Lou Saban, the ultimate football lifer, who coached the Buffalo Bills of the old American Football League to two championships in a career that took him from professional football to college to high schools, died on Sunday in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
He was 87.
His death was announced by his wife, Joyce, who told reporters that he had heart problems for years and was recently hospitalized after a fall.
“It’s hard to explain sometimes why a man does things,” Saban once said. “The answer often lies within his heart.”
Saban seldom stayed in a football job for more than a few seasons, and when he left once for the baseball world, he took one of most insecure jobs in sports — a Yankees executive under George Steinbrenner.
Saban knew Steinbrenner, who grew up in Cleveland, from the late 1940s, when Saban played for the Browns. When Saban was the football coach at Northwestern in 1955, he hired Steinbrenner as an assistant.
Steinbrenner named Saban the president of the Yankees in March 1981. He later acknowledged that he fired Saban on several occasions but that he would call him at home when he failed to show up for work the next day and say “get back in here right now.”
Saban resigned in December 1982 to become the football coach at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
In a statement upon Saban’s death, Steinbrenner remembered him as “tough and disciplined.”
Saban coached the Boston Patriots, the Bills and the Denver Broncos. In the major college ranks, he coached at Maryland, Northwestern, Miami and Army.
When he was in his 70s, he coached at the State University at Canton in northern New York, then moved to Chowan State in North Carolina.
He also coached high school football in the rural South.
Louis Henry Saban, a native of Brookfield, Illinois, got his first job in sports at age nine, when he caddied for Al Capone’s brother Ralph at a country club in Chicago. He played football at Indiana University, then became an all-league linebacker with the Browns, playing for them from 1946-49 in the All-America Football Conference.
After coaching posts at Case Institute of Cleveland, Northwestern and Western Illinois, Saban coached the Patriots of the newly formed AFL in 1960 and 1961. He became the Bills’ coach the next season and took them to the league championship in 1964 and 1965.
He later coached the Broncos and returned to the Bills as the coach from 1972 to 1976. He oversaw the offensive line known as the Electric Company, which turned on the “Juice,” O.J. Simpson, who had a record-breaking 2,003 yard rushing season in 1973.
Saban was a Chinese-language interpreter for the Army in World War II. According to Pat Toomay, a defensive end for the Bills in 1975, Saban once gave a halftime speech in Chinese.
“We went out and won,” Toomay said.
Saban had a coaching record of 95-99-7 in 16 years in the pros.
“Lou Saban was a great teacher,” Booker Edgerson, who played for Saban as a defensive back at Western Illinois and with the Bills and Broncos, told reporters.
“He could have built any program — football, baseball, basketball, whatever,” Edgerson said.
Saban made an attempt at retirement in 1985, when he and his wife built a house in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
His wife gave him a chain saw to cut some trees, hoping it would give him enough to do for a while, but he began cutting with abandon, and it was clear that retirement was not for him.
In 1989, he became the football coach at Georgetown High School in South Carolina. He told the Tulsa World: “I’m working just as hard as if I were with the Buffalo Bills.”
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