In 1924, the so-called "golden age" of sports in America lightly brushed Spokane. An undefeated football team at Gonzaga University was among the finest in the nation and featured a tailback named Houston Stockton -- whose grandson would go on to some basketball renown -- passing to an end named Ray Flaherty.

The golden age would fade into the common soon enough. But Ray Flaherty's impact on football is still felt.

The screen pass? That was his, the updated version anyway. Turf shoes? Well, that's a stretch, but alternative football did contribute to one of Flaherty's more notable successes.

He nurtured professional football's first truly great quarterback, stood up to one of its first meddling owners, and in the process may have been the first of a entirely modern breed: the player's coach.

"He knew football, but his biggest asset was in knowing how to handle players," said one of them, Jim Barber, on the occasion of Flaherty's death in 1994. "He knew when to chew a fanny or pat somebody on the back. The players liked him, but he was no patsy."

But if he did nothing else, Flaherty opened up the National Football League to the playing talent produced in the West, and in particular Gonzaga. His Washington Redskins teams which won NFL championships in 1937 and 1942 depended heavily on his Western pipeline, and those two championships -- and one of the best winning percentages in history -- are what granted Flaherty entry into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1976.

His affinity for the Northwest was never more pronounced than when he abandoned coaching at the young age of 46, returning to Spokane to run a beverage distributorship and, later, retiring to Hayden Lake, Idaho.

"It's all right for a young man," Flaherty said of football, "but they all get out sooner or later. There aren't any real old people in football."

That wasn't completely accurate. Flaherty's contemporaries -- George Halas of the Bears, Curly Lambeau of the Packers and Steve Owen of the Giants -- had careers that stretched from the Roaring '20s to "I Like Ike" and beyond. That's one reason all three of them made it into the Canton shrine a full decade earlier, for only Halas left coaching with a better winning percentage than Flaherty's 65.6 (80-37-5).

But before he was a great coach, Ray Flaherty was a great athlete.

Born on a farm near Lamont, Washington, on September 1, 1903, Flaherty attended Gonzaga High School in Spokane before enrolling at GU, playing on football teams that lost just four games in three years. His other athletic love was baseball. Even when his professional football career was well established, he moonlighted for four summers playing baseball in the Boston Braves farm system, and still played for a time in the Idaho-Washington League after he'd moved into coaching.

Upon graduation in 1926, Flaherty joined the Los Angeles Wildcats of the American Football League -- a barnstorming outfit that played all 23 of its games on the road, for which Flaherty earned the not-so-princely sum of $400. A year later, he jumped to the New York Yankees, whose meal ticket was a halfback named Red Grange. By 1929, he was with the NFL's New York Giants, eventually becoming captain and a playing assistant coach.

The birth of a football strategist may have come in the 1934 NFL championship game between the Giants and Bears in New York.

"The field was frozen," Flaherty recalled. "I had come out in some tennis shoes for the warm-up and found I could cut pretty good without slipping. The others guys thought they'd try them, but I told them to hold off until the second half because the Bears might get the idea themselves, and too soon.

"We were down 10-3 at the half and 13-3 when they kicked a field goal right after the half. We scored the next four touchdowns, pushed them all over the field and won 30-13."

It was in 1936 that the demanding George Preston Marshall, trying to pump life into his unraveling Boston Redskins, took a chance on a rookie coach named Ray Flaherty. A miserable 2-8-1 the year before, the Redskins promptly won the East Division title -- and upon adding quarterback Sammy Baugh fresh out of TCU, Flaherty had his first championship team when the franchise moved to Washington in 1937.

Baugh would lead the NFL in passing six times, operating out of the double and single-wing formations Flaherty used to open up the offense. His most notable wrinkle was the retooling of the screen pass, the downfield version of which had been outlawed years before. Flaherty had his linemen gather behind the scrimmage for the screen and ran the play against the Bears in the 1937 championship game with unqualified success.

"Curly Lambeau and Halas were big rivals," Flaherty said. "Lambeau was very happy we beat the Bears, but he ran up to me afterward and said, 'Ray, you're using illegal plays.' But they weren't illegal. We screened behind the line."

His Redskins teams included a number of players from his connection at Gonzaga, including Max Krause, Ed Justice, George Karamatic and the Hare brothers, Ray and Cecil. They were second in the East behind Owen's Giants the next two seasons and lost the historic 73-0 NFL title game of 1940 to Halas' Bears. But in 1942, the Redskins gained their revenge, beating the Bears 14-6 for Flaherty's second championship.

Then he went to war -- serving in the Navy's Fourth Fleet. When he returned, it wasn't with Marshall's Redskins but with the New York Yankees of the fledgling All-America Football Conference. Flaherty said it was a matter of money; Barber sensed a deeper reason.

"He didn't let Marshall browbeat him," Barber said. "There was a ball game in D.C. when Marshall came down out of his box and told him to put in so-and-so. Ray turned to him and said, 'Mr. Marshall, if you want to coach this team, get on the bench. Pay me off and I'll go back to Hayden Lake and go fishing. If you want me to coach, get back in your box.' He called his bluff."

There was no bluff in his dealings with players, either. Even Baugh, as contrary a sort as there could be, appreciated that.

"I think coaches get too damn much credit," he said in an interview after Flaherty's death. "You get the boys and you're going to win. It's not the coaches, it's the players.

"But Ray Flaherty was the best coach I ever had, and I played under 10 of them. The boys had a lot of respect for Ray Flaherty."

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