The Pewter Plank sat down with Jason Vuic, author of a brand new Buccaneers’ book for an interview.
For our younger readers, the early days of the Buccaneers were not kind. That is probably putting it mildly. Consider this, they didn’t even win a game until their second season. Not one! The Bucs lost their first 26 games in a row. If anyone isn’t counting, that makes them the worst in the history of the NFL. We all want to be known for something, but that takes it to the extreme.
Most fans have put that time period behind them, but not Jason Vuic. Instead, he has written a book that chronicles from when the franchise came together as an expansion team, through those first 26 games. He takes on a fantastic journey through the highs and the lows. The book is called “The Yucks” and it comes out on August 30th.
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Mr. Vuic was nice enough to sit down with us to talk about the book prior to its release:
Pewter Plank: My first question would be what inspired you to go back to this particular two years of the franchise?
Jason Vuic: I’ve been a Bucs’ fan since day one. Everyone remembers that first player or first game that you were attracted to. Sometimes it’s your home team and sometimes it’s simply a color. My number one reason was that Doug Williams came to my home town, I think along with the Selmons, maybe Jimmie Giles. I think it was 1982 and they played a charity basketball game. This would be in the Spring when the season was over and they would come to your high school with five or six players, you would pay $5-6 per ticket and they would sign autographs when it was over. They would play local VIP’s, high schoolers…etc.
They came to my high school, I guess they needed money, and I saw Doug Williams. I remember Williams clear as day, he was just imposing, inspiring and amazing. I was 8 or 9 years old and I got his autograph and from then on I was a Bucs’ fan. I fell in love with the Bucs and it never went away.
PP: But why this time period? It was before you were a fan, and they didn’t win any games! Why would you want to write about that?
JV: Here’s the thing. I’m grew up in a small town and I have been through every small town in the state. I love Florida history, and I was always interested in learning how the Bucs came to be. I think Tampa is a fascinating city. I like the cultural differences between Tampa, the old industrial city versus St. Petersburg, the retirement mecca. I’ve seen Florida grow around me. It occurred to me that somewhere in the Bucs’ story was the story of Florida, the story of Tampa Bay growing.
I realized I needed to go back to the beginning of the team. I needed to learn how this came about because not many people know the true origins of the Bucs team. How did they bid for a team? Who else took part? More than anything else, they lost 26 straight games. This is the team with the worst losing streak in the history of the NFL, and there in lies a story. This 26 game losing streak is really important in the history of Tampa Bay, so I had to go back to the beginning.
PP: Why do you think Tampa was so craving football?
JV: Your guess might be as good as mine, but I think Tampa Bay was a free city. It had the University of Tampa that had a fascinating sports history, they had a very good team in the late 50’s and 60’s.
A lot of people were moving in from areas where football was king. There was a desire to watch and have football in Tampa Bay. When Tampa first built the stadium, it was built to bring in University of Florida games, Florida State games, Miami games..etc., so they could play one or two home games away from their stadiums. There was a desire to see football especially on the part of many community leaders.
Rolled up in all of this was the fact that there wasn’t a lot to do in Tampa and people wanted to see football. Behind all this, people living in Tampa wanted a sense of place, they wanted to embrace their new community, their new area. Once they realized that, “Hey as a community we are looking good, we are impressing the NFL. If we can show the NFL, if we can just get a team, than we can say we are from a city that made it.” To have a major league sports team means you are a big league city. People relate to that. People of Tampa Bay loved football, wanted football and wanted to put themselves on the map if that makes any sense.
PP: What made those teams so lovable? You have had teams that weren’t as bad, but fans stopped going to games or wore bags on their heads. The fans of these teams stayed, why?
JV: I think the fact that they lost every game was in and of itself, intriguing. There was also John McKay and his entire persona in the press he was intriguing. You could never ignore it, people wanted to know what McKay was going to do. Then you had Ricky Bell, the number one pick. That was big news.
Each year you had something to see. You had Lee Roy Selmon, you had defense that was clearly improving in front of your eyes. I think that Culverhouse lowered the price of nosebleed seats midseason the first year, realizing it was better to have a lot of fans. Advertising took hold, television took hold. It was brand new, but took time to develop.
Part of it was support of the local team, but it was also the NFL. Win or lose, we’re in it. We were getting our butts beat, but we’re in the NFL. That took hold in the Bay area.
PP: Tell our younger readers a little bit about the first quarterback to play for the team, a name they will recognize.
JV: Steve Spurrier. His long-term Tampa connections are forgotten about by people outside of Tampa, well they were never really known. He was a Heisman winner at Florida in the 60’s, a phenomenal quarterback, a gifted quarterback. He was not a physical guy but he was a hand-eye coordination guy. He liked quick throws, he liked to trick people, to fool people. He liked to do what he does as a coach today. He wasn’t 6’5″, he didn’t have a monster arm, but he could play football. He knew football.
He was always silver-tongued. He always had a chip on his shoulder. He always did those things we love about Steve Spurrier. Everything we laugh at. It’s funny in a coach but probably would annoy you if you were a coach. His homespun humor didn’t sit well with the 49ers, so he sat on the bench. He got the chance to come to Tampa Bay and he did. When he came to the Bucs he was optimistic, but when he got there he was faced with horrible offensive lines that didn’t have a lot of talent, that had too many moving parts, too many injuries, like all expansion teams, they weren’t very good. Spurrier couldn’t run, and his starting receivers were borderline NFL players.
Spurrier had no one to throw to or to hand it to. He literally would hike the ball, drop back and got sacked. If he had been handed a team like the Steelers, he could have been a “caretaker” quarterback. Then you had him butting heads with John McKay. They are both imperious and both sarcastic. It’s an important part of the story, them being too similar.
PP: Was there anything that surprised you to learn? Anything that shocked you?
JV: I was blown away, more than anything else, by John McKay. I think John McKay drives the book. He drives it through the ’79 season. He was the Bucs until he left. More than anyone else. He was that forceful of a personality. What blew me away was when Jon Rauch, who was a very good coach, his son told me that McKay called Rauch a “deaf S.O.B.” in a staff meeting. McKay wasn’t a big guy, he was an older man, and Rauch tried to go after him. What I got was that McKay was such an overbearing personality. He was acerbic, he was imperious, he was sarcastic, he was ironic, he was demeaning, yet he was hilarious and knew what he was doing.
He was not typically loved by his players, wherever he went. “He treated everyone equally at USC, like dirt” (player quote). Pat Hayden grew up going over to the McKay household, said he wasn’t a benevolent dictator, he was a dictator. What blew me away was how difficult it was to play for McKay through those first two years. Especially for veterans like Spurrier, like Pat Toomay. Pat Toomay was a mild guy who liked to make sardonic comments, he was a funny guy. He called McKay’s wit “caustic wit”.
That’s what blew me away more than anything else. The toughness of John McKay, and his overbearing demeanor with the team and people around it. I’m not saying he was a bad coach. The Bucs lost 26 in a row, that wasn’t just injuries. That was John McKay and his insistence that they run the “I'”, that they power the ball down the other team’s throat when they didn’t have the players. McKay drove them through ten weeks of two-a-days. He decided to go with a crazy young team, and he decided to run the ball over and over again until it worked.
McKay was the reason they lost 26 straight games, but he was the reason they went to the NFC Championship game (1979 season). Most coaches would have tried something else, but he insisted he was right, and he proved he could run that system in the pros, he just needed the right players. That was a testament to his demeanor.
Next: Who Were the Winners and Losers for the Bucs in Game Three?
The book is called “The Yucks”, and it comes out on August 30th. It is fantastic. Whether you lived through the era or not, you will learn something and you will enjoy the read.
Find the book at your local bookseller, or order it from Amazon right here. Our thanks to author Jason Vuic and our friends at Simon & Schuster. Learn more about the author and his work here.