With this being the 50th season of Tampa Bay Buccaneer football, now is an appropriate time to dispel a myth that is nearly that old.
You’ve probably heard that John McKay, the Bucs’ first coach and master of the one-liner, was once asked about his team’s execution.
“I’m all for it,” McKay supposedly quipped.
It’s a great line; there’s just no evidence McKay ever actually said it. You can Google it and find tons of references to it – but Google is not primary proof. Google can’t tell you when he said it, or to whom. That’s important.
The quote has been extensively attributed to him over the years, yet it appears in exactly zero newspaper stories from 1976 to 1979, when it first appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (on Nov. 22) with then-Browns coach Sam Rutigliano attributing it to McKay “after his Bucs lost a game recently.” (The Bucs were, at that moment, 9-3 and on their way to the playoffs with a team that was actually executing quite well, thank you very much.)
Over time, the anecdote’s time frame has morphed into a nebulous “after a game in the early years of the Bucs” or “once.”
No one can tell you exactly after which game he supposedly said it. (Indeed, the faux quote itself is malleable, sometimes being expressed as “I’m all for it” and sometimes as “I’m in favor of it” or “I’d be in favor of it.”)
Sometimes he is said to have taken a puff from a cigar before saying it. Sometimes not.
It is actually an old vaudeville line1I suppose there are not many new vaudeville lines. Jason Vuic, author of “The Yucks,” has traced it back to the 19th century.
Even in the mid-to-late 1970s, had a quote like that actually been spoken to a reporter – even just one reporter – it would have been in the next day’s paper somewhere and on the wires shortly thereafter. You would know when he said it and where and to whom.
Yet, we know none of these things. There are no newspaper stories containing that quote after any of the Bucs’ first 26 games, or after their first 70 games. We have plenty of other McKay quotes with dates and opponents. But nothing on this one. He didn’t say it near a camera or a microphone, apparently. (It is not like everything was captured back then, but plenty of stuff was.)
You will not find a primary source or reference to it (and I have looked). It appeared in the Oct. 12, 1980 issue of Sports Illustrated (which used to be a highly respected sports magazine before some dudebros bought it), in their “Scorecard” section:
(We know it wasn’t after the 1980 Cleveland game, partially because of Rutigliano’s story that predates it by nearly a year, and partially because the quote literally appears in an Oklahoma paper from the morning of the game against the Browns.)
I reached out to Jerry Kirshenbaum, who was responsible for SI’s “Scorecard” section, and asked him if he recalled where he got the item. In a 2019 email, he told me:
“For sure I didn’t hear McKay utter the words myself. In fact I don’t think I ever crossed paths with McKay in my 30 years at SI. ‘They Said It’ was a popular feature of the magazine, and most of the bon mots we used, some more bon than others, were submitted to us either by our readers or our stringers. At this late date, there’s no way of knowing the exact source of the line attributed to McKay. We tried to use only quotes that were current and original, but I’m sure hand-me-downs sometimes made the cut.”
In another browser window, go ahead and search for “John McKay execution.” You will find hundreds of people who pass on the apocryphal story who are just using someone else’s retelling of the apocryphal story as their source. But you will not find a primary, dated, reporter-collected source. The earliest reference to it is that November 1979 Plain Dealer blurb, so it would obviously have to have come before that, were it true.
Now, either it just so happens that of all the great sports quotes, this one has no primary source for some reason, or he didn’t say it.
There is no evidence he said it. And no one has produced said evidence, only people passing along what they heard or read someone else pass along.
McKay is no longer with us, and Rutigliano is, at this writing, 94 years old. I have one more person to reach out to before I consider this matter officially closed, but if you’ve come across this item, feel free to point to it when you want to politely inform someone that their favorite quote of John McKay’s is not a John McKay quote at all.
For more, check out the video below from my new YouTube Channel, Classic Tampa Bay Moments, where author Jason Vuic and I do a deep dive into this well-known but apocryphal story.
