She Owns Up to the Decision

Wearing bunny earrings--possibly unique among owners of professional football teams--Georgia Frontiere, a Ram in wool clothing, formally introduced Wednesday the organization’s new coach, her new coach, handpicked, custom-made for the job but also secondhand and off the rack, someone old, someone new, someone borrowed, someone royal blue.

What she gave him, aside from four years to get the job done, is the boss’ business and hers alone. Maybe she forked over Ft. Knox to Chuck Knox; if so, lucky him. All we know for sure is that Frontiere freely acknowledged Wednesday that she went out and “hired a friend of longstanding” to coach the very same football team that he once coached for the man who eventually bequeathed it to her.

Her choice.

Make no mistake about that.

This was not necessarily an all-for-Chuck-say-aye consensus by some central committee, although certainly nobody with any input could have volunteered any valid reason not to hire Chuck Knox. No, this was essentially a case of a friend in the league being a friend indeed.

“But that’s not my reason for bringing him back,” Frontiere emphasized.

Go on. We’re listening.

“Chuck has brought success to every team he’s ever been associated with,” she said. “He is a man of vision, a man of integrity and a true-grit football man.”

Hmmm. For a second there, I thought he might be wearing a black eye patch.

Passing judgment on the employment--make that re-employment--of Knox as the new shepherd of the Rams is a pointless exercise. Would a younger, older, nicer, meaner, bosom buddy or total stranger be any better a choice? Only a clairvoyant could possibly know. Fact is, anybody from a team that has lost 10 games in a row should consider himself lucky to be invited back to camp.

I will say this, however, about some of the things the Ram owner did and said Wednesday.

She made sense. Or when she didn’t make sense, at least she made an effort. She was pleasant but also firm. She was self-assured, yet also vulnerable. She was alternately upbeat and hard on herself. She was corny, OK, yet she was realistic. There was no attempt to sugarcoat what happened to the Rams or to suggest that this was a boo-boo that needed only to be kissed to make it better. Georgia said the sort of things that needed saying.

And, as the leader of the whole shebang, it was good to hear it directly from her. She wasn’t simply window-dressing. She was up-front.

She said: “People have a total right to say it’s my fault. Whatever blame that’s there, I deserve.

“Was I too lax? Did I let things go on too long? Should I have intervened sooner? These are questions that I have to ask myself, questions that I have asked myself.

“It’s not always easy for me. I am not a hands-on person. I prefer to delegate authority to those more qualified. But ultimately, this is my football team. I’m accountable. When things aren’t working, it’s up to me to straighten them out.”

Which isn’t easy when you are an eternal optimist, as Frontiere describes herself, or someone more inclined to buss than cuss the hired hands.

“Maybe that was a mistake,” she concedes now. “Sometimes I think I’m not out there as an employer but as a well-wisher. I can’t keep telling the players they’re wonderful before they’ve won. If somebody compliments you before you’re ready, it’s not fair. If somebody praised a story you wrote before you wrote it, would that be praise you’ve earned? I don’t think so.”

Up to a point, it would be like expecting your fans to keep supporting your team, no matter how that team is playing, Frontiere said.

“We have to give them something exciting to watch. There was a time our fans practically willed us to win. You knew from the electricity in the stands that it could keep you going when things got tough. That’s what has been lacking these last couple of years. It has not been much fun for our fans or anybody else. We haven’t made it fun.”

Heaven knows, the former coach tried.

“John Robinson is a very good person who will always be a friend. By the end, I think he was a little angry with himself because he was unable to figure it out himself what was wrong. He thought he was doing everything right, but nothing was working. Well, the same goes for me. I thought we were doing everything right. Maybe I was blind. Maybe too many of us were.”

Hire a friend to repair the damage? Hey, why not hire a friend. Whom should she hire, an enemy?

“If Chuck had said no, I would have been devastated,” Frontiere said. “The search would have gone on, because business is business. But he means a lot to me. I was Carroll Rosenbloom’s wife. As such, I was privy to certain things. When Chuck was let go, he (her husband) was in tears. He said: ‘Go out of the room, please. I don’t want you to see me like this.’ That’s how much Chuck Knox meant to the Ram family.

“When Chuck said yes, I told him: ‘I feel like crying.’ Chuck said: ‘Why?’ ”

That’s when Georgia the family friend and well-wisher chuckled to herself and changed into Georgia the football-team owner.

“I’m not giving Chuck a time frame to win or anything like that,” she said. “What I’d love to do is say, ‘Chuck, you’re going to be with us forever.’ But this is business, not just pleasure, and from now on, I am not going to forget that.”