- Joined
- Apr 7, 2013
- Messages
- 120,136
By Jayson Jenks 3h ago
Not long ago, I started hunting for the answer to two questions I’ve always been curious about: Why do baseball managers wear uniforms? And why did football coaches stop wearing suits?
Newspaper archives led me to books while books led me back to newspaper archives — a bottomless fall into old photos and forgotten names. Finally, my search led me to two seemingly unconnected men: Connie Mack and Tom Landry.
Both were known for their stoic, reserved natures. Both had long, Hall-of-Fame coaching careers. And, most important to this story, both wore ties and stylish hats during games years after it was fashionable for coaches to do so.
Mack won (and lost) more games than any manager in baseball history; Landry is fourth on the NFL’s all-time wins list. Except for a 10-year gap between Mack’s last game with the Philadelphia Athletics and Landry’s first game with the Dallas Cowboys, their careers spanned almost 90 years. They coached through World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War; through the radio, the television and the desktop computer; and through 18 different presidents, from Grover Cleveland to George H.W. Bush.
Early on, they dressed like men of their era. Mack favored humble derby hats; Landry always donned his trademark fedora. By the end of their careers, however, their style represented a past slipping further and further from the present. For this reason, they seemed like the perfect guides to lead me to answers. Part one: Connie Mack
In 1905, an 18-year-old rookie with the Detroit Tigers was “feverishly excited” to see Connie Mack for the first time. Ty Cobb knew Mack by reputation — an expert had called Mack “the greatest of modern managers” that same year — and Cobb, a rookie from Georgia, wanted to see the legend up close.
The first time the Tigers played Mack’s Philadelphia team, Cobb took the field early, looking for Mack hitting fungoes or warming up pitchers, just like other managers. He couldn’t find him.
Then, right before first pitch, a tall, thin man in a dark suit and black derby hat “popped up from nowhere” and sat in the corner of the dugout. Mack didn’t yell at his team. He held his scorecard, had quiet conversations with players and watched the game with a cool concentration. Cobb called him “The Sphinx.”
“I was disappointed,” Cobb later wrote. “I could not imagine any man commanding a company of young, aggressive ball players who could sit so silently and unemotionally on the bench.”
Cobb was far from alone. Famed newspaperman Damon Runyon once wrote, “Among baseball managers, there are no stoics.” But Mack was the exception, “watching the ebb and flow of the baseball tide while other managers were shouting and raving along the coaching lines.”
Early in Mack’s career, a lot of managers wore uniforms because they also still played. One first-time manager in the 1910s said he would wear a uniform just in case his team needed him as a utility man. But around that time, Ban Johnson, the president of the American League, created controversy when he said he wanted to count any manager in uniform as part of his team’s 25-man roster. Clark Griffith, the future Hall of Famer, strongly disagreed.
“I am not a player because I wear a uniform,” Griffith argued. “I wear a uniform in order to be closer to the game.” Naturally, he explained, he also wanted to be on the field in case he was “compelled to make complaints to an umpire.”
Mack felt no need to complain, coach or yell on the field and therefore felt no need to wear a uniform. He made pitching changes by waving his scorecard and believed his concentration was sharper in the dugout, free of distraction.
Mack stood in such contrast to his peers that Johnson tried to persuade him to wear a uniform and coach on the field in the hope of selling more tickets. Mack declined. One reporter said that wearing a uniform “might break Connie’s heart.”
During Mack’s long career, a few of his peers also didn’t wear uniforms, although for different reasons. “Uncle” Wilbert Robinson, a man of generous proportions, stopped wearing a uniform, one reporter wrote, “when he grew so robust that a tent maker would be the logical baseball tailor for him.” In 1936, a minor-league manager named Joe Engel wore a white linen suit, Panama hat and two-tone shoes during a game. But when a controversy erupted in the seventh inning, Engel couldn’t run onto the field and join the fray.
“You have to wear a uniform to enjoy that privilege,” a reporter quipped. “And so Engel is planning to don a uniform for tonight’s game.”
(Is that true? Does a manager actually need a uniform to go on the field? In 1980, a reporter in Philadelphia set out to answer that question. He called the American League office, the National League office and the office of commissioner Bowie Kuhn. His conclusion: No one really knows. The tradition stuck nonetheless.)
After Mack died in 1956, a reporter said Mack “set ground rules still followed by many managers.” And it’s true. Mack’s stoicism in the dugout and refusal to scold players during games sound familiar, don’t they? But the suit-and-tie manager ended with him — or almost, anyway.
In 2000, the Oakland Athletics honored the franchise’s all-century team, which included the teams in Philadelphia. Oakland manager Art Howe presented the lineup card in a suit and gimmicky straw hat and said he was excited to emulate “the great Connie Mack.”
But Howe did not stick it out. Before first pitch, he put on his uniform.
(Associated Press) Part two: Tom Landry
Ten years after Mack retired in 1950 at the ripe old age of 87, Tom Landry showed up in his fedora. The expansion Dallas Cowboys hired Landry as the franchise’s first coach, and from early on, Landry dressed like a football Frank Sinatra: checkered suits, classy jackets and, always, his fedora.
Then again, so did every other football coach of the era: Vince Lombardi, Hank Stram, Lou Rymkus — all head coaches in 1960, all photographed in suits on the sideline.
I found a photo of Lou Saban dressed in a tie during the 1964 AFL championship game. I found a picture of Don Shula wearing a suit in 1965 and a fedora a few years later. George Allen wore a suit in 1967, John Madden wore a tie in 1969 and on down the line.
So why did they stop? And why didn’t Landry?
The answer to the first question will take some time. But an inquisitive woman from Sparta, New Jersey, asked Landry the second question in 1977. “I’ve always felt the way you look is a perfect indication of what you represent,” Landry responded. “Since we don’t have the chance to meet our fans, they’ll know what we are by the way we look.”
Landry wanted to stand for “class and character.” A college friend once told Sports Illustrated that Landry was “such a gentleman it’s almost spooky.” He had one autographed picture hanging in his office — that of evangelist Billy Graham. He valued “control and discipline,” and prided himself on never bending to emotions, good or bad. At different times, players called him “The Robot,” “the plastic man” and “Dr. Spock.” But it was all intentional.
“People ask how the Cowboys got the name ‘America’s team,’” former Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm is supposed to have said. “(It’s) because people could see Tom Landry standing there with his hat and everything he stood for.”
But why did Landry’s peers almost completely abandoned the suit and tie between 1960 and the mid-‘70s?
I emailed Linda Przybyszewski, an associate professor of history at Notre Dame who wrote a book called “The Lost Art of Dress.” She pointed to the significance of the “Youth Quake” movement in the 1960s; how Baby Boomers broke down the traditional lines between formal and informal dress. Many books have been written about this cultural revolution, but for this story the key takeaway is that men no longer felt obligated to wear suits in public.
Now, it’s funny and nearly impossible to imagine hard-ass football coaches being influenced by these youth-fueled changes — imagine Pete Carroll dropping his khakis and white dad shoes for joggers and a pair of Yeezys — but…
Shula went from wearing a tie in the ‘71 playoffs to a baseball cap in ’78 and an orange sweater in the 1980s. Allen traded in his fedora in ‘68 for a baseball cap five years later. Same with Saban, Madden and every other coach I could find who transition from the ‘60s into the ‘70s.
Everyone, that is, except Landry.
By all accounts, Landry was an innovative coach. Just listen to Bill Belichick gush about Landry’s influence. But just like Mack, Landry’s game-day suit and fedora eventually became a symbol of a fading time — “the man in the funny hat,” Roger Staubach once said.
When Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys in 1989 and fired Landry, most people recognized the moment with an unusual clarity. “It’s the end of an era,” former Cowboy Bob Lilly told Sports Illustrated. “Our era.”
“This is a new generation,” H.R. Bright, the outgoing Cowboys owner, told SI. “It’s time for a new generation to take over.”
Landry was gone and with him the age of the well-dressed football coach. A few years after Landry’s last game, the NFL required coaches to wear team-issued apparel. In 2006, Mike Nolan and Jack Del Rio petitioned the league to make an exception. Eventually, the NFL agreed, but only under one condition: Their suits had to be made by Reebok.
Best I can tell, no coach has worn a suit since. [HR][/HR]
Pretty interesting stuff.
Last edited:
