It’s not because they seem to be used nowadays for just about everything other than golf – on a used car lot, in airports, in shopping malls. I was once transported in one to a golf course from my car while covering the Buick Open – does that count as a golf cart being used for golf?
Despite all that, whenever I see a golf cart I can’t help but picture the bowl of jelly sitting on it that was former Lions coach Wayne Fontes.
It’s not only golf carts that Wayne-o has infiltrated. Parkas, ski masks, and cigars make me think of him, too. Oh, and multiple quarterbacks and silly grins and awkward moments and daft comments, too.
I bring up Fontes, the Lions head coach from 1989-1996, because NFL training camps are underway, and with them brings some of my favorite Fontes imagery.
It was 1994, and we’re watching the end of practice on a warm July afternoon. We’re gathered in a small circle, waiting for Fontes to arrive and give us his daily dose of “What’s up?” in regard to his football team’s status. I should have heard it, but you know how stealth those golf carts can be.
“Whoa, behind you!,” I hear, moments before Fontes, driving his cart, nearly puts me out for the season with a leg injury. And he has that silly, Fontesian grin on his large, kewpie doll-on-steroids face.
The post-practice presser is on, Fontes in his cart, sweat on his brow, as he talks about why the Lions will be good that season. Fontes always talked about why the Lions will be good. His football paradise was always just around the bend. He was like Pistons coach Dickie Vitale that way, only ratcheted down about four notches. But still definitively caffeinated.
“We’re getting better,” Wayne liked to say. He’d say it after wins, he’d say it after losses, and he probably said it at that golf cart gathering in ’94, though his words I didn’t save for infamy.
It seemed, with Wayne Fontes leading the Lions, that Bill Ford’s football franchise was turned into a three ring circus. And, like circuses, you may not like everything under the big top, but it was rarely boring.
Fontes and his parka; no Lions coach wore one as well -- or wore one at all
Take the quarterback situation. Please. Under Fontes, the Lions tried Rodney Peete; Bob Gagliano; Peete again; Erik Kramer; Peete again; Andre Ware; Kramer again; Peete again; Scott Mitchell; Dave Krieg; Mitchell again; Don Majkowski; and Mitchell again. Fontes seemed to get some sort of twisted pleasure, especially before the team signed Mitchell as a free agent in January 1994, in putting his quarterbacks on a carousel and spinning it until everyone was dizzy – players, media, and even his owner.
It was a classic Lions moment. Fontes had named, after the typical spin on the carousel, Andre Ware to start that particular week. It was going to be the first start in the draft bust’s career. A congratulatory phone call was placed by Ford.
“Just want to wish you good luck in your start this week, Andre,” the message went, recorded for posterity on the quarterback’s answering machine.
The quarterback whose machine it was, was Erik Kramer.
And, to add another wrinkle, Kramer hadn’t yet been notified that he wasn’t starting. He found out courtesy of Bill Ford’s misplaced telephone call.
Peanuts! Popcorn! Elephant ears!
It was circa 1995, and the drum was beating again for Fontes’s dismissal. The Lions were off to a horrible start and the piranhas in the media and the frustrated callers to talk radio were nailing the coach to the cross. It was not an atypical thing during Fontes’s tenure.
“That’s OK,” Fontes said on radio, or TV, or maybe both. “I’m the Big Buck. Everyone is aiming for me. Everyone wants to take down the Big Buck.”
So Fontes was known as the “Big Buck” for awhile – derisively, of course.
At a Halloween party, Mitchell was caught on videotape by one of the news crews in town, dressed as his coach. He stuffed a pillow under his Lions sweatshirt, put on a fake, bulbous nose, and puffed on a cigar. And with a microphone stuck into his made up face, Mitchell spewed some Fontes-like clichés in an embellished, loud voice.
In other NFL cities, such blatant mocking and disrespect wouldn’t be tolerated. I shudder to think of what would happen to the quarterback who’d be so bold as to mimic Mike Ditka or Bill Parcells in such a public, brazen manner.
But not Wayne Fontes. The coach laughed and welcomed the jab – even going so far as to wrap his beef shank arms around his QB and crow for the media – in a sort of “That’s my boy!” way.
They said Fontes was a player’s coach. That can also be a nice way of saying, “He lets the inmates run the asylum.” I hit former safety Ron Rice with that notion a couple years ago.
Which was it, I asked Rice: Was Fontes a “player’s coach” because he was a buffoon who let them do what they wanted, or … something else?
“Oh I loved Wayne. But he was a player’s coach because he respected you and knew when to push you and when to pull back,” Rice told me.
There’s actually some validation to Fontes’ handling of his players. His teams’ records in the month of December weren’t that bad. In some years, they were very good. His teams came to be known as fast finishers down the stretch.
After making the playoffs with a hard charge in 1995, the Lions went into Philadelphia for a Wild Card game and got their rear ends handed to them in a 58-37 loss. At one point, the score was 51-7.
No way could Fontes survive this, we all said. He did.
But the next season, after finishing 6-10, the Wayne Fontes Era was over with. Ah, but not before one last moment of goofiness.
At the press conference announcing his firing, and after Fontes had already spoken his part, Ford was at the podium. Suddenly, the seriousness of Ford’s comments was shattered by an interloper to the room. Wayne Fontes.
“Fired?! What do you mean I’m fired?,” Fontes bellowed, laughing and hugging Ford. The look on the owner’s face was, to quote MasterCard, priceless.
Fontes, long retired – the Lions were his last employer – lives in Florida now, his back and legs not moving along thru the calendar with the rest of his body. He had some surgery in the spring.
Who knew that we’d look fondly back at his time as some of the grandest in Lions football? Maybe Wayne-o did, after all.
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