Bonus Material: Making Redskins Greatest Games Volume One

Behind the scenes at The Curly R

This is a companion piece to Redskins Greatest Games Volume One.

I had wanted to do a series on my favorite Redskins games since the day I flipped the switch on Curly R and I first began to think about it in earnest last December as the Redskins were winding down a dreadful 2006 season. The question was, how to do it?

It had to be games I knew intimately, which narrows it down to, oh, about 200. More with the wonders of the NFL Record and Fact Book and the Washington Post Archives.

Curly R aside number one: I am still really pissed that I had to pay for those eight pieces from the Post. I have been a steady seven-days-a-week subscriber to the Post for 11 years and it annoys me that they want to touch me up for another 20-spot for a handful of pieces from years ago. The New York Times, in contrast, has a perfect system. All subscribers have access to up to 100 archive pieces a month. A year ago the wife got me a subscription to the Sunday New York Times, which qualifies us for TimesSelect archive privileges. Above the included 100 pieces per month, you have to pay, but when I search the Times' site, archive search is automatically included in the search. Not so with the Post. I have to go to a separate search page or do it through Google News Archive, which is still a little green. Note to Washington Post: your archives are moldering. Free them within reason for subscribers by adopting the Times' model, and alter the site-wide search to include archives by default.

If we further winnow down the games I know to those with a hook, we are still talking dozens, but it's more manageable. Because those Oilers were a dominant team with tragic flaws, because of the Jack Pardee connection, because I watched it curled up on a couch drinking and eating tuna subs with a big hangover and because this game was exactly the type of enchanted win typical of 1991 when everything, and I mean everything, broke the Redskins way, this game was always going to be the first one profiled.

Stylistically, I thought a single-part piece, eight to twelve grafs with three images (helmets, Joe Gibbs, Jack Pardee) would be enough to wrap up the game and the story behind the game (that technically makes this the story behind the story behind the game). This way I could do four to six in each offseason as a regular feature.

As I started to sketch this post out in January, doing my homework on how Jack got from the Redskins to the Oilers, I just became overwhelmed with Jack's story. Bear Bryant, George Allen, Super Bowl 7, the struggle between the Edward Bennet Williams camp wanting to keep the George Allen years alive and newly activist owner Jack Kent Cooke wanting to go in Bobby Beathard's direction, it was as serious a football story as I had ever seen.

Curly R aside number two: although I do not mention it in the piece, it is entirely likely that a divorce is what set the Redskins down that path away from their George Allen heritage (by firing Jack Pardee) and toward the team they would become in the 80s and into the 90s. In 1979, Jack Kent Cooke laid out a 49 million dollar divorce settlement to his first wife Barbara Jean Carnegie, then the largest divorce settlement in history. JKC had become majority owner of the Redskins five years earlier in 1974, but after getting touched up for 49 mil, he decided to stop being a silent owner and pay closer attention to his Redskins enterprise, moving EBW out and his regime, including Bobby Beathard, in. Chronology.

In short order, a new plan for RGG emerged. This would be a once a year look at a critical game and a chance to go in depth on the people and circumstances around the game. A profile emerges, and the game is the backdrop.

This first game is a great story all by itself, and I think it is an even better story when viewed in the broader historical context. All serious football fans are at once hopeless romantics and amateur historians, and the linking of the Redskins 70s renewal anchored by Jack Pardee to their decade-plus of success in the 80s and 90s anchored by Joe Gibbs is a critical factor in understanding the history of this team.

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Yes, I have the next game picked out. Redskins Greatest Games Volume 2 should be ready to go by July 2008...



Backstage sign from here.