. TheChehalis tribe named the area Ho'kweeum. Loosely translated,Hoquiam, as it was later spelled, meant "hungry forwood."

Five rivers empty into that shallow, wide bay in what becamesouthwestern Washington State. Before long, "hungryfor wood" was converted from a description of the land to adepiction of what happened when white men came in withtheir screaming, gas-powered saws, ripped through the tallfirs, dragged them to market, and forever changed the faceof the region. The railroad came right into the harbor to facilitatethe retailing of the forest, and a population of hardworking,hard-drinking loggers transformed the area intosomething the natives never could have imagined.

In the timber business, workers could get a cash payoutfor each day of work in the forest and then squander it awayby night in the area's bars and crowded houses of prostitution.Location was central to and almost codified the rampantdebauchery. Grays Harbor became a gray area for politiciansand lobbyists to the powerful. Just an hour's drivewest of the state's center of political power in Olympia, itwas close enough for politicians to sneak away for an afternoonor evening, yet it was far enough removed from the big-citynewspapers in Seattle and Tacoma, a couple of hours'drive to the northeast, to escape their attention.

They clear-cut the land by day and partied by night, eachendeavor leaving societal scars. Grays Harbor's skyline featuredmore than three dozen pulp, saw, shingle, and timbermills. After the community college opened in 1930, they nicknamedteams "Chokers" after the choke-setter—commonlyreferred to as "choker"—who was responsible for securing acable around felled trees to be dragged out of the forest.

Smokestacks firing clouds of hot ash into the sky framedthe profile of the port of Grays Harbor, so littered with years'accumulation of junk logs and unwanted wood chips thatit appeared possible to walk from one end of the bay to theother across the timber debris. From mid-October throughMay, when morning fog, overcast skies, and drizzle werethe norm rather than the exception, the place projected aforeboding panorama that provided literal heft to the colorthat embodied the harbor's name.

It was in this environment that someone like Jack Swarthoutwas both ready and welcome to any challenges.

Swarthout learned what the world looked like from a bleakadolescence on a farm in southern Washington State duringthe Great Depression and then came home from WorldWar II to a culture of burgeoning prosperity and possibility.Never before and never since has a generation ofAmericans grown up like Swarthout's did, seeing firsthandas teenagers the economic desperations of life, thencoming back from war to experience their country growinginto unparalleled prosperity. All things seemed possible,especially on the football field, just like Swarthout hadalways believed.

Swarthout saw football's lessons as valuable to the individualplayer, his school, the community, and as he said manytimes, "to the U.S. itself." The thing that made him standout was how he thought about winning.

Swarthout must have had an abundance of tactical genes.He was fascinated by uncommon approaches that couldcatch an opponent off guard and force him to scramble tomake changes in the heat of the game. He became an unofficialand often unrecognized father figure of sorts to an innovativecollection of northwestern football coaches whopresented their own rebuttal to the coaching orthodoxy ofthe times. From his navy experience, Swarthout knew allabout toughness, sacrifice, and determination, but he alsounderstood that everyone else knew all about that, too. Hewas interested in more, namely, the great benefit of tacticalthinking.

Swarthout didn't just want to beat the opposing team ina physical contest with stamina and fitness, he wanted allthe advantages on his side, starting with tactics. He knewit all gets set in motion with a thought and if your conceptcan flummox the other guy, it was that much easier to win.

Offensive football has always been polymorphic at thestrategic level, the capacity to score points being an objectivethat can be achieved in numerous ways by those willingto explore. Innovators are found at the edges, stressing theperfection of fundamental techniques but doing so throughdiffering architectural designs. Swarthout was emblematicof an almost tribal band of northwestern football coacheswho leaned more heavily on the thinking part of the gamethan most. They wanted to outthink you from the very startso you had to question every decision you made and thenthey wanted to beat you with execution.

To Swarthout, football was a game that improved andsharpened competitive instincts. It stressed discipline andemphasized the importance of teamwork. He felt there wasan edge to be gained in the attention span of his playerswhen he introduced a different approach or a new wrinkleto what they were already doing. In the end, he believed akid could hop into his football vessel and, through repetitionand attention to detail, learn how to become a betterteammate. What he really wanted, after all of that, was toshow his players how to grow up and be responsible adults.

The job teaching history and coaching at Hoquiam was, initself, something that evidenced a kind of synchronicity. EverythingSwarthout knew and believed in was emboldenedby the sense of cultural chaos that blanketed Grays Harborlike a morning fog that lifts in the afternoon and returnsby dawn. The oddity was that Hoquiam's mascot was theGrizzlies, the same as Swarthout's alma mater, and the bitterrival down the street in Aberdeen was the Bobcats, justas his old in-state collegiate rival, Montana State, had alsobeen the Bobcats.

No other high schools in the state had those two nicknames.Swarthout later admitted he was looking for a highschool head coaching position, preferably matched with aclassroom role as a history teacher, but the clincher wascoaching the Grizzlies against the hated Bobcats. It was alittle football kismet at work and it just felt right.

The two schools in Hoquiam and Aberdeen still maintainthe longest continuing high school rivalry west of theMississippi River. The longer it goes, the more attention itreceives, but it was an even-bigger deal back in the 1940s.There wasn't an athletic event in Grays Harbor more importantthan the annual Thanksgiving Day game betweenHoquiam and Aberdeen.

The Aberdeen-Hoquiam game always drew capacity crowdsof ten thousand to Olympic Stadium, built with local timberas a Works Progress Administration project and completedin 1938. It had the feel of a big-time facility because,when filled for games, the covered grandstand produced abooming sound out of those wooden bleachers that wouldmake you think you were in the Rose Bowl.

Swarthout looked the part of a postwar football coachstraight out of central casting. A picture of him, hands onhips in a T-shirt, sweat pants, and high-top sneakers witha tightly cropped GI flattop haircut, big shoulders, and thatsteely, no-nonsense, tight grin that glared out of his ruggedbuild would have made an excellent poster for the GreatestGeneration.

His approach in the classroom was somewhat didactic,strictly by the book, but his coaching, while emphasizingsound fundamentals, was forward leaning for his time interms of its design. Swarthout believed in the three Rs, whichwere repetition, repetition, and repetition, principles he usedto implement his version of the T formation. One of hiscoaching mantras was, "We're going to do it over until weget it right and then we're going to keep doing it right untilwe get it perfect."

He was smart enough to understand that the over-the-topdrill sergeant approach was best left in the military, where itbelonged, and was not suitable for the environment in whicha public school educator and coach went to work each day.He wasn't an in-your-face screamer, but he surely was insistentand aggressive. He believed that in all areas of lifethinking prompts action—that belief was at the core of hisfascination with football tactics—so when a young man'sthinking is confused, his behavior will tend to be erratic.