Growing up in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, Ron Mix was one Jew among many. But then his parents divorced and his mother moved with Mix and his brother into her brother’s home in nearby Hawthorne, an area lacking Jews. Mix’s life suddenly had been turned upside down.
But when Mix was a junior in high school, he learned that his favorite National Football League team, the Los Angeles Rams, hired Sid Gillman as head coach. Gillman had been an accomplished player — as an offensive end at Ohio State University, he played in the first College All-Star Game — and then a standout coach at Ohio’s Miami University and the University of Cincinnati. And Gillman was Jewish.
“My father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant. My mother’s parents were immigrants. … As a kid, you’re searching for identity, so it was important for me to find out that Sid was Jewish,” Mix said from his home in San Diego in a video interview for this article.
Mix went on to become a football star at the offensive tackle position and played nearly all of his professional career for one coach: Gillman.
The two men helped to make the Chargers — the franchise started in Los Angeles in 1960 and relocated to San Diego — perennial contenders in the newly formed American Football League that reached five title games and won one championship. And, four years apart, Mix (1979) and Gillman (1983) were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Gillman died at 91 in 2003.
Just ahead of the start of the new NFL season, the shrine held its annual induction ceremony on August 8. Mix, 88, was there amongst more than 100 returning honorees. So was linebacker Andre Tippett, who converted to Judaism after his playing days with the New England Patriots, and the Green Bay Packers’ retired general manager, Ron Wolf. Another Jewish inductee, Marv Levy, couldn’t make it, but the Buffalo Bills’ former coach might be excused, having just celebrated his 101st birthday.
Levy, like Gillman, earned his way in as a coach. So did the late Al Davis, who coached, owned and was the general manager of the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders. The best-ever Jewish players in the Hall of Fame were the late quarterbacks Sid Luckman of the Chicago Bears and Benny Friedman, primarily with the New York Giants.
Gillman made his reputation as a mastermind when it came to offense: advancing the ball down the field and producing points. As with many great sports coaches, Gillman innovated. His father, an immigrant from Austria, worked in movie theaters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Gillman was born and grew up, and Sid, as a coach, would splice film clips of football games and study them. With the Rams in 1956, he even hired Mickey Dukich as one of the first assistant coaches tasked with preparing film for Gillman to study an upcoming opponent’s offensive and defensive plays.
Gillman devised plays coded in three digits, a shorthand system for a quarterback to alert receivers what routes to run. He incorporated running backs into the passing attack. He had some receivers line up “outside the numbers,” meaning between the hashmarks and sidelines, to enable more passes toward the edges of the field, rather than in the middle, which was more congested.
“He had a good concept of how to stretch defenses. He was trying to create confusion,” said John Turney, a football historian. “It sounds simple now, but it’s not what they were doing then… He was ahead of the curve.”
Gillman helped to transform football from a game high on brute force — the quarterback handing the football to a runner to charge behind beefy linemen who pancaked opponents — to one utilizing the whole field, and creative planning, to produce greater yardage in each attempt.
Gillman’s influence resulted in his concepts being replicated across the league, particularly when his assistant coaches — notably George Allen, Chuck Noll and Davis — became head coaches elsewhere. Another notable example is Don Coryell, San Diego State University’s head coach, who attended Gillman’s practices and went on to institute explosive offenses there and with the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals and Chargers; one of Coryell’s assistant coaches, Joe Gibbs, accompanied Coryell at Gillman’s practices and, in turn, led the Washington Redskins to unprecedented success. In his last NFL job, Gillman was hired by Philadelphia Eagles head coach Dick Vermeil as quarterbacks coach. Gillman helped to significantly improve the play of Ron Jaworski, which landed the Eagles in their first Super Bowl.
“He’s the guy who turned us around offensively, as far as being innovative,” Jaworski said in a 2000 book, Great Jews in Sports.
Allen, Noll, Coryell, Gibbs and Vermeil later joined Gillman as Hall of Fame enshrinees.
Gillman “certainly had tons of respect from other folks,” Turney said. “He was called The Father of the Modern-day Passing Game.”
The eldest of Gillman’s four children, daughter Lyle, said her father thought that discrimination kept him from becoming head coach of Ohio State, a perennial power in collegiate football.
“Dad had a lot of antisemitism in those years. Dad always mentioned it,” she said.
Her parents, who were married 67 years, supported Jewish causes, but her mother, Esther, took a more active role because of Sid’s long hours as a coach, Lyle Gillman said.
Shortly after Sid Gillman’s death, a chair in his memory was established at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. It was endowed by three San Diego businessmen and hundreds of additional contributors. The fund goes for sport-related activities on campus, a univeristy official said recently.
Turney said that, were Gillman alive, he’d ask him plenty, such as how he identified mismatches against an opposing defense. Mix said he and Gillman rarely discussed even football matters — that Gillman wasn’t the type to relate directly with players. Nor, Mix said, did they speak about the long-ago impact of Gillman’s being hired by the Rams.
“I don’t remember any personal conversation with Sid as a coach,” Mix said.
Gillman lived for decades in San Diego, but was buried in Los Angeles, in a Jewish cemetery near Hollywood where such film and broadcast legends as Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Jack Benny and Dinah Shore were laid to rest.
“He’s buried with the stars,” said Mix. “He was a star.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler may be reached at [email protected].
