Sid Gillman. Josh Katzowitz
Sid as a senior at North High School.
Sid reaches for a pass in a game against Michigan in 1932.
Sid (2nd from left) at Ohio State, circa 1933.
Sid talking to a recruit at a booster event at Miami University, 1947.
Sid (3rd from right) as an assistant coach at West Point, 1948.
Sid and Esther in 1952, during his time at the University of Cincinnati.
Sid en route to a UC game with unidentified passenger, circa 1950.
Sid carried off by his Los Angeles Rams players after winning the NFL Western Division title in 1955.
Sid during his successful years as head coach of the San Diego Chargers.
Sid coaching in San Diego.
Sid with Chargers running back Keith Lincoln before an AFL All-Star game.
Sid and Esther in 1989.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was sitting in Terry Hill’s basement in San Francisco, leafing through Sid Gillman’s mother’s scrapbook, and I was almost finished. Nearly done with my research for the day—I actually was on the very last page—I came across a plain white envelope.
Postmarked Dec. 27, 1933, from Minneapolis (with a two-cent George Washington stamp), the letter was addressed to “Sidney Gillman, c/o General Delivery, Palo Alto, California.” Gillman, at the time, was playing in the East-West Shrine game, which is why he was on the West Coast after his senior season at Ohio State was complete and why this particular letter was traveling halfway across the country to find him.
Then, the typewritten letter:
Dear Sid:
This, I imagine, will be something very unexpected to you, but nevertheless, I can’t help but say that I have been one of your admirers for the past three years or more and want to say that your picture, which is shown in the “San Francisco News,” is even more than handsome….
Maybe I am wishing for way too much, but then one’s heart but cannot help but flutter. Then again, I suppose competition would be far to (sic) keen for one of my “Standing.” Aaah! How I wish I were even nearer to San Francisco….
I’ll be looking for more of your pictures and I will travel right along with you but Please! Remember I am one of your everlasting admirers.
(Signed, in cursive) Florabelle
Needless to say, I had many questions about this supposed secret admirer letter. I walked upstairs to ask Terry—Gillman’s youngest daughter—about it, and she had no idea. Could anybody alive today know the origin of this letter? There was nobody I could call on the phone or write to in an e-mail. As far as I could tell, it was impossible to know who sent the letter. Was it a joke? Was it real? What did Gillman think about it? More importantly, what did Esther Berg, his future wife, think about it? And why had the letter been kept in the family album? Why was the name of Gillman’s sister, Lillian, written on the envelope?
Why, why, why?
When you write a book on a man who’s no longer walking in this world, the challenges are mighty. You don’t get to feel the grip of his handshake, to hear the tone of his voice, to view the gleam in his eye. He doesn’t have a chance to explain his life, to defend himself, to counter your preconceived notions, to talk about those he loved and hated, to talk about himself.
And you can’t ask him about a 70-year-old secret-admirer letter.
Mostly, you have to rely on the words of others to paint the picture of the man you never got to know.
That said, I highly doubt I could have written this book without the help of Sid’s kids—Lyle Gillman, Bobbe Korbin, Terry Hill, and Tom Gillman. Also, many thanks to Bill Korbin and Larry Hill. Lyle was the first kid I contacted, and it immediately felt like we had known each other for years. She traveled many hours from her home in the mountains of Arizona to Los Angeles to meet up with Bobbe and me and spend two days talking about Sid and Esther and what life was like around them. They answered questions that could not be found in research materials—old newspaper clippings or 50-year-old magazine stories. They took a two-dimensional Sid off the ink print of the newspapers and breathed life into him, giving me a three-dimensional sketch.
We met at the Sheraton Four Points at LAX with handshakes and exited with hugs and kisses. And, from me, a lifetime of gratitude.
Terry, in San Francisco, gave me a great gift—a look at the dusty, deteriorating scrapbook Sid’s mom kept of all his high school athletic exploits that is nearly a century old. Terry also happened to stumble across five videotapes of interviews of Sid and Esther—who in the hell owns a VCR these days, anyway?—that were a lifesaver in helping me piece together their childhoods in Minneapolis.
Tom, though we never connected in Los Angeles, allowed me to pester him on the phone repeatedly during a three-day span, answering questions that were incredibly personal and that opened another side of Sid I never would have seen.
One of my biggest