“Everyone loves a winner.”
Most of the time this old saying is true. Knute Rockne was a colorful coach, and his Notre Dame team won a lot of games. The fans, the sportswriters and the players loved him dearly. Vince Lombardi was not so colorful, but his Green Bay Packers won a lot of games. The fans loved him, even if his players and many sportswriters were actually afraid of him.
But some coaches get their results from being hated. Gil Dobie was dour and drab. The fans, the sportswriters and nearly all his players hated him. But the records show that he was even more successful at winning games than Rockne and Lombardi.
Dobie became head coach at North Dakota Agricultural College in 1906. “Gloomy Gil,” as he was later called by sportswriters, had an unbeatable team. Dobie’s boys went through undefeated seasons in 1906 and 1907.
Then Dobie was hired by the University of Washington, where he earned his reputation as the most hated man in athletics. The first day of practice he barred everybody from the field. The mayor and the postmaster of Seattle wanted to get in, but Dobie wouldn’t let them. A fistfight almost broke out.
Then he set about terrorizing the Washington players. “You are the dumbest, clumsiest excuses for football players I’ve ever seen,” he snarled. One of the most popular students on campus was lineman Pete Tegtmier. Dobie growled at him, “You yellow-haired bum, you’ve got a yellow streak up your back as yellow as your dirty yellow hair!”
He never praised his players, even when they played their hearts out for him. During meetings with the team, none of the players were allowed to speak. He told the quarterback Wee Coyle that he played like a man “devoid of brains.” “I wouldn’t even let you play,” he said grimly, “if I didn’t have so many cripples.” Yet Coyle was one of the best football players in the Northwest.
No effort seemed to satisfy him. In 1915, Washington routed California, 72-0. Dobie didn’t want his men to get too cocky–he ordered them to run 20 laps around the field.
Washington fans despised him. Spectators booed him openly and threw peanuts at him.
Dobie coached Washington from 1908 through 1916, and in those years his teams never lost a game! Their overall record was 58 wins, no losses and 2 ties. Those nine undefeated seasons, added to the two at North Dakota Agricultural College, gave Dobie a total of 11 straight undefeated seasons. It is unlikely that this record will ever be beaten. Later, at Cornell, he was undefeated for three more consecutive years, 1921-23.
But Dobie never mellowed and was never loved by very many of his players or fans. He proved that even a winner can be unloved if he is ill-tempered enough.
According to hockey’s early rules, a goalie was supposed to remain standing. The rule provided that if a goalie dropped down to the ice to block a shot, he was automatically fined two dollars. If he did it a second time in a game, he was fined three dollars and assessed a five-minute penalty. At that rate, modern goalies would be in the penalty box most of the time.
If there is a record for the shortest major league career by a pitcher, it surely belongs to a right-handed pitcher named Henry Heitman.
On July 27, 1918, Heitman started a game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He faced the St. Louis Cardinals. The first four batters all hit safely. Heitman was sent to the showers. He promptly enlisted in the United States Navy and never played major league baseball again.
From The Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=mX5hAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Nk0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=4990%2C3278748
“Winning Villain” (and my father) had a terrible influence on me as I got older. I thought that if I was the best that anyone had ever seen at my job, I could be as much of an asshole as I wanted to be. I learned (very slowly, after getting shitcanned a lot) that performance does not necessarily trump personality. I even had managers tell me that I was the best they’d ever seen, but that I was simply too toxic to keep.
Being the slow learner that I am, I even took this attitude into management roles, with the result that I not only tended to get fired a lot, but my turnover was sky high because people didn’t want to put up with my shit.
Eventually, it was Charlie Daniels, of all people, who helped me understand the truth. He said to me, “it doesn’t matter if you’re making records or digging ditches. It’s always about people.”
I’m happy to say that I took the advice seriously and it paid off.
You were ahead of your time. These days high toxicity levels are valued more than performance. At least in government.
But seriously, you may have been a slow learner but you did learn. Many people never do.
Dobie sounded like a familiar name for some reason…
Then I put it together–it was a name I saw around the BSA(Bison Sports Arena),when I was an athletic training major at ‘SU.
He was inducted into the school’s athletic HOF, just a couple years before I started college;
https://gobison.com/hof.aspx?hof=134
NDAC finally became known as NDSU in the 1960’s;
https://library.ndsu.edu/fargo-history/?q=content/north-dakota-agricultural-college-ndsu