Throwback Thursday: John McGraw, The Model Of The Modern Sports Coach

(Editor's note: Each week VICE Sports will take a look back at an important sports event from this week in sports history. We are calling this regular feature Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.)

One hundred and thirteen years ago today, the New York Giants hired the man who would be their manager for the next 30 seasons, the steward for 10 National League pennants and three World Series championships (1905, 1921, 1922), a dugout boss who may have managed for another decade had prostate cancer not cut his career short in 1933, at 60 years old.

More than all that, John McGraw was the original model—the foundational archetype—of the modern American sports coach: intense, imperious, a metaphor for business success and, above all else, defined and judged by wins and losses.

McGraw spent three seasons as a player-manager for the Baltimore Orioles before jumping to the Giants, and he continued to play sparingly until 1906, when he was 33. He was a scrappy third baseman who rarely hit for power but led the National League in runs scored and walks twice and on-base percentage three times all before he turned 28.

At the plate, one contemporary reporter wrote, according to the SABR Bio Project, "McGraw uses every low and contemptible method that his erratic brain can conceive to win a play by a dirty trick." He carried these same qualities into his managerial career, as noted in a report in The Pittsburgh Press from 1904's spring training, McGraw's second as New York's manager. The Press described McGraw's team as "full of snap and vigor" and "'scrappy': without doubt the most belligerent team in America. The report sarcastically notes, "Traveling with the Giants has none of that monotony and Arcadian rest to be enjoyed in the company of a circus or a 10, 20 and 30 cent burlesque show."

Of course, McGraw's win-at-all-costs managerial style produced victories. Lots of them. He managed his teams to 2,763 wins, second to only Connie Mack; three World Series titles, tied for sixth; and 10 pennants, tied for the most all-time with Casey Stengel—who himself won two World Series himself as a player on McGraw's Giants in 1921 and 1922.

McGraw's intensity has remained his defining element to this day and is a reason why many, like sportswriter Frank Deford, consider him to be the "classic American coach." Deford describes McGraw in his book The Old Ball Game as, "a male version of the whore with a heart of gold—a tough, flinty so-and-so who was field-smart, a man's man his players came to love despite themselves."

In other words, McGraw was a maniacal hardass who knew how to win baseball games. Question is, at what cost?

McGraw's nickname was "Little Napoleon," and not by accident. He was determined to root out "distractions" and demanded discipline from his players both on-and-off the field, to the point of imposing curfews and regularly reviewing his players' meals on road trips. According to writer Hayden Bird, McGraw supposedly carried a piece of rope that had been used at a lynching.in his pocket for "good luck."

On the other hand, Bird writes, McGraw tried to break baseball's color barrier in 1901 by claiming an African-American player he wanted in his lineup was really a Native American named Chief Tokohama.

McGraw's intensity started the fight with American League President Ban Johnson that landed him in New York, a move that may have saved a flailing Giants franchise. McGraw had been left out in the cold when the National League's Baltimore Orioles were dissolved after the 1899 season. Baltimore's owners also owned the Brooklyn Robins and claimed McGraw's contract. But as John Thorn wrote in Baseball In The Garden of Eden, McGraw refused to report. He and teammate Wilbert Robinson continued to hold out even after they were sold to the St. Louis Cardinals; they didn't take the field until May, after they had successfully managed to strike the reserve clause from their contracts.

McGraw was a major player in the business world even during his playing days, as he had a number of business interests in Baltimore. He swiftly became involved in Johnson's American League, even making secret deals while he played for the Cardinals. He arranged to head a new Baltimore squad for the 1901 season, a franchise that was eventually destined to become the American League's New York entry. The American League raided National League rosters, seizing on player disgruntlement over a $2,400 maximum salary in the senior circuit.

The same intensity and vulgarity that made McGraw a folk hero clashed with Johnson's attempt the make the American League a clean version of the hard-drinking and gambling National League (a promise the National League first made and broke as it attempted to get off the ground in the 1870s). Despite Johnson clearly stating that the umpires were to be respected in his American League, McGraw swiftly engaged in his trademark "low and contemptible" style. As Orioles manager, McGraw's club "quickly reverted to their NL ways," Thorn writes, "spitting, cussing, kicking and even punching umpires with whom they had a difference of opinion." These actions brought suspensions onto players and eventually McGraw himself.

Unfazed, McGraw continued his aggressive managing until was ejected from a game against Boston and refused to leave the field, leading to a forfeit. Johnson had had enough and suspended McGraw for the rest of the season. Johnson attempted to phase McGraw out of the franchise's future New York group. When the Giants offered McGraw their managerial post, McGraw jumped, and not without taking a swipe out of Johnson's Orioles.

McGraw convinced Giants owner Andrew Freedman to make a hostile takeover of the Orioles. Freedman bought 51 percent of the stock, and by the same rule that allowed McGraw to be assigned to Brooklyn in 1900, McGraw was able to take his pick from the Orioles roster, in large part why the Giants were able to win two pennants and a World Series within McGraw's first three seasons in town. This lingering grudge was also the impetus for the Giants' 1904 refusal to play against Johnson's Red Sox in what was slated to be the second official World Series.

McGraw's outright violence may no longer be acceptable—even though it still happens quite often at various levels of sport across the country—but much of the rest of McGraw's rugged authoritarianism lives on in American sports through coaches like football's Jim Harbaugh and Tom Coughlin. McGraw's relentless attempts to control his players, root out distractions and seek every advantage in the service of winning and only winning have become the norm. At the same time, his tenacity, determination and bottom-line results made him somebody who entrepreneurs, army generals and athletes alike could both admire and relate to—a man whose defining qualities are the ones we still revere, for better and for worse, in our coaches today.