Sid Gillman. Josh Katzowitz
here was Lincoln, who would be counted on so heavily to beat the Boston Patriots as one of the most important pieces of San Diego’s outstanding offense, driving his car to the game. And feeling sluggish. And crappy.
“I didn’t feel,” Lincoln said, “like I wanted to feel going into a championship game.”
Gillman had waited 30 years for a moment like this. He had waited three decades to showcase his offense, the evolution of which had made him the foremost expert in the art of the forward pass. He had waited so damn long to prove that his crazy ideas, inspired by a maniacal Ohio State coach from the 1930s named Francis Schmidt and expanded upon by Gillman throughout his career, would work.
The AFL championship game was not quite the biggest platform Gillman could have wanted, though the upstart league finally was seeping into the country’s consciousness and pushing against the NFL’s monopoly. But Gillman thirsted to show a national TV audience, and those who had denied and derided him because of his Jewish heritage, and those who always picked somebody else to coach their team, that his Chargers squad knew how to score. That they knew how to win. That he knew how to win.
After AFL championship game losses in 1960 and 1961, after losing the NFL championship title in 1955 when he coached the Los Angeles Rams, and after a 1962 season in which Gillman presided over his worst year as a coach, Gillman needed this win. He needed this validation. Needed it like he needed food in his belly. He needed Lincoln.
And Lincoln needed an aspirin.
In 1963, San Diego was still new to the pro sports scene. The Chargers had moved from Los Angeles two years earlier, and it’s not like a longtime, historically successful NFL franchise had suddenly burst into town. No, the Chargers left L.A. because they were never going to be more popular than the L.A. Rams. They were never going to be more popular than the Rams because the Rams were a longtime, historically successful NFL franchise that drew crowds of more than 100,000. But the Chargers were as exciting as they were fresh-faced. They were AFL upstarts with a growing fan base and an eclectic group of players and coaches who showcased a different brand of football.
Before the Chargers arrived, the city of San Diego was a curiosity to much of the country. To an outsider who hadn’t ventured that far south before, San Diego was a Navy town, a town in which you stopped briefly before heading to the Mexican playground 20 miles away.
The only athletic teams in town to which anybody paid attention were the minor-league baseball Padres and San Diego High School—the latter of which consistently was the biggest sports story in the area. Hardly anybody cared about San Diego State athletics, and Balboa Stadium, which was built in 1914 and now held low-level car races and prep football games, was crumbling.
Until Chargers owner Barron Hilton left L.A. for San Diego, the town’s sporting events sleepwalked through the city’s consciousness. It was, as San Diego Union sports editor Jack Murphy wrote, “the Rip Van Winkle of American cities.”
Or as the wonderful Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray put it, “There’s always a lot of suspense going to San Diego these days because you never know when President Johnson might order it closed or moth-balled—or transferred to Newport News. But I guess they’re afraid of a serious dislocation of the tattoo industry.”
“San Diego was kind of in the doldrums in this period,” said longtime San Diego sportswriter Jerry Magee. “The period through World War II was a very active one here, because we had people making ships and doing things like that to aid the war effort. After the war ended, San Diego went into the doldrums. San Diego needed a catalyst. It needed something that people could rally around in the community. The Chargers became that entity. It represented San Diego’s ability to really become big league.”
That’s why the Chargers’ fans became so entrenched in the team so quickly. It’s why, although the metal seats at Balboa Stadium were awfully uncomfortable, fans suddenly had a new reason to attend games there. It’s why the Chargers knew their decision to leave L.A. for a washed-up Navy hub, which was in the middle of a near-fatal case of sleepy-town blues, was the right one.
Because when the Boston Patriots came to town for the 1963 AFL championship game at Balboa Stadium, the fans were going to experience what Gillman felt. That the Chargers had to win the game.
Before they could get to that title game, San Diego needed a quarterback. Oh, the Chargers already owned a 23-year-old second-year Kansan named John Hadl, but even though he started 10 games in 1962, his reign as a rookie quarterback was disastrous. His passing was inaccurate and inconsistent. He threw 24 interceptions against 15 touchdowns. The team went 1-9 in the games he started. It was clear Hadl wasn’t ready to lead the Chargers anywhere but to the AFL’s basement.
Though Hadl eventually would find his mark, earning six Pro Bowl berths in his 16-year career, Gillman needed a veteran to run the team while Hadl learned how to become a successful pro quarterback. Gillman needed a player who could integrate the team’s passing game into the offense and mesh it together with two of the best running backs in the league. He needed somebody who could inspire.
Gillman found the perfect guy in Canada. He was Tobin Rote, by then a 35-year-old quarterback with not much football left in his body. He already had a long career, winning an NFL championship in 1957 with the Detroit Lions before moving on to the Canadian Football League with the Toronto Argonauts and becoming the best quarterback in that league.
“Tobin Rote is about as great a quarterback as ever took the ball from center,” Gillman said after the 1963 AFL title game, clearly in love and full of hyperbole. “He has a great mind, has all the ability in the world, and is a great leader. As a balanced runner, passer, blocker, leader, field general, he has no superior.”
He also was pretty special when playing with a pounding hangover. For one night game in Toronto, after he had been out until 7 a.m. that day and had slept only three hours, he set a CFL record with 38 completions. He couldn’t stop his hand from shaking a few hours before the game, but still, he managed a feat that would have impressed Mickey Mantle.
The man’s tolerance for booze must have been off the charts, because, even though teammates could smell Rote’s beer breath in the huddle whether it was an 11 a.m. practice or an afternoon workout, he never appeared drunk. In fact, Tobin could down a dozen beers, guzzle a few more while marinating steaks for a barbecue, and then bet anybody that he could drink another dozen Molsons in the span of three minutes. That was a bet Rote would win, and the respect shown by his Argonauts teammates those years was nearly as high as his blood-alcohol level.
Yet, in mid-January of 1963, Rote was available for the Chargers to sign him, and immediately, Rote proved his leadership capabilities. An example: During the 1963 season, Chargers guard Pat Shea was fined $250 by the San Diego police after he went berserk when a traffic officer made what Shea considered rude remarks to Shea’s pregnant wife. The very next day, Rote campaigned to his teammates to get everybody to kick in some money—$5 here, $10 there—to help Shea pay off the fine.
Rote could sit there shirtless in the locker room, a swath of hair on his chest, belly, and arms that made him look like he was wearing a tank top of black fur, and he could make his teammates believe—in him and in themselves.
“He was the greatest guy in the world to be around,” said Tom Bass, then a Chargers assistant coach. “He just brought leadership qualities that were completely unique. Players loved him and would do anything for him.”
Plus, he was tough. On the second play of the Chargers’ first exhibition game of 1963, a defender tore one of Rote’s ribs away from his sternum, an injury that could have kept him out months. Five weeks later, he was starting San Diego’s first regular-season game.
“Tobin Rote had all the stuff,” fullback Keith Lincoln said. “John [Hadl] had a learning curve. Tobin had leadership skills, he could rally the troops around him and his arm still had life. He did a really good job of tying it